Harvest of Sighs

Prologue-2

It will be that much harder if the door opens and the Thorn King must do his duty by the land, her mother had said. It will be that much harder for you to do your part.

She knew what part her mother meant. She meant Estamond should kill him if he would not go willingly.

At the memory, Estamond’s hand goes to her pocket. She could no more kill Randolph than she could kill her own children, than she could kill her own parents, or her twin brother. It was simply impossible. She hadn’t known it was impossible then, when she married a Guest, but she knew it now.

So she hadn’t told her mother about the door. But her mother knew anyway.

If you don’t do it at Lammastide, then it will be done at Samhain.

It will be one of us.

I’ll do it in the hills.

That’s what her mother’s note said—and nothing more. Not that it needed to say more, Estamond could read the meaning loud and clear. If she did not kill the Thorn King on Lammas, then her mother would kill Estamond’s father or her brother—or maybe even herself—on Samhain night. And that was the best possible scenario, because there was one other at the Kernstow farmstead her mother could kill, and if she did that, then Estamond would set the moors afire with her despair.

And her mother wouldn’t do it in the thorn chapel, where Estamond could try to stop her. No, she’d do it up in the hills, where there’d be no way to find her. No way to predict her movements or protect her family.

No, if Estamond didn’t close the door, her mother would. And her mother would close it at such a cost that they might as well already be dead.

The day after she’d received the note, Estamond had dragged her tender postpartum body to the farm to beg her mother to change her mind, but she was gone on one of her mysterious errands and her father was up with a flock near Reavy Hill. Only her twin brother had been there, which was dangerous for a number of reasons.

“Esau,” she’d said in surprise as he ducked out of the farmhouse door to welcome her. The house looked as it always looked—damp stone and dark windows—fuchsia foxgloves peeking around the low stone walls surrounding the house, and the hills blushing purple with blooming heather.

And Esau looked as he always looked: tall and lean and broad-shouldered, his hair the same dark brown as hers, his eyes the same glittering emerald. As children, they roamed and romped all over the moors, hiding and darting far away from the drudgery of the farm, pretending to gather herbs and plants for their mother. They matched in more than looks—they matched in wildness, in anger and in thrill—and so perhaps it wasn’t a surprise what happened between them later, on the same moors where they used to play so innocently.

At least, their mother hadn’t been surprised. After she’d midwifed the child, she’d used the birth blood in the spoons and smiled to herself at what she saw. The boy—Esra, they named him—grew up utterly doted on and pampered by his Nanna and Poppa, as well as by his mother and father. And if his mother and father had the same parents, if they looked alike, if he must not tell certain people who his mother was—well, that all seemed normal enough to Esra. Every farmstead tucked into the moors had its own strangenesses and peculiarities, after all, and anyway, people already expected the Kernstows to be strange.

“Is he here?” Estamond had asked, her heart twisting. Esau and Esra had been the sacrifice she’d had to make in order to marry a Guest—a necessary sacrifice in her mother’s eyes, but a sin in Esau’s. It was a sin he would never forgive her for, she knew, and yet, she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it. Esra was safe and happy, and she’d never begrudge Esau finding another woman to vent all his feral passions at, and so he could also be happy if he chose. She’d gained the thorn chapel in return for leaving her brother and her son behind, she’d gained the stones and the altar and the door and the place that belonged to her family by ancient right. She’d gained five more children for the one she left to her parents, she’d gained a sweet, devoted husband in place of her twin brother. A brother whose love was like the moors themselves—howling and desolate.

And yet, she still missed them, missed them like she missed the rain on her face or the mist in her hair.

“He’s started at the village school,” Esau had told her, stepping close enough to seize her in his arms, which he did. “Now, why are you here?”

“Mother,” she’d gasped. “Mother sent me a note. She wants me to kill the Thorn King at Lammastide.”

“Or it will be one of us,” Esau said. “I know.”

“Not Esra,” she begged. “Please.”

Esau had growled then, hauling her even tighter to his chest. “If you would do your duty, then no one would have to die at all.”

“No one here, you mean,” she hissed, struggling. “You want me to choose between my husband and you.”

“I want you to choose between the Guests and the Kernstows,” Esau said, scowling. “They stole the thorn chapel from us. Why should you cry over a dead Guest now?”

“They stole it thirteen hundred years ago,” Estamond said, still struggling in his arms. “When will we forgive them for it? Does a man really deserve to die for what his forefathers did that long ago?”

“He deserves to die because he is the Thorn King,” Esau pronounced, his voice as firm as his hold on her. “It’s his fate. If I were born to be the Thorn King, then it would be my fate as well.”

With some private shame, Estamond had to admit that Esau was much better suited to the role of wild god than her quiet Randolph. If some quirk of fate had meant that Esau had been born a Guest, if he’d been given the torc and asked to wed himself to the land, then what a king he would have become. Uncanny and wicked and wild. Not just a Thorn King, but a king of thorns.

“But if he will not kneel to his fate, then one of us must become the thorn king in his place,” Esau continued. “The door must be closed, even if it has to be with a substitute. Here and there, king and door.”

King and door. They were words she’d grown up with, words as unmovable and unchangeable as the wild god carved onto their hearth. Part of a song so old that no one knew when it had first been sung.

Here and there, king and door,

Cup and spear, corn and war.

She stopped struggling now as she realized it was pointless to fight this. To fight the Kernstow legacy. To somehow stave off the hungry heart of the valley.

“Even after our inheritance has been denied us, it’s always fallen to the Kernstows to make sure the Guests abide by the rules of the land,” said Esau. “And it’s up to us to close the door if they won’t.”

Estamond’s head fell forward against his chest. He smelled like heather and rain and home. “Just not Esra,” she whispered. “Not him. Please.”

Esau was still furious, but she could hear the truth of his next words in his voice. “I would never let it be him, Essie. And for what it’s worth, you know Mother wouldn’t either. She’s seen something for him in the spoons—something about his descendants. He’s the future of the Kernstows now. He’s all we have left.”

It was unwise to tell him what she told him next, but Estamond had never been wise. “You should marry, Esau. Find a wife or even a sweetheart. Get babes on her.”

His hands tightened so hard around her arms that she let out a squeak, and then those hands were on her back and in her hair, pressing her so tightly to him that she could feel every tensed muscle and every inch of his erection. “There’s no one but you,” he vowed. “There will never be anyone but you. And you will be mine again, my own, and you’ll never leave me again.”

“Esau . . . ”

His mouth and nose were in her hair. His hands shaped to the curves of her hips and bottom through her dress. “You don’t need him,” he rumbled. “If you simply do what needs to be done, then you’ll have won the thorn chapel back for our family, and we’ll be together again.”

Turbulent longing tangled and pulled with horror; she would never do it, never, never—but oh, how she’d missed this. How she’d sometimes ached for this, ached for Esau’s fury and possession. His greedy hands and animal growls. Randolph was sweet and kind and true, but Esau was her very own heart, her very own soul. Their hearts were made out of each other’s. So were their bodies and minds.

Even the wild god himself would struggle to compete with that.

Estamond’s body didn’t hide the truth from her brother—it never could—and before long, Esau’s mouth was hot and urgent on hers. He handled her like a doll—not a precious china doll with silk clothes and curls made of real hair, but like a rag doll. Like she was his thing to drag over the hills and clutch in the dark, and even though her tender core twinged and her milk-full breasts ached, she relished every second of it.

Esau was taller than her, stronger than her, angrier than her. With very little trouble or effort, he had her inside the house and on his wool-blanketed bed, his teeth on her throat and his hand up her skirts. With a hot, wet flush, her milk let down, hard enough to soak through her nursing corset and dress.

Esau’s eyes narrowed. “Is that for him? For one of his brats?”

Estamond narrowed her eyes right back, and she was tempted to hiss at him like a cat. “For one of my brats, yes.”

“The child should be mine,” he breathed against her skin. “All of your children should be mine.”

“I was always supposed to be the May Queen, Esau. I was always supposed to be his.”

Esau grunted low in his throat, his hand dropping to his trouser buttons. It was inevitable between them, once again. Two bodies that should have never separated to begin with.

“I only just stopped bleeding,” she told him as he moved between her legs. “I still hurt.”

“I won’t go in,” he said. “But I have—to—touch—”

The moment his bare organ pressed against her slick opening and then rode up to grind against her, Estamond forgot nearly everything. Her mother’s note, the impending Lammas feast, and very nearly the tiny babe still sleeping in a maid’s arms in the cozy Guest carriage waiting for them on the road.

True to his word, he didn’t penetrate her, but it was still f*****g, there was no denying that. She came hard and keening, and Esau followed her, liquid heat surging out of his tip and onto her intimate skin, and then he collapsed over her, still rutting gently as he slid his arms tight around her. She was his rag doll once again.

“I hate that Mother made you marry him,” he murmured.

“No one made me do anything,” she said. “I love him.”

“Yet you’re underneath me.”

“You’ve never understood,” she said impatiently. “You’ve never understood how there could be both at once.”