Page 58 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
Saint’s tongue moves a
gain, warm and wet, lapping up everything Auden had spilled, as if it’s too precious to waste, too treasured to let drip onto a dirty floor. His lips are somehow firm and soft all at the same time—plush and silky and yet still a man’s lips, still a man’s mouth—and that lip ring, it’s everything, it’s fucking everything, Auden can feel it along his shaft and against the creases of his fingers when Saint kisses his hand clean, he can feel it along the creases and tucks of his testicles when Saint kisses those clean too. He threads his clean hand into Saint’s hair and shoves Saint’s mouth even harder against him; he lets out a feral groan when Saint sucks his too-sensitive cock into his mouth. He feels himself swelling hard again—he could keep Saint here just like this, he could fuck Saint’s pretty mouth and then he could reward him with callous pets and pleasures until Saint came too, and it would be revenge and lust all tied together—
No.
Oh God, oh no. No, no, no.
“Saint,” Auden says hoarsely, pushing him away, “stop, fuck. Stop.”
Saint looks up at Auden from his lap, his lips swollen and his eyes darker than anything Auden’s ever seen, and Christ, he’s so handsome and so pretty and it’s not fair, it’s never been fair that St. Sebastian Martinez could be his undoing when St. Sebastian also could hurt him so much, so fucking much.
“I can’t do this,” Auden manages. And he’s about to say, I can’t hurt Delphine, when St. Sebastian gives a jerky nod and gets to his feet in an equally jerky movement.
“I know,” St. Sebastian says. He sounds hurt, and not in the way Auden’s fantasized about hurting him. He sounds hurt in a way that makes Auden hurt too somehow, and then he’s gone before Auden can say anything to fix it.
He’s gone, and Auden is alone in the tower with nothing but thorns in his chest and the memory of Saint’s lip ring on his skin.
Chapter 18
Six Days Later
“Gotcha.”
There’s plenty of light here on the second story of shelves, and so when I finally find what I’m looking for, I don’t bother to climb down to one of the tables with their lamps to look at it, I stay up here on the balcony.
The book is mid-eighteenth century, quite small, but the printing is clear and straight, and the handsome leather bindings show expertise and care. There’s only one word tooled onto the spine, Thornechapel, but the title page reveals that it is indeed the book we’ve been looking for: A Record of Thornechapel Customs, including the Consecration of the May Queen, Stories taken from Ancient Sources and Explicated Herein.
Dartham’s chief source.
Delphine and the others did their best scanning through Estamond’s ledgers this last weekend, but reading old, faded Copperplate is tricky work unless you’ve had practice, and it finally fell to me to finish combing through the entries. It took me almost a week to find the entry itself, and after figuring out Estamond’s shelving system—a system that could kindly be called eccentric—it only took a half hour of hunting to find it hidden in the upper stories, wedged between guides to monastic gardens.
I prop my shoulder against the side of the shelf while I carefully page through the book. It only takes two pages to find mention of Imbolc and the other feasts Dartham complained about, and it looks like there’s a fair amount of detail for me to sift through. Deciding that I should go down to the table after all, I’m about to close the book, and that’s when I see the handwriting.
On a page depicting the now-familiar scene of a woman standing in the chapel ruins with a lantern, there’s a caption that says, “The consecration of the May Queen on Beltane night.”
And someone has crossed out Beltane in one decisive stroke, and written Imbolc instead. The m has an extra hump in it, as if whoever wrote it was in a hurry. I think of Estamond’s signature in her ledger and smile. It had to have been her.
But interestingly, the word Imbolc is underlined with a different pen—a blue ballpoint pen. A modern pen. There’s also an exclamation point after, pressed into the paper in the same blue ink, slanted and emphatic.
Stop seeing your mother’s ghost everywhere, I chide myself. This can’t be her handwriting; there’s simply no way for you to tell.
But I can tell for certain that I’m not the first person since Dartham to find this book, and I still can’t help the weird spike of intuition that the last person to find it was my mother.
As if enervated after the storm, winter has retreated into the shadows of trees and the cover of night. The days have grown milder as the week goes on, and eventually the swells and drifts of snow are melted into a cold, gloppy mud.
I’m slogging through it now in my blue rubber boots, the Consecration book tucked securely in my coat pocket and my thoughts racing. Racing through the much more explicit description of what kind of wedding rite the lord of the manor and the bride are supposed to perform.
Not just the promise, but the consummation—not just words, but flesh.
The bride and the lord are supposed to fuck. During the ceremony.
There at the altar be made a bride by thorns was what Dartham had said. And there’s a hot, tight feeling between my legs as I recall reading what the Consecration author had described, and God, if it were up to me, if it was to be me holding the lantern and walking toward Auden . . .
But it’s not going to be you, I remind myself. I’m a pervy little sex monster, and the ritual described in this old book is exactly the type of thing I’m hardwired to find delicious. Being bathed and groomed and robed, married to a tall stranger by firelight and then claimed in front of everyone—
It’s not going to be you.
It’s supposed to be Delphine. Delphine being claimed by firelight, by the man she’s going to marry anyway. I try to ignore the lance of pain that goes through me as I imagine watching the two of them together, fucking and rutting by the altar. It’s paired with an equally potent lance of arousal, and I want to shake myself.
