Page 7 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Being the Thorn King is the worst fate possible, she thought, feeling almost angry about it. Why did death demand that life be fed to it at all? Why must there be a door here? And why did anyone ever, ever, decide the door was worth being near? Why didn’t they run away from it the moment they realized what it was? Why wasn’t the entire valley marked as unsafe, unholy, taboo?
The shadow in the doorway moved, and again Estamond tried to scream, and again nothing came out. Her vision was twinned and blurred, and so the shadow itself remained nothing but a tallish and strongish smudge until it was leaning right over her.
Would it kill her? Would it drag her back through the door?
Would it cry for her? Sing for her? Hold her gently as she died?
Was it a saint or a god?
But no, she knew the truth as she heard its pained, anguished roar—it wasn’t the shadow of the door at all, but Randolph, her own wild god, her own lord of the manor.
Randolph who was no longer the Thorn King and who would be safe because she chose to be the king in his stead.
He cradled her in his arms and it made everything worse—the nausea and the dizziness and the infernal pain in her hand—but it felt so good to have him here that she couldn’t complain. Not that she had the breath for it anyway.
“Why?” he gasped, his gasp so wounded and desperate that Estamond felt the pain of it even on top of the pain of dying. “My God, Estamond—why?”
She pressed her bleeding hand weakly to his face. Damn, but she loved him. She loved him enough that she knew she would make the same choice again. If it came down to her or this shy, tender man, she would wear the torc in his place, every time.
“I hired the nurse for you,” she managed to wheeze out.
He shook his head, tears falling fast from bright hazel eyes. “I don’t—Estamond—I don’t understand—”
“Make sure the children know how much I loved them,” she forced out. “And I mean it—about Janie—for you—”
She couldn’t breathe, and the agony of not breathing was beyond pain, beyond fear, and then suddenly, like the tumble of a ripe apple from a tree or the slice of a scythe through wheat, the pain was over. There was only the distant warmth of Randolph’s arms and the song of lament pouring through the doorway. There was only the weight of the torc around her neck.
And then?
Then there was nothing at all.
Seven miles away and nearly a century and a half later, Esau and Estamond’s many-times great granddaughter woke up in a car with a thrashing scream. Alarmed, her lover pulled the car to the side of a moor-topping B-road and parked it, coming around to the side and pulling her out of the car before she could manage to scream again.
He sank down to the ground with her in his arms, cradling her against his chest and rocking her gently back and forth as she sobbed into his shirt.
“Shhh,” the sole heir of the Guest family murmured, stroking her hair as he held her close. “It was just a dream, little bride.”
She cried even harder, shaking her head, as if unable to put words to what she’d just seen.
He kissed her hair and held her tighter against him. He loved her more than he’d ever loved anything, and he would sit with her on the side of the road and hold her all day if that’s how long it took for her to feel safe again.
“It was just a dream,” he repeated, even though he had no idea what kind of awful dream would have her like this, shaking and inconsolable. “I’ve got you now. I’ve got you with me. It was just a dream.”
Chapter One
Rebecca
It was an accident, the day I saw the gardens of Versailles.
In the hotel, my mother and father had argued—bitterly. To this day I don’t know what they argued about, but I do know that they fought incessantly in those years, the kind of fights that would end in slammed doors and my mother’s sobs. Back then, sometimes I’d catch my father crying too, yelling, shouting, matching my mother rage for rage and grief for grief, the pain written on his face for anyone to read.
She would move back to Accra from London two years after that day, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t even know enough to see the fighting as a portent of a dying marriage. It was upsetting, but in the same way thunder was upsetting—it came, it went, it was a part of life.
And so while they’d fought, I’d sat in the window seat and played with the Barbie dolls Daddy had brought back from New York a few days ago. One came with a little tea set—plastic, incomplete to my eyes, because there were only two cups and two saucers and a teapot—but I made do. I pretended that my doll had a complete tea set at one point, but she’d taken in some of the items to get valued. Or perhaps they’d been chipped by a careless guest, and she was currently having them repaired by an expert in antique tea set repairs.
The other doll came wearing a striking red dress with a silk stole. Her hair was pulled up in a high bun on top of her head, exposing her throat and her shoulders. She had stars hanging from her ears, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, so beautiful I hardly touched her, for fear of ruining her. Instead, she sat remote and barely interested on the windowsill while Incomplete Tea Set Barbie made her cup after cup of tea. Tea Set Barbie would tell her over and over again how beautiful she was, how pretty her red dress was, how she hoped they would be best friends forever. Sometimes Tea Set Barbie would kiss Red Dress Barbie because Red Dress Barbie was so perfect. Sometimes Tea Set Barbie would lay her head in the other doll’s lap and simply savor her untouchable beauty and cherish every second that she got to be near it. Every once in a while, Red Dress Barbie would pat Tea Set Barbie on the head, acknowledging her reverence and affection, and those were the moments Tea Set Barbie lived for.
“The only two black Barbies I could find, and they’re both in dresses,” my father had complained to my mother when he’d met us here in Paris. He’d been at a landscape architecture conference in New York, and now there was one here. There were times he lived conference to conference, one city to another, only coming home for short jaunts to sleep and repack.
