A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(51)

“Is there anything else?” she asks.

Fuck, I don’t know, I want to say. Can’t you see this fucking thumb doing a fucking thing on my shoulder?!

Oh my God, I have to get it together. I’ve been clamped and flogged in front of hordes of people and I’m losing it over a goddamn thumb? From a boy who’s made it clear we can’t be anything together?

I try to ignore his touch, don’t succeed, and then force myself to answer anyway. I scan the page really fast to make sure I’ve covered everything. “Just that after she’s ‘made a bride by thorns,’ whatever that means, she’s given cakes and wine, and then the entire village can share them. Oh, and the same maiden is also the May Queen on May Day.”

Delphine claps her hands together. “Oh! We should do a May Day party too!”

Her enthusiasm has caught the attention of the rest of the room, and as always, my gaze goes first to Auden, who’s staring at Saint’s thumb on my shoulder like he wants to bite it off.

“What should we do on May Day?” Becket asks, curious and seemingly oblivious to the drama playing out on my shoulder. The drama between Saint’s mixed signals and my growing need to pounce on him and kiss the sullen brood right off his mouth.

The drama Auden seems very, very aware of.

It’s Delphine who answers. “Never mind that right now, because first, we are going to do something next weekend and it’s going to be such a delight.” She launches into a fairly accurate recounting of what we know about the ritual, and then immediately starts talking about how we’d recreate it. “I mean, torches are a bit primitive, but wouldn’t lanterns be pretty? And Auden can be the lord of the manor, and I can be the bride, and we’ll have Abby make the cakes—”

“There’s nothing that says the bride and the lord have to be a woman and a man,” Becket points out.

“I think etymology says,” Rebecca remarks dryly.

“Okay, okay, but I mean for us. Because it would be ours, right, our own thing? Our own ritual, our own celebration? There’s no reason we can’t reclaim it and make things less . . .” Becket temples his fingers and stares at us gravely, as if he’s at his pulpit giving a homily “ . . . gender essentialist.”

“My good priest, you aren’t actually considering this madness, are you?” Auden says, finally breaking his gaze away from my shoulder to stare at Becket with pained incredulity.

“Why not?” I ask, a little indignant on Becket’s behalf, at the same time Becket himself replies, “Well, why not?”

Auden sits up, setting his whisky on the table with a glassy plink. “Firstly, it can’t be very Catholic to trounce around in the dark with lanterns while a young maiden promises to keep the livestock safe and then eats a cake.”

“St. Brigid is a Catholic saint,” Becket interjects, but Auden keeps going.

“Secondly, the practicalities are almost insurmountable. Who would play which role and would someone feel left out if they’re just some sort of lantern-holding extra? How are we going to explain whatever the fuck these cakes are to Abby? How are we going to get out to the chapel without anyone breaking an ankle and then stay warm enough to light a fire, have some odd little marriage rite—and we have no idea what this rite consists of, by the way, except that it involves thorns—eat some cakes and then walk back uninjured and not hypothermic?”

“Oh, don’t be such a bore,” Delphine groans. “If they did it back in the—” she waves a hand at the book “—in the whatever times, then we can do it now! We have coats, Auden,” she adds, as if this is a closing argument.

Auden ignores her. “Thirdly, why? Why the fuck would we waste a night in the cold making idiots of ourselves? We don’t believe that wells or livestock or fires need to be blessed anymore, so what’s the point in pretending that we do?”

“What’s the point of any ritual, then?” Becket points out. “Rituals aren’t for wells and livestock, Auden. They’re for the people performing them.”

“Well, then? What do those people get out of it? Because they’re not getting magical protection, and they’re not getting the attention of gods who don’t exist. And I’ll make this question more than academic—I’ll make it individual to the six of us.”

Behind me, I hear St. Sebastian catch his breath.

Auden said six of us. Not five.

Auden continues, “What do we specifically get out of tramping through the frozen grass to light a fire and eat cake? We’re doing that tonight and all we had to do was walk to my fucking library.”

Becket temples his fingers again, staring serenely at his friend. “I think you’re answering your own question. We would tramp through the cold grass precisely because it’s not normal, because it’s not what we do in our daily lives. That’s how we demarcate the sacred from the profane—it’s how we communicate to ourselves that this day or thing is special, that it matters.”

Auden gets to his feet in agitation, giving all of us an imploring, frustrated look. “But why does it have to matter? What is this day to us that we need to make it special?”

“It could be Thornchapel coming back to life,” Rebecca says. We all look over to where she’s standing by the fireplace, her gaze turned toward the snow and one foot idly rubbing at Sir James Frazer’s fur. She looks back to us. “Right? Isn’t that what this festival is about? Marking the coming end of winter? Celebrating the earth reawakening?”