Page 35 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Voices rustles from the trees around me, and drums pound, drums like on Imbolc night.
The wild god, the woods whisper. The Thorn King.
The Thorn King? I think, knowing I should remember why that’s important.
When the door opens, the trees whisper, the Thorn King must come. When the door opens . . .
What door? I try to ask back, but it’s a dream, and my lips won’t move, my words won’t leave me. What door?
But the trees are silent, and just as I’m about to ask again, I wake up with a violent start.
“Ah, shit,” I say, looking at the afternoon sunlight diffusing through the library windows. There’s a piece of paper stuck to my face from where I laid my head on the table to rest for just a moment. Of course, just a moment turned into a few hours, and now I have a neckache from sleeping wrong, plus I’ve wasted half my workday napping. A familiar zing of self-loathing passes through me, chased quickly with excuses. You can’t help it, you haven’t been sleeping well, you didn’t ask to have narcolepsy.
I’ll have to work through the evening to justify the nap; even if Auden and I are . . . something, that doesn’t mean I can forget that he’s also my employer. I’m being paid for a job, and the job isn’t falling asleep over a pile of rare books.
God, that dream though. What a mind-fuck. The wild god?
Just a dream thing, Poe.
With a sigh, I look down at the paper that was stuck to my face. I wasn’t even really working, truth be told, I’d been glancing through the Record again, in a fussy, desultory kind of way, as if I expected answers if I glared at the pages enough.
I’d been looking at the Imbolc page in particular, and had idly copied down the caption that had been annotated by Estamond. “The consecration of the May Queen on Beltane Imbolc Night!”
I rub at my cheek now as I examine it, hoping I don’t have ink smudged on my face.
Consecration.
Imbolc Night.
I look at the added underline, look back at the book, and then look at it again.
“Poe, you’re so stupid,” I breathe, pushing away from the table and then darting up to my room. Within a few minutes, I’m back down in the library with the convivificat note, looking at the impressions in the paper. The LC, underlined. The s-e-c-r-a-t-i-o-n. I’d wanted proof that my mother had seen this book?
Here it is, in her own handwriting: the last bit of IMBOLC, capitalized and underlined for emphasis. The end of the word consecration.
I stare down at the note, equal parts happy to have some kind of answer and agitated that I might never have more answers. Like who sent the note? And fucking why?
But for the first time in a long time, I can shake off the gloom and hurt those questions raise, and peer down at the note with a more objective lens. Because if my mother had seen the Record, then maybe that’s enough to know that our parents were doing something in the thorn chapel, something a lot like us. My father won’t tell me, and both Delphine and Becket are too nervous to ask their own parents, especially Imbolc. I think they don’t want to hear that their parents did the same thing.
And when I asked Rebecca if she’d ask her father, she’d merely trained those gorgeous dark eyes on me and said in a mild tone, “My mother doesn’t live on a different continent because my father is brilliant at communicating, you know.”
I will get answers from my father one day. He promised he’d tell me everything in person. But until then, this is enough to guess at what our parents did.
Now if we could only find out why.
A few days later, after the London group returns back to Thornchapel, Rebecca calls a group meeting in the library.
We’re all full from dinner—tender rare beef and surprisingly luscious beet salad—and ready for drinks. For the first time since Saint found my mother, I enjoyed eating again. I’ve also been working in earnest this week, craving the mind-numbing distraction of cataloging and scanning again, and so when I go into the library tonight, it’s with the satisfying sense of having worked hard this week and made tangible progress.
At least I can still get work done. At least I have my friends. Have Saint and Auden . . . whatever that means.
I meant what I told Saint earlier this week, and I do want to bring whatever’s between the three of us out into the open—although Saint’s response was less than encouraging, and only served to feed the unhappy conclusion I’d already reached. Had reached the night Auden had Saint fuck me in his bed.
If all three of us can’t be together . . . then maybe none of us should be together.
My body clenches in protest at the thought, going tight and wet and achy. Or tighter and wetter and achier, because I’m always hard up for it now, it seems. Even in the fog of tragedy, of this new Poe I’m growing into, I’m thrumming with need. More than I ever have been before, and the dreams I’ve been having . . . bonfires and orgies in the whispering trees and more of those men chasing each other through the trees, catching and pinning each other to the soft forest floor and claiming their due . . .
Well, the dreams are not helping.
