Pillar of Flames

A memory opens the chapter with a young Farnese lying awake, unsettled by the awful noise drifting up from the square beyond her home. Rising to peer through her window, she watches a man convicted of heresy consumed by flames at the stake. In the present day, she gives the command to put three condemned heretics to the fire. Her guards remark on the steely resolve she shows whenever a burning takes place, and Jerome overhears an explanation for it: her family's house once overlooked a plaza used for such executions, and she secured leadership of the hunt for the Black Swordsman by torching a group of heretics herself as a show of devotion.

As the three men are engulfed, Farnese turns Mozgus' teachings on faith over in her mind. In the watching crowd, a small boy wails for his father, one of the burning men. A jittery onlooker moves toward the child, convinced heresy must run in the blood, but before he can demand the boy be burned too, Serpico intervenes, leveling his blade and stating plainly that the child was cleared of guilt during his father's trial.

Having shielded the boy, Serpico requests leave from the execution grounds, saying he feels ill, and Farnese grants it. In truth he simply cannot stomach the sight of people burning and slips away to compose himself. Jerome soon finds him and praises his defense of the child. Serpico confesses that the moment struck close to home, because three years prior he watched his own mother die at the stake. The bleak account and his flat delivery leave Jerome unnerved, and he apologizes for prodding. Serpico shrugs it off and heads back to his post.

Left to think it over, Jerome puts two dates side by side: the death of Serpico's mother and Farnese's first sentencing both fell three years ago, a pairing he suspects is no accident. The chapter quietly links the two knights through a shared history of fire without spelling out the full connection between them.

That night, Farnese stares into the fireplace in her chamber and relives her earliest encounter with the pyre. As a child she crept down the stairs for a clearer view of a man being burned outside, and when a torch was pressed into her palm she hurled it almost without thinking. The surge of feeling seized her, and she kept flinging torch after torch, hooked on the sensation. Trying to recapture that thrill, she pleasures herself while gazing into the flames, where she imagines a man ablaze, before curling up in tears and searching desperately for something righteous in what she has done.