Page 101 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I catch his gaze once more, the gaze of this virile stag, and can barely breathe. I’ve always known his eyes are the color of the forest, but now’s when I recognize his eyes are the forest, they are the forest looking out at me. He is the forest and the god and Auden all at once, and I have to offer him everything, it’s a compulsion that cries out from the very pit of my soul, and I arch my throat. I lift my hips underneath his.
“Take me,” I plead. Above us, clouds scud across the sky. Around us the drums beat. “Take me,” I say again.
The god studies me, cocking his head as if I’m a puzzle.
“You owe me one more thing,” the god says. “Before I can take you. Do you know what it is?”
I shake my head; the antlers scratch into the grass and moss. “I don’t know,” I moan. My heart is still throwing itself against the walls of my chest, and my cock aches and aches, and having this fertile, vigorous stag king above me is stirring every sense past reason. “Fuck me,” I whisper. “Please.”
“You have a debt to pay me,” the god says. “A debt of courage.”
My heart throws itself around even harder and a fresh burst of adrenaline washes through me.
He means the graveyard.
A debt of courage has to mean the graveyard.
“Please,” I say, and I’m crying, the tears are brimming hot against my eyelashes. “Please, don’t hate me anymore for it. I hate myself for both of us.”
The god over me freezes, his eyes searching mine. “What are you talking about?” he asks.
“The graveyard,” I sputter tearfully. “Those six steps.”
Warm fingertips touch my temple, catching the tears there. “What six steps?” asks the god carefully.
“The six steps I ran away from you. I realized you were still there, I realized you were getting hurt, and I—it took me six steps—” The agonizing shame of it rips through me and I roll away from his forest eyes, but the god keeps me pinned as he stares down at me without expression.
“It’s why you hated me. Why I hated myself,” I whisper. “I left you to be beaten and I didn’t come back quick enough. Not quick enough to save you.”
The god drops his head between his shoulders, closing his eyes as our antlers click together. “All this time,” he murmurs. “All this time you thought I hated you because you ran?”
Of course. “Yes.”
“Fuck,” the god says. He looks like I’ve stabbed him in the heart. Like he’s the one who’s been slain on the hunt. “I wanted you to run that day. I stayed so that you could run. I never hated you for that.”
“But then,” I ask, “why did you hate me at all?”
“Because you never came back.”
I blink through the tears. “You mean—”
“You went to America without even a goodbye—without a fucking email or letter or anything. Do you know how much that fucking hurt? How much I wanted to curl up and die, because I thought I’d lived through the worst, I thought that I’d faced down the biggest dragon there was in order to be with you, but then I discovered that the real terror was losing you, was falling in love and then having my heart ripped out with no warning. Not because the world didn’t want us to be together, but because you didn’t want to be with me.”
The drums echo my heart, my thoughts. Wrong? Wrong? I was wrong?
> “Oh,” I say, faintly.
“Yes, oh,” the Thorn King says with a rueful look. He ducks his head again, but this time it’s to kiss the tears off my temples and eyelashes. “All I wanted was to love you and maybe one day Poe. And then you left.”
“You really didn’t hate me for the graveyard?”
His eyes are sad when he lifts his head to look down at me. “Never. Not for a single moment.”
“But . . . the debt—?”
He uses a thumb to tug at my piercing. “Do you not remember what I said to you in your room? That when you’re brave enough to guess why I want to see and know everything about you . . .?”
Oh God. That.
