Chapter 42 Gwenna
FORTY-TWO
GWENNA
The last day of classes, it’s sunny and warm.
No one takes final exams. The administration cancelled them "in light of recent events"—which is the closest anyone official has come to acknowledging what happened.
The party line, as far as I can tell, is that there was a "structural incident" at the chapel and…
yet another mysterious fire, this time at Camlann House.
(“Those insurance claims are going to start looking mighty fishy,” Kai observed).
As if an entire campus blooming back to life in the span of minutes is just… weather.
But no one's asking too many questions. Not the students who watched from their windows as spring erupted through dead stone, and definitely not the faculty who found the church steps cracked open and empty, the White Brothers gone like they'd never been there at all.
Father Denis held a special Mass the Sunday after. Didn't mention anything specific. But he read from Revelation: Behold, I make all things new. Then he looked out at the congregation, students and professors and whoever showed up, and told us all to go outside and enjoy the sunshine.
We did.
So we’ve passed the final days of the semester outside. As much as possible. Sipping coffee on benches, walking by the lake, or sprawled on the quads, reading.
Today, we go for Option C.
I’m sitting in the grass, curled over a paperback—fun reading, not schoolwork.
Kai is asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his head in my lap, cradled in the skirt of my sundress.
Kingston is at the picnic table, working on something fencing-related—summer clinics, training plans, I don’t know.
Lanz and Cal are playing chess, and from the sounds of it, Lanz is losing again.
“That can’t be right,” I hear Cal say. “How did both of your bishops end up on white?”
“I don’t freaking know. Ask the Pope.” There’s a soft thud as Lanz flops onto his back. “I yield. I’m terrible at this game.”
“Don’t they call fencing physical chess?” I ask, turning a page in my paperback. “Maybe don’t admit that in front of your team captain.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Kingston says, without looking up from his paperwork.
“Win’s a win.” Cal shrugs, sweeps the pieces into their little bag, and folds up the board. To me, he says, “How is it?”
“Hm?” I lift my head. He’s nodding at my book: I’m about two-thirds of the way through Lilith’s Gambit, the “thrilling” and “high-octane” sequel to The Michelangelo Matrix, which I started all of this morning ago and which is, I have to say, not quite living up to the magic of the original.
I lower it slightly. “Spoilers okay?”
Cal nods.
“They killed off Fabienne.”
Cal’s eyes widen. “No way.”
“Way. Now Dr. Montgomery’s taken up with an Italian novelist.”
“Dr. Montgomery?” A shadow falls over our little group from the footpath. “I don’t suppose that’s a colleague of mine?”
I follow the shadow up to see Dr. Emrys, carrying a briefcase and still in a suit despite the high 70s temperatures, but looking quite sunny. A bit fit, even.
Younger, I realize. Slightly.
I smile and shake my head. “Not unless you’ve recently taken up a post at Collegium University. Fictional,” I hasten to add, flopping the paperback for emphasis, when Dr. Emrys looks patently befuddled at the deeply stupid name for a research institution.
Kingston, seeing the professor, looks up. “Dr. Emrys.” He stands, extends a hand to shake, which Emrys does. “It’s good to see you.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” Emrys says. “I was hoping I’d run across you somewhere—wasn’t quite sure where you’ve been posted up.”
Kingston nods. “In town. For now.”
After the fire, we’d been given temporary campus housing—I squeezed in with Morgan again, the guys given a quad in the senior dorms—but a few weeks ago, we officially took over Luther’s townhouse in Sarrasford.
Morgan made sure to send me off with a bundle of sage to cleanse it.
We’ll stay there over the summer until TK TK fall situation.
“Well. Good that I stumbled over you here, then.” Emrys turns to me. “I found a little, ah, extra reading for you.”
“Pass.” Kai’s eyes are still shut. I flick him gently in the forehead and shoot Emrys an apologetic look.
“Thank you. What…is it?”
Emrys chuckles. “Only two words. Hardly a burdensome text, if you ask me, but…” He sets his briefcase on the picnic table and extracts a rolled-up tube of paper: a poster, which he unfurls.
It’s narrow and wide, a grainy, somewhat faded photo of crumbling pillars and walls at the foot of a mountain with wide black borders and a caption: Γν?θι σεαυτ?ν.
“The Temple of Apollo,” Emrys says. “Delphi. Found it while I was clearing out the classroom for the semester and figured…” He shrugs. “Figured it might suit.” He rolls it back up and hands it to me.
“Thank you,” I say, touched and genuinely excited about a poster of an Ancient Greek ruin, nerd that I am. “I love it.” I spread it out again to admire.
Lanz peers over my shoulder at the Greek. “What’s it say?”
By way of answer, I glance back at Kingston—he of the elementary Greek—and cock my head. Your move.
Kingston frowns. “Know thyself,” he says. “Right?”
I nod. “Right.”
“Indeed,” Emrys chimes in. “Although—as I’m sure you know, Ms. Vale—it’s debated what exactly that was supposed to mean, in context.
Some see it as a call to know one’s limits as human.
Plato argued it as a call to know other souls in order to know one’s own, as an eye takes in the sight of another eye, while the Stoics thought it demanded all three parts of wisdom: ethics, physics, and logic. ”
I know this, vaguely. “What does it really mean, then?”
Emrys gives me a smile that you could almost call cheeky. “I think, perhaps, you should determine that for yourself, Ms. Vale.”
I smile, but the words sit in me. Know thyself.
I'm still not sure I understand it fully, what happened. Maybe I never will. But I know it worked. And I know it was true.
I am what I think I am.
If there is a God—and God, no pun intended, but I suppose there is, after what I’ve seen, Pascal’s wager be damned—then it is a God who claims me. Me, Gwenna. As I am. As I decide I am.
Thou art mine.
Enough that He—or She, or They—would rupture the earth to defend me.
To insist upon me—all my contradictions, all my changeability, all my impractical passions and insatiable need to work, all my delight in the ways that the world can be and be written of—as I am, not as anyone else thinks I ought to be.
To hold back life everywhere if I could not fully live in mine.
Emrys picks up his briefcase. “Well. I’d ask if I’ll be seeing you in any classes in fall semester, but if memory serves, you’ll be in my Malory seminar. As will you, Mr. Pendragon.”
“I look forward to it,” Kingston says.
They shake hands, and Emrys turns as if to go—but hesitates.
"Ms. Vale." His voice is softer now. "I've been meaning to thank you. For the photograph."
The photograph. The one from Porter's—Vivian in her white gown, standing at the edge of the Classics department, next to a kind-eyed man with a long white beard: him. Emrys. A century or so from now, from his perspective.
I'd brought him a copy of it after everything was over. A strange gift, but I didn’t know how better to explain it—wasn’t sure I even could, given the looping logic of how time seems to work for him. I just…felt I should.
"I've thought about it a great deal," he continues.
"Knowing what's coming. Who's coming." A faint smile crosses his face.
"Brilliant, stubborn, entirely too certain of her own righteousness.
I imagine I will love her very much. And…
suspect she will break my heart, in the end.
Or, rather, become something I can no longer reach. "
I don't know what to say. He's going to fall in love with the woman who became the Lady of the Lake. Who asked me the question that almost drowned me. Who, in some strange way, set much of all this in motion.
"I used to dread it," he continues. "Knowing what was coming. But now, having known you…" He pauses, choosing his words. "I think I understand better what it means to love someone who is in the process of becoming. Even if what they become is beyond you."
"I'm sorry," I finally manage. "That you have to—know. Ahead of time."
Emrys shakes his head. "Don't be. Foreknowledge isn't the same as predetermination, Ms. Vale. She'll make her choices. I'll make mine." He looks at me with those too-old eyes. "Just as you made yours. The difference is, you chose to remain yourself. And that, I think, is rarer than you know."
With that, Emrys bids us farewell, and Kingston packs up his paperwork to settle on the grass behind me. I feel his touch, gently stroking at my lower back, between my shoulder blades.
It’s almost not strange, wearing clothes like this—a dress with no sleeves, no collar, just white braided straps and. But the strangeness is only the sensation of it—the ease and immediacy of feeling the breeze, the sun, the brush or press of hands.
It’s no longer strange to see my arms. To see the scar on my chest.
I glance down at myself, as I thumb a few pages ahead in my book with one hand and idly wind my fingers in Kai’s hair with the other.
It’s there. Peeking out near the strap. Clear and distinct. Two lines.
Absently, I set down the book and run my fingertips over it. Close my eyes.
Maybe it’s not a cross—maybe it never was. Could just as easily be a sword.
Or maybe it just is what it is. That simple, that easy.
Four points, one center.
Them. Me. Us.