Fenix found the third-ranked general alone, in a chamber lit by torches that burned an angrier violet than any he'd passed through so far, and understood, the moment Theodore Ira's curled fists came into view, that this was not going to be a fight that left much room for conversation.
"Fire," Theodore said, by way of greeting, his voice rough and low, the specific rasp of a man who had spent three hundred years finding very little use for gentler tones. "Good. I've had enough of the ones who want to talk first."
"I'm not much for talking either," Fenix said, and let the flame answer for him.
The fight that followed had none of the strange conversational quality the other chambers had held — no illusions, no mirrors, no careful psychological unmaking. Theodore came at him direct and total, hatred released the way Fenix's own fire released, without hesitation, without calculation, two forces that understood each other instinctively even as they tried to end one another.
The chamber shook with each exchange, fire meeting fist meeting a hatred so total it seemed to have its own gravity, pulling every ember Fenix threw toward it as though wanting, in some strange way, to be consumed rather than to win.
"You're not like the others," Theodore said, between exchanges, something almost approving in his rough voice. "Most of them talk. You just burn."
"I've spent my whole life being told fire doesn't think first," Fenix said, driving another wave forward. "Turns out that's useful, against someone who reaches into people and lets loose whatever's already sitting there. There isn't much sitting in me that isn't already burning. Nothing left for you to release that isn't already out."
"Everyone has something buried," Theodore said, circling him. "Even you. I can feel it, underneath the flame — something you've never let anyone see, not even the house you've spent two years fighting beside."
"Try to find it, then," Fenix said. "I'll wait."
Theodore's fists connected once, hard, driving Fenix back against the chamber wall, and for a moment the general's curled hands hovered at his throat with a violence that had killed a father at seventeen and left broken men in a dozen forgotten towns since.
"I could end this in a single motion," Theodore said, low.
"So could I," Fenix said, and let the fire answer for him a second time, closer now, hotter, driving straight through the anger Theodore had spent three hundred years releasing into other people and refusing, this once, to let it find anywhere to land except back on the man who'd unleashed it.
Theodore staggered under the force of it, something in his rough composure finally cracking. "You don't understand what this is," he said. "The anger. It isn't mine to control anymore. It hasn't been mine in three hundred years."
"I don't think that's true," Fenix said, pressing forward despite the exhaustion beginning to pull at his own limbs. "I think you decided a long time ago it was easier to believe that than to believe you had any say in it at all. I've met men like you. Not with your power. But with your kind of anger. It's always a choice, somewhere underneath, even when it doesn't feel like one."
Theodore's centuries of borrowed fury finally, after one long brutal exchange, found nowhere left to go but out — burning through him the way it had burned through every person he'd ever released it into, except this time with no one left standing behind him to absorb the aftermath. He staggered, and for one strange moment something crossed his face that had nothing to do with anger at all — a flicker of the boy who had once caught his father's wrist, of a tavern-keeper named Isolde who had told him the anger was grief wearing anger's clothes.
"Isolde," he said, quietly, to no one Fenix could see.
Then the fire finished what it had started, and Theodore Ira was gone, his curled fists finally, after three hundred years, unclenching in the half-second before the end.
Fenix stood alone in the chamber for a long moment, breathing hard, the violet torches burning down around him one by one, and found himself, unexpectedly, thinking of the name Theodore had spoken at the very end — a woman neither he nor anyone in the house had ever met, and yet somehow, in that final half-second, the only thing that mattered enough to say out loud.
"I hope you found her," he said, quietly, to the empty chamber, and meant it more than he expected to.
He found Katherine and Thomas in a corridor not far beyond, and it was Thomas who spoke first, his shoulders set in a way that told Katherine, before he said a word, exactly what news he was carrying.
"Kristen," he said. "William found her. Ashton's alive — hurt, but alive. Kristen isn't."
Katherine felt the words land the way bad news always landed in the middle of a fight that hadn't finished being fought — not with the full weight it deserved, because there was no room left in her for the full weight, only a small hard place where the grief could sit until later, when later became a thing she was allowed to have.
Fenix said nothing at all, but something in his singed, exhausted face tightened, and Katherine understood that he had heard it too, and was carrying it the same way she was — sealed away, for now, in the small hard place grief goes when there isn't yet room for it.
"How many are left," Katherine said, because the question that mattered right now was the one that kept the rest of the house alive long enough to grieve properly afterward.
"Two generals unaccounted for," Thomas said. "And her. Whatever she's been doing behind that throne room door while we cleared the rest of this castle for her." He looked down the corridor, toward a distant flicker of violet light that seemed, the longer he watched it, to be leading somewhere specific. "Come on. Let's find the others. I don't like the idea of facing whatever's left of this without everyone we still have standing beside us."
They walked together in silence for a while, the corridor's black stone swallowing the sound of their footsteps, each of them carrying their own version of the same small hard grief, waiting for the moment when the fight would finally be over and there would be room, at last, to let it out properly.
"I keep thinking about the last thing she'd have said," Katherine said, finally, breaking the silence. "If she'd had time to say anything. Kristen wasn't the sort to leave things unsaid, usually."
"I don't think she needed time," Fenix said, quietly. "I think what she did was the saying. She didn't need words for it. She just moved, the way Jasper always said she moved, faster than doubt could catch up to her."
"That doesn't make it easier," Katherine said.
"No," Fenix agreed. "I don't think anything's going to make it easier for a while yet. I think we just carry it until it gets lighter, the way we've carried everything else this house has lost."
Thomas said nothing to either of them, but Katherine noticed the particular set of his jaw, the specific stillness he wore when he was cataloguing a loss the way he cataloged everything — filing it somewhere he could return to properly once the fighting was finally, entirely, done.
"Two more corridors," he said, finally, nodding toward the distant violet glow. "Then we find the others, and then we finish this. Whatever's left of today, we finish it together."