A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(56)

It had been a danger that didn’t feel like a danger at all.

And then when Auden said six of us. Not five. Not them minus Saint, but them plus Saint . . .

He didn’t even know what he felt then, except that it was almost like panic but sweeter. Honeyed like bourbon and the lies he tells himself at night with his hand on his cock and his mind full of Auden.

Saint rolls onto his side and stares at the window, even though there’s nothing to see but snow and darkness. He doesn’t need to see to know the window looks out over the south gardens, over the maze. He knows exactly which stand of trees conceals the tunnel exit from the maze’s center, and which almost indiscernible path leads to the chapel ruins.

He knows because he goes there often. Like a poacher in the woods, treading soundlessly through the back paths and hidden inlets onto the Thornchapel grounds, he’s learned to come and go without being seen. Unlike a poacher, he’s not hunting, he’s not looking to take anything that isn’t his—all he does is search out the ruins and sit, as if the wildflowers and dead stones have answers for him.

His mother’s family was a family of devout Catholics, and his mother had grown up with faith as inescapable and natural as breathing. She lit her saint’s candles, she prayed her devotions, and she went to Mass faithfully, every week. At his birth, she named her only child after the patron saint of saintly deaths.

And for all that—for his mother’s fierce faith and his own name—Saint had never found any faith of his own. It all felt hollow, and after watching his mother die, it now feels worse than hollow—it feels pointless.

Except there are these times . . . these strange, ephemeral times when he almost feels . . . something. He doesn’t know what to call it, how to think of it, and he doesn’t even know if he likes it, because whenever that something brushes up against his mind, it’s so dizzying and potent that he feels like he could lose himself in it without a second thought. And for a man who’s clawed for every scrap of identity he has, the thought of losing anything is terrifying.

What he does know is this: any time he’s ever felt whatever it is, magic or God or the collective energy of the universe, it’s been in the thorn chapel.

It should feel ridiculous, what he’s agreed to do with the others. In fact, he half expects they’ll all wake up and remember their drunken declarations with shame, and the idea will be quietly and gratefully forgotten.

But for St. Sebastian, nothing could be further from ridiculous. Nothing could feel more necessary right now. He may not believe in anything, but if he could, it would be there in that place and it would be with them, and it seems right somehow to try. Like doing anything else might actually tear him apart.





Father Becket is at peace until he dreams. And then the zeal opens its pitiless mouth and chews him with eager, champing teeth.

He’s told himself precious few lies over the course of his life; he prizes honesty as the king of virtues. And while he learned compassionate silence with others so that he could comfort them without prevarication, he forbade himself the same comfort. He would always tell himself the truth—the zeal demanded it—and so any lies he told himself were lies he sincerely believed. A lie, for instance, that his interest in Celtic mythology was merely an academic response to his surroundings.

Of course, he’d reasoned to himself, he’d be fascinated here, in this lonely corner of the country still studded with fragments of Brythonic place names and scattered with dolmens and menhirs older than the Celts themselves. It was intellectual curiosity that sent him searching for books and rambling over the moors to see each and every standing stone or ruined church or hill fort for himself. That was all. Nothing more.

The lie had dissolved tonight. He could no longer pretend to himself that his fascination was intellectual. It was personal, deeply personal, rooted to his very soul somehow. And despite the dispassionate and worldly air he’d put on downstairs, he’s troubled by it. He’s troubled by the pull he feels toward this place. He’s troubled by the feeling that it needs him.

It’s not the unorthodoxy that troubles him, at least he doesn’t think so. He’s an unorthodox priest anyway, being openly bisexual—if celibate—and encouraging his parishioners to think critically and constructively about their faith. He is fond of other religions and their rituals, he enjoys learning about them, and he sees this Imbolc as more of a cultural exercise anyway.

Or at least he should.

Instead, he’s terrified that the zeal waits for him in the chapel ruins. And when he dreams—dreaming of the summer he came here in college, alone and with the zeal blazing so hot inside him that he couldn’t even think—he dreams of being in the thorn chapel. He dreams of standing in front of the altar and feeling like a pillar of fire because he was so consumed with a desire to know his god.

And when he wakes up, he wakes up with his skin burning against the air, like he’s aflame with righteous hunger once again.





The storm howls on through the morning, and Rebecca wakes at her usual early hour to find that it feels like day hasn’t broken at all. There’s a vague sort of brightening in the white maelstrom outside, like somewhere high above the world the sun does, in fact, still exist, but it’s dim enough that Rebecca has to turn on the light in the kitchen to make her tea while she hunts down an apple for breakfast. She decides to work in her favorite spot, which is a corner of the old hall, on a window bench overlooking the terrace and south gardens. Of course today she won’t be able to see much outside, but she’ll be cozy with her pile of blankets and the space heater she keeps over there.