Read Chapter 30: The Deliberate Fire

The road back to London was a river of ash and desperation, and Tom moved against its current like a trout fighting upstream. Every step toward the burning city felt like a betrayal of his own reason. He had escaped. He had the box. He had the confession that could destroy Lord Percy. And now he was walking back into the furnace because Alice was still somewhere inside it.

The sky ahead glowed an ugly orange, even though dawn should have been creeping over the horizon. Smoke clawed at his throat from a mile out. The wind carried the crackle of timbers giving way, punctuated by distant screams too faint to be anything but the city’s death rattle.

He had wrapped the box in a scrap of burlap and slung it across his back, the weight of it pressing into his spine like an accusation. Every few hundred yards he stopped, listened, scanned the road behind him. No red cloaks. No riders. Just the shuffling tide of refugees moving the other way, their faces hollow and blackened with soot.

It was near the river bend, where the road curved past a collapsed mill, that Tom saw the anomaly.

A small fire had started in a stand of dry scrub beside the road. Not a natural fire — there was nothing here to catch a spark from, no lantern overturned, no fleeing household with dropped coals. And the man standing over it was no accidental bystander.

He was a monk. Grey wool habit, rope belt, hood half-pulled over a shaved crown. His back was to Tom, but his hands moved with deliberate purpose, feeding the flames from a bundle of straw. Then he stepped back, surveyed his work, and moved on to the next patch of scrub twenty paces further down the road.

Tom dropped into a crouch behind a charred fence post. He watched, stomach tightening, as the monk repeated the ritual. Kneel. Feed. Move. Each new fire took hold quickly in the dry summer brush, sending fresh columns of smoke into the already agonized sky.

This wasn’t a man fleeing the flames. This was a man planting them.

Tom crept closer, keeping low, using the drifting smoke as cover. The monk hummed a low hymn as he worked, his movements serene, almost prayerful. He reached the edge of a small orchard — still intact, barely singed — and paused, looking back at the line of fires he had set. A satisfied smile crossed his weathered face.

“That should reach the warehouses by noon,” the monk murmured to himself. “And the wind will carry it to the riverfront. Marshal law by nightfall. God’s will be done.”

Tom’s blood went cold.

Marshal law. Of course. A fire that grew faster than the bucket brigades could fight would force the King’s hand. And once London was under military control, the search would be absolute. No hiding. No bribing gatekeepers. Every street would be swept by soldiers looking for a man with an iron box.

The monk was not burning buildings. He was burning the city’s civil liberties to cinders.

The monk turned then, and Tom saw his face fully for the first time. It was a face he knew. Not from the crypt, not from the tavern — but from the shattered window of the burning house where this all began. The same man who had watched Percy’s men drag Alice away, his hands clasped in prayer as the flames consumed the aristocrat’s mansion.

Tom’s hand drifted to the knife at his belt. The monk was alone. Unarmed, perhaps. One clean strike and the fire-lighting would stop.

But the monk was walking somewhere with purpose, and Tom needed answers more than he needed vengeance.

He followed.

The monk moved through the outskirts with the confidence of a man who knew every alley and garden wall. He cut through a collapsed stable, past a well where a dead horse floated, and into the shell of a church whose roof had fallen in but whose stone walls still stood. Tom slipped through a gap in the masonry, hugging the shadows as the monk descended a set of stairs into a crypt.

Tom paused at the top of the stairs. The crypt. Again.

Voices echoed up from below. The monk was speaking now, no longer murmuring to himself.

“The diversion is set. By dusk, the entire eastern quarter will be alight. The King will have no choice but to declare emergency powers. Percy will have his marshal law, and the hunt will become a formality.”

“And the girl?” A second voice. Deeper. Familiar in a way that made Tom’s scars ache.

The man in the red cloak.

Tom pressed himself flat against the wall, breath held, heart hammering against his ribs.

“The girl remains secure,” the monk said. “She is leverage. A simple trade. The box for her life. When the thief returns — and he will return, because he loves her more than he loves his own skin — we will be ready.”

“He is a coward. He will run.”

“He did not run. He went east, then doubled back. I saw him on the road not an hour ago. He is coming for her.”

Tom’s stomach dropped. The monk had seen him? All that careful stalking, and he had been the one followed all along.

“Where is she?” the red-cloaked man asked.

“The chapel of St. Dunstan. Hidden beneath the sacristy. Walled up behind the old confessional. No one will find her. No one but you and I and the Lord who watches over this blessed work.”

Tom heard footsteps approaching the stairs. He scrambled backward, pressing himself into a niche behind a fallen pillar as the two men emerged from the crypt. The red cloak brushed past him — so close Tom could smell the smoke soaked into its fabric. But the man did not look his way.

They walked toward the city, disappearing into the haze.

Tom stayed frozen for a long moment, counting his breaths. St. Dunstan. He knew the chapel. It was a squat stone building near the old market, abandoned for years after its congregation fled to the countryside. And beneath its sacristy, behind a confessional, Alice was waiting for him.

He moved.

The chapel of St. Dunstan was still standing, though barely. Its roof had collapsed at one end, and the stained glass had long since shattered, but the stone walls remained intact, a lonely monument to a faith that had moved on. Tom circled it once, twice, looking for watchers. There were none. The fires the monk had set were drawing the city’s attention toward the river, and this forgotten corner of the parish sat quiet as a grave.

He found the sacristy door ajar. Inside, dust and decay. A fallen vestment cabinet. A cracked font. And there, in the corner, a confessional box with a carved wooden lattice that seemed out of place among the ruin.

Tom approached it slowly. He pressed on the side panel. It gave way with a groan, revealing a narrow opening behind it. A stone passage. Low, dark, and smelling of damp earth.

He dropped the burlap from his back and held the iron box before him like a shield. His hands were shaking. His breath came shallow.

Then he heard it. A muffled sound. A voice, barely audible through the stone.

A woman’s voice, humming a lullaby. The same lullaby his mother used to sing, before the fire, before everything.

“Alice,” Tom whispered.

He stepped into the passage, the box held tight against his chest, and the darkness swallowed him whole.