I was so certain. So sure I understood what that meant.
The matches are where they've always been. A silver box on the mantel, tarnished at the corners, the Camlann crest worn smooth by generations of hands. I taught Kai and Lanz to use these, that first winter—apparently the only one who knew how to build a fire. How to bank the coals so they'd last through the night. How to stack the logs so the fire would breathe.
We sat in front of this hearth for hours, those early months. Silence, at first. Then talking. Arguing. Learning each other's rhythms. Kai's impulsiveness, the way he'd just explode and storm out of the room . Lanz's restlessness, jumping in to try and smooth things over. And me.
I open the box. Take out a single match. Feel the weight of it—negligible, nothing, a splinter of wood tipped with phosphorus.
But it’s enough.
The drapes are heavy damask, the color of dried blood. They've hung in these windows for years, maybe since Camlann House was built.
I’ve never really liked them.
The sound of the match strike is obscenely small. A scratch. A hiss. And then the flame—orange and alive, flickering at the end of this little wooden thing, waiting to be told what to do.
I could still stop. I could blow out the flame, set it aside, try to find some other way out.
But Gwenna is out there. Gwenna, who looked Camlann House and said yes, I want this, I want you, I want all of it.
She is the point.
I touch the match to the curtain.
The flames are small at first, little birthday candle things, almost cheerful, and then, all at once, they burst into bloom, now gnawing up the curtains, now licking at beams, orange light everywhere, like an eerie, too-bright sunset suddenly filling the room.
The damask blackens and curls. The fire finds the beam above the window and begins to chew. And I step back and wait.
For grief. For regret. For some part of me to scream that I'm destroying the sacred foundation of all that we are.Camlann Houseisyour brotherhood, Luther had told me, when he’d first pressed the keys into my hand.Treat it accordingly.
But the guilt doesn’t come.
Smoke curls, the acrid scent of polyester and shellac bubbling under the heat. I pull my t-shirt over my nose, trying to breathe in, to stay awake and alive, to watch as flames climb the walls.
Because Camlann House was never our brotherhood. It was just where we kept it, for a while.
We are the brotherhood—the four of us.
And we go where she is.
THIRTY-FOUR
GWENNA
“Et voilà,”comes his voice. “La fin de la quête.”
It’s soft, sibilant, mannered, the way he speaks. The liquid edges of French combined with the cool calm of a religious renunciate.
And yet I am terrified.
I amterrified, frightened out of my absolute wits and shaking on this carpet.
Luther’s office is huge, vaulted and wide, and yet it feels cramped with…I can’t even count how many of them there are in here. A wall of white. Impossible to tell one body from the next. All these men staring at me with eyes I can’t see, faces I can’t read, and somehow they’ve been expecting me.
“What do you want?” I say. “What am I supposed to do for you?”
The prior-at-arms, who stands perfectly erect, perfectly straight, lets out a chuckle. A genuine chuckle, lighter-pitched than I would expect, and the eerie contrast between the scene and the sound only makes my heartbeat whirr faster.
“What do we want?” His English is smooth. “Si polie, la petite.”
