Page 55 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
I let go of his hand and point at Estamond with her torc and her vivid eyes.
“You’ll finally get to be with your queen,” I say, thinking of his boyhood games, but Auden gives me an odd look, as if unsettled by what I just said.
“My queen,” he answers slowly. “Yes, I suppose I will.”
We end up bringing the painting down to show the others, who are predictably excited and fascinated with it, and we all have another round of drinks while Delphine makes me pose like Estamond in the picture to gauge the resemblance for herself.
It’s decided—by Delphine and Rebecca, in a rare show of solidarity—that Becket and Saint should spend the night in the old wing’s remaining spare room, and that the planning for Imbolc would resume tomorrow. Saint makes a faint noise of protest at this, but there’s no arguing the blizzard outside, no denying the snow falling so thick and fast that even the forest can’t be seen from the windows.
So after dousing the fire, we stumble in a boozy haze up to our rooms, and after a general hubbub of brushing teeth and hunting for extra blankets and making sure Becket and Saint found everything they needed and also would both fit on the spare room’s bed, we close our doors and prepare to sleep while winter screams outside.
It takes me almost no time at all to fall into the dreams.
And when I do, there are thorns biting into my wrist and there’s a fire hot on my back and when I look down, I’m clasping St. Sebastian’s hand. Auden’s hand covers both of ours, and all of it is wrapped in thorny vines, stiff enough to make a cage, but tight enough to make all three of us bleed. We’re handfasted.
“A bride by thorns,” dream-Auden says.
Except then it’s not him, it’s Delphine and me, bound together with blood and thorns and she’s shivering against the pain, but with delight—and then it’s all of us standing in a circle, thorns between our palms and clasping hands tight so that we’ll each be pricked.
“Are you ready to lie down, Proserpina?” dream-Auden asks gently, and I am, I am finally ready to lie down.
There’s a door behind the altar.
I stare at it as I slowly spread my legs and am made a bride.
Chapter 17
Our Life, Our Sweetness, and Our Hope
The bed is almost too small for Becket and Saint together, but the priest is conscientious and Saint is exhausted. He came to Thornchapel to drop off a public library book for Proserpina, a fantasy title he knew she wanted to read and that he’d checked out under his account so she could take her time with it without worrying about late fees . . . but even at the time he knew it was a pretense. She hadn’t asked for the book and he hadn’t offered it—there was no reason for him to come to Thornchapel other than that he was crawling out of his skin from not having seen her that day. And if there was the danger that Auden would be there, the danger that he might see the same look of mingled hunger and anguish on Auden’s handsome face as Saint saw that night when he hurt Proserpina’s bare bottom for everyone to see . . .
It had been a danger that didn’t feel like a danger at all.
And then when Auden said six of us. Not five. Not them minus Saint, but them plus Saint . . .
He didn’t even know what he felt then, except that it was almost like panic but sweeter. Honeyed like b
ourbon and the lies he tells himself at night with his hand on his cock and his mind full of Auden.
Saint rolls onto his side and stares at the window, even though there’s nothing to see but snow and darkness. He doesn’t need to see to know the window looks out over the south gardens, over the maze. He knows exactly which stand of trees conceals the tunnel exit from the maze’s center, and which almost indiscernible path leads to the chapel ruins.
He knows because he goes there often. Like a poacher in the woods, treading soundlessly through the back paths and hidden inlets onto the Thornchapel grounds, he’s learned to come and go without being seen. Unlike a poacher, he’s not hunting, he’s not looking to take anything that isn’t his—all he does is search out the ruins and sit, as if the wildflowers and dead stones have answers for him.
His mother’s family was a family of devout Catholics, and his mother had grown up with faith as inescapable and natural as breathing. She lit her saint’s candles, she prayed her devotions, and she went to Mass faithfully, every week. At his birth, she named her only child after the patron saint of saintly deaths.
And for all that—for his mother’s fierce faith and his own name—Saint had never found any faith of his own. It all felt hollow, and after watching his mother die, it now feels worse than hollow—it feels pointless.
Except there are these times . . . these strange, ephemeral times when he almost feels . . . something. He doesn’t know what to call it, how to think of it, and he doesn’t even know if he likes it, because whenever that something brushes up against his mind, it’s so dizzying and potent that he feels like he could lose himself in it without a second thought. And for a man who’s clawed for every scrap of identity he has, the thought of losing anything is terrifying.
What he does know is this: any time he’s ever felt whatever it is, magic or God or the collective energy of the universe, it’s been in the thorn chapel.
It should feel ridiculous, what he’s agreed to do with the others. In fact, he half expects they’ll all wake up and remember their drunken declarations with shame, and the idea will be quietly and gratefully forgotten.
But for St. Sebastian, nothing could be further from ridiculous. Nothing could feel more necessary right now. He may not believe in anything, but if he could, it would be there in that place and it would be with them, and it seems right somehow to try. Like doing anything else might actually tear him apart.
Father Becket is at peace until he dreams. And then the zeal opens its pitiless mouth and chews him with eager, champing teeth.
He’s told himself precious few lies over the course of his life; he prizes honesty as the king of virtues. And while he learned compassionate silence with others so that he could comfort them without prevarication, he forbade himself the same comfort. He would always tell himself the truth—the zeal demanded it—and so any lies he told himself were lies he sincerely believed. A lie, for instance, that his interest in Celtic mythology was merely an academic response to his surroundings.
