A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(103)
Next to, and slightly above, the bones, I finally see the altar stone itself. Thick and gray.
I stop praying.
“Poe?” Saint asks, feeling me stiffen all over again. I don’t answer, because I can’t, because everything is suddenly gone from me—even the prayer, even the tears.
On the edge of the altar stone, on the side that would have faced the priest, is carved a single word in a very ancient hand. The carved letters are deep enough that most of them are still filled with mud, although Saint’s scraped the stone clean enough that the word is clear and legible, a word I’d be able to read even if I’d never seen it before.
But I have seen it before.
The word is in Latin.
All along, the answers to all my questions were right here at the thorn chapel’s altar. Buried and just waiting to be found. I turn my face into Saint’s chest so I don’t have to see that word anymore, so I don’t have to see my mother’s picture or my mother’s orbital bone or the grass that once covered my mother’s grave.
But it doesn’t matter. The word is seared into my mind just like everything else.
Convivificat.
It’s Only Just Begun. . .
Poe, Auden and Saint aren’t anywhere near done with each other yet, and Thornchapel has only just started to give up its secrets. . .
Find out what happens next in Feast of Sparks, coming this June.
Add Feast of Sparks to your TBR now!
Author’s Note
Thornchapel exists in a peculiar and otherworldly eddy in my brain, and therefore you will have noticed a couple of the creative liberties I have taken in order to place Thornchapel at the heart of these six characters.
Firstly, Thorncombe—along with the River Thorne and the Thorne Valley—do not exist and have no direct models, although I’ve pulled inspiration from the Dartmoor villages, woods, and moors I’ve visited, and tried to be faithful in the details, if not the structure. Thornchapel itself is the brain-baby of a few different muses: Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, Cotehele House, and Lanhydrock House (the last two are both in Cornwall) and while the chapel ruins are constructed from pure fancy, the processional stone row leading to the chapel’s entrance is modeled after the Merrivale stone rows in Devon.
Secondly, I’ve taken some freedom around the celebrations and rites celebrated during Imbolc and St. Brigid’s Day. Imbolc is not necessarily associated with handfasting, and its association with fertility is less, ah, obviously libidinous than Beltane’s, but Thornchapel is its own little world, and therefore I’ve given it unique customs. Also sexier ones.
Thirdly, Poe’s experience with narcolepsy is directly cast from my own, and therefore is only a very limited view of the symptoms and secondary symptoms narcoleptics live with. It’s a complicated and misunderstood disease (might I add, also a very annoying disease), and I’m fully embracing the chance to make Poe’s narcolepsy something sexy, destined and powerful, since in my own life, it’s rarely these things.