Page 95 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
As we approach the tent, one of the older women in the village nudges the May Queen, and then the May Queen herself stands up and meets us in a flutter of white poplin and long red hair. I recognize Gemma Dawes, the daughter of the café owner, from all the times I’ve helped her in the library. Her expression is one of shy solemnity as she offers Proserpina a flower crown of her own.
“Oh thank you,” Poe says, flushing and beaming one of her big smiles that makes the very air around her warm like summer. She reaches for the crown, but the girl shakes her head.
“No, Miss Markham,” she says, and I can see Poe is surprised this girl knows her name. Being more familiar with the Thorncombe gossip network, I’m not. “I’ll help you.”
So Poe ducks a little and the village May Queen settles the crown onto Thornchapel’s May Queen, and for a moment, I can’t help but see the little girl crowning the Virgin outside Becket’s church, and the déjà vu is so tantalizingly powerful that I have to catch my breath. I hear Auden do the same.
The village queen smiles as Poe straightens up, and then she turns to Auden and me as well. “You could come watch from my tent if you’d like. We’ve got plenty of room and I’ll have to get up for the maypole dance soon anyway.”
That’s how the three of us end up watching the stag race from the tent, as if it’s a medieval pavilion and Auden and Poe are king and queen. We watch the boys kick off their shoes and hop around to warm up as the rules of the race are explained to the crowd. The runners can push, shove, and tackle, but no foul play—no hitting or kicking or bucking with their headdresses. The first boy to cross the finish line after nine loops around the green is the king stag and will have the honor of sitting with the May Queen for the rest of the day. The May Queen herself blushes after this part, and I notice her eyes straying to one boy in particular, a kid named Charlie who spends a lot of time reading sci-fi novels in my library (and whom, therefore, I like very much).
The boys line up, and I hear Auden snort with amusement at how they’re all trying to test the strength of their headdresses by tossing their heads. It makes them look like stags in truth, practically stamping at the ground to show off. A whistle blows, and they charge forward, heads down, legs and arms pumping.
It’s more dangerous than I would have thought. The antlers are a constant threat as they try to shove or tackle their competitors to the ground, and more than once a boy is nearly gored when two or three of them fall down together. The course is a good one—circling the green in a big enough loop to promise a few long straights for the sprinters, but with a couple of switchbacks and turns that give the more agile of the boys a shot to leap ahead. And some of them do literally leap—over other boys, over humps in the grass—and some of them leap together, until after three or four passes around the course, they begin to look like a herd for real, crashing through the forest and not the village green. Like they could be landing with hooves and not bare feet.
This is real magic, I think, entranced. Taking something mundane—ridiculous even—and rendering it mysterious all over again. I know every one of these boys, I know their parents, I know this green as well as I know my own garden. And yet I believe right now that they are not just boys, but part of the forest. I believe that if they didn’t run, something irrevocable would be lost.
But, as all magic moments do eventually, this moment burns itself away. Soon only three boys are really in the running, then only two, and by the time Charlie crosses the finish line, panting and staggering to the side, they are just adolescent boys again, gangly and hoping to impress pretty, red-haired Gemma.
Auden turns to me as Gemma goes to award the antlered Charlie his victor’s bouquet.
“Well, St. Sebastian?” he asks, and he doesn’t have to ask anything more. I know what he wants.
I nod, and then after the maypole dance begins, the three of us make a discreet exit and go back to the house.
Chapter 28
St. Sebastian
Present Day
* * *
“Nervous?” Auden asks me quietly as he closes the door behind us. Poe’s gone ahead to the thorn chapel, along with Delphine and Becket, and so we’re the last ones to leave the house.
I look down at the antler headdress in my hand. “Yes,” I say. “You?”
Sir James prances impatiently around his master’s feet, and Auden gives him an absent thump on the shoulder. “Yes. I’m nervous too.”
We walk down the shallow steps leading to the lawn, but instead of veering to the right for the hidden path, Auden walks for the maze. “I thought we’d go the old way today,” he says to me as Sir James trots happily ahead. “It seems fitting.”
“Because of Beltane?”
He doesn’t answer right away, but it seems like a thinking silence and not a stony, “shut up, St. Sebastian” silence, so I don’t poke at him. I simply match his pace and wait for him to speak when he’s ready.
We’re almost to the maze itself when he does finally answer, although it’s not an answer at all, but another question. “Why do you pray when you don’t believe in God?”
My boots scuff at the gravel path as I nearly trip in my surprise. “What?”
Auden glances over at me as we approach the temporary metal fencing Rebecca’s team has put around the maze. “You go to Mass, you murmur along with the words. I know from Becket that sometimes you go into the empty nave and sit alone.”
Goddammit, Becket.
“Most people who don’t believe in God wouldn’t still give God so much of their time and attention,” Auden says. “I’m just curious as to why.”
While I try to think of an answer to this, we step through a gap in the fence and continue on the path to the maze entrance—Sir James darting around and sniffing every spade, spray paint mark, and boot print the demolition crew has left behind.
“Demeter and Persephone are gone,” I say. It makes sense that the statues would be removed for safekeeping before backhoes and diggers got involved, but there was something about those two statues—the mother reaching for her daughter with such desperation and yet such certainty, as if she knows her love is powerful enough to break the world if that’s what it takes—that reminded me of my own mother. Like Demeter, she would have stopped at nothing to keep me safe.
