A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(72)

“Right, because she was married to you and he was married to Auden’s mother.”

“It was ridiculous because she would never belong to anyone, not even me. We belonged to her, that was how it worked. That was how it always worked.”

I think of his words earlier, about obsession. About how he used the words pain and power, words that can mean nothing to some people and everything to me.

“Dad, were you and Mom kinky?”

“I can’t talk about this with you,” he chides.

I want to tell him that I’m kinky too, that I understand, that he won’t have to explain roles and terms to me because I already know them all, but I don’t. I don’t tell him. There are limits to what a daughter wants her father to know about her, after all.

“I’m taking that as a yes,” I say. “You were kinky and she was your Domme.”

“I’m not going to answer your questions about this.”

But I’m fitting together parts of the puzzle now, reaching for the picture I keep on my nightstand and looking at it. Looking at my mother trying to put the torc on Ralph’s neck. Like a collar.

“She was Ralph’s Domme then too. Which means Ralph was submissive . . . but how could he have been?” I wonder aloud. “He was so awful to everyone around him. He hit Auden sometimes, I think, and I know he yelled at him so much, he was always angry.”

“Abuse has nothing to do with kink,” Dad says sharply. He sounds very sober right now. “And it especially has nothing to do with what kind of power dynamic gets you off. I’ve known Dominants gentler than Mother Teresa, and submissives more vicious and ambitious than you could ever imagine. Ralph was a tainted man who just happened to get off on pain. It didn’t stop him from trying to control everyone and everything around him. It didn’t save him from himself.”

I think about this a moment. “Did Mom ever want to marry him? Like before she knew how awful he was?”

“Of course not.” My father’s voice is still sharp. “I told you that we loved each other deeply—we still chose each other, we still chose our commitment to each other and to you, and she didn’t entertain his ideas for a single second. It infuriated him. Enraged him beyond all measure, but the angrier he got, the more she’d punish him, and the more she punished him, the more he wanted to marry her. It was a vicious loop, and it finally twisted hard enough that I thought it would strangle us all. Everyone had to leave before our work was finished, and it was the end of whatever we had. I haven’t spoken to any of the others since.”

I try to remember the day we left, if the adults had seemed angry or strained or sad. But I can’t picture any of their faces, hear any of their words. I’d been too busy saying goodbye to the other children, memorizing the color of Auden’s eyes and the shape of St. Sebastian’s hands, and there’d been no room for me to notice how the adults felt when I felt so cheated and wronged to be taken away from my friends and the magic house of Thornchapel.

“Why did we come to Thornchapel at all?” I finally ask. “How did you meet everyone? What were you working on?”

He answers after a long pause. “It’s a conversation we should have in person. It’s a very long, very weird story.”

“Weirder than telling me that you and Mom slept with other people, and oh, sometimes she beat them too?”

He lets out a tired laugh. “If you can believe it, yes. It’s even weirder than that.”

“I’m holding you to your word,” I say. “I need to know.”

“You could come home now and I could tell it to you?” he offers hopefully.

“Dad.”

“Just promise me you won’t go out to the chapel ruins,” he says. “Don’t go into the woods. Especially not today. Please.”

What can I say to him?

Sorry, Dad, I can’t promise that because a bunch of us are going out to the ruins to have a sex party in the dark?

“Okay, Dad,” I lie. “I won’t go out there tonight.”

“Good.”

The rain’s swallowed the house now, we’re in a world of rain, and the narcolepsy creeps back for me, clutching at me with fingers made of yawns and nods. I manage to say goodbye to my father—after getting his repeated assurance that he will finally tell me the story of the adults that summer—and then I lie back down and disappear into dreams of mud and sex.

Dreams of tonight.





Chapter 22





To Thee Do We Cry, Poor Banished Children of Eve





The sawn boards give off a pleasant fresh-wood smell as St. Sebastian carries them into the clearing. He skipped the maze and went to the ruins using one of his poacher’s paths through the trees, wood lengths balanced easily on one broad shoulder. It takes four trips to get all the wood into the clearing, a final trip to bring out the tools he borrowed from Augie, and then he gets to work assembling the low platform in front of the altar.

He loses himself in the tactile, methodical comfort of building, in the music of the drill and the clink of screws in his palm. The world outside the clearing slinks away from here, and by the time St. Sebastian finishes, there’s mud on his knees and his hands, and one thick daub across his cheek, as if he’s been marked with the only world that matters. The only earth, which is the earth of Thornchapel.