Feast of Sparks

by Sierra Simone

  I can’t seem to make for Thornchapel after visiting the farm, so I head for Bellever instead, thinking that I’ll drop in on Becket at the church. Bellever is a tiny hamlet sandwiched between a tor and a thick forest of spruce, and the story goes that the church there was built when Edward III gave the land to his son as part of the Duchy of Cornwall, but Becket’s told me that the church is younger than that, probably from the early Tudor period instead.

  St. Petroc’s is strikingly beautiful and in remarkably good condition—it was abandoned for a time after the Glorious Revolution and then purchased by the Guest family and gifted to the Catholic Church in the 1830s to be restored and reopened as a Catholic parish. And today, with the mist settling in between the widely spaced trees of Bellever Forest and the shallow river rushing nearby, it’s deliciously melancholy, enough so that my mood is lifting before I even step foot inside the church. Although maybe that’s just the Becket Effect—I always feel lighter after seeing him, like I’ve been absolved and cleansed just by being in his presence.

  Sir James’s paws have thankfully mostly dried on the drive here, and so there’s no muddy dog prints on the handsome flagstone floors as we walk in—just the heavy tread of my boots and the click of Sir James’s paws and then the matching steps of the priest as he ducks into the narthex from his adjoining office.

  “Poe!” Becket says, coming forward to kiss my forehead and help me with my damp coat. “Hi, Sir James—yes, yes, I know, it has been a long time, it’s been a whole day—” His cooing to the dog is interrupted when Sir James bucks up to lick his face. Becket laughs, not seeming to mind at all, and there’s a happy twinkle in his blue gaze when he looks at me. “I’m still happy to take him off your hands, you know. I’m used to keeping him.”

  “He helps me sleep,” I say, shaking some of the rain out of my hair. “And he barks at the renovation workers when they try to come into the library. I like that.”

  Becket grins at that, giving the dog a scratch behind the ears. “So to what do I owe the pleasure of the visit then? If it’s not to return this wayward mutt?”

  I sit down on one of the pews and smile up at him. “I was out and about and I wanted to see you.”

  I can tell this last part pleases him, but he works to hide it. Instead, he teases, “Playing hooky, are we?”

  “Something like that,” I say. “Have you ever been to the Kernstow Farm?”

  He takes a seat in the pew in front of me, still scratching at Sir James’s ears as he thinks on it. “Maybe? It’s north of Thorncombe, right?”

  “Right.”

  He thinks for a moment later and then gives me an apologetic smile. “If I have, I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  “My mother was a Kernstow, you know. I wanted to see where the family came from. I wanted to see . . .”

  I trail off for a minute, not sure what I was going to say because I still don’t know what I hoped to accomplish with my little excursion, and Becket reaches down with his non-dog-petting hand to touch my hand. “Did you? See what you came to see?”

  Sigh. “No. But I did find this engraved onto the hearth stone.” I pull out my phone, find the picture, and then hand the phone over to him. “I know you like all the history and everything around here. Does this look like anything you’ve ever seen before?”

  Becket’s mouth parts the tiniest bit, like he’s surprised. “Yes,” he says slowly, “yes, I think I have. But not here.”

  “Really?”

  With a few quick movements of his long fingers, he pulls up an image search on my phone and then passes it to me. And then I’m just as surprised. Several images of an antlered figure sitting cross-legged fill the screen, most of them rendered in metal and most of them far more detailed than the hearthstone, but certainly the same as the hearthstone person. Most of the images are of artifacts in museums, and the small captions at the bottom tell me they’re from all over Europe.

  “That’s . . . it. That’s the same person. Man? Antler-man?”

  “A god, I think,” Becket says. “Or a priest embodying the god. Cernunnos is the name most scholars give him, although we really don’t know for sure. Modern worshippers call him the Horned One. Sometimes the Stag King.”

  “The Stag King,” I repeat. Same as the Thorn King? “Do you remember if Dartham’s book mentions anything like that? Or the Record?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to read ahead in either,” Becket says, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Stag King is mentioned in some capacity. Have you come across anything like it in your Beltane research?”

  I blow out a sheepish breath. “I’ve been trying to catch up on the library work I fell behind on, and then they finished renovating the south wing of the house, so those of us living at the house have been trying to move everything out of the old wing so they can start work on it next.” I cover my face. “I’m a bad Beltane researcher.”

  “We’ve got so much time,” Becket assures me, unaware of the lustful direction of my thoughts. “I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.” He pauses, biting at his full lower lip for a minute. “How is everything going? With the investigation? I’m worried about you.”

  It’s nice to have someone worried about me, and even when I’m lonely with only the dog for company, I have to admit that I’m very lucky. Three months ago, I only had an ex-girlfriend that I could wheedle into beating me on occasion. Now I have five friends who worry over me, beat me, fuck me, laze around the library and gossip with me.

  “I’m doing okay,” I say, and I think I mean it. I think it’s normal to go from horny or sleepy or wearily satisfied at seeing a room all boxed up and ready to move to crying or numb or angry. It seems normal to me at least. “They’ve taken down the tape around the ruins,” I say. “There’s really nothing more they can do, they told me. They’ve searched as thoroughly as they can for a weapon or restraints or anything else of my mother’s and come up empty. They think maybe . . . maybe it was a hiker. Or possibly some locals, drunk and wild on Halloween. Unless someone steps forward with a confession, though, it’s impossible to say.”

  Becket’s gone stiller and stiller while I’ve been talking, and for the first time since I’ve known him as an adult, he turns his head away as if he can’t bear to be seen. As if wrestling with some great and terrible reality.

  “Becket?” I ask, reaching out to touch his elbow propped along the back of the pew. “Are you okay?”

  He closes his eyes for a minute, his lips moving almost imperceptibly. Praying. He’s praying. And then he opens his eyes, and his stare is utter and bleak pain. “It wasn’t a hiker who buried your mother, Poe,” he says softly. “It was Ralph Guest.”

  Pain and confused anger twist up from somewhere deep inside me, and I press the heels of my hands to my eyes, thinking of my conversation with my dad. Thornchapel is dangerous to Kernstows . . .

  No. No, it’s too much. Too neat, too pat. A scorned ex-lover turning to murder to exorcise his pain? That’s television. That’s fiction.

  See what you can dig up about what happens in the thorn chapel on Samhain. What the Guests have done since time out of mind there . . .

  Goddammit, no. No.

  “Becky,” I say, dropping my hands. “There’s no proof—we can’t know that—”

  “I do know—”

  “Just because we know Ralph was a bad man doesn’t mean he murdered my mother. My dad says Ralph loved her. Loved her. She was his Domme. And she was coming back to Thornchapel or to him—why would he have killed her? We all want her death to make sense, to have some kind of reason behind it—God knows, I want that above anything else—but I can’t just believe it because my dad hates him. I need proof and there isn’t any.”

  “I saw him with the body, Poe,” Becket says gently. “With her body.”

  I stand up so quickly that Sir James bolts up too, spinning in a circle as if to find some danger to protect me from. I step past him in the aisle and then I turn back to face Becket. I’m
not even sure what my hands are doing or what shape my mouth is making, but it makes Becket get to his feet too with a face full of love and shared hurt with me, like he’s hurting just as much as I am, like he’s hurting because I’m hurting.

  “No,” I say, unable to listen to this any longer. “You didn’t see him with the body. You couldn’t have. It was twelve years ago, you were fourteen, you were in Virginia.” I’m all practical-librarian now; I’m purely about quality of information, purely about checking sources and vetting facts.

  Becket doesn’t come any closer, but I know he wants to, I know he wants to tell me this while holding my hand or hugging me, and I can’t decide if I think that’s kind or if I don’t want to be touched by anyone ever again. I face away from him, wrapping my arms around myself as if it will shield me from his words.

  “We came to spend a week with my grandmother for her sixtieth birthday,” he says. “She let me borrow her car because I said I wanted to drive it down the lane and back. I drove it here instead.”

  “No,” I say to the tabernacle. “No.”

  “Dusk comes early on Samhain—it was dark by late afternoon. I could only see the ruins by firelight—and the light of the lantern circle surrounding the altar.”

  I want to clap my hands over my ears, I want to beg him to stop. I want to say no as many times as it takes to will the world back to normal.

  “Ralph was digging by the altar. He was alone, except for the body, and she was wrapped in a sheet close to where he dug. I watched him dig it, Poe, and I watched him put her in there.”

  “Why didn’t you do anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I turn—I’m not angry because I’m not anything—I’m instead every emotion in its infancy, I’m the primordial soup of emotions. “You didn’t try to stop him? You didn’t call the police? You didn’t tell me before now—” even as I speak the words, the real horror of them snatches me up and tosses me between its teeth. “You knew,” I say slowly, a scream welling like a bubble in my throat. “You knew she was dead and you knew Ralph Guest killed her and you never said a fucking word—”

  Becket is to me before the scream escapes, but his quickness is balanced with gentleness as he cups my elbows to look down into my face. Outside, the rain picks up enough to spatter and roar against the stone and glass walls of the church, echoing everywhere. “I didn’t know it was her, Poe,” Becket says. “How could I have? I had no way of knowing beforehand that she’d also come to Thornchapel for Samhain. And after that, my parents never spoke of her, they never talked about her disappearance. It wasn’t until you came back, until you told me your mother had disappeared here, at Thornchapel, and on that day, that it all came together for me. I’ve been trying to decide what to do ever since.”

  I look up at him. Even though I haven’t been crying, my eyes feel hot and swollen. “Have you told the police?”

  “I am going to. But I owed you the truth first, before I owed it to them.”

  The scream dies in my chest unscreamed, but I’m still shaking, I’m still wildly angry and upset and disturbed and also weirdly guilty that Becket has carried this burden for so long. Because even if he didn’t know it was my mother . . . “You’ve known for years that Ralph Guest killed someone,” I say. “How—why didn’t—”

  Becket’s face is both rueful and kind. “We’re not all Sagittari, Poe. I wish I were as fierce as you, as certain about what to do. But I was scared. Terrified, in fact—I’d always been terrified of Ralph, and knowing he was capable of murder only made it worse. I had to stay hidden in the trees for hours until he finally left so that I could sneak away safely because I thought he’d kill me too. I thought he’d kill me if I ever told the police.”

  “You would have been safe,” I insist, but it’s a rote insistence, automatic, because the truth is I don’t know that for sure.

  Becket shakes his head. “You were young that summer, so maybe you don’t remember him the way I do because I was old enough to see the kind of man he was. And when my family left after whatever big fight they had, they told me that Ralph Guest had more money than I could ever count in a thousand lifetimes, and that he’d use it to hurt us if we didn’t leave right away. If that’s what he’d do to us for not leaving, what would he do to us if I told the world what I saw? What if no one believed me, because I was just a teenager who’d stolen a car and he was Ralph Guest of Thornchapel? What if no one believed me and I got hurt? What if no one believed me and my family got hurt?”

  He stops for a breath, and then lets go of me.

  “I’m so sorry, Poe. When you came back, and everything made sense, I should have told you. But by then, Ralph was dead and I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know what the right answer was until Saint found her bones, and even then I wasn’t sure what possible good it could do to tell you. That night has haunted me for twelve years. I didn’t want it to haunt you too.”

  “It already does,” I say, and I close my eyes tight for a minute, wishing I could squeeze out the last ten minutes like I can squeeze out the light.

  But I can’t. It’s there now, it’s already catalyzed, it’s already burned into my memory like an acid etch.

  Becket saw Ralph burying someone that Samhain night. That someone was my mother.

  Ralph killed my mother.

  God. Why? Why?

  “Thank you for telling me,” I manage finally. It seems like the thing to say right now, even though the last thing I want to do is thank him. “I’m sorry,” I add, because it also seems like the thing to say.

  “Poe, it’s me who’s sorry. I deserve every feeling that you have, because I’ve been holding onto this for months, using the excuse of not wanting to hurt you to avoid doing something difficult. And the difficult thing happened anyway, as it always does.”

  I couldn’t keep your mother safe from that place, but I can still protect you. Leave.

  My father’s plea comes back to me as we finally resume our walk back to the house.

  I’ll have to tell Dad, I think numbly. He needs to know he was right.

  And what then? Becket will tell the police, but they can’t arrest a dead man. I suppose there will be more interviews, a detailed but inconclusive report—all the facts, none of the reasons.

  What the Guests have done time out of mind.

  What if the reasons are easy to find? What if my father was right, and this is about the chapel and Samhain and Kernstows and Guests after all?

  “Poe,” Becket says, and I look up at him. And then all my anger, all my sadness, and all my desolation—all my numbness and all my pain and all of the ten thousand gradations of feeling that live in between—they swell up inside me, they crest and rise like a terrible, murky wall—

  Becket kisses my forehead, not like a friend, not even like a lover, but like a priest. Like a priest saying You are still a child of God, like a priest passing on God’s love and blessing. And then the terrible wall breaks, it rushes down, like a wave upon some inner shore I didn’t know I had until this moment, and I’m free of it, I’m washed clean.

  Becket pulls me into his arms for real and crushes me to his chest while I cry. It’s not a full sob fest, not like the night Auden and Rebecca flogged me, but it’s a slow, almost easy kind of crying. The tears slide out with no effort at all, and it feels so good to rub my face against Becket’s chest, so good to have his arms around me while I cry, and I think I could stand here forever. Right here in the middle of St. Petroc’s with the rain streaming down the stained glass and with its priest murmuring sweet things into my hair.

  I turn my face up into his collared neck, and his scent is so lovely that I want to run my nose everywhere just to get more of it. It’s paper and incense and maybe some kind of expensive shaving oil—the smell of a philosopher and a man—and without thinking, I rise to my tiptoes to bury my nose in the space right about his collar and breathe him in. He doesn’t smell of winter or Thornchapel, like Saint and Auden, and I have a sharp moment when
I wish it were them holding me.

  We should try to restrain ourselves as much as possible, Auden said. But god, it feels so good just to be held. To have strong arms and a strong throat and a delicious scent chase away everything that feels bad.

  I can tell the moment Becket realizes what I’m doing, the moment he feels me change from crying to curious. His hands immediately tighten on my back as if to drag me even harder against him, and then they relax nearly just as quickly, keeping me still at a careful, friendly distance. A priestly distance.

  There’s no excuse for what happens next, really. Not the grief, not the two weeks too busy for kink or touch. Not even Becket’s scent, as sensual and evocative as it is. No, I should know better, I should care for my friend better, because they aren’t my vows. It isn’t my collar. I have no say in how and when he sets them aside. And even if Saint and Auden and I decided it was okay, even if we decided that nothing that happens between the six of us is cheating, do I really want to do this?

  But I lean up even further and crush my mouth to Becket’s anyway.

  He tastes as good as he smells—better even, because his mouth tastes like incense smells: spicy and rich and smoky—and I wrap my arms tight around his neck to get more of it.

  He’s frozen at first, still and tight as if he’s completely stunned, and it’s only the fast heave of his chest against mine that tells me he’s feeling the power of this moment too. Although whether it’s anger or lust or fear, I don’t know.

  Don’t be a sex monster. Stop this madness right now.

  With a sharp inhale of regret, I pull away. “Becket, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  Becket unfreezes in an instant, sliding his hands up into the damp waves of my hair, his blue eyes burning all over my face. “No,” he grinds out. “You should.”

  And then he kisses me back.

  I knew Becket was no virgin; he’d told us all as much back before Imbolc. But it’s still a complete shock to have him part my lips so confidently just now, to feel him taste me like he’s an epicure sampling a rare delicacy. To have him walk me back, back, back, even while he plunders my mouth, so that we’re in the small transept where the candles are burning and where we won’t be seen right away if someone walks in. His kissing is expert, his hands in my hair are beyond experienced, especially after they move from my hair to trace along the hollows of my throat and the sensitive places behind my ears, and it’s clear he knows how to handle a lover’s body, how to make skin and lips sing with need.