Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3)

by Sierra Simone

  “Is he here?” Estamond had asked, her heart twisting. Esau and Esra had been the sacrifice she’d had to make in order to marry a Guest—a necessary sacrifice in her mother’s eyes, but a sin in Esau’s. It was a sin he would never forgive her for, she knew, and yet, she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it. Esra was safe and happy, and she’d never begrudge Esau finding another woman to vent all his feral passions at, and so he could also be happy if he chose. She’d gained the thorn chapel in return for leaving her brother and her son behind, she’d gained the stones and the altar and the door and the place that belonged to her family by ancient right. She’d gained five more children for the one she left to her parents, she’d gained a sweet, devoted husband in place of her twin brother. A brother whose love was like the moors themselves—howling and desolate.

  And yet, she still missed them, missed them like she missed the rain on her face or the mist in her hair.

  “He’s started at the village school,” Esau had told her, stepping close enough to seize her in his arms, which he did. “Now, why are you here?”

  “Mother,” she’d gasped. “Mother sent me a note. She wants me to kill the Thorn King at Lammastide.”

  “Or it will be one of us,” Esau said. “I know.”

  “Not Esra,” she begged. “Please.”

  Esau had growled then, hauling her even tighter to his chest. “If you would do your duty, then no one would have to die at all.”

  “No one here, you mean,” she hissed, struggling. “You want me to choose between my husband and you.”

  “I want you to choose between the Guests and the Kernstows,” Esau said, scowling. “They stole the thorn chapel from us. Why should you cry over a dead Guest now?”

  “They stole it thirteen hundred years ago,” Estamond said, still struggling in his arms. “When will we forgive them for it? Does a man really deserve to die for what his forefathers did that long ago?”

  “He deserves to die because he is the Thorn King,” Esau pronounced, his voice as firm as his hold on her. “It’s his fate. If I were born to be the Thorn King, then it would be my fate as well.”

  With some private shame, Estamond had to admit that Esau was much better suited to the role of wild god than her quiet Randolph. If some quirk of fate had meant that Esau had been born a Guest, if he’d been given the torc and asked to wed himself to the land, then what a king he would have become. Uncanny and wicked and wild. Not just a Thorn King, but a king of thorns.

  “But if he will not kneel to his fate, then one of us must become the thorn king in his place,” Esau continued. “The door must be closed, even if it has to be with a substitute. Here and there, king and door.”

  King and door. They were words she’d grown up with, words as unmovable and unchangeable as the wild god carved onto their hearth. Part of a song so old that no one knew when it had first been sung.

  Here and there, king and door,

  Cup and spear, corn and war.

  She stopped struggling now as she realized it was pointless to fight this. To fight the Kernstow legacy. To somehow stave off the hungry heart of the valley.

  “Even after our inheritance has been denied us, it’s always fallen to the Kernstows to make sure the Guests abide by the rules of the land,” said Esau. “And it’s up to us to close the door if they won’t.”

  Estamond’s head fell forward against his chest. He smelled like heather and rain and home. “Just not Esra,” she whispered. “Not him. Please.”

  Esau was still furious, but she could hear the truth of his next words in his voice. “I would never let it be him, Essie. And for what it’s worth, you know Mother wouldn’t either. She’s seen something for him in the spoons—something about his descendants. He’s the future of the Kernstows now. He’s all we have left.”

  It was unwise to tell him what she told him next, but Estamond had never been wise. “You should marry, Esau. Find a wife or even a sweetheart. Get babes on her.”

  His hands tightened so hard around her arms that she let out a squeak, and then those hands were on her back and in her hair, pressing her so tightly to him that she could feel every tensed muscle and every inch of his erection. “There’s no one but you,” he vowed. “There will never be anyone but you. And you will be mine again, my own, and you’ll never leave me again.”

  “Esau . . . ”

  His mouth and nose were in her hair. His hands shaped to the curves of her hips and bottom through her dress. “You don’t need him,” he rumbled. “If you simply do what needs to be done, then you’ll have won the thorn chapel back for our family, and we’ll be together again.”

  Turbulent longing tangled and pulled with horror; she would never do it, never, never—but oh, how she’d missed this. How she’d sometimes ached for this, ached for Esau’s fury and possession. His greedy hands and animal growls. Randolph was sweet and kind and true, but Esau was her very own heart, her very own soul. Their hearts were made out of each other’s. So were their bodies and minds.

  Even the wild god himself would struggle to compete with that.

  Estamond’s body didn’t hide the truth from her brother—it never could—and before long, Esau’s mouth was hot and urgent on hers. He handled her like a doll—not a precious china doll with silk clothes and curls made of real hair, but like a rag doll. Like she was his thing to drag over the hills and clutch in the dark, and even though her tender core twinged and her milk-full breasts ached, she relished every second of it.

  Esau was taller than her, stronger than her, angrier than her. With very little trouble or effort, he had her inside the house and on his wool-blanketed bed, his teeth on her throat and his hand up her skirts. With a hot, wet flush, her milk let down, hard enough to soak through her nursing corset and dress.

  Esau’s eyes narrowed. “Is that for him? For one of his brats?”

  Estamond narrowed her eyes right back, and she was tempted to hiss at him like a cat. “For one of my brats, yes.”

  “The child should be mine,” he breathed against her skin. “All of your children should be mine.”

  “I was always supposed to be the May Queen, Esau. I was always supposed to be his.”

  Esau grunted low in his throat, his hand dropping to his trouser buttons. It was inevitable between them, once again. Two bodies that should have never separated to begin with.

  “I only just stopped bleeding,” she told him as he moved between her legs. “I still hurt.”

  “I won’t go in,” he said. “But I have—to—touch—”

  The moment his bare organ pressed against her slick opening and then rode up to grind against her, Estamond forgot nearly everything. Her mother’s note, the impending Lammas feast, and very nearly the tiny babe still sleeping in a maid’s arms in the cozy Guest carriage waiting for them on the road.

  True to his word, he didn’t penetrate her, but it was still fucking, there was no denying that. She came hard and keening, and Esau followed her, liquid heat surging out of his tip and onto her intimate skin, and then he collapsed over her, still rutting gently as he slid his arms tight around her. She was his rag doll once again.

  “I hate that Mother made you marry him,” he murmured.

  “No one made me do anything,” she said. “I love him.”

  “Yet you’re underneath me.”

  “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.

  Still the shadow waited.

  All the stories she heard, all the things her mother had told her—they seemed like such mockeries now. Clumsy half-ideas sketched out by the ignorant and proclaimed as the truth, because how could any story convey the reverent, wonderful terror of this? The open door with something waiting behind it? And Estamond wondered—a little wildly, a little heretically—what would happen if she just left it open.

  Or what would happen if she simply . . . walked through.

  The voice keened louder now, plangent and strange. It was a wail both unearthly and not, both disquieting and oddly familiar. Estamond had the uncomfortable sense that it was for her, somehow, that the voice was lamenting her.

  Or if not her, then the Thorn King come to die at the door tonight.

  She took another step back, and then another, until she stumbled back against the grassy hump of the ancient earth-covered altar. She felt more terror than wonder now, more horror than awe, because inside of that lamenting voice was her fate, and her fate was a forlorn and lonely death, and she didn’t want it, she didn’t want any of it. She wanted Randolph and her children, she wanted Esau and Esra. She wanted more harvests, more Lammas revels when her biggest fear was making sure there was enough mead and ale for the feasters. She wanted sticky summer nights and snow-heaped winter days, she wanted the hills and the mist and the bright chatter of the River Thorne.

  She wanted to live, and yet living was impossible so long as her mother drew breath. Living meant death to someone she loved, and she was incapable of allowing that.

  This, and more, the mournful voice seemed to know. Without understanding the words, Estamond understood the meaning.

  Life was beautiful and bursting and ripe, and sometimes it had to be given up or given back. Sometimes it had to be sown back into the earth from where it came.

  It was a lesson Estamond had always associated with Samhain, the feast of the final harvest, but she supposed it worked for Lammas too. Tonight instead of weaving dolls out of barley or crowns out of meadowsweet, she would be cut down like the first of the grain.

  Everything in its time, her mother would say.

  John Barleycorn must die, she would say too.

  But what if I just left? What if I didn’t close the door?
<
br />   What was the worst that could happen?

  As if hearing her thoughts, the shadow moved. Just a step, just enough so that she could see where its hips tapered to long thighs. And then it lifted its hand, and then she saw the hand itself—a man’s hand like any other man’s hand, except it was glistening with something dark and wet and—

  Estamond screamed.

  The chanting and singing stopped, so did the drums. The only thing that remained was the piercing voice of sorrow, singing its ageless song. Singing as Estamond stared at the bloody hand, and prayed and prayed she wouldn’t see any more of the man who waited on the other side.

  “I’ll do it,” she called out in a trembling voice. “Please, don’t—I shall do it myself.”

  The hand lowered but the shadow remained.

  Here and there, life and death …

  Nearly the same thing.

  Estamond felt the weight of the words as surely as she felt the weight of the torc on her neck and the weight of the bottle in her dress pocket. She understood then, why the door must close, why the veil could flutter but not part. Or at least she thought she did, because as terrifying as that shadow was, as maddening as the singing lament became as it urged her on to her own grim fate, she had to admit she was still drawn to the world beyond the door, she was still enlivened by it, even as she unstoppered the bottle that would smother the life right out of her. The world beyond the door was just like here, but more. Both more wonderful and more strange. More sweet and more dangerous.

  Perhaps she could’ve lived near the open door, but many others would not wish to. Perhaps even most others.

  The brew was bitter, and Estamond wished she’d brought some whisky or sherry to wash out the taste. With a regretful sigh and a careful eye on the door and the shadow behind it, she took the small knife and drew it across her palm.