“Don’t look at your feet,” Ralph said impatiently. “I want to see your face.”
Ralph’s displeasure was its own command. St. Sebastian dragged his eyes to the older man’s face, and then wished he hadn’t. He looked so much like Auden—long, elegant nose, high cheekbones, a jaw that came only after centuries of breeding beauty with money. Even the silvering hair and lines around his mouth didn’t hide how handsome he was, nor how much his son resembled him. St. Sebastian had a floating, disassociated bubble of a thought—a thought that must have floated in from a parallel universe where the beating had never happened and he and Auden had been spending the last few days having sex and drinking wine—and the thought was this:
This is what Auden will look like when he gets older.
And the thought was also this: how handsome he’ll be in the mornings, blinking awake on the pillow next to me.
And the thought came with images, with sights and smells and sounds, it came with the fantasy of watching a grown-up Auden knot a tie as the morning news filtered in from another room, of watching an older Auden read the newspaper, read a book, laugh at something from across a Parisian café table. And maybe there were children too? And a dog, a big one that they could lay on and thump and wrestle with.
And the thought came with their ghost, Proserpina, there for it all, beautiful and green-eyed and tucked between their arms.
That was what came with looking at Ralph’s face, and St. Sebastian had to look away again.
Ralph sighed, and surprisingly, it wasn’t an irritated sigh or a displeased one. It sounded almost…sad. “My wife and I are preparing to move back to London, and I don’t imagine we’ll be back here until Christmas. But when we come back, I’d like to speak with your mom sometime. About your future and how I can help. Help more than I have been, at least.”
This was beyond unexpected, and St. Sebastian’s gaze snapped back to Ralph. “What?”
“I think you heard me. Now, you should go before my wife sees you.”
It was such a strange thing to say, on top of the strange thing that preceded it, that all of St. Sebastian’s footing was lost and all he could do was nod. Maybe Mrs. Guest blamed him for the attack or maybe she didn’t like knowing Auden was spending time with a boy in the first place—hundreds of maybes piled up in his head so fast he could barely squeeze out a polite goodbye as he turned to leave.
“And St. Sebastian,” Ralph called out after him. St. Sebastian turned to look at Auden’s father, who was staring at him with dark, impassive eyes.
“Yes?”
“I’m taking care of those boys, do you understand? The ones who hurt you and Auden. No one hurts Guests and escapes the price.”
St. Sebastian didn’t have an answer to that, and Ralph didn’t seem to expect one. He closed the door to Thornchapel and St. Sebastian was left alone.
Chapter 26
Proserpina
Present Day
* * *
“So the stag was a boy?”
“I think you mean a young man,” Rebecca corrects from her perch at the end of the table.
“Ugh, fine,” I say. “The stag was a young man?”
We’re all gathered around the table in the library, curving over the pictures Saint has brought from his mother’s office. Apparently she’d been leaning on her access to the Thorncombe Historical Society’s archives—archives being a stack of cardboard boxes in an old lady’s attic—to write an article about local folk customs, and she’d gathered some very, very old photographs in the process. They all seem to be of the same celebration—May Day in Thorncombe—and there’re photographs from as far back as 1899, going up until the mid-seventies.
The usual May Day props are represented: there’re several pictures of the maypole and the wreath and ribbons above it. There are pictures of young men and women a-maying, with arms full of flowers and boughs of greenery, and then portraits of young women in white dresses wearing flower crowns shyly holding hands with young men in front of the maypole.
But it’s the pictures of boys wearing antler headdresses that made Saint bring them to us, and so now here we are with the pictures spread over the table, and Dartham’s book and the Record open beside them. I’m studying them intently, marking the similarities between the boys in the pictures and my dreams about Auden’s ancestor running through the forest.
The wild god.
“I want to look,” Delphine chirps from beside me.
“Take Auden’s gloves, I think he’s done looking,” I say, my eyes glued to the pictures.
There’s a puff of protest from behind my shoulder, and I tear my eyes away from the pictures so I can properly glare at Delphine. “These pictures have been in a cardboard box that is not acid-free, sitting in a folder that is also not acid-free, in Saint’s house which is the furthest away from environmentally controlled as I can imagine.”
“Hey,” Saint protests, but I ignore him.
“We are not compromising century-old photographs a single bit more, not while they’re in our care, which means gloves, Delly. I’m serious.”
Delphine pouts at me, but she accepts gloves from an amused Auden. “We don’t have to wear gloves with the books,” she grumbles as she pulls them on.
“That’s because book paper is different than photographic paper; book paper has short fibers that—” Oh God, why am I even bothering? “Gloves,” I say instead, in the firmest voice I can manage.
“Poe is the library Domme,” Becket notes.
“Does that make Saint the library sub?” Rebecca asks, retucking her long legs underneath her. Delphine follows the movement with the avidity of a bunny waiting to see if the thing it’s just spotted is danger or food. Of course, Rebecca is both; she’s safety and edgy, sexual threat, and that’s probably why her little blond bunny has been looking so happy since the equinox.
I glance over to Auden, who’s already gazing at me with his arms crossed and his mouth in an imperious tilt that I now know means he’s feeling possessive. He’s pleased too, although I can only catch his pleasure in the rare flash of his dimple as he surveys his friends chattering and jostling around his table, and in the warm look I sometimes see him giving me and Saint (along with a concurrent flex of his hands, as if he’s itching to pull us both close.)
Maybe tonight, I think. Maybe tonight’s the night.
More than a week ago, Auden found me in my box-stacked bedroom and asked if he could tell me a story. A story about a beautiful, wild boy who belonged to the forest and about the other boy who wanted to love him and hurt him too. Auden told me about the graveyard—about how he’d stayed so Saint could run—about how when he woke up, both eyes nearly swollen shut and his sinuses filled with blood and his chest crushed—his first thought was he’s okay. He’s safe.
I kept him safe.
And then Rebecca’d found him because she’d gotten to Thornchapel early and she’d gone roaming around their usual hangout spots to find him, and then he didn’t remember much, except that even in the harsh, antiseptic air of the hospital, he clung to his pain like a gift. It was a gift if it meant Saint was safe. It was precious and beautiful, and he’d give any amount of pain all over again, he’d give his entire life, if it meant he could keep the people he loved safe.
But then Saint had left, he’d gone to America, and Auden’s pain changed into something else.
Heartbreak.
Auden told me about the money, about discovering that Ralph had been paying Jennifer Martinez over a thousand pounds a month for nearly eight years by that point, and how he’d put a stop to it, knowing it was unkind, knowing it was foul play, and being so angry and desperate to see Saint again that he didn’t care.
All this he told me while I sat on my bed and he knelt on the floor in front of me. It should have been wrong, to have him there, especially now when we were just forming our Dom-sub relationship, and even more especially since he was a baby Dom, and still stepping into himself. But it felt natural and
even necessary to have us positioned like this, as if he was a supplicant coming to a queen or a penitent confessing his sins to a saint.
As if he was a king kneeling before a priestess to receive a blessing.
And when I threaded my hands through his soft brown hair and he closed his eyes, I had a dizzy, blur-edged feeling of doing the same thing before, a déjà vu so powerful that I had the sudden, unnerving fear that if I pressed too hard on it, I’d find myself somewhere else entirely.
Someone else, even.
But the moment had passed, and then Auden had stood up and kissed me in the way he’d taken to kissing me since Imbolc, which was so full of feeling that I could feel his entire body trembling as he kissed me, and was also so searingly greedy that I always ended up breathless and clinging to him for support—as if it wasn’t enough to have my kiss, he also needed to have my breath and balance too.
And after that confession—and the smaller, sweeter confession of how he’d pleasured himself and Saint in Saint’s bed—I thought surely it would be soon. Saint had forgiven Auden, and certainly Auden must have forgiven Saint, and what was there left to wait for?
“I want him to admit something to me,” Auden told me the next day when I asked him this very question.
“Admit what? After everything the two of you have done to each other, what is there left to concede?”
Auden shook his head, looking at me with regret and resolve. Whatever it was he asked of Saint, he wouldn’t relent on it. So, once again, we’re in limbo.
Limbo with each other, limbo with my mother’s murder—as the police have re-interviewed all of us and taken boxes of Ralph’s things to sort through, but still haven’t given us any conclusive answers. Limbo even with Beltane, which so far is only a mess of antlers, fire, and sex, with so much left undecided.
With a mournful sigh as I acknowledge the possibility that I might not get fucked tonight, I look back at the pictures. Maybe we’ll break our rules anyway, like we did Easter night when Auden commanded Saint to eat me out. The thought makes me squirm—happily. Yes, maybe that will happen again . . .
“It can’t have always been this, though?” Saint is currently standing next to Becket, looking puzzled. “This feels so easy. And nothing about Thornchapel is easy. Ever.”
“Maybe it was a real hunt once upon a time,” Becket murmurs, eyes sweeping over the pictures. “The May King would hunt the herd’s stag for real—the chase and the danger and the death were all truly there. But then it gradually changed into a race. A game.”
“So killing the stag would have been the point?” asks Saint.
“Those poor baby deer,” sighs Delphine.
“A stag isn’t a baby,” Rebecca says. Delphine just sticks out her tongue at this, which seems to distract Rebecca sufficiently from correcting Delphine further.
Saint is still poring over the pictures. “There has to be a deeper origin to it. It can’t just be strapping on antlers for an elaborate game of tag.”
“I like tag,” Auden says to nobody in particular.
“Poe, what do the books say about the hunt again?” Saint asks. “Does it sound like it was a game back in the Record’s time?”
I slide the book over and reread the salient passage aloud, even though we’ve all read it what feels like a hundred times since the equinox. “‘The lord of the manor has his stag hunt at this time, taking with him the strongest, fleetest youth. Together they hunt through the trees while the people dance the fire dance, and only after the hunt is finished may the stag-slayer claim his May Queen. That is why it is said among old wives still, “First hart’s slain, then comes the king of May”.’”
“Slain,” Saint repeats. “That sounds like a real hunt to me.”
“Slain is the only word indicating death, though,” Auden says. “The rest could easily be talking about a chase. A mock-hunt.”
“Why do you want it to be a real death so badly?” Rebecca asks.
Saint’s eyes flash. “I don’t want it to be real. I want to know the truth. And I can’t believe that this started as a game.”
“That doesn’t mean it had to start as violence instead,” Rebecca counters. “Things aren’t set into binaries like that.”
“Except life and death are binary,” Saint points out. “And that happens to be exactly what we’re talking about.”
“We’re never going to have an answer to this,” I interrupt. “Even if we could figure out what they did three hundred years ago, it wouldn’t tell us what they did six hundred years ago, and even if we knew that, then we still wouldn’t know what they did before the Saxons came or before the Romans came or before the druids. I don’t like that any more than you do, but there you are.”
Saint straightens up and stretches enough so that the hem of his worn T-shirt pulls above his belt and shows off the dark line of hair leading from his navel to his boxers. Now it’s Auden’s and my turn to be distracted. “What about the thing you found at the farm, Poe? That looked pretty old. What if it’s connected to this?”
Grumpy that I didn’t make that connection myself, I pull up the picture of the antler-figure on my phone and set it on the table. By now we’ve all seen it—along with the picture Becket took of Dartham’s journal—but we bend over it anyway, comparing the carving with the pictures of young men in antler-headdresses. The similarity is impossible to miss.
“I looked up some work on British rock art,” I say after we’ve been looking for a few minutes. “Those spirals—one counter-clockwise, one clockwise. The clockwise one representing life and growth and fertility.”
“And the other?” Saint asks.
“Chaos. Entropy. Death.”
“That sounds very binary,” Saint says, with a pointed look at Rebecca.
“But the spirals are connected,” Rebecca says, ignoring Saint. “So what does that mean?”
Becket takes this one. “My guess? That death and life are connected,” he says. “They are nested, one inside of the other, in a never-ending tangle. Of course there cannot be death without life, but there also can’t be life without death. Et cetera.”
“Does this have anything to do with that creepy passage about the Thorn King you showed us?” Delphine asks, wrinkling her nose a little. “It was very Game of Thrones-y.”
“The Thorn King would be both life and death,” Becket explains. “His sacrifice would have meant renewed life for the land and for his people. And unlike in Game of Thrones, I imagine it must have been done willingly. The ancient people here would have revered strength and kingship, and if the sacrifices had to happen by the standing stones, how are you going to get the strongest man there unless he’s consented to go?”
“Or unless he’s no longer the strongest man,” Auden says quietly.
Saint’s hands are laced around the back of his neck. “So we know the Guests displaced the Kernstows sometime around the creation of Wessex—at least that’s what Dartham believed. Which means that carving could be very, very old.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think it’s that old. The house is maybe a few hundred years old—five hundred years at most. It had a chimney built in.”
“What does a chimney have to do with it?” Saint asks.
“Chimneys weren’t standard in common dwellings until the Renaissance, and sometimes not even until after then,” Delphine says.
Silence reigns around the library table. She sees us staring at her and sniffs. “I took a first in history, you know. I’m not a total imbecile.”
“Of course not,” Becket soothes and pets her comfortingly on the shoulder.
“It would be odd if they weren’t somehow tied,” Rebecca notes. “It’s very distinctive imagery. A stag king.”
“The Horned One,” I murmur, and then I sigh. “This still gets us no closer to what Saint wants to know. Which is why it’s done.”
“I hate to sound like a broken record,” Becket says, “but I feel like we talked about this during Imbolc too, and I still
maintain that there’s no way to understand a ritual without doing it.”
“But don’t you think the why is important?” Saint asks. He drops his hands and then tugs unthinkingly at the archival glove that’s sagging around his wrist. With the white gloves and the threadbare T-shirt from the library summer reading program three years ago, he looks like some kind of paradoxical grunge-dandy. “You’re a priest, Becket—”
“So everyone keeps telling me.”
“—you know exactly why you’re saying a Mass. You know who the Mass is remembering, you know what it’s remembering. The why is present in every facet of it; there’s no separating the myth from the ritual.”
“And this is a ritual without myth, is that what you’re saying?” Becket asks.
“It’s a ritual without meaning,” Saint clarifies. “I’m sorry to always be the one protesting, but I just—” He breaks off, looking frustrated. “If we can’t assign meaning to what we’re doing, then how will we know if we’re doing it right?”
Delphine makes a tired little noise. “Why can’t it just be a game? A bit of fun? Why is that so bad? We talked about Imbolc like it was a game too before we did it, and it ended up being magic. Why can’t we do the same now?”
Rebecca nods in agreement, as does Becket, but Saint sighs. “Isn’t that a little disrespectful?” he asks. “To the people who made these myths?”
That sends a blanket of quiet over the room for a moment.
“I think they’d be honored,” Auden says. “If we’re remembering them and the things that are important to them. If we’re doing this in the same spirit as they were.”
“Which was?” Saint asks.
Auden raises his eyes to the thick trees outside the window, his stare thoughtful. “I think they were afraid. They knew famine and disease and violence and cold. They needed to negotiate with that fear. But I also think they wanted to celebrate the things worth celebrating. Life, good crops, babies, all of that. Maybe we don’t see the world as sentient, unknowable chaos like they did, but aren’t we driven still by fear? By the need to mark the good things in the midst of the bad? That, I think they would understand, and they would see that we’re cherishing the tools they left us, even if we use them differently.”
Feast of Sparks Page 29