“Really?” she asks him.
He gives her a solemn nod.
She looks up at him like he’s just given her the moon, and it makes me want to give her the sun instead. Jealousy rolls through me like vinegar, sour and burning and chemically blighting everything that just happened. I was the one who fucked her, after all, the one who made her come all wet and helpless against the spines of the books she loves so much. And yes, I love being used by Auden, shamed by him, but this moment? This one apart from sex, when he was able to say a few words and have her look like he’d just proposed marriage?
I want that too.
“So yes,” he says. “If I have to crawl on my belly through a pit of coals, the answer to whatever you want is still yes.”
“Flattering,” I bite out, suddenly too brittle and raw to handle any more of his needling. His insinuations that my mere presence is worse than medieval punishment for him.
I turn away to attend to the condom and my jeans, vowing that I’ll have my shit together when I turn back around to face them. Except then he’s right in front of me, hand extended. “I’ll take care of it,” he says, meaning the condom.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Why?”
“Because as of this moment, you are as much mine to take care of as she is,” he says. There’s no emotion in his voice. None at all.
I bristle. “You’re going to try to earn me now? After all this fucking time? After the hell you’ve put me through?”
“As long as you start trying to earn me,” says the prince I once knelt to.
“What, as your fucking submissive?”
Auden’s mouth goes hard. “As St. Sebastian. You can decide what that means.”
I have a retort for that, I really do, but then Poe standing behind him raises her hand to her waist and makes a fist. Clenches it slowly.
Like a beating heart.
And just like that, the bitterness leaves me. Why am I fighting this? This, the thing I’ve wanted for so long that I don’t even know myself without it? Maybe that’s it, though. Maybe I’m scared of who I am without this ghost to chase, without longing for a man to bruise my soul and my body while he simultaneously unbruises the past.
“Fine,” I mutter.
“What?” Auden asks.
“Fine,” I say, louder, and then just to be a twat, I drop the tied-off condom in his hand.
If I was expecting a reaction though, I’m disappointed. He merely nods, as if I’ve completed a task to his specifications, and pockets the thing. As if cleaning up after me is one of his new duties.
Oh. Oh, it’s humiliating how much I like that. How I’m already picturing him wiping cum from my body, washing me, watching him wash Poe.
I burn with shame.
“So we’re agreed,” Auden says, looking between Proserpina and me. “The goal is the three of us.”
“Yes,” Poe says, sounding happy and nervous all at once.
“But I think we have to acknowledge certain realities,” continues Auden. “I don’t want to stop doing kink with you, Poe. And I’m also away from here for half the week, leaving you all alone with St. Sebastian.”
“And Becket,” she says. “He stays here when you three go to London too.”
“Still,” he replies. “We need to decide now if we’re betraying each other if we have an encounter between the two of us without the third present, because given that we can’t seem to get through a single conversation without fucking, it’s going to be a real obstacle in the future. And we also need to decide if the others are in bounds. Whatever we woke up on Imbolc—whatever we tapped into—I don’t think it’s fair to ask any of us to fight it.”
“You’re fighting it,” I point out. “You didn’t even come tonight.”
A rueful smile, and then Auden glances down at his trousers. For a moment, he looks sheepishly and adorably like an architect who just came in his pants. “Didn’t I?”
“No to the betrayal,” Poe decides. But there’s an ache in her voice when she says, “But it has to be fair that we can be jealous too. If you and Saint . . . you know, without me . . . it’ll hurt. But it’ll hurt more the other way, the way where we keep doing what we’re doing now, so this is the hurt I choose.”
The hurt I choose.
Yes. The hurt we all choose.
“And the others?” Auden asks. “If I walked over there and had Becket drop to his knees so I could fuck his mouth, would you be very angry with me?”
His words already have a stimulating effect on her, speeding up her breathing all over again. She’s insatiable . . . and a voyeur . . . and an exhibitionist. A perfect little bride of thorns.
“He would have to agree . . . the others, I mean,” she says breathlessly, “it would be their choice. We can’t just say what we want to do with them and then do it.”
“No, of course not,” he agrees, “although if you think Father Hess wouldn’t open his mouth for my needs, then you don’t know him as well as you think you do. No, right now, we’re only talking about our limits. Everything else can come later, organically, but I’m not willing to jeopardize a single fucking moment of what I promised you. Understood, Miss Markham?”
“Understood,” she breathes.
“Try again.”
“Understood, Sir.”
He nods in satisfaction. “Better.”
“Should we try not to?” I ask. “Relieve our needs with anyone? Isn’t fucking anyone going to make this more complicated?”
Both Poe and Auden seem to think about this a moment, and I have my own moment where I realize how fucking surreal this all is. Not only did I somehow fuck up falling in love by managing to do it with two people instead of one, but now we’re standing here with completely straight faces, asking ourselves if we can fuck our friends too.
“We should try to restrain ourselves as much as possible,” Auden says. “For the sake of avoiding complication. But I’d never hold seeking comfort from our friends against either of you. Whatever the six of us share, it’s bigger than friendship, and nothing that happens in our circle is cheating. Not to me. If a moment arises when you need something from one of our friends, then you have my blessing.”
“You too,” Poe says. And then looks at me. “And you. You’d have my blessing.” She says it like she expects Auden and I to fuck circles around the library, but when Auden nods, I can see in his face that he won’t be fucking anyone until he’s good and ready. He’s woven restraint too deeply inside him, and I think it would take an act of God to break those restraints and free the animal inside him.
“Agreed,” I say. And then I say, because it’s the truth, “I still don’t know if I understand the rules.”
“That’s easy,” Auden responds. “I make them. And right now, the only rule I’ve made is that we have to try this. Being three.”
“I like that rule,” Poe says happily, and she steps forward to kiss us both lightly on the lips.
“Poe,” Auden says in a warning voice.
She looks up at him, eyes bright. “Yes?”
“I’m giving this until Beltane. I want us together that night. No matter what lies undone between us.”
She thinks for a minute, then nods her accession and turns to walk back into the light. From Rebecca’s knowing tone of voice and Delphine’s giggles after Poe reaches the fire, I’m guessing we weren’t as quiet in the shadows as we thought we were, or maybe Poe’s stained cheeks and wrinkled clothes gave it away.
With a sigh, I start toward the circle too but am quickly stopped by Auden’s hand on my arm.
“St. Sebastian,” he says, and I give up any hope of resisting him. I turn to meet his glinting gaze.
There’re a thousand things we could say to each other right now. Cruel things, true things, things that have been unspoken for so long that they’re no longer cruel or true, just curses etched in lead and thrown into waters so deep they no longer have any power. We could lie and say we’re only doing this for Poe, to make her happy,
because her happiness feeds us both. We could lie and say everything is basically mended between us.
But we don’t lie to each other right now.
“You’ll never trust me again,” I say, because I know it’s true.
His eyes drop to my mouth and his hand tightens imperceptibly on my bicep. For a moment, I think he’s going to agree with me.
But he only says as he lets go of my arm, “You’re going to need your safe word in the coming weeks.”
And I know that’s true too.
Chapter 15
Proserpina
Present Day
Two weeks later
* * *
Kernstow Farm is a lonely mess of mud and stone at the northern head of the Thorne Valley.
Rather than sheltering in the valley itself, the farm hunkers against the wind and the rain out on the moors, surrounded by stark, sullen hills and a few stunted trees. Although the roof is long gone, along with any doors and floors and other finishings that would mark the building as a house, the sturdy stone doorway is still intact, and it beckons to any strays who pass.
I’m no stray, though. I belong.
When I stoop under the lintel to step inside, Sir James Frazer at my heels, I can see a cove in the far wall that could be a tumble-down fireplace, and a flat, moss-covered expanse that must have been a hearth-stone at the bottom. When I squat down to rub away some moss and confirm, my fingers encounter deeply etched grooves. Grooves like carvings, straight and curved and straight again, not the kind of accidental wear and tear one might expect from a fireplace used for centuries. Sir James—who I’ve been keeping during the week instead of Becket because it’s painful to be alone during the day—sniffs at the stone once, without much interest, and then walks away to snuffle at the other corners of the derelict structure.
Curious, I stay where I am and pick away at the moss, eventually finding a small stone nearby to scrape it as clean as possible. It’s impossible to make sense of first—a line with several other lines branching off and an arc below it—and it’s not lettering of any kind, it’s not even runes (and it wouldn’t be runes anyway, not in this corner of the country)—and my forehead is scrunched into tight furrows of puzzlement as I keep scraping. Distantly, I’m aware of a bubble of pleasure somewhere in my stomach, despite the occasional scrape of my knuckles on dirty stone and the damp chill that hovers in the ruined farmhouse like a ghost. It’s the pleasure of having something new to think about, something other than my mother, which is the same reason I’ve been working myself to the bone in the library these past two weeks.
It takes less than ten minutes to clear off as much of the hearth as I need, but I have to stand up and squint a little to make sense of it. It almost looks like an etching of a person, but a person unlike I’ve ever seen. A person with . . .
“Antlers,” I say to myself as soon as I see it. “Those are antlers.”
Sir James Frazer trots over to smell the newly exposed stone, deems it just as boring as the first time he smelled it, and wanders back outside the house looking for something to chase.
The person isn’t three-dimensional in any sense, is barely even humanoid in shape. Almost a stick figure, with its stick legs curled as if it’s sitting and both stick arms outstretched. Crude hands hold a spiral aloft on each side—the left hand holding a clockwise spiral and the right hand holding a counter-clockwise spiral. The lines of each spiral end in the figure’s hands, meaning that none of the spirals truly end and both are connected through the figure’s body. The antlers are the branching lines I saw earlier, and the arc is the uppermost part of a nearly featureless face. The entire thing is less a depiction, and more of a concept. A symbol.
But for what, Poe?
I think of my dream earlier, the one with Auden’s ancestor in the forest. The wild god. The Thorn King.
Is that what this is supposed to be?
I take a picture with my phone, certain that I’ll be able to find some answers in Thornchapel’s library, but I’m not ready to move away from it just yet. I’m not sure why—the antler-figure is unsettling, as unsettling as the dream I had—but I feel drawn to it nonetheless. Perhaps precisely because of the dream, or perhaps it’s the idea that my mother might have stood here too and looked on the very same thing. It was the kind of thing she would have liked. A secret right in the open. A mystery with ties to something alluringly ancient.
It’s the kind of thing I like too, but truth be told, I didn’t come here looking for secrets. I don’t even know why I came here, really, except that I saw the Kernstow Farm mentioned in a book I was scanning, and suddenly nothing seemed so important as to come here, nothing at all. I had to see the place with my mother’s name. I had to see where my family had come from—once upon a time, the place where Estamond Guest herself came from. So I hunted down my Dartmoor Ordnance Survey map, loaded Sir James Frazer into the car, and wended my way through the narrow valley roads to the smallish pull-off that marked the beginning of an ancient dirt lane, and together the dog and I hiked up here.
I don’t even know what I wanted or what I expected to find, but when I duck back outside and roam around the enclosure made by low, grass-topped stone walls, I can’t help but feel disappointed. Like I was going to come here and the ghost of Estamond was going to apparate and then explain everything to me. My mother’s death, why she came here, why the Kernstows were forbidden to marry the Guests, and what it was the Guests got up to in the chapel ruins anyway. Like I was going to come here and find my mother’s initials carved into the wall, along with a helpful note. Convivificat was my band name, nothing important or sinister at all, love you, xoxo — Mom.
A moody rain is setting in, the kind of rain that can’t decide if it’s fog or what, and it mists against my face as I call for Sir James. He lopes over to me, tongue hanging out and mud up to his thighs, and in that moment, I wish so keenly that his master was striding along behind him, coat flapping around his thighs and mist-damp hair falling into his face. Auden would stride over and pull me into his big chest, grumpy that I was letting myself get chilled in the rain, and then he’d scrape his teeth along my neck until I was all warm again. Auden would make everything okay, because when I’m with him, I feel that new feeling again, that feeling like I’ve been tilled. That the worst is over and something good is waiting just out of sight.
But Auden is in London, and I masochistically rejected the impulse to call Saint and have him come with me. Maybe coming here was a roundabout way of flogging myself, of reinforcing the isolation creeping up around me for these last two weeks while everyone has been so busy.
With the milder weather, Saint’s uncle’s company has taken on another project, in addition to Thornchapel and another house outside Two Bridges, and so St. Sebastian has been spending every available minute with Augie, creating budgets and schedules and materials orders. Auden’s been consumed with this next phase of renovation, which will be the wing of the house we just vacated and the hall, and because so much restoration work is involved, he’s been lining up masons and glaziers and joiners and plasterers and the like. Rebecca has been busy with London work—the upcoming spring season meaning an increase in both construction on existing projects and more clients, and Delphine hasn’t been able to come back from London since the last time she was here—one weekend for a party her mother had planned, the other because she was being featured on some morning show. And Father Hess has been hosting Friday night fish dinners for Lent and teaching an extra Bible study on the mysteries of Jesus’s death and resurrection, so he’s been scarce as well.
It’s been lonely for a kinky party girl.
I take a final minute to survey the abandoned farm. In every way, it’s Thornchapel’s opposite. Where Thornchapel soars, this house squats; where Thornchapel is grand, the Kernstow Farm is rough and scrubby, and would have been humble long before Estamond’s brother abandoned it and the roof caved in. For Estamond, becoming the lady of the Thornchapel must have been like bec
oming a princess overnight. Surely she must have been happy to leave this place?
I try to see it through her eyes, through the eyes of someone who called it home. She would have known it when it was warm and snug, she would have known it when it was her family’s sheep bleating just over the hill. She would have known when the moors were misty and when they were warm, and she would have known the names for the small flowers that pushed up out of the mud in defiance of the wind and rain and sheep hooves. She would have known the shadow-and-glow play of firelight over the antlered figure on the hearth.
Maybe she was happy here. Maybe she was sad to go.
I decide to believe this. I think of my mother, always grinning and always sun-kissed, even in winter somehow, and how she saw as much magic in our backyard as in the grave of a Natufian shaman. Maybe happiness and magic are Kernstow traits, which is nearly cheering, until I think about how I’ll never watch my mother jump after fireflies in our backyard again, and then I’m suddenly very ready to say goodbye to this lonesome place after all.
Then with the rain susurrating around us, Sir James Frazer and I walk back to the car.
I thought I understood grief. My mother had been missing for twelve years, and even within the first few months, family members and my parish’s priest and the police officers involved—and even my own father—tried to prepare me for the grisly inevitability of a body. For the barren destiny, the grim cup the Markhams would have to drink from for the rest of our lives.
Adelina Markham was dead, and we would never know why, and that was our particular family fate.
You’d think that in twelve years of this, I’d have achieved some kind of motherless nirvana, an equanimity and balance with the world that saw fit to take my mother from me—but no. I thought I had, I thought all of my little hopes and what ifs were carefully potted, cloistered away from real hope, from actually imagining a happy ending.
Hope is a weed. Hope is a flood. It pervaded everything, and I didn’t even know I’d had any hope at all until it was snatched away the day after Imbolc.
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