Page 99 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
No. It’s not what I want. We’d talked about it extensively as a group, because Auden wanted to be the hunter from the outset, but any one of us could have been the hunted and no one jumped immediately to volunteer. Becket in particular was worried about revalidating the hunt as a masculine space, and suggested drawing names again, like we’d done for Imbolc. But I knew from the beginning that if there was anyone Auden was chasing, I wanted it to be me.
With a sigh, I shake my head the tiniest bit.
“Okay,” Poe says. Her fingers move fast and sure as she anchors the leather band around my head. “Too tight?” she asks when she’s finished.
I swing my head back and forth like I saw the boys do in the village. The antlers stay tight to my head. “It’s perfect.”
She kisses my shoulder again, unable to resist petting my exposed stomach as she does. “I’ll be waiting for you,” she whispers. “At the end.”
“I know. It’s just a game. I’ll be fine.”
“It’s more than a game to you, Saint. Even I can see that. But Auden will keep you safe.”
“Maybe I don’t want him to.”
And to that she doesn’t have an answer. She kisses me a final time and then I hear her soft footsteps on the grass as she walks away.
I’m tempted to turn around right then. Call her back. Tell her that if I don’t run I’ll die, but running might be the death of me anyway.
Tell her I’m scared that this is another moment that can’t be undone. A stitch that can’t be unpicked.
I don’t have easy answers about belief. For all that it sounds inauthentic to do something without believing in it, I think maybe the opposite is the real sin. Believing without doing. And if there is a chance that I could believe in this, that maybe I already do, then the cost of not doing it is just too high.
I can feel the others behind me, standing at the entrance to the stone rows. They’ll watch me run and they’ll watch Auden follow. And while we rouse the forest to life with the ancient chase, they will light the fire and begin to dance. While the forest has its sacrifice and the Stag King is anointed with it.
What are you going to do when you catch me?
Why, whatever I want.
I take a deep breath.
And then I start running.
* * *
***
* * *
The first few hundred meters are easy. The woods around the chapel are park-like and nearly tame, all wide spaces between the trees blanketed in leaves and moss and bluebells, and light shafting in through the branches above and burnishing the air itself into a deep, golden haze. Birds trill and there’s the occasional flurry of movement through the leaves as I run, as if I’ve disturbed the small, happy creatures that just wish to trund
le through the flowers in peace. And still I can hear the music from the village, faint but definite, and then I think I can hear something else, something closer. A drum.
I risk a look behind me and see nothing—the trees have closed in and hidden the standing stones from view—but I do smell the light singe of smoke on the breeze.
They’ve lit the fire.
Auden will be coming soon.
I know the point is to be caught, the point has always been to be caught, but the farther I run, and the more scatters and cracks I hear behind me, the more my mind seems to forget. The more it feels like I’m being chased for real, that the danger behind me is undeniable, that if I’m caught, it will mean something dire beyond reckoning. Chemicals start pumping through me, erasing all doubt, silencing the small voice that says why am I doing this? Why am I wearing antlers and running half-naked through the woods?
There can be no doubt now, though. I’m running because I’m being chased.
I’m running because I want to escape.
I speed up, easily vaulting a fallen log and dodging under branches. The woods are closer together here, tighter and darker, the stretches of golden haze growing farther and farther apart until the forest floor dims to an isolated twilight, a gloaming pierced by the occasional spear of sun.
Faster, instinct tells me. Faster.
