I emerge out of the chapel, heaving a deep breath. The trees heave it with me. “Yes,” I agree. “I see the problem.”
“We talked some time ago about how I’ll have to make a report to the county archeologist—have you given any more thought to how you would like to handle the inevitable public interest?”
I wince. I’m not proud of the solution I’ve come up with, but I can’t have people out here, not until the door’s shut, and even then, I can’t be certain how safe anything is. But even though it’s a matter of safety rather than secrecy, I still feel like my bloody father when I say, “I’m going to ask the county archaeologist to keep it quiet. For now.”
Silence greets me on the other end.
I go on. “We’ll of course abide by any determinations about future construction and so forth, and allow them whatever latitude they need to do their own surveys. But I don’t want television crews out here, Tally. I don’t want to end up on an Ordnance Survey map. I don’t want pricks from Oxford or wherever crawling all over my woods and demanding more digging.”
“Obviously I would never let someone from Oxford come near my site,” Tobias says. “But Auden—”
“My mind is quite made up,” I say firmly. “Do whatever you need to do legally, but please understand, I’m not ready for Thornchapel to become a thoroughfare for documentarians, rambling tourists, or swotty history types in cargo shorts.”
“Are you implying,” Tobias asks in a dangerous tone, “that I wear cargo shorts?”
“I would never.”
“Good, because I refuse to be so maligned by someone who insisted on wearing his rowing shorts everywhere, even when not rowing.” A pause. “Not that I minded seeing you in them.”
I walk up to the menhirs that guard the entrance to the stone row, and then look back. Above the forest, the hills rear up in a hazy spread of purple heather and yellow gorse, and above that is a sky so clear and blue that it’s hard to believe summer will ever, ever end. I wonder if the people who dug the graves are the same ones who erected these stones. I wonder if they stared up at these same hills.
I wonder if the door opened for them too.
“Why do you think they did it?” I ask. My voice is soft, uncertain, so unlike the bossy little lordling I just pretended to be. “Why do you think they made those graves where they did? How they did?”
“That is a very stupid question,” Tobias says bluntly, and I have to laugh.
“And why is it a stupid question?” I ask, still smiling as I press my palm to a sun-warmed menhir.
“Because you’ve got all sorts of modern assumptions bound up in your why. You’re trying to think about this logically—you’re imagining these Bronze Age people decided to build their kistvaens like how a multi-national supermarket chain decides on a new store location—and that’s not right at all. This is symbolic thinking we’re dealing with, and unfamiliar symbolic thinking at that, and symbolic thinking is entirely different from reasoning, it’s entirely different from the kind of rationale that we would use to build a supermarket. Mythos and logos, Auden. Aren’t you friends with a priest? Shouldn’t he be telling you these things?”
“He’s no longer a—actually, never mind. It’s a long story.”
Tobias continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “If I were in your shoes—which I’m not, I’m in mine, which means I already know the correct questions to ask—I would ask myself what the makers of these graves were trying to achieve. I would ask myself what symbolic language they were speaking with these burials. Were these graves a reflection of the world—or how they saw the world? Or some kind of transactional process, like a payment or a bargain with nature or their gods? Or was it an atonement? An attempt to right some wrong? Or an act of worship or reverence?”
“I fail to see why the word why is an unhelpful synecdoche for all the things you just said,” I respond, and he scoffs.
“That’s why I do the digging and the question-asking, and you walk around London with a scarf and a pout.”
“Don’t forget the bag.”
“All scarfy boys need a way to carry around their Midori notebooks and magnetic Apple Pencils. The bag was implied.”
“Ouch.”
“You deserved it. I have to dash—Mummy is calling—but I’ll give you a shot over the bow when I contact the county archaeologist, so you can begin your classist and corrupt machinations. I’ll also send you a copy of the preliminary report I’m giving her, if you’d like it.”
“I would.” I give the menhir a pat and push myself away from it. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Of course it is, but you’re worth it. Especially if you still own rowing shorts,” he adds. “Tatty-byes, darling.”
And then Tobias is gone, and I’m alone in the clearing with my thoughts . . . and the roses.
And the door.
Chapter Nineteen
Auden
It’s not part of the ritual. It’s not called for or remotely necessary. But since I have another hour or more before the others come down here, I decide to do it. Not for any rite or reason, not for the door. But for me.
I shrug off my shirt, I toe off my trainers, and I run.
My feet dig into the grass—long, ticklish, and cool—and soon I’m moving between the trees, the white trunks of the birches flashing past, leaves whipping, the grass giving way to loamy soil and the occasional fern and the sometimes soft, sometimes scratchy carpet of old leaves and moss.
More acorns have tumbled here, and as I run, I see flashes of movement through the trees, sepia and russet. The deer I’ve been pretending to cull. They’re in season, and they’re bounding all over the woods with me, darting in and out of view.
I don’t have antlers tied to my head today. I’m not playacting the part of a wild god. It’s barely even a special day.
And yet.
Yet they are here. There are more of them, and more, until the herd is tearing through the trees with me, kicking up leaves and leaping over logs and moving like one entity, one creature broken into many bodies. It’s me and them, not me hunting, not me chasing, simply me with, and together the deer and I push into the deepest part of the forest, to where the equinox sun only barely reaches the forest floor, to where mushrooms and moss grow plentiful and thick.
Birds flit from tree to tree here, and the huge oaks have spread their branches, and it’s so old here, older than Thornchapel, older than the Guests. Older maybe than the Kernstows and the stone rows and the graves. This is a ghost of the forest that once covered all of Devon—all of Britain. This is the forest that the first mesolithic hunter-gatherers filtered into from Europe, following the herds of red deer and horses, this is the forest that the first post-glacial Britons would have seen.
Trees and mushrooms and deer. Abundance growing and decaying. Light and shade, wet and dry, life and death. And I can feel it all as I run, I can feel all of it threading through me like the mycelium threads through the forest under my feet. I can feel the world blooming and wilting and sprouting and falling, and I can feel the hinge of the season in the very air I breathe, and I can feel the woven circle it all makes, the budding, the dying, the turning, the turning, the turning—
And it’s almost there again, that answer I needed when I was on my knees for St. Sebastian. An answer that grows through every part of me like roots through soil, like a river through a moor, like a bright vein of metal through rock. Or is it the question that runs through me, and not the answer at all? Is it this excruciating contradiction, this incessant entropy, this chaos that more and more seems to define Auden Isaac Guest than anything else ever has?
Because I don’t know how to hold all the parts of me—the conquering and the cherishing, the taking and the serving, these angers and these aches and these loves and hurts—inside myself any longer.
I don’t know how to carry all this seething, restless, tender, keen existence inside only one heart, and inside only one body.
I don’t know
how I am supposed to be all of it, just like the forest is all of it, life and death and light and dark, and I don’t know what that means for the people I love. That I want to hurt them as much as I want to love them has been the awful shadow stitched to my heels since I was twelve, and that I savor the ways they hurt me back has been a secret even to myself until just this year.
Surely it is hard enough to be one person, one whole person, who loves like normal people love, but to be this—to be the teeth in the dark and the hands that soothe—and to not even be that properly? Because I want to hold everyone I love inside me and hollow myself out so they can nestle right against my bloody ribs, but how can I trust myself to do that? Why should anyone trust me to do that when I know exactly what kind of man I am, what bruises I long to leave?
Why should anyone see the teeth in the dark and willingly, happily bare their throats?
I don’t know, and that this is all happening when the forest is doing this, when Thornchapel mirrors my own moods back to me, and I can run through the trees with the deer as if it’s the most natural thing in the world . . .
I have no idea what to do with that either.
Have all Guests been able to do this? Or the Kernstows before them?
Was my father able to do this?
And why, why, why? Is it the valley or the door that gives Guests this power? Or does the valley have power because of the door?
Does it matter? When I’m crying rose petals and running with deer, isn’t the question of why a little academic at this point?
I don’t know, just like I don’t know anything, and as I canter in the direction of the river, I feel the answer sliding away before I can grab hold of it. Flitting away just as the deer do when the river comes into view.
And the moment is over, it’s done. The herd is gone, the world is no longer a heavy, bursting, rotting, and growing thing inside me, it’s just the world, just the place I occupy while I sketch plans for tourism centers and shop online for floggers and spreader bars.
It’s just the ground I stand on while I miss St. Sebastian.
I stagger to a stop near the water, air sawing in and out of my lungs, and drop to my knees. Sweat trickles down my back and my stomach, and the bank is damp enough that I can already feel the wet seeping in through my jeans. My head hangs between my shoulders as I struggle to get the oxygen I need.
I can be the Thorn King when it’s this—and only this, I think. The king who thunders through the forest with the deer beside him, the bare feet and the stabbing sides and the blur of branches as I race past. Who couldn’t be? Anyone could be a king if that’s all being a king was, whispering through the world alone.
But that’s not all it’s supposed to be. That’s not what Estamond meant on that cold day when she informed me that kings walk to the door.
Kings are kings of people, and I don’t know if I can be that. I don’t know how, not when I still don’t understand my very self. Not when the answer to my question keeps slipping away, like raindrops on a window.
“Just like old times,” a voice says, and I turn to see my biggest question of all coming toward me.
My river boy, my St. Sebastian, my maybe-brother.
“I think you were wearing less during those old times,” I say, my voice still ragged from my run, and St. Sebastian smiles down at me. He’s in his usual boots, jeans, and T-shirt—this one another summer reading program shirt from the library—and he has an extra shirt slung over his arm.
It’s mine.
“We’ve found more creative ways to sneak glimpses of each other’s underwear since then,” he says, handing me my shirt. “I found this in the clearing. And your shoes—although I suppose you’ll want to wait until after you wash your feet in the river to put them on.”
“Thanks,” I say, taking both the shirt and trainers and setting them next to me. Even though I can breathe now, I still don’t stand. It feels safer for me to be down here.
And by safer for me, I mean safer for him.
“I remember the first time you found me here,” Saint says, looking over to the deep, clear pool that used to be our haunt. “I still don’t know how I survived you pulling my shirt off me. Or you seeing my cheap boxers.”
“I wasn’t assessing the cost of your underthings, St. Sebastian,” I clarify. Eight years too late it seems. “I was trying to see your cock.”
Even now, even after all the things we’ve done, I can still make this man flush. Red darkens along the high curves of his cheeks, and he blinks down at his boots. “Ah.”
“I would have thought it obvious, given that I was hard by the end.”
Our eyes meet. “You were, weren’t you?” he says softly.
“Then and every other time I was with you. Do you know how hard it is to hike through gorse while stiff, St. Sebastian? And yet I persevered. For you.”
The corner of his mouth sharpens and tips up. Nearly a smile. “It still surprises me that you wanted me.”
“What?”
“Well, I—” He chews his lip a moment. “You were you and I was me, and it just didn’t make sense to me how you could—you know—want me.” And then he gestures to himself, a sort of head-to-toes gesture, which only baffles me more.
“How could I want the sulky boy in eyeliner and ripped jeans? How could I want the boy with the mouth I hadn’t stopped thinking about since I was twelve? How could I want the boy who’d gone from mischief to pretty misery?” I lift up on my knees a little, enough that I can ease the strain behind my zipper.
Nothing has changed really—not the river and not us—and my body still responds to his like the only thing that will stop death is fucking him.
He notices, his eyes tracking down to the front of my jeans, and then slowly back up my damp abdomen and chest to my face.
“You’re on your knees,” he says after a minute, as if he’s only now noticing.
“Remind you of anything?”
His breath shivers in and out, and I know he’s hardening too. That flush is still high on his cheeks. “Don’t tease me,” he whispers.
“I’m not teasing.”
“You are. You’ve been teasing me since I came back.”
“No,” I say, “I’ve been honest with you since you came back. There’s a difference.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “Don’t be coy. You know that your honesty isn’t—it’s—well, it’s flirting, Auden, and you know it.”
Maybe I do know it a little. After Lammas, I did what I thought I was supposed to do, I did what I thought was right: I stayed away, I didn’t chase, I gave him all the room in the world to build a life apart from me.
I gave him that, even though it felt like dying to do it.
But he came back. He came back and there is a chance now, a real chance.
And if I’m honest, abnegation felt as wrong as arrogance. Restraint felt as wrong as reckless taking, and so now here I am trying to find a middle path between the two, ne quid nimis and all that. And anyway, Proserpina said I should remind him of why he should choose me, even if that means reminding him that I am a kinky pervert.
“Are you accusing me of being a coquette?” I ask, raising up on my knees a little more. I’m vain enough to know I’m setting off my body to its best advantage and that the sunlight is filtering down through my eyelashes right now to leave fan-shaped shadows on my cheeks. I know when I lick my lips, I’m drawing attention to the wideness of my mouth, to the small hitch on one side of my upper lip. I know that when I lean forward, my hair tumbles over my forehead and light moves over my sweat-sheened muscles.
“Of course,” I purr, “a coquette doesn’t perform what he promises, does he? He’d be all talk.”
His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. “Are you saying you wouldn’t be all talk?”
“That’s precisely what I’m saying. If you allowed it, of course. If you so chose.”
I crawl forward on my knees. One movement and I’m so close that I have to tilt my head all the
way back to see him. All he’d have to do is unzip himself and he could be in my mouth.
He seems to realize this too, and he lifts his hand as if to do it. And then drops it again.
“I noticed,” he said hoarsely, “that you didn’t promise not to touch me during the ritual.”
“Do you want me to promise?”
Another swallow. “No.”
“Would you like me to move away from you right now?”
“N-no. You can stay.”
I peer up at him. In this moment, he is very nearly the same St. Sebastian Martinez I fell in love with that summer. Despite the way his slender frame has filled out with muscle, despite the shadow of stubble on his jaw, despite the piercing set in the middle of that perfect, undrawable mouth, I still see the same soul I saw by the river that hot day. Eyes glittering, mouth sullen and delicious. Torment etched into every line of him.
It was how I noticed he was beautiful at first, that torment. Not only because I like the taste of torment in certain circumstances, but because there was something so singular about it—both that it was unique and also that it was unified. His entire person was complete, choate; he knew himself, and even through the smudged eyeliner and loud music, that self-knowledge burned bright. He wasn’t broken into two halves—a half that longed to hurt and a half that longed to be hurt in turn—he wasn’t marred by contradictions and contrasts and multiplicities. He wasn’t forever his own foil.
He was, simply, him. And that he radiated with a fever of grudge and melancholy, that he came with a pre-lacerated heart—well, then.
All the sweeter.
“Would you like me to be honest with you? Would you like to hear all my coquettish promises?”
He breathes out a yes, and I’m already talking, already confessing and pronouncing and lobbying. Already building realities out of words like I build structures out of pen strokes.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 22
