Page 92 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I slide the book over and reread the salient passage aloud, even though we’ve all read it what feels like a hundred times since the equinox. “‘The lord of the manor has his stag hunt at this time, taking with him the strongest, fleetest youth. Together they hunt through the trees while the people dance the fire dance, and only after the hunt is finished may the stag-slayer claim his May Queen. That is why it is said among old wives still, “First hart’s slain, then comes the king of May”.’”
“Slain,” Saint repeats. “That sounds like a real hunt to me.”
“Slain is the only word indicating death, though,” Auden says. “The rest could easily be talking about a chase. A mock-hunt.”
“Why do you want it to be a real death so badly?” Rebecca asks.
Saint’s eyes flash. “I don’t want it to be real. I want to know the truth. And I can’t believe that this started as a game.”
“That doesn’t mean it had to start as violence instead,” Rebecca counters. “Things aren’t set into binaries like that.”
“Except life and death are binary,” Saint points out. “And that happens to be exactly what we’re talking about.”
“We’re never going to have an answer to this,” I interrupt. “Even if we could figure out what they did three hundred years ago, it wouldn’t tell us what they did six hundred years ago, and even if we knew that, then we still wouldn’t know what they did before the Saxons came or before the Romans came or before the druids. I don’t like that any more than you do, but there you are.”
Saint straightens up and stretches enough so that the hem of his worn T-shirt pulls above his belt and shows off the dark line of hair leading from his navel to his boxers. Now it’s Auden’s and my turn to be distracted. “What about the thing you found at the farm, Poe? That looked pretty old. What if it’s connected to this?”
Grumpy that I didn’t make that connection myself, I pull up the picture of the antler-figure on my phone and set it on the table. By now we’ve all seen it—along with the picture Becket took of Dartham’s journal—but we bend over it anyway, comparing the carving with the pictures of young men in antler-headdresses. The similarity is impossible to miss.
“I looked up some work on British rock art,” I say after we’ve been looking for a few minutes. “Those spirals—one counter-clockwise, one clockwise. The clockwise one representing life and growth and fertility.”
“And the other?” Saint asks.
“Chaos. Entropy. Death.”
“That sounds very binary,” Saint says, with a pointed look at Rebecca.
“But the spirals are connected,” Rebecca says, ignoring Saint. “So what does that mean?”
Becket takes this one. “My guess? That death and life are connected,” he says. “They are nested, one inside of the other, in a never-ending tangle. Of course there cannot be death without life, but there also can’t be life without death. Et cetera.”
“Does this have anything to do with that creepy passage about the Thorn King you showed us?” Delphine asks, wrinkling her nose a little. “It was very Game of Thrones-y.”
“The Thorn King would be both life and death,” Becket explains. “His sacrifice would have meant renewed life for the land and for his people. And unlike in Game of Thrones, I imagine it must have been done willingly. The ancient people here would have revered strength and kingship, and if the sacrifices had to happen by the standing stones, how are you going to get the strongest man there unless he’s consented to go?”
“Or unless he’s no longer the strongest man,” Auden says quietly.
Saint’s hands are laced around the back of his neck. “So we know the Guests displaced the Kernstows sometime around the creation of Wessex—at least that’s what Dartham believed. Which means that carving could be very, very old.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think it’s that old. The house is maybe a few hundred years old—five hundred years at most. It had a chimney built in.”
“What does a chimney have to do with it?” Saint asks.
“Chimneys weren’t standard in common dwellings until the Renaissance, and sometimes not even until after then,” Delphine says.
Silence reigns around the library table. She sees us staring at her and sniffs. “I took a first in history, you know. I’m not a total imbecile.”
“Of course not,” Becket soothes and pets her comfortingly on the shoulder.
“It would be odd if they weren’t somehow tied,” Rebecca notes. “It’s very distinctive imagery. A stag king.”
“The Horned One,” I murmur, and then I sigh. “This still gets us no closer to what Saint wants to know. Which is why it’s done.”
“I hate to sound like a broken record,” Becket says, “but I feel like we talked about this during Imbolc too, and I still
maintain that there’s no way to understand a ritual without doing it.”
“But don’t you think the why is important?” Saint asks. He drops his hands and then tugs unthinkingly at the archival glove that’s sagging around his wrist. With the white gloves and the threadbare T-shirt from the library summer reading program three years ago, he looks like some kind of paradoxical grunge-dandy. “You’re a priest, Becket—”
