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Because that’s the thing.They’rein power.They’rein charge. And that means they can lose it all.
Eventually, we decide to hold the bonfire where the braziers are normally positioned for Samhain. It’s right on the crest of a hill, in front of the castle and before the dark verge running down to the forest. If anyone looked out from their windows, they’d see us. Good. Let them watch Antiro burn.
Danny collects large stones, trying to create a neat container for the flames. The rest of us hunt for kindling. Finlay bends down, rubbing two sticks together in the center of the stones at extreme speed, crediting his pyromania with being a Scout. A dim spark slowly blooms from his fingertips before catching orange, heat licking up the wood.
The air is colder than I’ve known it lately, November fully embedded in the frosted grass and the silver plumes of our breath. The sparks from the sticks rise higher and higher, gradually melting the cold and warming us up, and Finlay begins to feed the ripped-up Antiro signs to the amber flames.
“Burn, baby, burn,” he mutters spitefully, in a voice so sinister that chills slide down my spine. The Antiro sign ignites immediately, the fire quickening along its edges, and I whoop loudly. The stars glimmer above us like approving silver eyes, each one winking with every leap of flame.
Rory switches on the radio, turning it to a station that plays punchy EDM. Music fills the grounds in a shimmer of synths, and with the throb of a belting bassline angelic female voices promise the world for one night. I throw my hands in the air, dancing to the heady beat. Luke tosses cardboard from his bag of crap, and I laugh at his composure as he feeds the flames one by one, stoking the fire with endless propaganda against him. If it were me, I’d have upended the bag long ago.
It reminds me of setting fire to Antiro placards from the protest at the St. Camford quadrangle. It had felt good then, watching their cardboard signs curl into ashes, watching lines of smoke rise like snakes into the air. It had been thrilling. Dangerous. It feels even better now because it’s not just me: it’s all of us.
I feel free. Liberated.
Dancing. Burning. Feeling bad.
I take the proffered bottle from Danny’s hand and drink.
I drink and I drink — and the world ends.
It ends with barley coddling my tongue and spices licking my throat. A hand clamped on my wrist and threats of pleasure warming my ear.
It’s a taste I haven’t known since summer. Since long bright days spent reading indoors. Dark secret rooms filled with grotesque art and taxidermy, and a man longing for his missing wife.
I pass the bottle across in a heartbeat.
“What is it?” I ask Danny, and after taking a quick sip, he inspects the label.
“Lagavulin,” he answers, his pronunciation impeccable, but then a boy from the North would know. My breath falters. It’s the same damn whisky. A tongue had once rolled those syllables with an equal lack of effort, amber liquid pouring from a sparkling crystal decanter. Eyes closing. Gentle inhales. The world shrunk down to the contents of a diamond-ridged tumbler, as though it had been special, cherished, not designed to be swigged sloppily from the rim of the bottle, made for better things than super-charging drunkenness between angry, wayward teens.
The bonfire is strong now, a hot sunny glow level with our knees. It consumes everything thrown its way, every handwritten scrap and obnoxious sign, and makes the world clean again.
My throat scorches with the raw, bitter taste of whisky. Memories flash and flare like starbursts, all at once, and then a hollow nothingness. Fire burns away the November chill.
I eye the bottle as it’s passed to Finlay, who drinks from it deeply, before offering it to Rory, to Luke, and then arriving back to me. It’s powerful stuff. My head already feels comfortably coddled, my ego ballooning, and the flames feast and feast like chomping devils upon all that we dare throw at it. But there’s still material the fire hasn’t reached yet, hasn’t touched, and I want it to burn. I wanteverythingto burn.
And I want to expel, extinguish, exorcise — I want to exorcise this strange, new, sick hurt that seems to have been distilled inside this whisky since I last supped.
I take a hit of that slick liquid courage before placing my thumb over the wet hole. It happens too quickly for any of the chiefs to stop me.Uisge beathaflows past my shielding thumb and onto the searing heat below, and the fire — the fire isbeautiful. It leaps with joy. It burns bright white, drunk on the alcohol, exploding upward in furious orange streaks that almost take my arm as a sacrifice. Laughter bubbles out my mouth.
Rory yanks my waist, hauling me away from the flames. The bottle falls onto the grass, the remainder of it seeping into the ground, where tipsy wildflowers will pop up in time for spring.
“Jessa!” Danny gasps. “Are you okay?”
Rory watches me closely, his arm still clamped around me. In a quiet, serious voice, he asks me, “What the fuck was that?”
I say nothing for a long time, staring into his familiar gray eyes. How am I supposed to say it?
“I don’t think I like whisky very much,” I eventually mumble, and my heart is racing, blood flying through my body, because Rory looks… he looksso muchlike…
The Prime Minister wanted me pinned against the wall.
He wanted me to dance for him.
I swallow and screw my eyes shut. This is a bad habit I can’t get over, that Ineedto get over. My hand reaches out for my bag. And into the roaring, insatiable maw of hunger, I shake out every shred of Antiro debris. Flames now tower above us, and the greedy fire crackles and sparks with pleasure and gratitude. I stare up at it in awe, at this creation of mine: a spectacle of everything bad in the world, everything that’s wronged me personally, being destroyed.
And the sheer relief is overwhelming.
