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We pass the quadrangle, where the shrine of Antiro signs appears to have multiplied. They’re yards deep now. There are winking candles and painted crosses and placards featuring the letterA— but not a soul in sight. The three of us gaze at the pile of angry cardboard signs, and I can almost hear Rory and Danny wondering how our future is going to look.
None of us expected to come of age during a war.
Tonight had been a break. The latter half, anyway. It had been about singing, having fun, being free and cutting loose for the smallest, most merciful handful of hours. But seeing the remnants of this afternoon’s protest brings what we’re fighting against flooding back.
We’re not free. We can’t ever be free when Benji and his foot soldiers are so ready and willing to sacrifice it all on our behalf.
We lean against a stone pillar, silently acknowledging the sight. Rory nudges something with the tip of his shoe, causing it to rattle across the ancient flagstones. He bends down to inspect it, then picks it up. “A match,” he says, lifting it to eye level, and all at once the three of us are thinking the same thing.
“No,” Danny says instantly. “Wecan’t.”
I hold out my palm. “Give me it.”
Rory hesitates for a moment, but then he glances back at the pile of signs.ROYALISTS CAN SUCK MY DICKhas a prominent pride of place, with a drawing of two crowns as balls and an anatomically inaccurate cock spurting money.SUPPORT KING JAMES OR KILL YOURSELFis another, this one drawn with a cartoon noose that I force myself to look at.
“Give me it,” I say, more forcefully, surer than I’ve ever been about anything.
With a careful look at me, Rory slowly hands over the match. Before he changes his mind, I take the match and run across the grassy quadrangle, over to the narrow stone steps that lead to the battlements around the perimeter of the square. I leap the small chain fence blocking access and run upstairs until I’m directly above the multitude of protest signs.
“Don’t do it!” Danny yells at me from between cupped hands. Rory says nothing, just watches me with a kind of academic curiosity.
The world is a lot bigger from here. The whole of St. Camford and its surrounding village stretches out in front of me, and for the briefest moment I feel like I’m its queen. Black-green hills loom in the distance like vast alien ships. Up here, the coldness of the night sky strikes my skin like burning.
I strike the match hard against the stone wall until a little bud of orange blooms between my fingertips. I glance at the array of signs spread beneath me — and without so much as taking a breath, without even stopping to think about it, I bite out, “For Luke,” and drop the lit match.
This is our last act at St. Camford.
I watch it fall. I watch the slat of wood somersault to the ground. For a long moment, nothing happens at all, and I assume the flame must have flickered out during its descent. But then, in the center of the signs, sunlike rays begin to pierce through the painted cardboard, and smoke starts curling upward into wisps that coil around the pillars and into the battlements. I watch in fascination as the shrine slowly burns, as the trail of fire slithers and each cardboard sign combusts, and the grassy quadrangle turns into a pit of hot raging fire beneath me.
I’m not scared. If anything, I feel strong. Powerful. I think of Luke, I think of Jonie.This is what they deserve. I take my leave the same way I came, the heat licking at my skin the closer to the ground I get. Rory and Danny are taking shelter behind a pillar, watching the flames as they leap up the castle walls. When I reach them, we don’t stop — we run and run and run hand in hand until we’re breathless and gasping, three crooked shadows in the dark, until only the faintest thread of smoke is still seen in the sky.
