Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
KINGSTON
She was right there. She was right there.
I saw her running for us. Saw her scream. Saw her scream my name—I could read it on her lips—but heard nothing but the sound of blood pounding in my ears.
That’s all I can hear, still. A rushing silence as two things repeat in my mind.
Escape. Get to Gwenna.
I have always been focused. Always been disciplined and directed and committed to my objectives. But this—she—transcends it all. There is no intellection, no reasoning, no strategy, even. There is nothing but pure, potent, animal drive to rip her out of their grasp and run.
Nothing else matters. Nothing else.
There's a crash, and then a few thuds, as something hurls against the windowpane and bounces away, useless. A brass ashtray, hurled by Kai.
"Don't," I say. "Don't waste your strength. It's not going to work."
"You've got another idea?" Kai snaps. And yet I know he's not mad at me. Just mad. Mad at this. Mad that she's...
“There has to be some way.” He starts pacing, scratching at his neck, and one of the three nicotine patches he slapped on today.
“There has to be…” A few feet away, Callahan has sunk into the couch, his eyes wide and staring at nothing.
He did this. He knows it. He can barely look at any of us.
But he didn't. He wasn't trapped. We all were.
That's what they do, with lies and conditions and double-speak and poisonous ways of thinking, with vows.
"Callahan." I stride over to him, businesslike.
Callahan lifts his head.
I jerk a nod toward the back of the house. "Get to the cell. Grab weapons for everybody. We want to be armed."
Callahan nods, gets to his feet, jogs off like he's relieved to have something to do. I turn around to Lanz, and god but he looks the way I feel—hollowed out, desperate.
"We're going to get to her," I say. And hope I believe it myself. "She's still nearby."
Lanz nods. "She's farther but not much. I'd notice if she were taken that much farther away."
"You can feel it," I ask. "You're sure it's not just—"
"No," Lanz interrupts. "It's—trust me, it's real. And it hurts, but I can..." He sucks his teeth. "Just, the faster we move, the better."
"No fucking kidding," Kai mutters from across the room. "What's your plan here, King?" He doesn't sound angry, just curious. Maybe skeptical. I press a hand to my forehead, trying to think.
Camelon House has been here forever. The ward must be old, probably built into the house, part of the bones. It's not a hex that wears off or a curse that can be undone. It's structural.
"Structural? The ward must be in the bones of the house," I say quietly, thinking aloud.
Kai stops pacing. "So?"
"So, if there's no house," I say slowly, "there's no ward."
Silence. They understand.
Callahan comes back, weapons rattling under his arm. "I just grabbed…” He shakes his head, dumps them onto one of the armchairs.
"Whatever.”
“It's fine," I say. “Everyone—”
I barely have to gesture before we all grab a blade, myself included.
And then I look to the fireplace.
Everything here is wood, fabric—it's a tinderbox, really—and yet I want to be methodical, even now.
"King, are you..." Lanz starts. "Are you sure? I mean, everything we have is in here, and—"
“And she’s out there,” Kai cuts in. “I say do it.”
Lanz’s eyes widen. He nods.
I cross the room slowly. Not because I'm hesitating—I'm not—but because I want to see it. All of it. One last time.
The leather chair by the window, cracked along the arms. The shelves of books with their crumbling spines—Malory, Augustine, Aquinas, heirloom copies untouched for years. The oil paintings, eyes long yellowed over with varnish.
I remember the first time I stood here.
Seventeen years old. The three of us just arrived—me, Kai, Lanz, laden down with our bags and our swords and the weight of nine hundred years of expectation pressing down on our shoulders. We walked up the path together, not speaking.
Kai said, "Charming. Very 'last known address.'"
Lanz laughed—actually laughed, which surprised me, because I hadn’t so much as seen him smile since his father died a few months earlier.
And I stood in this room, in front of this fireplace, and thought: this is where it begins. This is where we become what we're supposed to be.
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 House is your 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.