Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
GWENNA
Outside, the air smells like smoke.
I see the source immediately: a black cloud chugging upward from somewhere across campus, towards the lake. Too far from view to tell.
Something’s on fire.
“What’s that?” I ask. “What is that?” What did you do?
No answer. Of course there is no answer. The two Brothers who flank me are silent as marble columns, and just as strong. They push-pull me to the edge of the footpath that unfurls to the rest of the quads, that splits and turns and weaves through all of campus.
And, in front of us, the prior.
“She will witness what she has done,” he says. “She will walk the path to the end.”
No. I can’t walk. I won’t walk. My muscles are locking and my bare heels are dug as deep into the salted, ruined earth as I can manage.
But they have me. The arms at my shoulders are too firm and too forceful, and they push, drag me forward, scraping my feet first over dirt, then over the stone of the path.
“Witness!”
It’s like some sick version of a campus tour.
A last glance at the place that captured my heart and my mind.
And yet it hurts to look at, like seeing someone you love on their deathbed, wasted away by some disease, not the healthy person you really knew but just some shell that barely resembles them.
Because the campus looks dead. As we march—as they march, and I brace myself with all my might to resist every step—all I can see is what’s not there, what’s been sucked away and dried out. Trees with gray limbs and no leaves. Quads that are more dirt than grass. Cracked stone, crumbling concrete.
And that acrid, billowing smoke in the distance.
“Witness!”
The prior. He speaks again.
“And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets—”
No. I won’t listen. I can’t. I force myself to look at the places as we pass, to find a safe space in my mind. Look, there’s Fisher Hall. Where I first got my course assignments. My dorm room key. Even my stupid little student ID—
“—and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her—”
There’s the Divinity School building. Holy Grounds in the basement, all the scrubby armchairs and strange grad student baristas and inscrutable trivia questions.
“For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men.”
The library. The library, that gorgeous place full of so many books, thoughtfully collected, dutifully maintained, properly organized, now waiting to be read by anyone with their interest piqued and a card to swipe.
“Keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids—”
The Classics building. My heart seizes in my chest. Emrys. Is he even still here? Did they—
I look from side to side, as if the blank faces surrounding me will tell me anything. But no.
“—for by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread!”
And now I see where we are going.
The chapel. The gorgeous, gothic, too grand-by-half chapel that has no right being so exquisite in the middle of a hidden pocket of New England, and yet.
It is here, cornerstone to cornerstone laid and carved with care and reverence.
The chiseled stone foliage of the facade are now the only leaves on campus, the blank-eyed saints and their demure Gothic smiles the only pleasant faces.
This was where I first met Kingston. That strange, serious boy, intense and restrained all at once, focused but distant, kind but careful.
From above, the bell tolls.
Will I see him again? I wonder. Will I even see them again? Before whatever happens to me?
I start to shake, tears building behind my eyes.
They force me up the steps, to the small flagstone landing before the doors, and there’s someone there.
Two White Brothers, chains in their gloved hands, yes, but someone else, another figure between them, and my heart leaps, because maybe, maybe—but no.
Not any of the four of them. Not a man at all.
Tall, willowy, streaming blonde hair, eyes bound in a blindfold.
My heart stops.
Morgan.
They have Morgan.