Page 102 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
Within thirty minutes, I’m at the edge of the woods, where St. Sebastian is pacing. Without a coat, predictably.
“How are you not cold?” I ask, as we start mounting the path up to the clearing.
“Been chopping wood,” is the short reply.
“Why again?”
He runs his hand through his hair in a jerky movement that reminds me of Auden. “Because it needed doing. You know. If we wanted to use the chapel again.”
Again.
Last night was perfect, perfect and magical and everything I’d hoped it would be, and so why should we stop? Why shouldn’t we do another one?
Maybe for May Day, like Delphine had suggested. My heart tightens with excitement when I think about it.
“That was thoughtful of you,” I tell him. “Thank you.”
He bites his lip ring. “Please don’t thank me.”
“Okay?”
But he won’t elaborate, and eventually I don’t have enough breath to talk anyway, because he’s walking so fast that I practically have to jog to keep up.
“Slow down,” I puff as we reach the clearing’s edge. “I’m too short to keep up with you.”
He glances back at me without answering, and then keeps striding forward. I narrow my eyes at his well-defined back, deciding to be irritated no matter how good that back looks through the worn cotton of his T-shirt. I fail to see what could be so important that it’s worth dragging me out of bed and then jogging across half the estate—
Oh.
Holy shit.
St. Sebastian has clearly been hard at work this morning, and the entire length of the fallen tree is now stacked in charred, even chunks off to the side of the platform, which he’s left intact—presumably for future use.
Chopping all that wood is an impressive feat, but that’s not what has me stunned. It’s the altar itself. It’s what’s left of the serene, grass-covered hummock that we used just last night.
“The earth was so soft from all the rain that the tree displaced almost the entire mound,” St. Sebastian says of the muddy mess. “So after I chopped up the tree, I grabbed the shovel and thought maybe I could clear some of it away, you know. Just the worst of it.”
“Of course,” I say, approaching the former altar. “Smart idea. Was there anything underneath the mud?”
“Yes,” he says slowly.
My blood races fast and curious. “There was? Like the original church altar? Saint, that’s a huge deal!”
“I found something made of stone—I think it was the church’s altar. But . . . Poe—”
I’m to the altar now, ready to move around to where the most mud seems to have been cleared away so I can see the stone, but something in St. Sebastian’s voice stops me. I turn to face him.
He’s stopped a few feet behind me and he’s holding something out. Something small and colorful in his hand.
“It’s plastic,” he says, a little hoarsely. “So it didn’t—”
I take the little card out of his hand, and I’m about to ask him more questions—what it is and where near the altar he found it and why he looks so upset right now—but then I glance down, and everything in my body seems to rush up toward my head. My stomach, my heart, my blood—everything floating up and crowding my mind until I can’t breathe or hear or think.
From my fingertips, a happy, healthy, and alive Adalina Kernstow Markham smiles up at me. Probably the only woman in the Kansas State Licensing Bureau’s history to smile in her driver’s license photo, but there you have it. She was a smiler. Every picture of her on a dig was her covered in dirt and grinning up over some piece of pottery that looked like every other piece of pottery that she’d found. She’d only been in her mid-thirties when she left us, but even by that young age she’d had smile lines around her eyes and mouth.
She used to laugh so much that strangers would compliment her on it.
I look down at her driver’s license and nothing makes sense for a minute. Why is it here, in the chapel, why is it covered in flecks of mud?
