“If we fuck, it’s going to change something,” he tells her. “And I’m not willing to do anything right now that makes St. Sebastian feel further outside us than he already does.”
“But we did say that we’d forgive each other if it happened,” she protests weakly.
“If it happened. We’re not supposed to lean on forgiveness as an excuse to sin, or do you not listen to Father Becket on Sundays?”
“Fine,” she grumps. She’s still moving in his arms though. He thinks she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.
Then she brightens. “He’ll be here any minute. Maybe the three of us could . . . ?”
Auden has to admit he’s tempted. He’s tired of coming by himself, coming in his trousers, he’s breaking apart with the need to fuck wildly. Maybe the three of them could sneak off tonight before Becket leads them off onto the moor, and this time Auden could finally and truly sate his needs. And if he’s honest with himself, that’s what he’s let himself imagine since Monday. That St. Sebastian would come to him, and he’d finally give St. Sebastian the real answer about the M he drew on his chest, and then something would finally stop hurting between them. He’s stroked himself to fantasies of St. Sebastian’s reaction all week.
But.
“We agreed, remember?” He presses his lips against her forehead. “We agreed to work on being a three without fucking. Because you know that we can all have sex. We’ve done it before. What we’re trying is something different.”
She slumps against him, her head dropping to his shoulder. “I know. I know. But can’t we just switch to meaningless sex for one night, and then go back to trying to fix ourselves? It’s been so long.”
“There’s no sense in plucking unripe fruit, little bride. It’ll just make us sick after.”
“Says you.” More grumpiness. Instinctively Auden gives her a light slap of warning on her arse, and she shivers, happily. Maybe he should punish her a little, just to take the edge off. There’d be no harm in it, and he needs it just as much as she does—
“Daddy’s home, I see,” St. Sebastian says from behind him.
Slowly, Auden turns—Proserpina still in his arms—and looks at him.
He loves looking at him. Even when he hated him, he loved looking at him, because from an artist’s point of view, St. Sebastian Martinez is perfect. Cheekbones high enough to create hollows beneath them paired with a jaw sculpted to angelic ratios. Hair that Auden would use India ink to draw, to get that midnight color, to get that hint of shine, and a mouth so kissable and yet firm that Auden’s never managed to draw it perfectly, even still, no matter what kind of ink he’s tried.
Auden has to drag his eyes away from that mouth and its piercing now, and focus. “You came.”
St. Sebastian sighs and looks down at the floor, where he’s currently scuffing a boot against the flags. “Nothing on telly,” he says, but he’s flushing ever so slightly. Auden recalls the last few Mondays they’ve spent at the library, Mondays that have driven Auden to the edge of feral madness, because he’s trying to earn St. Sebastian now too, and earning means care. Earning means trust.
Earning does not mean shoving St. Sebastian against the knitting books and fucking a climax right out of him.
St. Sebastian still hasn’t met his gaze, but he has glanced up at Proserpina’s face briefly before looking away again. The expression on his face makes Auden’s stomach clench with both possessive jealousy and also tenderness. Because St. Sebastian looks so hopeful and so vulnerable and so jaded all at the same time when he looks at Proserpina; he looks so wary and obsessed. He looks at Proserpina like she’s a Faerie queen who’s just invited him to eat at her table and he knows it will be his undoing but he just can’t stop himself.
This is why you agreed. This is why the restraint is necessary.
Not only for Proserpina, but for St. Sebastian too.
For himself.
What had happened in the graveyard had made Auden bitter and St. Sebastian skittish; it had blighted the thing growing between them. And Auden doesn’t know how to remedy blight except to burn everything down and start over, and he doesn’t know how to start over without earning, which is what he’s trying to do now.
“I’ll see you in the library,” St. Sebastian mumbles before either Auden or Proserpina can say anything else, and then he’s gone.
Proserpina wriggles free of Auden’s hold, but once she’s on her feet again, she presses her face into his chest. “Tell me you’re almost done fixing the two of you. Please tell me that.”
God, if only he could go back to that summer, if only he could make the teenage version of himself hobble back to Thorncombe and tell St. Sebastian every single thing that needed to be said.
“I’m working on it, little bride,” Auden says with a sigh and kisses her temple. “I’m working on it.”
Chapter 23
Proserpina
Equinox
* * *
A curious thing happens to Proserpina that night.
After a dinner—where she updates everyone on what she’s discovered about Beltane—and after they reconvene in the library, she lays down on one of the sofas and falls asleep and dreams.
As dreams go, it’s a fairly boring one. It’s set in the library, late enough that the incorrigibly early-rising Rebecca has fallen asleep on the opposite couch and Delphine has dozed off in a nearby chair, phone in hand. The boys are seated on the floor by the fire, passing a bottle of scotch between them, and the fire’s mostly burned itself out. There’s no longer any real flames, just a reddish glow and the occasional lonesome pop cracking through the room, and most of the light comes from a lamp near Delphine’s chair, glinting off the bottle as they hand it around. Every few seconds, Sir James Frazer lets out a giant, put-upon sigh, until Saint reaches over and starts scrunching the fur at his neck. Contented, the dog stretches his paws out toward the fire, arches his back, and then falls fast asleep.
Auden and Saint are arguing about something—no, not something. About what she told them all over dinner. About Beltane.
“Hunting is out of the question,” Auden says. “Do any of us really know the first thing about it? Honestly know?”
“Poe said she thinks her interpretation is off,” Becket says. “There might not be any hunting at all.”
Saint is clearly still stuck on Auden’s early comment. “Don’t you go shooting, like, all the time? Isn’t that a requirement of Posh Club?”
“Shooting isn’t hunting,” replies Auden in a tone of crisp offense.
“But you’re killing things with guns—”
“Clay pigeons, Martinez. They look like plates. Would you like me to write to their little clay plate families? Send some fresh clay flowers?”
“Well, if we’re being frankly historical,” Becket says, “the hunting was probably done not with a gun, but with a bow and arrows.”
Saint and Auden both look at Becket in silence.
“Which is probably also out of the question,” says the priest. “I just thought I’d point it out.”
“We’re not going deer stalking,” Auden says firmly. “I don’t care what the villagers did in the Middle Ages.”
“It seems more Neolithic than medieval in origin,” Becket remarks—again unhelpfully, judging from the ensuing look Saint and Auden give him.
“I’ve seen bucks here in the woods,” Saint continues, as if Becket hadn’t spoken. “I don’t think it would be hard to find a stag.”
“Once again, I only kill clay,” Auden says in an exasperated voice. “I’m not killing a stag. Especially not for what we think a three-hundred-year-old book is telling us about a festival most people use as an excuse to fuck.”
“I don’t see what’s any worse about killing a stag for a ritual than killing it for sport.”
Auden doesn’t answer right away. “I just don’t see why killing has to be part of this at all,” he says finally. “Everything else about this ritual is happy. There’s flowe
rs and sex. We’re supposed to have a flowers-and-sex party with blood on our hands?”
“There’s always the ritual bath,” Saint says drily.
“Speaking as a priest,” Becket cuts in, “I think some sacrifice is necessary. I think wherever this tradition came from—the neolithic Britons or the Celts or maybe even the Romans—they would have seen it as necessary. Sacrifice is god-fuel.”
“Well, I’m not doing it,” Auden says. Stubbornly, arrogantly. “I don’t care how many triple goddesses it pisses off. Thornchapel’s had enough blood.”
“We don’t have to kill a stag to make a sacrifice,” Becket reminds him gently. “I was thinking more like . . . Lent.”
“Like we should give up fizzy drinks and crisps for Beltane?” Saint asks, puzzled.
“No, like we should think outside the box. Think non-lethally outside the box.”
There’s some silence after this, broken only by the pop of the fire and then a low whimper from Sir James Frazer, who, judging by the twitching of his massive paws, is having a very good doggy-dream.
“What about the rest of what Poe told us?” Saint asks. “The May Queen and the May King?”
The dream blurs a little at the edges here—much to Proserpina’s frustration, because she wants to know what they’ll say. She’d used tonight’s dinner to run through her meager Beltane findings, and there had been a lot of chatter afterward, but it was mostly Delphine clamoring happily for more salacious Great Rite details and Rebecca trying to hammer out specifics. She didn’t have a chance to ask Auden or Saint what they thought of it.
She strains to hear, thinking maybe if she could just scoot closer to the edge of the sofa, she could make out the low murmur of Auden’s voice. And then she finally hears him speak loud enough for her to hear, and he says:
“Hunting is out of the question. Do any of us really know the first thing about it? Honestly know?”
Proserpina blinks, confused, and then realizes she is really blinking, actually moving her eyelids. She’s awake.
“Poe said she thinks her translation is off,” comes Becket’s voice. “There might not be any hunting at all.”
What the hell?
Saint goads, “Don’t you go shooting, like, all the time? Isn’t that a requirement of Posh Club?”
Shooting isn’t hunting, Proserpina thinks dizzily, and sure enough, Auden says, “Shooting isn’t hunting.”
I dreamt this, she thinks, and then she thinks, but surely not. She’s never had a dream so vivid, so detailed, detailed down to the very words, to the very spits of the logs in the fire and the snores of the dog.
Maybe she dreamed it as they were speaking it—that would make sense. Except then how can she explain how she’s woken up to their conversation at the very beginning? If she’d been simply hearing them in her sleep and projecting it into her dream, then wouldn’t they be past this part of the discussion by the time she woke up? They wouldn’t be looping back to the exact thoughts, exact replies . . . exact pauses in speech.
Auden is making his joke about clay families now, and now Becket is being a little bit of a know-it-all, and Saint is making a case for killing a stag.
Sacrifice is god-fuel.
Thornchapel’s had enough blood.
And then Saint is asking, “What about the rest of what Poe told us? The May Queen and the May King?” and Proserpina has to sit up, she has to back as far away from sleep as possible. This has happened to her before, having had a dream so disorienting or disturbing that the thought of succumbing to sleep again seems like submitting to torture—but she’s never, ever had a dream that’s come true like this.
Immediately. Exactly.
It terrifies her.
“Ah, our sleeping beauty awakens,” Auden teases, but it’s gentle teasing. Proserpina still blushes some; she’ll never not be embarrassed at being caught sleeping when everyone else is awake. Well, almost everyone, she amends to herself with a glance over to Rebecca and Delphine, who are asleep exactly as she dreamed them.
She considers and just as quickly discards the possibility of telling the men about the dream. It’s still too close and unsettling for her to think about, much less talk about, and even if they believe her, what then? She’s told them before that she has vivid dreams, and this isn’t so much as a new talent as . . . a leveling up, say. Not really worth sending out a news alert. “You’re talking about Beltane,” she says instead.
“We’d just gotten to the Great Rite,” Becket answers at the same moment Saint says, “Come have some scotch.”
Both are invitations in their own way, and so Proserpina gets off the sofa and comes down to sit on the rug with them, accepting the bottle when Auden hands it to her.
“I only know about the Great Rite from books,” Saint says. “But it doesn’t seem that much different than what we did on Imbolc.”
“That’s why someone—Estamond, I think—made that note in the Record,” Proserpina says. “I think they do it differently here than it was done elsewhere.”
“Right, because usually a young woman is selected to be the May Queen and then only performs May Queen duties on May Day—or Beltane, as it were,” Becket chimes in. “But here at Thornchapel, the May Queen is chosen earlier.”
“Consecrated on Imbolc, not Beltane,” Proserpina echoes. “The real question—the one I keep asking myself—is why does it matter? Who cares if the May Queen is chosen and ‘married’ in February rather than May? Why was it important enough for Estamond to cross out? For my mother to underline?”
“Maybe it hews closer to the mythology that way?” Becket wonders aloud. “The May Queen is a representation of the goddess, and the lord of the manor, it seems safe to presume, is the May King, and therefore a representation of the god. Which means both have stirred back to life after the Winter Solstice—”
“They’ve died?” Auden asks, eyebrows raised.
“The god has,” Becket says. “I’ve read a few different versions—that he dies on Lammas or on Samhain or even that he slowly begins to die after the Summer Solstice. Symbolically, of course, although there is some suggestion that these myths were acted out ritualistically.”
Auden pauses mid-drink, and that’s when Proserpina notices that the three men have managed to put an impressive dent in the scotch since she’s fallen asleep. “Acted out like the Stations of the Cross?” Auden asks, his I can pronounce Magdalene College correctly, can you? accent even more vaguely disdainful than usual. “Or are you saying ‘acted out’ as in human sacrifice?”
Becket looks a little uncomfortable. “Well, both, I guess. I mean, yes, acted out in a purely allegorical way, where no one would be killed, but where the legacy of the killing is still present in the ritual.”
Auden sets down the bottle. Clunk. “And by legacy, you mean . . . actual human sacrifice?”
At Becket’s guilty expression, Auden shoves his hands through his hair and pulls. “Why is this place so intent on killing things? People? And this is my home?”
St. Sebastian seems both sympathetic to Auden’s murder angst and also amused by it. “It wasn’t just here, Auden. Human sacrifice was everywhere at one point. Europe. The Levant. The terra-cotta soldiers at the First Emperor’s tomb aren’t surprising because they’re there—they’re surprising because they weren’t actual, sacrificed people instead.”
Auden keeps his hands in his hair but slides his eyes over to Becket and St. Sebastian. “So the god dying—you think that was human sacrifice, once upon a time? Like in The Golden Bough? Because I liked that book too, but you should know nobody takes it seriously anymore.”
“You took it seriously enough to name your dog after the author,” St. Sebastian says mildly.
Auden looks drunkenly affronted. “Sir James Frazer is not a part of this!”
“Wait, which Sir James Frazer?” Proserpina asks, genuinely confused now.
“Anyway,” Becket says over all of them, “this is the mythological framework I think we’
re working with: there’s the death of a god—”
“Not always,” St. Sebastian interjects. “Adonis was mortal.”
“Okay, fine, death of a god and in one case, a mortal.”
St. Sebastian lifts a hand, as if accepting this correction.
“The god—or mortal—is a consort to a goddess. Tammuz had Inanna, Attis had Cybele, Osiris had Isis, and so on—”
“But Jesus and Dionysus are in Frazer’s book and they’re not consorts to anyone,” Proserpina points out. “Even though they fit the mold most of all.”
Becket huffs a little. “I’m not Wikipedia. I’m just trying to explain the context around where these rituals emerged.”
Auden still has his hands in his hair. He clutches his fingers tight to pull harder and then releases a deathbed-worthy sigh. “Go on, Becket, horrify me further.”
Another huff. “As I was saying, when united, the goddess and consort pair are productive and fertile, and this is spring and summer. Everything is growing and wet and green. But then something happens and the consort is killed. Sometimes he’s resurrected, but sometimes he’s not—in any case, the period following his death is winter.”
“Also Inanna and Persephone die or disappear each year too—and it is their absence that causes winter and their return that heralds spring,” Proserpina says. “So let’s not get too caught up in the notion that being a vegetation deity is the sole province of boys.”
“Regardless,” Becket pronounces, “the idea is that these myths are holding onto kernels of older beliefs. You can see traces of human sacrifice everywhere—the Bible, the Greek myths, obviously in concepts like the Wicker Man and John Barleycorn—there’s no doubt that it was real and common right up to the Bronze Age and even later in some cases. But what the Thornchapel practices say to me is that the people here were interested in a very specific kind of sacrifice, a very specific kind of story.”
“The Year King,” St. Sebastian says. And with those quiet words, the arguing stops. The fire cracks again, and Sir James Frazer gives a long groan.
Feast of Sparks Page 24