Harvest of Sighs

Prologue-3

She and Randolph had welcomed others into their bed as visitors—although he only f****d another if Estamond was there too, while Estamond, with his permission and complete knowledge, sometimes sought pleasure without him. The only lover she’d ever hidden from him was Esau, for understandable reasons. Even if Randolph was the wild god a handful of nights throughout the year, in between he was just a quiet country gentleman, whose most outrageous crime was being a Catholic. He’d love her no matter what, she knew; he’d struggle with it for a few days and then overcome it, because there was nothing that could dim his love for her, not even what she’d done with Esau up in the hills. But she wanted to spare him the struggle and the pain of knowing. He deserved to be free of it.

“I’ve only understood one thing in my life,” Esau said, “and it’s that I need you. If you ever left for good, I—”

She was surprised at the pain in his voice, but he wouldn’t let her see his face.

“Maybe the door will accept a substitute,” he said. “But I can’t. Come back to me.”

She knew she never would, but it still hurt to know it. It was one of life’s strange cruelties that she could be married to a man she loved, that this man would let her f**k anyone she pleased, and yet the one person she truly yearned for was still outside her reach. Maybe this was why she let Esau hold her far longer than was wise, until the afternoon shadows began to gather in corners and they needed each other once again.

Later, as Estamond sat gingerly in the carriage while it bumped back to Thornchapel and the maid and the baby both slept, she realized she had an answer. She didn’t like the answer, she didn’t like the answer at all in fact, but it was nevertheless the answer she’d been looking for when she came to Kernstow Farm.

According to the old ways, the Thorn King had to die. But nowhere did it say that the Thorn King needed to be the same Thorn King who presided over the feasts.

And nowhere did it say that the Thorn King needed to be a man.

Estamond set the lantern down on the grass altar and set about what she came to do. Out came the golden torc, out came the small leaf-shaped knife made of copper—both taken from their glass cases in the library. The knife she set on the altar next to the lantern, and the torc she pried open just enough to slip onto her neck. Once upon a time, she’d crowned Randolph with this. She’d shown him the stories about the thorn chapel were real, and she’d brought the old ways—forgotten by the last few generations of Guests—back to Thornchapel.

She’d put the torc around his neck and then played the part of his bride, his saint, his May Queen. His priestess. She’d sung with him and bled with him, she’d bound herself with thorns to him, she’d guided him.

There was no one to guide her tonight. No one to bleed with her or sing with her. She was a wild god without a consort, a Thorn King without a queen.

She was alone.

I am the Thorn King tonight and that’s what matters, she reminded herself. She was keeping everyone she loved safe all at once. She would close the door, and then there’d be no chance of her mother going up into the hills. Esau and Esra would be safe. So would Randolph. It was the only way.

With the torc heavy and cool on her skin, Estamond turned and surveyed the door once more.

It was tall, but not much taller than Thornchapel’s own doors, rising perhaps eight feet into the air. The fittings were made of dark iron, and the door itself was made from a wood so weathered and gray that it seemed as old as the chapel itself. It was set into the half-crumbled chapel wall, the stonework rising into a lancet arch around the top, all of it covered in climbing roses.

Elsewhere in the chapel, the roses blushed pink and sweet; here, around the door, the roses were so red they were almost black. In fact, in the shadows and slivers of moonlight, they were black.

The torc suddenly felt too heavy, too tight, and Estamond found that she was scared. Terrified, like she hadn’t been since she was a girl. It wasn’t that the roses were black. It wasn’t even that the door was there at all, when there should only be the bramble-gnawed remains of a chapel wall.

It was that the door was open and she could see through to the other side.

She stepped forward once, twice, close enough to press a hand against the pitted stone of the doorway. Through it, there was an expanse of flower-studded grass and then the woods—the same thing she would see if the door weren’t here. The same thing she should see, if everything was as it was supposed to be. But somehow she knew it was not the same. It was not the same grass, not the same trees. The forest would not be her forest and the valley beyond would not be her Thorne Valley.

Here and there, king and door.

How did the rest of the song go? It was hard to remember with her entire body trembling like this, hard to remember the words that made sense of a door to nowhere and everywhere all at once.

The breeze ruffled through the trees behind her and tugged gently at Estamond’s dress, but through the doorway, all remained still. No breeze moved through the leaves or disturbed the grass, no wind stirred the branches there. It was a world as still as cut glass.

Estamond lifted her other hand, thinking maybe she’d reach through the door to feel the air on the other side of it, but right as she did, something flickered across the unmoving grass of the other place. Like a lantern or a torch being carried just out of sight, close enough to send light playing over the ground and faintly into the trees, but not so close that she could see the source of the light itself.

But then came a shadow.

It fell across the path of the light, stopping so that only the silhouette of a man’s upper body could be seen. Lean but still powerful.

Estamond dropped her hand, took a step back.

The shadow didn’t move. It waited, patiently, almost like a gentleman waiting to hand a lady through a carriage door. But the light on the other side continued to move, flickering and flaring and making the shadow waver at the edges. Estamond realized the drums were slightly louder here, and so were the chants. Through the raised voices, she could discern a lone, wailing cry—a single note of lament amidst the estival joy—and the sound of it sent hairs rising on Estamond’s arms.

It was a sound of anguish. A sound of sacrifice.

Still the shadow waited.

All the stories she heard, all the things her mother had told her—they seemed like such mockeries now. Clumsy half-ideas sketched out by the ignorant and proclaimed as the truth, because how could any story convey the reverent, wonderful terror of this? The open door with something waiting behind it? And Estamond wondered—a little wildly, a little heretically—what would happen if she just left it open.

Or what would happen if she simply . . . walked through.

The voice keened louder now, plangent and strange. It was a wail both unearthly and not, both disquieting and oddly familiar. Estamond had the uncomfortable sense that it was for her, somehow, that the voice was lamenting her.

Or if not her, then the Thorn King come to die at the door tonight.

She took another step back, and then another, until she stumbled back against the grassy hump of the ancient, earth-covered altar. She felt more terror than wonder now, more horror than awe, because inside of that lamenting voice was her fate, and her fate was a forlorn and lonely death, and she didn’t want it, she didn’t want any of it. She wanted Randolph and her children, she wanted Esau and Esra. She wanted more harvests, more Lammas revels when her biggest fear was making sure there was enough mead and ale for the feasters. She wanted sticky summer nights and snow-heaped winter days, she wanted the hills and the mist and the bright chatter of the River Thorne.

She wanted to live, and yet living was impossible so long as her mother drew breath. Living meant death to someone she loved, and she was incapable of allowing that.

This, and more, the mournful voice seemed to know. Without understanding the words, Estamond understood the meaning.

Life was beautiful and bursting and ripe, and sometimes it had to be given up or given back. Sometimes it had to be sown back into the earth from where it came.

It was a lesson Estamond had always associated with Samhain, the feast of the final harvest, but she supposed it worked for Lammas too. Tonight instead of weaving dolls out of barley or crowns out of meadowsweet, she would be cut down like the first of the grain.

Everything in its time, her mother would say.

John Barleycorn must die, she would say too.

But what if I just left? What if I didn’t close the door?

What was the worst that could happen?

As if hearing her thoughts, the shadow moved. Just a step, just enough so that she could see where its hips tapered to long thighs. And then it lifted its hand, and then she saw the hand itself—a man’s hand like any other man’s hand, except it was glistening with something dark and wet and—

Estamond screamed.

The chanting and singing stopped, so did the drums. The only thing that remained was the piercing voice of sorrow, singing its ageless song. Singing as Estamond stared at the bloody hand, and prayed and prayed she wouldn’t see any more of the man who waited on the other side.

“I’ll do it,” she called out in a trembling voice. “Please, don’t—I shall do it myself.”

The hand lowered but the shadow remained.

Here and there, life and death…

Nearly the same thing.

Estamond felt the weight of the words as surely as she felt the weight of the torc on her neck and the weight of the bottle in her dress pocket. She understood then, why the door must close, why the veil could flutter but not part. Or at least she thought she did, because as terrifying as that shadow was, as maddening as the singing lament became as it urged her on to her own grim fate, she had to admit she was still drawn to the world beyond the door, she was still enlivened by it, even as she unstoppered the bottle that would smother the life right out of her. The world beyond the door was just like here, but more. Both more wonderful and more strange. More sweet and more dangerous.

Perhaps she could’ve lived near the open door, but many others would not wish to. Perhaps even most others.

The brew was bitter, and Estamond wished she’d brought some whisky or sherry to wash out the taste. With a regretful sigh and a careful eye on the door and the shadow behind it, she took the small knife and drew it across her palm.

It hurt.

It hurt and she hated it and her whole body seemed to light up with bone-thrumming pain as she held out her hand and let the blood drip from her fingers to the grass at the door’s threshold. An offering, a prelude to the offering to come.

The shadow didn’t move, but the chanting began again, loud and urgent and wild. There was no malevolence to it, but no benevolence either—just pure, unfettered energy that could be harnessed to any purpose. Like life itself, Estamond thought, and then felt the thought recede with a slowness that mimicked being drunk.

That would be the brew, then. Leaching through her blood like rot through grain.

Blood given to the threshold, Estamond arranged herself on the grass-covered altar. Her hand hurt and she tucked it up against her chest as she fought the urge to throw up. Dizziness came and receded and came again, and it wouldn’t be long, she was certain, it would only be a matter of minutes before she fell asleep. She was very afraid and she didn’t want to do this any more and her hand hurt so much that she had to scream, but when she opened her mouth to scream, nothing came out, nothing but strangled breath.

Being the Thorn King is the worst fate possible, she thought, feeling almost angry about it. Why did death demand that life be fed to it at all? Why must there be a door here? And why did anyone ever, ever, decide the door was worth being near? Why didn’t they run away from it the moment they realized what it was? Why wasn’t the entire valley marked as unsafe, unholy, taboo?

The shadow in the doorway moved, and again Estamond tried to scream, and again nothing came out. Her vision was twinned and blurred, and so the shadow itself remained nothing but a tallish and strongish smudge until it was leaning right over her.

Would it kill her? Would it drag her back through the door?

Would it cry for her? Sing for her? Hold her gently as she died?

Was it a saint or a god?

But no, she knew the truth as she heard its pained, anguished roar—it wasn’t the shadow of the door at all, but Randolph, her own wild god, her own lord of the manor.

Randolph who was no longer the Thorn King and who would be safe because she chose to be the king in his stead.

He cradled her in his arms and it made everything worse—the nausea and the dizziness and the infernal pain in her hand—but it felt so good to have him here that she couldn’t complain. Not that she had the breath for it anyway.

“Why?” he gasped, his gasp so wounded and desperate that Estamond felt the pain of it even on top of the pain of dying. “My God, Estamond—why?”

She pressed her bleeding hand weakly to his face. Damn, but she loved him. She loved him enough that she knew she would make the same choice again. If it came down to her or this shy, tender man, she would wear the torc in his place, every time.

“I hired the nurse for you,” she managed to wheeze out.

He shook his head, tears falling fast from bright hazel eyes. “I don’t—Estamond—I don’t understand—”

“Make sure the children know how much I loved them,” she forced out. “And I mean it—about Janie—for you—”

She couldn’t breathe, and the agony of not breathing was beyond pain, beyond fear, and then suddenly, like the tumble of a ripe apple from a tree or the slice of a scythe through wheat, the pain was over. There was only the distant warmth of Randolph’s arms and the song of lament pouring through the doorway. There was only the weight of the torc around her neck.

And then?

Then there was nothing at all.

Seven miles away and nearly a century and a half later, Esau and Estamond’s many-times great granddaughter woke up in a car with a thrashing scream. Alarmed, her lover pulled the car to the side of a moor-topping B-road and parked it, coming around to the side and pulling her out of the car before she could manage to scream again.

He sank down to the ground with her in his arms, cradling her against his chest and rocking her gently back and forth as she sobbed into his shirt.

“Shhh,” the sole heir of the Guest family murmured, stroking her hair as he held her close. “It was just a dream, little bride.”

She cried even harder, shaking her head, as if unable to put words to what she’d just seen.

He kissed her hair and held her tighter against him. He loved her more than he’d ever loved anything, and he would sit with her on the side of the road and hold her all day if that’s how long it took for her to feel safe again.

“It was just a dream,” he repeated, even though he had no idea what kind of awful dream would have her like this, shaking and inconsolable. “I’ve got you now. I’ve got you with me. It was just a dream.”