A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  A Lesson in Thorns

  Sierra Simone

  Copyright © 2019 by Sierra Simone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Hang Le

  Editing: Nancy Smay of Evident Ink, Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits

  Proofing: Michele Ficht

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  It’s Only Just Begun. . .

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sierra Simone

  About the Author

  In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

  Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

  There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

  It has no windows, and the door swings,

  Dry bones can harm no one.

  T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  Prologue

  They found the roses right away.

  The thorns took longer.

  First, there was the escape, which wasn’t an escape at all, really. The adults were busy with whatever it was that kept them cloistered and murmuring in the library, and the children were otherwise unsupervised since no one thought any harm could come to them this far into the countryside.

  Then there was the maze—which only Auden could navigate with any confidence, this being his house after all—and it only took a single hour to find the center, and in the center, the roses twining around the base of the stone Adonis and Aphrodite, all their blooms white and fragrant and blown.

  Fat bees blundered in a drunken crowd. A storm threatened overhead. And only an exploring child would have bothered to crawl under the small fountain at the statue’s base to find the secret inside.

  Today there were six exploring children.

  And they found the secret inside.

  Finally, after a dark and damp journey through the tunnel even Auden hadn’t known about, they came to a gate with a latch rusted right through. St. Sebastian kicked it open.

  Becket fretted, and Delphine yelled about the torn spiderweb and the spider that no longer had a home. Rebecca only rolled her eyes and helped St. Sebastian drag the thing open far enough that all six of them could squeeze through.

  Proserpina was last because Proserpina was always last. Not because she was disliked or because she was timid, but because she was dreaming on her feet while everyone else was walking.

  The gate led to a path so old that it had sunk into the earth. Trees branched and arced overhead, and to the sides were unbroken woods—oak, ash, birch, and beech. Rowan and elder. All leafy and lush and ivy-clad. Between them, blackthorn trees straggled at intervals, their thorns long and cruel, and their branches clumped with the dark pearls of early sloe.

  Though it was only just past lunch, the heavy clouds darkened everything to twilight, and the wind tugged insistently on the leaves, making the entire path around them seem restless and alive.

  “Auden, where does it go?” Rebecca asked. She and Delphine were both trying to be in the front, but neither of them really knew where they were going, and so their jostling was less violent than normal.

  “I don’t know,” Auden said, bouncing a little.

  He knew where everything went in London, where his family lived most of the time. Every road led to another road, every car and bus and train had a destination. Every day had a plan, and every plan had a goal, and every goal had a reason.

  At Thornchapel, none of this was true.

  At Thornchapel, time could slip by unmarked and you could walk places no one had walked in years. Maybe centuries.

  This was the first day Auden began to see this, began to see the ways one of his homes was different than the other, even if he couldn’t articulate it. He was old enough to feel it, to feel Thornchapel, even if he couldn’t name what it was he felt, and he was old enough to love it, but not old enough to understand.

  And maybe that’s why later he would grow to hate it.

  They walked for ten minutes more, maybe twenty, but so far away from the house and with nothing but trees whispering close, it felt much longer. It felt like they were brave, like they were having an adventure, with the bite of genuine fear that any real adventure is required to have. And then the trees opened up to a clearing.

  Nearly knee-high grass waved against crooked standing stones, which were barely taller than the grass itself. They were arranged in a narrow row, and at the end—

  “The thorn chapel,” somebody murmured. It might have been Becket, but it didn’t matter. They all realized it at the same time.

  The chapel was really only recognizable by a remaining chunk of wall, on which a glassless window remained with its distinctive arch. The rest of the walls had crumbled into drifts of stone, barely visible over the layers of moss and grass and roots. Blackthorn trees—more like bushes—pushed up from the ancient rubble. Wild dog roses—just as thorny, just as sprawling—grew everywhere else in hues of almost-white and almost-pink.

  It was a church. Only the walls had been replaced with thorns and the floor with grass, and where the altar should have been was a large grassy hummock instead. And everywhere flowers—not only the roses, but wood sorrel and foxglove and violets and meadowsweet in restrained riots of white and purple.

  Delphine and Rebecca raced to the front while Becket approached the chapel from the side in awe. St. Sebastian found a stick and started whacking at the flowers to slice off their heads. Proserpina slipped into the stone row—the entrance of which was guarded by two tall menhirs—and began dreaming her way toward the chapel itself.

  And Auden stood at the edge of the woods, unable to take a single step closer.

  It’s really here.

  It wasn’t a quaint name, chosen on a whim. It wasn’t, as he’d once heard his grandfather say, a corruption of a Latin word referencing the thick forest canopy around the house.

  There was a chapel.

  It was covered in thorns.

  Thornchapel.

  And he had the strangest feeling that as he thought the name of this place, the place thought his own name back to him . . .

  No one later remembered whose idea the wedding was, but it had probably started as a fight between Rebecca and Delphine, since that’s how most of their ideas that summer had begun. But once the idea had been voiced, there’d been no doubt that it was a good idea, even to Becket who was really too old for these kinds of things. There was a chapel, after all, and something that looked like an altar, and weddings were something you did in chapels, in front of altars.

  There was a brief fight about who should get married, because it seemed common sense that Auden, as the sort of lord of the manor, should be the groom, but Delphine and Rebecca both wanted to be the bride and their fight over it grew so heated that St. Sebastian observed, “You
already fight like Auden’s parents, maybe you two should get married.”

  This was not received well, by the girls or by Auden, and then Becket the peacemaker pointed out that Proserpina had already wandered down to the chapel proper and so it might as well be her. Rebecca and Delphine sullenly agreed to be bridesmaid and flower girl, respectively; Becket, as the oldest, appointed himself the priest; Auden turned to St. Sebastian and said, “Will you be the best man?”

  St. Sebastian sniffed. “I’m already the best man.”

  Auden rolled his eyes. He did that a lot with St. Sebastian.

  “I’m going to sit in the back and interrupt the wedding,” St. Sebastian declared.

  Auden sighed. “What?”

  “You know, like in the movies. They say ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ and then someone always speaks.”

  “But that’s not real life.”

  “And this is?”

  He had a point, but Auden didn’t want to admit it. Something else he did rather a lot of with St. Sebastian.

  No one really could remember the order of a wedding service, except that the flower girl came first. Becket and Auden waited by the uneven lump that had once been an altar while Delphine scattered hastily gathered rose petals down the center of the ruin. Then came Rebecca, carrying a bouquet of foxgloves because they were tall and interesting compared with the retiring violets and sorrel. St. Sebastian sprawled in the back, lazily tossing pebbles into the air.

  Auden felt strange so close to the altar, like the air around it was infused with an electric charge, or maybe that was merely the oncoming storm, or maybe it was that he was a boy playing a game he hadn’t actually agreed to and he was bored. Whatever it was, he suddenly felt the fierce need to hurt something. Or to feel hurt himself. He couldn’t figure out which, and the two needs tangled up into an untidy knot in his chest thornier than the chapel around them, and it felt like the knot was all he was, all he ever could be—

  Proserpina entered the chapel with a crown of flowers on her head. The knot eased; it untangled some. And when St. Sebastian decided that Proserpina needed someone to walk her down the aisle and he hopped up to take her arm, Auden quite literally could not breathe for a second. He didn’t know why—St. Sebastian irritated him, Proserpina fascinated him, but he wasn’t entirely sure he liked her for having that effect on him—so why now, when the two of them approached the altar and approached him, did he think of the need to hurt and the need to be hurt and why did he want to grab them both and pull them into that need? Grab them and somehow shove them deep into his heart of thorns forever?

  He couldn’t speak as St. Sebastian escorted Proserpina right to Auden’s feet and then gave her a puckish kiss on the cheek that had Proserpina laughing and Delphine scolding and Rebecca shushing Delphine’s scolds and their resident barely-teenage priest tutting at the disruption of order.

  “I thought you were going to interrupt the ceremony,” Becket sighed as St. Sebastian took a seat on a nearby clump of grass.

  “I can do both,” St. Sebastian said in an obviously kind of tone.

  Becket made a put-upon face, which was only slightly different than his normal pious expression, and then continued with as much as he remembered about wedding ceremonies.

  There was a dearly beloved and then a story about Adam and Eve, and then he finally said the part St. Sebastian was waiting for, speak now or forever hold your peace.

  They all looked over to the boy, who was currently grinning mischievously and was very busy not interrupting the wedding. Auden arched an eyebrow at him.

  St. Sebastian arched one back, but still did nothing.

  It seemed like the threat had passed, so Becket moved on to the vows. “Do you, Auden Guest take Proserpina Markham to be your lawfully wedded wife? You have to say I do here.”

  Auden, still afflicted with that disturbing and paradoxical need, answered in a distracted voice, “I d—”

  “I do!” St. Sebastian jumped in, hopping up between them.

  “Ugh, God,” went Delphine.

  “Shh!” went Rebecca.

  “And DO YOU, PROSERPINA, TAKE AUDEN TO BE YOUR LAWFULLY WEDDED HUSBAND,” shouted the young priest above the chaos, and smiling, Proserpina said, “I do,” even as St. Sebastian once again interrupted her vows with his own emphatic, “I DO!” and yanked her flower crown onto his own head as if he were the bride.

  Even Auden had trouble not smiling, although those thorns of hurt were everywhere in him now; he felt like he was going to break apart like one of the chapel walls or fall over like the altar; he felt like he was never going to fit inside his own skin unless he became someone else, something else, somewhen else.

  But he didn’t need to be somewhere else. He knew that, even if he didn’t know how he knew that.

  Thornchapel was right. Proserpina and St. Sebastian fighting over the flower crown in front of him felt right.

  It was only him that felt wrong.

  “This is not how weddings work,” Becket accused. “St. Sebastian, stop it. Give back the flower crown.”

  “No,” said St. Sebastian.

  “You have to because three people can’t kiss, only two can,” Delphine said knowledgeably.

  “There’s going to be kissing?” Proserpina said, suddenly sounding very, very awake.

  “That’s stupid,” Rebecca said back to Delphine. “Three people can kiss. All six of us could kiss if we wanted.”

  “Yes, there is kissing,” Becket said to Proserpina, with the grave tones of one who knows these things.

  “We don’t have to kiss,” Auden said quietly to his bride.

  “Well, I want to,” St. Sebastian declared, which surprised absolutely no one.

  Becket pinched his nose, looking exactly like an exasperated grown-up. “No one asked you.”

  Delphine was still fighting with Rebecca, and she wrinkled her nose, which was one of those things that made her look even prettier than normal. “At the same time? It wouldn’t work.”

  “You don’t know everything, you know—”

  Every moment of Auden’s unmet destiny bit his skin and punctured his heart, and every second he stood still was a jagged clamp around his throat.

  He had—he had to do—

  Something—

  Thornchapel—

  Wounds and dying and fires burning against the night—

  Sparks hissing as he was brought back to life—

  He seized both Proserpina and St. Sebastian and pulled them both to his mouth just as lightning cracked across the sky.

  A kiss.

  A kiss that was almost a bruise, almost a bite, and how he wanted both, he wanted kissing and bruising and holding and biting—and he wanted to shelter them from the rain and force them to kneel in the mud too, and he didn’t know what it meant or why it was happening or even why they were letting him yank them close.

  It was awkward and bumping, and Proserpina had sucked in a stunned breath as St. Sebastian had shuddered, but yet when they stumbled apart to the deafening thunder and the shocked stares of the other three, Auden couldn’t bring himself to be ashamed.

  He could only feel like he wanted to do it again.

  Rain began slicing down before any of the six could find the right words, and there was more lightning and more wind, and within fifteen seconds, it became evident that they’d have to run back to the house. Which they did, and after the long time it took, they were soaked to the bone and shivering, and then they were all roundly reprimanded by the parents, who were not impressed with their refusal to talk about what they’d been doing or where they’d been.

  The rain continued for another week and well into the week after that, and by that point, the thorn chapel had become something like a myth or a shared dream and it slipped into the realm of reverence and dares and distance. They instead explored the house and the nearby village of Thorncombe and swam in the indoor pool and put on plays in the attic. Delphine and Rebecca fought, and Becket was an insu
fferable know-it-all, and St. Sebastian wandered in and out, and Proserpina dreamed.

  And Auden was still everything inside of himself, unbearably everything, every single thing he’d been at the altar when he’d needed to kiss St. Sebastian and Proserpina and maybe bite them too.

  Then the summer term ended.

  Or rather, their parents left their strange house party to return to their real lives. Proserpina and Becket went back to America, and Delphine and Rebecca went back to London. St. Sebastian, whose mother hadn’t been at the house but who lived in the village, and so he’d injected himself into their play, returned to life in a grimy semi with a tired parent and cupboards of expired food.

  And Auden left too, even though Thornchapel was his. His parents whisked him back to the Chelsea townhouse, back to real life and boring parties and their fighting and their restlessness and their pain. He was not the same boy they’d brought to Devon, but they didn’t notice, or if they did notice, they ascribed it to the usual pre-teen malcontent that often afflicts boys at that age. Soon enough, he was sent off to school, where he burned with all the things he didn’t understand about himself. And though he was popular and well-liked, though he excelled in every imaginable way, he burned alone.

  Thornchapel was alone too, though it had yet to burn.

  There were a few scattered visits, but they were short, and never did Auden have the courage to return to the altar alone, although it haunted his thoughts constantly. Somehow, it became the place that he could blame for everything—for his parents’ fractured marriage, for his father’s treatment of him, for his needs and his uncertainty and his torment. And his blame shifted to hate, and the hate spread from the altar to the chapel to the grounds and the entire house itself. Until the house’s thorns and his thorns became one and the same, and he knew if he could defeat one, then he could be free of the other.