Page 3 of Bitter Burn
A hazel tree and a twisting hunt of honeysuckle. Far larger than they have any right to be for how young they are.
The hazel tree, growing from a dead knight’s grave, has already spread its branches wide, and the honeysuckle, growing from a dead queen’s, has crept its way over to the tree and climbed, twined, wrapped itself around every branch it could. In the summer, it’s nearly impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, since it’s all a thicket of vibrant green leaves and pink and yellow flowers, but in the winter, it’s easier. Only the honeysuckle has held on to some of its green.
I move between the graves, and as I often do, I sink to my knees between them. Finger the dying leaves caught in the long grass. Leaves that were grown out of soil so precious I won’t let anyone else near it.
My dead knight. My dead queen.
In this cold, empty garden because of me.
Two
Mark
Present Day
I’m not sorry. I think it’s important that you know this about me—that you understand this.
I’m not sorry. I’d do it again.
It’s selfish to do what I’m doing, but everything I’ve done since I kissed my bodyguard on the roof of my club has been selfish. Everything since my engagement to Isolde Lawrence, since founding Lyonesse, since watching my husband bleed to death under the cover of night and opera music.
I can dress it up as justice; I can dress it up as revenge; maybe I can even dress it up as love…but I know the truth. I know myself. I want. I want like a hungry wolf; I want like the sea lashing at the rocks. I want senselessly and ceaselessly and entirely.
I want my wife back. I want my bodyguard.
I want a hand around their throats and the salt of their tears stinging my lips.
I don’t take the usual way to Morois House but instead park a few miles away in a private, unmarked lane and press through the snow-caught heather until I reach the edge of the woods and leave the moor behind. On the narrow path leading into the valley and to the house itself, I keep to the grass and the rocks as much as possible to avoid making tracks—an old habit. One I learned here, in fact, alongside Melody and our older sister, Blanche. My grandfather, retired MI6, would play long games of hide-and-seek with us in these woods, teaching us how to hide during a sunny day and during a rainy one, how to find cover when the light was good and when the light was bad. He taught us the names of the flowers and the birds, how you could use the latter to assess whether anyone was coming close, how you could throw sticks and rocks against the trees to confuse a pursuer, how you could double back, triple back, go in circles to make your trail impossible to follow.
One day, he took my sisters and me on a long walk to a stone circle, half fallen over and overgrown with grass and wildflowers. The trees were too thick for the local farmers to let their sheep graze, my grandfather explained, and aside from the occasional rambler hoping to end up in a pub, no one came there. It was on the Ordnance Survey maps, but it was difficult to get to, and with the photogenic shores of Tintagel so close, why would anyone bother? Cornwall has plenty of standing stones, dolmens, and cairns that come with more convenient parking and fewer brambles, and besides, most visitors weren’t coming for the history; they were coming for the sea.
But we weren’t visitors, not the Trevena family, not even the last American flowering of it, and Grandad wanted us to know. He insisted that the Trevenas had once used these stone circles in times gone by, that we came from the people that built them five thousand years ago, that his own grandad took him to this very spot and told him that the Trevenas must never forget who they were: bronze, stone, sea.
Melody, even at that age, was too practical to care about something as intangible as an ancestral past, and Blanche immediately made a romance of it, but I knew what our grandfather was giving us that day, and it wasn’t a homily about the beauty of Cornwall. It wasn’t an invitation into a legacy.
It was a warning.
Trevenas outlast. Trevenas are cruel. We are salt-skinned and thorned with gorse, and we worshipped capricious gods long after the saints began crawling over our hills. We have hearts of tin and minds of slate, and we do not flinch.
Grandad was MI6; his grandfather returned from the Great War with three German cavalry pennants and not a single ounce of shell shock; and his grandfather before him was the last of the great Cornish smugglers. My own mother had been a mergers and acquisitions shark in the City, carving up corporations and portfolios with clever, monstrous slices, a shark who made her husband take her name after their wedding because she refused to have a new plaque etched for her firm’s office. The only softness we ever saw of her before she died was her love for our father, who was a gentle man. Blanche inherited his sweetness, his generosity, his goodness. Melody and I inherited his crooked pinkie fingers and nothing else; we twins were Trevena through and through.
It’s something I think about often these days, who I am. What I am.
If I were a different man, would I be sneaking through the mostly naked trees toward my own house right now? Would I have a fine red ridge on my throat from the night my wife almost killed me? An ugly knot of scar tissue on my shoulder from the time I was stabbed?
Would I have played the game, moving piece after piece on a board I couldn’t see the edges of, for years and years, just to have both of them in my power?
I exhale slowly. It doesn’t matter. I’m not a different man, and I’m not about to become one.
Although as I hear a melody floating over the wet, snow-patched graveyard, I almost wish that weren’t the case. I almost wish that I were good, normal, the kind of warmhearted and generous lover that could follow the sound of singing to its source and greet it with a smile and open arms.
Instead, I lean my shoulder against the trunk of a tree and close my eyes and listen.
Tristan is singing.
I’ve never heard anyone sing quite like Tristan, like his heart has slipped onto his tongue, like it’s not really singing if you don’t leave a little arterial spatter on the floor when you’re done. And not in a tortured way, not in a way that implies labor or pain—more like someone offering their kidney without a second thought. Like someone taking off their coat in the cold and draping it over your shoulders instead.
It’s too generous; I don’t deserve it. Neither does Isolde. The two of us deserve chants of penance or half-muffled opera music in the dark. We are the same that way.
