“I mean…”
“Are you saying St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas are wrong?” He frowns. “I’m sorry, I interrupted.”
Dear God, with the manners. I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “No.I’m just saying that we might need to think more broadly. Or deeper.”
Kingston stares at me. Not angry. But not like he agrees with me, either.
He sets down his pen.
“Dr. Emrys,” he begins. “I appreciate your theory that the Grail might somehow connect to all the”—he hesitates just a fraction of a second—“magicin the world. I know what you think you’ve seen. I know you believe you can perceive things that exist outside of…linear time. But even you admit that what you saw was unclear, correct?”
“Yes,” Emrys acknowledges. “In some aspects.”
“Exactly,” Kingston says. “And based on that, and that alone, you're asking me to believe that not only is there some magical connection we can't prove, but that the Holy Grail is somehow—that it’s?—”
He stops. Looks at me. Looks away. And clears his throat.
“In a little under thirty minutes, I will be welcoming a delegation from the White Brothers of St. Vincent to Caliburn.” Kingston tidies the stacks of facsimiles on his desk. “And I amnotgoing to go around making wild accusations based on nonsense that actively contradicts the teachings of the Church.” He gets to his feet, puts his coat over his arm and the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “The Grail is what they say it is. And I suggest we proceed accordingly.”
“But—”
“Gwenna, Lanz is outside to see you back when you’re finished here. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He leaves. When the door clicks shut, Emrys looks at me, eyebrows raised.
“I don’t think you’re wrong, Ms. Vale,” he remarks slowly. “But Mr. Pendragon is not the type to be content with being told he’s wrong.”
“It’s not…I don’t think he’swrongwrong.” I slump in my seat slightly. “Just that there’s maybe more of a gray area.”
“Ah, well, I don’t think Mr. Pendragon is the type to be content with gray areas, either.”
Especially not with the Consistory on the way, I think. That’s surely why he’s on edge, isn’t it. Why he’s out of class for the rest of the week, up until Candlemas.
To meet with them.
To do…I don’t know what.
I drum my pencil against the desk, unable to focus on whatever I was midway through translating. I look back up at Emrys.
“What do you know about the Consistory?”
“Ah.” His eyes flash. “The White Brothers of St. Vincent. You mean the official story, I suppose?”
“We can start there.”
Emrys laughs softly. “They are an order of cloistered monastics, headquartered near Avignon, France. Founded around the time of the First Crusade. Extraordinarily ascetic. They rarely speak, and hide their faces even from each other.” He smiles. “Do a bit of beekeeping as well.”
I shiver in spite of myself. “And…unofficially?”
“They exist, solely and exclusively, to train and instruct the seekers of the Holy Grail.”
Will a sentence like that nevernotstrike me as bizarre?I wonder. The words just soundfake.Like something out ofThe Michelangelo Matrix.
Outwardly, I just nod.
“So Kingston…all of them,” I say. “They just…signed on?”
“Recruited, I believe,” Emrys says. “First as oblates. Then consecrated at age 18. I first came to know the Pendragons a few years before that—as a tutor, of sorts, for Kingston. The expectations for scholarship were…rigorous.”
