Some Fuses Take Four Thousand Years

A hundred and fifty-nine years ago, a young Welsh witch wrote a letter asking a first-order being to move a date forward. The first-order being, after five years of review, agreed.

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This year, the fuse she lit went off.

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Book Three is the reckoning. Alistair drives to Lyon to meet a thirty-four-year-old museum conservator who has been waiting thirty years to receive a specific small envelope from her mother. Jacks takes tea with Atropos in a Welsh kitchen and is told, at last, why the fuse was timed to the specific morning it was timed to. Red sits her directorship briefing on a Monday morning still wearing a bedraggled white flower crown from the night before. Rose, in a Sicilian cage, chooses. Miran, at a piano in Soho, plays his resignation. Ten thousand Londoners, on no official permission, gather in Trafalgar Square at two in the morning on the first Saturday of October to dance to ABBA. The dead come back for one night. Nobody is quite sure how.

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The trilogy’s final image is Red and Jacks on the base of a lion plinth on Tower Bridge at six in the morning, sharing a thermos of coffee, watching one very faint star — the last remnant of a constellation a scribe drew in the sky at two-forty-seven a.m. and never quite put away — still, specifically, on.

 

Book Three closes the trilogy with an epic water dance on the Thames of London.

 

It does not close the door.