Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  He knows what Ralph believed. Ralph believed it had to be a king or a Kernstow, since the Kernstows used to be kings. But Becket believes differently. After all, his own god wasn’t a king alone, but also a priest in the order of Melchizedek, and the king of the grove at Lake Nemi wasn’t a king in truth, but a priest of the goddess Diana.

  It has been priests as often as it has been kings. Perhaps more often than not.

  This is to be part of his untaming then. Or his atonement.

  But not tonight. Tonight he will kiss his friends and take his pleasure with them. He will watch with a familiar, fond jealousy as Proserpina sighs in the arms of their king, he will watch Auden and Saint dance around each other, not taking or touching save for with Proserpina between them. He will indulge, because summer has already sighed into autumn, and Samhain will be here soon enough.

  And perhaps . . . perhaps there is another way. He would like there to be another way.

  Take this cup from me. That’s how the verse goes.

  He will search for another path, but since he was fourteen, he’d suspected this was a cup he would have to drink from someday.

  And he would rather be the one to drink than anyone else.

  Auden

  The door is still there when they finish.

  “Perhaps it will be closed when we come back in the morning?” Delphine suggests, and they all make noises of agreement, although Auden is certain that no one actually thinks this will happen. They all seem to know, judging by their faces and their lowered eyes, that it didn’t work. Whatever they were trying to do failed.

  Unlike Beltane, they do not sleep on the platform afterwards. With the fire and blankets, it might have been warm enough, especially if they’d all piled in together, but no one wants to sleep surrounded by the roses or watched over by the door. Least of all him.

  He wouldn’t be able to sleep for a single moment at all, not with those he loves most in this world so near to it.

  So they troop back to the manor with blankets and things carried between them. Auden goes last, burying the last of the fire and taking a look around to make sure everything is safe and secure for the night. And when he flashes his torch over the doorway, he thinks he sees something on the other side. Someone.

  But it’s gone the moment he perceives it. He would like to believe he imagined it; he tells himself he imagined it. He tells himself that nothing can come through the door, even though that’s a lie.

  Back at the house, they meet a fussy Sir James, who’d been left alone on the pretext of convenience, but everyone knew it had been because Auden was worried about Sir James being in the chapel while they were trying to close the door, and they all shower and go to bed. Delphine and Rebecca to separate rooms, Becket and Saint to guest rooms they’d claimed earlier. Auden slips into bed with a shower-damp—but already asleep—Poe, and pulls her into his chest, where she nestles so pleasingly that Auden finds himself praying that the rest of this night will last forever, that the rest of his life will be holding her and feeling her fingertips twitch against his chest as she dreams.

  God is not in the prayer-answering mood, it seems.

  Auden dozes and wakes, and dawn has come, and with dawn, a persistent kind of dread.

  He climbs out of the bed, carefully tucking the covers back around his submissive and smiling as his dog takes his place.

  Sir James lays his head on Poe’s shoulder, heaving a giant sigh like it’s unconscionable that a dog should have to lay on pillows and beautiful women with such little notice, and then closes his eyes.

  Promising himself that he’ll be back soon to reclaim his Poe-cuddling rights, Auden dresses quickly in jeans and a jumper and then slips on his trainers before heading out across the lawn.

  The sounds of sheep bleating from the hills carries all the way down to the valley, and the forest is flush with the whispers of morning—voles going to bed and rabbits waking up—bats finishing their last feeds, birds bitching at each other—and Auden is almost lulled into a hazy, sleep-deprived kind of hope.

  This is how Dartmoor is supposed to sound. This is how Thornchapel used to sound before this year. Maybe . . . maybe the ritual worked. Maybe he’ll get to the chapel and the door will be gone and he won’t cry rose petals anymore and everything will go back to how it should be.

  But it’s a fool’s hope, an iron pyrite hope, and he knows it before the clearing even comes into view. Which is fortunate, because what he finds is enough to steal his breath and weaken his knees.

  He stops just at the edge, still in the shade of the forest, still in the place where everything sounds like it should on a country morning in late September. But in front of him . . . in front of him, nothing is as it should be. Nothing is good or right.

  The roses are everywhere now.

  In the space of a few hours, they’ve crawled from the entrance of the chapel to the stone rows to the clearing beyond, carpeting the floor of the glade and starting to climb up the trunks of the birches and the oaks. They cover everything, dark and fully bloomed, and they bob in the early morning breeze like heavy heads of grain.

  But this is no harvest.

  Resonance. That was what he and Rebecca had settled on. Like the strings plucked on a Hardanger fiddle or a viola d’amore, one string vibrating the other.

  They did this. Somehow. They plucked, and they plucked wrong, and now the resonance is here in the form of silky petals and curved thorns.

  And if they pluck wrong again?

  No. No, he can’t think like that. He won’t.

  Or at least that’s what he tells himself as he trudges back toward his house, rubbing a petal free from an eye as he goes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Proserpina

  “This is all of it, I think.” Becket sets a stack of books next to me and then leans against the library table I’m currently staring down at. “Poe? Proserpina? You here?”

  I manage to break my attention away from the small piece of paper I was staring at and offer him a grateful smile. “Yes, hiiii. Thank you for bringing these over here! Is that everything from the cart?”

  “It is,” Becket says, folding his arms and smiling down at me. He’s so tall, and even though I know he’s not necessarily a dominant person, it trips all my submissive wires, and I want to twine around his legs like a cat. “What were you looking at?”

  “Oh,” I say, moving my attention back to the table. “I read Dr. Davidson’s book about ancient British religion. She mentions the Thorne Valley quite a lot—and evidence for human sacrifice at sites near here—but it’s the introduction my mother wrote that I’ve been mulling over. Here.” I flip the book to the pertinent page and read, “The Romans were curious; it is said that when they first encountered the Dumnonii living in the Thorne Valley, they asked the Britons why the altar in the woods was so deeply sacred to them. We don't know what words the Dumnonii used to explain it, but we do know how the Romans translated what they said. Convivificat.”

  I look up at him. He’s staring down at the book. Or rather, just past the book at the well-creased piece of paper beside it.

  “That’s the note your mother wrote,” Becket states, nodding down at it. “The one you were sent late last year.”

  “Yes. I thought—I don’t know what I thought really. That looking at it for the millionth time would help me understand something about it, I suppose. Understand something about the altar. About the door.”

  “And it hasn’t?”

  I run my thumb along the bottom of the note. “No. And it’s probably stupid to hope it could help me understand a riddle like the door when I don’t even understand a riddle as tiny as who stamped the envelope this came in. Who sent it to me in the first place.”

  The paper is soft along the bottom, the fibers getting worn and fuzzy from handling. It’s thick paper with a significant cotton content—stationery paper, something for indoor work. It couldn’t have come from a field notebook—my mother swore by Rite in the Rai
n, never used anything else—and it wasn’t from an airplane or a hotel. It had almost certainly come from her desk, which meant she’d written it before she came back to England.

  As if he can sense the way my thoughts are tending, Becket asks, “Why do you think she wrote the word down? The altar was covered with grass by the time she came here. By Estamond’s time.”

  I trace the pad of my finger over the sharp c of the word, thinking. “This is the real question, isn’t it? The chapel was still in use as a church through the medieval period, and then as a hidden meeting place for recusants in the Valley during the Reformation, so I have no doubt that the carving on the altar is attested in the historical record somewhere. But why write it down herself? Why think of it at all? Why bring it with her here?”

  “It quickens,” Becket says to himself. “It comes awake.”

  “Does it refer to the door?” I ask. “It must. That’s what awakens in the chapel. That’s what stirs. And that’s what’s so remarkable about what the Dumnonii told the Romans, not that there is a door at all, no, but that the door comes back. That was the most important thing to know about the door. Which is a troubling thought.”

  Becket tilts his head. “It is?”

  “Yes. Because if the door comes back and has done since before the Romans came, then that means there’s no closing it for good, is there? It will always open again, even if you pay the highest price.” I lift my finger from the c, thinking not of the note, but of the c carved into the altar. Thinking of my mother’s skull with dark soil clinging to the arch of her orbital bone.

  She had paid the price. And then my father and I paid a price of our own. So it hadn’t only been the sacrifice of a single life when she died, but the destruction of many.

  “Maybe there was no other way,” Becket says, and his voice is deep and a little strange, but when I look up at him, his eyes are a bright and normal blue, and he’s giving me a warm smile. He is just Becket and not the sapphire-eyed being I once found in the shadows of the Kernstow farmhouse.

  “Or the people there believed there was no other way,” I say, frowning at a nearby glass case of artifacts. The torc is in the middle—the torc my mother holds in that picture with the other parents. The torc Estamond wore before she died. “Or they were taught there was no other way.”

  “Ralph wasn’t taught,” Becket points out. “He seems to have come to this belief through research. And intuition maybe.”

  My frown deepens. It’s painful enough that my mother was murdered, and by someone she used to care for. But I can’t decide if it’s worse thinking Ralph killed her because he believed he had no other choice or because he had a mere intuition it was what should be done. “If he came to it through research, then he should have known it’s the Thorn King who’s supposed to walk to the door,” I say. “The king alone.”

  “Unless someone chooses to be the king in their stead. Remember Estamond?”

  I sit back in my chair. I had never considered—it had never even occurred to me—that my mother might have been complicit in her own murder. That she might have chosen it, to be the king, to be killed.

  “You’re saying that she might have consented to her own death?” I’m not saying it defensively or rhetorically, but as a genuine question. “Like Estamond did?”

  “Is it not a possibility? Could it not explain why she was there that day?”

  I think for a moment, trying to remember her as she was and not as I’ve added on to her memory and deleted from it during these last twelve years without her. Could she have been the kind of woman who’d willingly die? Was she someone who would have believed there was no other way to shut the door?

  “I don’t know. I do know that she wrote often about human sacrifice—mostly in the ancient Mediterranean—and she told me once that in ancient Greece, even the sacrificed animals had to consent to being killed.” I can recall her telling me this in the kitchen, fresh coffee beside her well-traveled laptop and pictures of patinated human bones all over the table. “If there was no consent—if they couldn’t make the animal nod its head or if the bones burned incorrectly after—then the sacrifice was considered tainted or impure. For the sacrifice to work, there had to be consent. At least for the Classical Greeks. The Bronze Age Greeks seemed to believe differently.”

  “There’s a logic to this that’s very compelling,” says Becket. “Even Jesus consented to his death.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” I say suddenly. “Whether she was willing to die or not, she still died for nothing. Everyone who’s died at the door has died for nothing because it will always come back. Always.”

  “Maybe there is a way other than death,” Becket says, but when I look over at him, his face is all doubt.

  “We can’t be the first people to try to find another way.” I rub at my forehead again, staring down at the note. “Convivificat. Convivificat. There has to be a reason for why it mattered to her.”

  “Perhaps she wrote it as a warning,” he says.

  “Do you think the Dumnonii meant it as a warning to the Romans?” I ask, looking down at the book. “But then why did those who followed carve a warning onto an altar? Why worship there, in a place of danger?”

  “A warning is a powerful thing, spiritually speaking. The Ten Commandments are warnings. The implications of damnation are a warning. Maybe the people who worshipped there saw the warning as a gift. Or as a kind of protection.”

  That could be true. “They’ve found witches’ marks on churches,” I say. “Not to hurt the churches, but to protect them. A mark against the evil eye, a talisman. Sigils meant as a threat to outside forces but a comfort to those within.”

  “It seems like our choices are limited then, in how we interpret the word and its meaning,” Becket says, straightening up. “Which makes it difficult to know what your mother meant by writing it.”

  I offer him a self-deprecating smile. “And now you see why I was staring at nothing. My thoughts go in all these circles, the same circles, again and again. The door is scary. The word is a warning. But I’m missing something, because I know—I know—that the thorn chapel can’t be all blood and invasive flora. There has to be something more to it.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so,” I say, closing Dr. Davidson’s book and standing up. “Because we’ve pulled hundreds of books, pamphlets, tracts, and surveys over the last two weeks, and I can’t find any kind of unifying imperative when it comes to the door.”

  Becket seems surprised by this. “You can’t? The sacrificial imperative seems very strong to me.”

  “It is—in certain texts. And then in others . . . .” I reach for one of the books I was paging through this morning, a dusty, cloth-covered book called The Riddling Rose and Other Devonshire Legends. “Here, okay, listen to this. In the story ‘The Riddling Rose,’ a peddler learns there’s a fairy market once every seven years, where he can buy up all sorts of fairy wares. When he finds the way to the market, he discovers the gate to fairyland is blocked by a rose bush—which makes him a bargain. If he can answer three riddles, it will allow him to go to the market and come home again unchanged. There’s a bunch of back and forth about the riddles, blah blah blah, but the upshot is that he answers them right and wins the rose’s bargain—he can go into fairyland and leave again safely. He does a good business there, and then returns to the path the next day to come home. But once he steps through the gate, he realizes everything has changed. The path he walked on—well marked and well trod—is now covered in brambles and weeds. The village he passed through just before coming to the gate has new, tall houses and a new stone market in the middle—seemingly sprung up overnight. And he recognizes no one there—not the innkeeper though he stayed at the inn nor the blacksmith though the peddler had shod his horse on his way through.”

  “Ahh,” says Becket. “So the rose lied.”

  “The rose didn’t technically lie but had tricked him nonetheless. Time passes differently in the other
world, and so while he indeed left the market unchanged, his world changed without him. A hundred years had passed over here, and the peddler no longer knew his own land. Everyone he’d ever known or loved was dead.”

  “Quite a price to pay for one night at a market.”

  “Depends on the market, I guess. Okay, and this one”—I set The Riddling Rose down and take Amusing Tales of the South-West—“Here a young maid catches the eye of the fairy king during his May Day dance. He returns for her on Halloween, and abducts her through the door into his fairy hill. She learns that the door to the fairy hill will open out to her world again, and after waiting a long time, she manages to escape—after several misadventures obviously, because it’s that kind of story. She returns through the gate mostly unscathed, but pregnant with the fairy king’s child. She builds a home from rowan and elder, studded with iron nails, but because she ate the food on the other side, she soon sickens and dies without it, and the child follows her to the grave. The fairy king is said to search for her and their child still, riding over the moors whenever the seasons turn, refusing to accept their deaths.”

  Becket considers. “So there were no true sacrifices in either story.”

  “There was return in both stories. And these aren’t the only ones. All this local folklore about people accidentally getting caught up in the Wild Hunt or being swept off in a fairy dance to fairyland—almost all of the people return. But in this one...” I rest my fingers on a third book.

  It’s a small leatherbound volume which has no title embossed on the front—nor a true title page. Where there should be a title page is only a chromolithograph of a knight encountering a door in the middle of a forest.

  The door is ornate, covered in gilded carvings and things, and there’s no hint of a chapel or any other structure nearby, so it’s not our door, not our forest. Not Thornchapel.

  But the illustration still raises goose bumps along my arms.