Page 5 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“You’ve never understood,” she said impatiently. “You’ve never understood how there could be both at once.”
She and Randolph had welcomed others into their bed as visitors—although he only fucked another if Estamond was there too, while Estamond, with his permission and complete knowledge, sometimes sought pleasure without him. The only lover she’d ever hidden from him was Esau, for understandable reasons. Even if Randolph was the wild god a handful of nights throughout the year, in between he was just a quiet country gentleman, whose most outrageous crime was being a Catholic. He’d love her no matter what, she knew; he’d struggle with it for a few days and then overcome it, becaus
e there was nothing that could dim his love for her, not even what she’d done with Esau up in the hills. But she wanted to spare him the struggle and the pain of knowing. He deserved to be free of it.
“I’ve only understood one thing in my life,” Esau said, “and it’s that I need you. If you ever left for good, I—”
She was surprised at the pain in his voice, but he wouldn’t let her see his face.
“Maybe the door will accept a substitute,” he said. “But I can’t. Come back to me.”
She knew she never would, but it still hurt to know it. It was one of life’s strange cruelties that she could be married to a man she loved, that this man would let her fuck anyone she pleased, and yet the one person she truly yearned for was still outside her reach. Maybe this was why she let Esau hold her far longer than was wise, until the afternoon shadows began to gather in corners and they needed each other once again.
Later, as Estamond sat gingerly in the carriage while it bumped back to Thornchapel and the maid and the baby both slept, she realized she had an answer. She didn’t like the answer, she didn’t like the answer at all in fact, but it was nevertheless the answer she’d been looking for when she came to Kernstow Farm.
According to the old ways, the Thorn King had to die. But nowhere did it say that the Thorn King needed to be the same Thorn King who presided over the feasts.
And nowhere did it say that the Thorn King needed to be a man.
Estamond set the lantern down on the grass altar and set about what she came to do. Out came the golden torc, out came the small leaf-shaped knife made of copper—both taken from their glass cases in the library. The knife she set on the altar next to the lantern, and the torc she pried open just enough to slip onto her neck. Once upon a time, she’d crowned Randolph with this. She’d shown him the stories about the thorn chapel were real, and she’d brought the old ways—forgotten by the last few generations of Guests—back to Thornchapel.
She’d put the torc around his neck and then played the part of his bride, his saint, his May Queen. His priestess. She’d sung with him and bled with him, she’d bound herself with thorns to him, she’d guided him.
There was no one to guide her tonight. No one to bleed with her or sing with her. She was a wild god without a consort, a Thorn King without a queen.
She was alone.
I am the Thorn King tonight and that’s what matters, she reminded herself. She was keeping everyone she loved safe all at once. She would close the door, and then there’d be no chance of her mother going up into the hills. Esau and Esra would be safe. So would Randolph. It was the only way.
With the torc heavy and cool on her skin, Estamond turned and surveyed the door once more.
It was tall, but not much taller than Thornchapel’s own doors, rising perhaps eight feet into the air. The fittings were made of dark iron, and the door itself was made from a wood so weathered and gray that it seemed as old as the chapel itself. It was set into the half-crumbled chapel wall, the stonework rising into a lancet arch around the top, all of it covered in climbing roses.
Elsewhere in the chapel, the roses blushed pink and sweet; here, around the door, the roses were so red they were almost black. In fact, in the shadows and slivers of moonlight, they were black.
The torc suddenly felt too heavy, too tight, and Estamond found that she was scared. Terrified, like she hadn’t been since she was a girl. It wasn’t that the roses were black. It wasn’t even that the door was there at all, when there should only be the bramble-gnawed remains of a chapel wall.
It was that the door was open and she could see through to the other side.
She stepped forward once, twice, close enough to press a hand against the pitted stone of the doorway. Through it, there was an expanse of flower-studded grass and then the woods—the same thing she would see if the door weren’t here. The same thing she should see, if everything was as it was supposed to be. But somehow she knew it was not the same. It was not the same grass, not the same trees. The forest would not be her forest and the valley beyond would not be her Thorne Valley.
Here and there, king and door.
How did the rest of the song go? It was hard to remember with her entire body trembling like this, hard to remember the words that made sense of a door to nowhere and everywhere all at once.
The breeze ruffled through the trees behind her and tugged gently at Estamond’s dress, but through the doorway, all remained still. No breeze moved through the leaves or disturbed the grass, no wind stirred the branches there. It was a world as still as cut glass.
Estamond lifted her other hand, thinking maybe she’d reach through the door to feel the air on the other side of it, but right as she did, something flickered across the unmoving grass of the other place. Like a lantern or a torch being carried just out of sight, close enough to send light playing over the ground and faintly into the trees, but not so close that she could see the source of the light itself.
But then came a shadow.
It fell across the path of the light, stopping so that only the silhouette of a man’s upper body could be seen. Lean but still powerful.
Estamond dropped her hand, took a step back.
The shadow didn’t move. It waited, patiently, almost like a gentleman waiting to hand a lady through a carriage door. But the light on the other side continued to move, flickering and flaring and making the shadow waver at the edges. Estamond realized the drums were slightly louder here, and so were the chants. Through the raised voices, she could discern a lone, wailing cry—a single note of lament amidst the estival joy—and the sound of it sent hairs rising on Estamond’s arms.
It was a sound of anguish. A sound of sacrifice.
