Page 104 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Present Day
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After Saint and Auden go into the trees, Rebecca crowns Delphine, Becket and herself with circlets of summer flowers, just as we crowned the Virgin this morning. I keep my crown from the village, even though it looks different, more red and green than the pink and blue and white of Rebecca’s crowns, but I like it. I like that a few thorns still linger deep within the soft petals, adding a dash of wildness and bite to the beauty.
“I don’t feel like Mary would approve,” Delphine murmurs as we take our lanterns in hand in order to make the circle—two each, since we plan on making a bigger circle this time.
“Do you really think St. Brigid would have approved last time?” I tease.
Delphine rolls her eyes. “Well, I don’t know St. Brigid. I do know Mary.”
“Like, personally?”
A pout. “You know what I mean.”
“If it helps, I think the Record says that the locals prayed to Mary because they couldn’t exactly admit they were praying to something older.”
If they even knew that’s what they were doing. Maybe they did think it was a Marian celebration. Maybe it actually was. Thornchapel is shrouded in so many layers of history, it’s nearly impossible to say what a thing really is. The Victorian Guests were making romantic interpretations of medieval festivals which had trickled down from the original Guests—who’d stolen this place and its rites from the Kernstows. And who knows whom the Kernstows inherited it from? Who knows what came before them?
Druids? Something older than druids?
“You pray to whomever you feel best praying to,” I tell her. “Or don’t pray to anyone. Just use yourself to make the space sacred and don’t worry about gods or goddesses or Mary at all.”
“Ah, setting intentions,” Delphine says wisely. “My therapist taught me how to do that.”
I smile at her.
She tilts her head at me. “It really doesn’t bother you? Mixing the two things?” She drops her voice, looking worried. “Does it make us, you know, pagan?” She mouths the word pagan as if we’re going to be overheard by polite company out here in the orgy-circle.
“We get to decide what it makes us,” I say confidently, even though I’m actually not sure. Does doing something like this change us no matter what? Do we want to be changed?
Is it possible to hold too much sacred?
“I just don’t know if I want to be . . . you know,” Delphine says. Then she brightens. “I do see a lot of pagans on Instagram.” She whispers the word pagans again.
“Maybe it’s in our genes since our parents did it. Well, some of it. We think,” I amend, since we still don’t know for sure what our parents were doing out here, and none of us have been brave enough to ask yet.
Delphine wrinkles her nose. “Don’t remind me.”
I wrinkle my nose too, and laugh, also grossed out to think about our parents out here making their own summer sex circles. And then my eyes catch the sun-drenched stone of the altar and my laughter fades.
I’m not unhappy to be here, even knowing her bones were on the other side of that altar until just a few months ago. I mean, I’m not happy either. Maybe neither option is quite right; maybe I’m happy to be unhappy? Maybe I don’t want to trade away either the magic or the pain of this place, and if that means sometimes I’m laughing and then sometimes I’m crying, and sometimes my thoughts careen from life to death, then so be it.
“Oh, Poe,” Delphine says. Her hands are full of lanterns, so she butts her forehead against my shoulder in an affectionate nudge. “Is it okay? Are you okay?”
I give her a smile, even though my chin is doing the thing. “Yeah. It’s okay.”
And as shocking as it is, I know it’s the absolute truth.
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Rebecca says the words for the fire after the circle is done, and I don’t catch all of them because the breeze is brushing through the chapel and her voice is husky and low, but I know what they’re for. We’re blessing the fire and blessing the smoke it will breathe out, we’re asking the fire to consecrate the animals and the land and us. We’re welcoming the May Queen and her May King, we’re welcoming the summer and the light that will stretch all the way to Samhain.
And then Becket begins on the drum. A slow beat at first, an almost solemn thud, as Rebecca lights the fire and hot flames begin to curl from inside the hollow base, then the tempo speeds up as we start walking a circle around the fire.
