Harvest of Sighs E-Book

Sierra Simone

• Herausgeber: Sierra Simone
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Thornchapel
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 697

Beschreibung

The genius and the sunshine girl.  As children, we fought bitterly and often, bickering every chance we got.  

But then we grew up.  

Then we came back.  

Delphine Dansey carries her heart on the outside of her body; she’s looking for love and chasing dreams.  She’s spoiled and selfish, the kind of beautiful that’s made for money and fame. But somehow she’s ended up in my keeping: a pretty submissive I can’t seem to resist, a lover who obsesses and tempts me.  

I thought I’d locked my heart away a long time ago, along with all my other weaknesses. But some doors won't stay closed, no matter how hard I fight to keep them shut.  She unravels me, just like our friends are unraveling, just like Thornchapel itself is unraveling.  

All year long, we’ve been sowing lust and jealousy and pain, heedless of the consequences. But a harvest is inevitable, and so now we must reap our sorrows.  

And our sighs.

Harvest of Sighs is Book Three in the Thornchapel Quartet.

Content warnings can be found at thesierrasimone.com/contentnotes

Leseprobe

Harvest of Sighs

Sierra Simone

Copyright © 2020 by Sierra Simone

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover Design: Hang Le

Cover Image: Vania Stoyanova

Cover Models: Shacori Valentine, Keira Leilani

Editing: Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits

Proofing: Nancy Smay of Evident Ink, Michele Ficht

Contents

Content Warning

Part I

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

II. Midsummer

16. Midsummer

17. Midsummer

18. Midsummer

19. Midsummer

20. Midsummer

21. Midsummer

Part III

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Auden is Coming . . .

Acknowledgments

Also by Sierra Simone

About the Author

Content Warning

Content notes for Harvest of Sighs can be found at www.thesierrasimone.com/contentnotes.

There was three kings into the east,

Three kings both great and high,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn should die.

—Robert Burns, “John Barleycorn”

PartOne

Prologue

Estamond, 1874

Obviously, Estamond Kernstow Guest’s final wish was that her husband would fuck the nursemaid.

An hour before she wished this, Estamond gave her sleeping husband a fond kiss on the cheek and an equally fond pat on his cock, which even at rest, was considerable—and on its own, a testament to why her breasts were full of milk for their fifth child. But of course she loved all the parts of him, not just his wonderful organ. She loved his big, careful hands and his mighty heart, which thumped so steadily inside his chest. She loved his expression when she made him laugh, which was an expression of stunned wonderment. As if the first forty years of his life had been so friendless and lonely that he’d never learned to laugh and doing it now was like discovering whisky for the very first time.

She loved his eyes, green and brown like the woods of the valley, and she loved how they were always soft with affection for her. She loved how wild and beautiful they became when they were in bed together.

She loved him, and she hated to leave him. She knew if he were in her shoes, he wouldn’t be able to do his duty by the land because it would mean leaving her. And there was much Estamond hadn’t been able to learn in her thirty-three years on this earth, but she did know one thing as well as she knew her own name: Randolph Guest would never be able to make himself leave her.

She sighed as she lit a lamp and trimmed it down so it wouldn’t wake her husband. Perhaps if he loved her less, she wouldn’t have to go to the thorn chapel tonight.

Perhaps if he loved her less, this would be easier.

Perhaps she wouldn’t mind leaving. Perhaps then she wouldn’t worry if he’d survive her having to go.

After pushing herself off the warm bed—still rumpled from their earlier fuck—Estamond dressed herself. No need for a corset, no need for petticoats or jewelry or any of the other things she normally wore. She buttoned and laced herself into a simple white gown with deep pockets, braided her dark hair, and tucked a note and a small bottle into her dress. She grabbed a pair of sturdy boots, which she didn’t put on. Not yet.

Every time she bent down, she bit back a sigh of discomfort. Truth be told, it had been a bit too early to welcome Randolph back inside her body after little Samuel’s birth. The babe was only three weeks old, and though her bleeding was well over, she still felt the soreness of his entrance into the world. But she hated going without sex—had hated it ever since she learned what sex was as a girl up on the moors—and no man could be gentler and sweeter than her Randolph. And besides, she couldn’t go into the thorn chapel tonight without feeling him inside her one last time. So if there was soreness, she welcomed it. It would be like he was still with her even as she laid herself down on the altar.

The way it should be on Lammas night, she thought, a touch unhappily. Estamond didn’t usually feel unhappiness—she could no more be unhappy than a fox or a cat could make themselves kind—but today was a day for exceptions.

Normally, Lammas day was a good one, an excuse for hot bread and sweat-slick sins in the chapel. It was her favorite feast day, if she was honest. Everyone assumed that she loved the more dangerous revels, Beltane with its carnality or Samhain with its stark, heady power, but Estamond was a Kernstow. She’d grown up in a waste of gorse above the welcoming shelter of the valley. She’d grown up hunting mistletoe and singing to the moon.

She’d had enough wild magic for lifetimes.

And so the homey, domestic harvest of Lammas—all grain and bread and dolls for children and country charms and courting—that she loved, that she longed for.

Just as a tame person might crave the thrill of Samhain or Beltane, so a wild girl craved the ripe warmth of Lammas.

Until tonight, that was.

Tonight, Estamond craved nothing. Tonight, she mourned.

But true to form, the mournfulness did not last. Even as she murmured farewell to her husband, her sometimes wild god. Even as she went into the nursery and kissed each sleeping child gently on the forehead.

The babe, Samuel, stirred the tiniest bit in his wet nurse’s arms but did not wake.

“I’m going outside,” Estamond told the sleepy-eyed nurse, who was a girl of just twenty. Estamond had never hired a nurse before—bucking convention, she’d breastfed all her children herself. But after her mother’s message last week, Estamond had known she would go to the thorn chapel tonight, and she couldn’t leave her newborn unprovided for. And so she found Janie from the next village over, whose sweetheart had died of a cough when she’d been swollen with their child. She was unmarried and plump and pretty, and when she first came to Thornchapel and met Randolph, she’d blushed all the way from her cheeks to the tops of her milk-swollen breasts. That was enough for Estamond. Any girl who could see how handsome Randolph was under all his shy quiet was a girl worth having around, especially given Estamond’s task this Lammas. Estamond hired her on the spot and had Janie bring her own babe to Thornchapel to raise alongside the Guest children.

Janie nodded dozily at Estamond and said nothing. Everyone in the Thorne Valley knew what happened in the thorn chapel on feast days. And even though the Guests had put out that they wouldn’t attend the village festival or host their own Lammas feast due to Samuel’s birth, it still wouldn’t seem unusual for one of them to go out to the woods alone.

After all, some things were necessary.

Yes, some things were.

Estamond had one last stop before making her way to the maze, and that was her beloved library. She took what she needed, drank in the moon-bright room one last time, and then left Thornchapel as silent as a cat, unmarked by anyone, not even the nurse, who’d already fallen back asleep, or the husband whose bed she just left.

She was alone.

* * *

If you don’t do it at Lammastide, then it will be done at Samhain.

It will be one of us.

I’ll do it in the hills.

The light from her single lantern was weak, as Estamond well knew it would be, but the maze’s path was as familiar to her as the taste of Randolph’s lips or the whorls of her children’s hair, and she didn’t falter; she didn’t hesitate or trip. She even gave Adonis’s foot a pat as she slipped down between the doomed lovers and the fountain and into the tunnel.

And then to the woods.

After a girlhood of scrambling over bleak hills and through punishing heather, the verdant woods of Thornchapel bothered Estamond not at all. In fact, she found her step slowing as she walked; she found herself savoring the warm summer night. She listened to the charming rustle of hedgehogs and watched the occasional flap of a bat by the glow of her lantern. Owls called out their territorial cautions, and more than once, Estamond’s light caught the reddish flash of fox eyes before the creature darted back into the trees. The moors had always felt half-dead to Estamond, scoured as they were by wind and rain, but the woods of Thornchapel—those were alive.

And on Lammas night, they were more alive than usual.

Drums beat faintly as she approached the clearing in the woods, and she could hear the soft strains of the Other-music suffusing the air. Air now gone electric and stirring, as if merely to breathe was to become intoxicated. Any other Lammas, any other feast, and Estamond would have reveled in the intoxication—she would have drenched herself with it.

She had grown up with the wild god carved onto her very hearth, holding his opposing spirals in each hand as his antlers caught flares of firelight and shadow. She’d grown up knowing the feasts and what they meant. She’d grown up knowing a secret that only the country folk still knew.

The spirals don’t just mean life and death, her mother had told her. The wild god holds more than life and death in balance.

What could be more important than life and death? Estamond had asked.

Here and there, Daughter. The wild god keeps in his body the boundary between here and there. And I will tell you another secret.

What is that? Estamond had asked.

Here and there, and life and death…are very nearly the same thing.

The Kernstows kept the knowledge; they lived by it. And the country folk still knew it too, deep in their hearts, for at every feast, they still celebrated summer and winter, the green and the brown. They still told stories of there, of the cruel, merry things that lived there, and they still honored and feared them.

Gods and saints, Estamond’s mother had replied when Estamond asked what lived there. Saints and gods.

In the house with the carving of the wild god, there’d been a Bible also, and a small crucifix by the door. The Kernstows reverenced both. After all, St. Brigid was with them on Imbolc, was she not? And the Virgin on May Day? And didn’t the parishioners bring their first loaves to the church on Lammas?

Didn’t the holy dead demand prayers and adoration on All Saints’ Day?

But Estamond wondered what the God of the Bible would say to her tonight as she passed through the menhirs and followed the stone rows to the chapel. After all, there had been a church here once, a church built after Wessex had washed against the rocky crags of Dartmoor. Because Wessex had brought the Guests, and the Guests had brought their brooding death god from across the sea.

And the god brought his church, with his own cakes and ale, his own holy words and rites.

It was always God’s place, her mother had said once about the thorn chapel.

Which god? Estamond had asked.

It was always God’s place, her mother had repeated. Pointedly.

Then she’d added, Before the Guests, before the Romans, before the druids. When the thorn chapel was alone and the door was nothing but a shimmer in the air. It was God’s before all that.

And that was as much an answer as Estamond was ever going to get about which god reigned among the thorns.

The Other-drums throbbed and thumped through the clearing, loud and louder as Estamond entered the chapel itself. She could hear the voices now, the singing and the chanting that seemed to come from the air itself. Her lantern light flickered over stretches of tumbling roses, which were blown wide-open and trembling in the breeze, quivering like a woman waiting for a lover’s touch. The moon shone down on the grassy hillock where the altar once stood—or rather, still stood today, just under a blanket of thick, emerald grass.

It could be any other Lammas in the chapel. Any other rose-scented night with drums and voices calling. Any other warm, moonlit feast.

It could be.

It would be.

Except for the door.

Estamond walked around the altar with the lantern raised high, even though the moon on its own illuminated the door well enough. The first time she’d seen it two years ago, it had been merely a glimpse, a flash of wood and old iron out of the corner of her eye. And then it became more—it stabilized or solidified or pushed its way through whatever thick magic normally kept it hidden—and every feast night, she saw it plain as anything, as if it had been built there yesterday.

Or as if it had always been there.

And then every feast night turned into every new moon, and then every new moon turned into every night. Until it stood there even in the broad daylight. Until even Randolph could see it.

She hadn’t told her mother, of course she hadn’t.

Because while, yes, her mother was the only one who approved of Estamond marrying Randolph—who had in fact foretold it using copper spoons and blood cut from the tender inside of one of Estamond’s thighs—it was also her mother who’d warned Estamond not to fall in love with Randolph Guest.

It will be that much harder if the door opens and the Thorn King must do his duty by the land, her mother had said. It will be that much harder for you to do your part.

She knew what part her mother meant. She meant Estamond should kill him if he would not go willingly.

At the memory, Estamond’s hand went to her pocket. She could no more kill Randolph than she could kill her own children, than she could kill her own parents or her twin brother. It was simply impossible. She hadn’t known it was impossible then, when she married a Guest, but she knew it now.

So she hadn’t told her mother about the door. But her mother knew anyway.

If you don’t do it at Lammastide, then it will be done at Samhain.

It will be one of us.

I’ll do it in the hills.

That’s what her mother’s note said—and nothing more. Not that it needed to say more. Estamond could read the meaning loud and clear. If she did not kill the Thorn King on Lammas, then her mother would kill Estamond’s father or her brother—or maybe even herself—on Samhain night. And that was the best possible scenario because there was one other at the Kernstow farmstead her mother could kill, and if she did that, then Estamond would set the moors afire with her despair.

And her mother wouldn’t do it in the thorn chapel, where Estamond could try to stop her. No, she’d do it up in the hills, where there’d be no way to find her. No way to predict her movements or protect her family.

No, if Estamond didn’t close the door, her mother would. And her mother would close it at such a cost that they might as well already be dead.

* * *

The day after she’d received the note, Estamond had dragged her tender postpartum body to the farm to beg her mother to change her mind, but she was gone on one of her mysterious errands and her father was up with a flock near Reavy Hill. Only her twin brother had been there, which was dangerous for a number of reasons.

“Esau,” she’d said in surprise as he ducked out of the farmhouse door to welcome her. The house looked as it always looked—damp stone and dark windows—fuchsia foxgloves peeking around the low stone walls surrounding the house and the hills blushing purple with blooming heather.

And Esau looked as he always looked: tall and lean and broad-shouldered, his hair the same dark brown as hers, his eyes the same glittering emerald. As children, they roamed and romped all over the moors, hiding and darting far away from the drudgery of the farm, pretending to gather herbs and plants for their mother. They matched in more than looks—they matched in wildness, in anger, and in thrill—and so perhaps it wasn’t a surprise what happened between them later, on the same moors where they used to play so innocently.

At least, their mother hadn’t been surprised. After she’d midwifed the child, she’d used the birth blood in the spoons and smiled to herself at what she saw. The boy—Esra, they named him—grew up utterly doted on and pampered by his Nanna and Poppa, as well as by his mother and father. And if his mother and father had the same parents, if they looked alike, if he must not tell certain people who his mother was—well, that all seemed normal enough to Esra. Every farmstead tucked into the moors had its own strangenesses and peculiarities, after all, and anyway, people already expected the Kernstows to be strange.

“Is he here?” Estamond had asked, her heart twisting. Esau and Esra had been the sacrifice she’d had to make in order to marry a Guest—a necessary sacrifice in her mother’s eyes, but a sin in Esau’s. It was a sin he would never forgive her for, she knew, and yet, she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it. Esra was safe and happy, and she’d never begrudge Esau finding another woman to vent all his feral passions at, and so he could be happy too if he chose. She’d gained the thorn chapel in return for leaving her brother and her son behind; she’d gained the stones and the altar and the door and the place that belonged to her family by ancient right. She’d gained five more children for the one she left to her parents; she’d gained a sweet, devoted husband in place of her twin brother. A brother whose love was like the moors themselves—howling and desolate.

And yet, she still missed them, missed them like she missed the rain on her face or the mist in her hair.

“He’s started at the village school,” Esau had told her, stepping close enough to seize her in his arms, which he did. “Now, why are you here?”

“Mother,” she’d gasped. “Mother sent me a note. She wants me to kill the Thorn King at Lammastide.”

“Or it will be one of us,” Esau said. “I know.”

“Not Esra,” she begged. “Please.”

Esau had growled then, hauling her even tighter to his chest. “If you would do your duty, then no one would have to die at all.”

“No one here, you mean,” she hissed, struggling. “You want me to choose between my husband and you.”

“I want you to choose between the Guests and the Kernstows,” Esau said, scowling. “They stole the thorn chapel from us. Why should you cry over a dead Guest now?”

“They stole it thirteen hundred years ago,” Estamond said, still struggling in his arms. “When will we forgive them for it? Does a man really deserve to die for what his forefathers did that long ago?”

“He deserves to die because he is the Thorn King,” Esau pronounced, his voice as firm as his hold on her. “It’s his fate. If I were born to be the Thorn King, then it would be my fate as well.”

With some private shame, Estamond had to admit that Esau was much better suited to the role of wild god than her quiet Randolph. If some quirk of fate had meant that Esau had been born a Guest, if he’d been given the torc and asked to wed himself to the land, then what a king he would have become. Uncanny and wicked and wild. Not just a Thorn King, but a king of thorns.

“But if he will not kneel to his fate, then one of us must become the thorn king in his place,” Esau continued. “The door must be closed, even if it has to be with a substitute. Here and there, king and door.”

King and door. They were words she’d grown up with, words as unmovable and unchangeable as the wild god carved onto their hearth. Part of a song so old that no one knew when it had first been sung.

Here and there, king and door,

Cup and spear, corn and war.

She stopped struggling now as she realized it was pointless to fight this. To fight the Kernstow legacy. To somehow stave off the hungry heart of the valley.

“Even after our inheritance has been denied us, it’s always fallen to the Kernstows to make sure the Guests abide by the rules of the land,” said Esau. “And it’s up to us to close the door if they won’t.”

Estamond’s head fell forward against his chest. He smelled like heather and rain and home. “Just not Esra,” she whispered. “Not him. Please.”

Esau was still furious, but she could hear the truth of his next words in his voice. “I would never let it be him, Essie. And for what it’s worth, you know Mother wouldn’t either. She’s seen something for him in the spoons—something about his descendants. He’s the future of the Kernstows now. He’s all we have left.”

It was unwise to tell him what she told him next, but Estamond had never been wise. “You should marry, Esau. Find a wife or even a sweetheart. Get babes on her.”

His hands tightened so hard around her arms that she let out a squeak, and then those hands were on her back and in her hair, pressing her so tightly to him that she could feel every tensed muscle and every inch of his erection. “There’s no one but you,” he vowed. “There will never be anyone but you. And you will be mine again, my own, and you’ll never leave me again.”

“Esau…”

His mouth and nose were in her hair. His hands shaped to the curves of her hips and bottom through her dress. “You don’t need him,” he rumbled. “If you simply do what needs to be done, then you’ll have won the thorn chapel back for our family, and we’ll be together again.”

Turbulent longing tangled and pulled with horror; she would never do it, never, never—but oh, how she’d missed this. How she’d sometimes ached for this, ached for Esau’s fury and possession. His greedy hands and animal growls. Randolph was sweet and kind and true, but Esau was her very own heart, her very own soul. Their hearts were made out of each other’s. So were their bodies and minds.

Even the wild god himself would struggle to compete with that.

Estamond’s body didn’t hide the truth from her brother—it never could—and before long, Esau’s mouth was hot and urgent on hers. He handled her like a doll—not a precious china doll with silk clothes and curls made of real hair, but like a rag doll. Like she was his thing to drag over the hills and clutch in the dark, and even though her tender core twinged and her milk-full breasts ached, she relished every second of it.

Esau was taller than her, stronger than her, angrier than her. With very little trouble or effort, he had her inside the house and on his wool-blanketed bed, his teeth on her throat and his hand up her skirts. With a hot, wet flush, her milk let down, hard enough to soak through her nursing corset and dress.

Esau’s eyes narrowed. “Is that for him? For one of his brats?”

Estamond narrowed her eyes right back, and she was tempted to hiss at him like a cat. “For one of my brats, yes.”

“The child should be mine,” he breathed against her skin. “All of your children should be mine.”

“I was always supposed to be the May Queen, Esau. I was always supposed to be his.”

Esau grunted low in his throat, his hand dropping to his trouser buttons. It was inevitable between them, once again. Two bodies that should have never separated to begin with.

“I only just stopped bleeding,” she told him as he moved between her legs. “I still hurt.”

“I won’t go in,” he said. “But I have…to…touch⁠—”

The moment his bare organ pressed against her slick opening and then rode up to grind against her, Estamond forgot nearly everything. Her mother’s note, the impending Lammas feast, and very nearly the tiny babe still sleeping in a maid’s arms in the cozy Guest carriage waiting for them on the road.

True to his word, he didn’t penetrate her, but it was still fucking, there was no denying that. She came hard and keening, and Esau followed her, liquid heat surging out of his tip and onto her intimate skin, and then he collapsed over her, still rutting gently as he slid his arms tight around her. She was his rag doll once again.

“I hate that Mother made you marry him,” he murmured.

“No one made me do anything,” she said. “I love him.”

“Yet you’re underneath me.”

“You’ve never understood,” she said impatiently. “You’ve never understood how there could be both at once.”

She and Randolph had welcomed others into their bed as visitors—although he only fucked 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 fuck 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 have only been 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’d 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 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 anymore 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.”

One

Rebecca

It was an accident, the day I saw the gardens of Versailles.

In the hotel, my mother and father had argued—bitterly. To this day I don’t know what they argued about, but I do know that they fought incessantly in those years, the kind of fights that would end in slammed doors and my mother’s sobs. Back then, sometimes I’d catch my father crying too, yelling, shouting, matching my mother rage for rage and grief for grief, the pain written on his face for anyone to read.

She would move back to Accra from London two years after that day, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t even know enough to see the fighting as a portent of a dying marriage. It was upsetting, but in the same way thunder was upsetting—it came, it went, it was a part of life.

And so while they’d fought, I’d sat in the window seat and played with the Barbie dolls Daddy had brought back from New York a few days ago. One came with a little tea set—plastic, incomplete to my eyes because there were only two cups and two saucers and a teapot—but I made do. I pretended that my doll had a complete tea set at one point, but she’d taken in some of the items to get valued. Or perhaps they’d been chipped by a careless guest, and she was currently having them repaired by an expert in antique tea set repairs.

The other doll came wearing a striking red dress with a silk stole. Her hair was pulled up in a high bun on top of her head, exposing her throat and her shoulders. She had stars hanging from her ears, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, so beautiful I hardly touched her for fear of ruining her. Instead, she sat remote and barely interested on the windowsill while Incomplete Tea Set Barbie made her cup after cup of tea. Tea Set Barbie would tell her over and over again how beautiful she was, how pretty her red dress was, how she hoped they would be best friends forever. Sometimes Tea Set Barbie would kiss Red Dress Barbie because Red Dress Barbie was so perfect. Sometimes Tea Set Barbie would lay her head in the other doll’s lap and simply savor her untouchable beauty and cherish every second that she got to be near it. Every once in a while, Red Dress Barbie would pat Tea Set Barbie on the head, acknowledging her reverence and affection, and those were the moments Tea Set Barbie lived for.

“The only two Black Barbies I could find, and they’re both in dresses,” my father had complained to my mother when he’d met us here in Paris. He’d been at a landscape architecture conference in New York, and now there was one here. There were times he lived conference to conference, one city to another, only coming home for short jaunts to sleep and repack.

“Why shouldn’t they have dresses?” my mother had said. “Girls like dolls with dresses. Anyway, the white Barbies have pretty dresses too.”

“The white Barbies are also paratroopers, presidents, and surgeons,” Samson Quartey had replied, but he’d dropped the subject, probably wary of another fight.

I was playing with the dolls when my mother shut herself in the bedroom that morning, tearfully telling Daddy that he’d given her a migraine, that he’d known she got them while traveling and then he’d callously gone and argued with her anyway and now her head hurt so badly she couldn’t even stand up. It was proof he’d never loved her, she said, proof that he wanted her to be unhappy.

My father stood outside the bedroom door for a few minutes after that diatribe, a single hand braced against the wood, as if he wanted to reach through it to touch her. As if he wanted to see through every opaque and brittle thing in the world to the truth behind it.

When he finally came to my window seat, the wet tracks on his cheeks glittered in the sun.

“I was going to leave you with your mother, but I think…I think you should come with me,” he said. His voice was thick. I didn’t understand all the ways he was unhappy then, and I certainly didn’t understand the small, irremediable ways that two people could sow unhappiness in each other. But I did know my daddy needed a hug, and I’d slid off the window seat to wrap my arms around his legs.

“Sweet girl,” my father said. He was crying again. “We should get your shoes on.”

And then I’d asked the only question I cared about. “Can I bring my Barbies?”

* * *

I was six, and so I had only the shakiest idea of what my father did for a living. He told me it had to do with flowers and soil, but all I ever saw at home were rolls of paper and neatly sharpened pencils. Computer screens with flat, colorless drawings.

I didn’t know then that not every father propped his daughter on his shoulder and made her find the horizon. Made her identify which was bigger, this tree here or that tree there. Made her identify which was closer, which was planted to hide something, which would blossom in the spring and which would be a collection of stark branches in the winter. And in Accra: Which leaves were taro and which were caladium? And there, that tulip tree crowned with blossoms so orange and so red they looked like blossoms made of fire? Was that an invasive species? Wasn’t it true that sometimes the most beautiful things in life were the most destructive, the most grasping?

It didn’t seem remarkable to me that my father wanted me to understand proportion, unity, form. Repetition, color, and texture. When one is a child, one only knows the tiny perimeters of their own world, and so I must have assumed this was how every child was raised. I couldn’t know then that my father’s appointment with the head gardener at Versailles was an unusual privilege, something not every father got to do.

But there was a moment, there must have been a moment, when I started to see. When I stood at the head of all that majestic symmetry, and I finally understood what my father was trying to explain to me about balance and about vision. About horizons, about light and dark, about transitions. About harmonies. Before me was not just an imprint of a design—tidy, ordered, controlled—but an assertion of human will over nature.

I did not know yet that Versailles had required villages to be moved, earth to be leveled, rich wetlands drained. I did not know then that there was a cost to correcting irregularities, to valuing geometry over tumult, that flattening and diverting and carving and scraping could give one something less than the sum of its parts.

I only saw the wide, curlicued parterres, the Grand Canal stretching into the distance. The marches of orange and oleander trees. The four seasonal fountains—Flora, Ceres, Bacchus, and Neptune. The straight paths of fine gravel, and the regimented oaks, and the mathematical little yews, clipped into cubes and cones and spheres.

I only saw perfection.

I turned to the keeper of the gardens and asked in my halting French if he had built the gardens.

“Non, chouchou,” the gardener had said, eyes crinkling with an amused smile. “Il a été construit par un homme nommé Le Nôtre.”

Le Nôtre.

I was silent the rest of the day, thinking of this man. Thinking of what he must have felt to have built this place. He must have felt like a god.

* * *

By the time Incomplete Tea Set Barbie and Red Dress Barbie were dust-covered relics on a shelf, I’d become the foremost preadolescent biographer of André Le Nôtre. I had a poster of Versailles on my wall—a reprint of an antique map—and stacks of books about the man himself and jardins à la française. But then my father took me with him on a trip to Italy, and there we saw the statue-lined parterres of Villa Farnese, its lush enclosures and mossy staircases with splashing streams running down the middle of the steps themselves. There we went to the Sacro Bosco, following in the footsteps of Salvador Dalí himself to peer at moss-covered monsters made of stone, at elephants and grottos and crooked houses and Greek Furies and virgin temples.

Thus came my Mannerist phase, which coincided nicely with the quirks and sulks of puberty, and after that came my Baroque stage. At some point I put up a poster of Capability Brown; the 1993 adaptation of The Secret Garden was background noise for years of schoolwork. One Christmas in Accra, I was so bored that I built an Archimedes screw from plastic bottles and a dowel I harvested from a clothes hanger, and then I arranged all the potted plants into a facsimile of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Once I made a Zen garden in my room with a baking tray and aquarium sand and had a gritty floor for years after, no matter how many times I swept.

I went through a potager phase, a ferme ornée phase, some time each obsessed with arboretums, alpinums, and palmetums. When I was a teenager, I truly believed I was the first person ever to appreciate the ecological sense of a bog garden, the mystery of a hedge maze, or the dark seduction of a poison garden.

I became something of a garden hipster; some of my schoolmates drew Twilight fan art, instead I sketched out what I imagined King Solomon’s ecclesiastical garden of despair would have looked like. I asked people if they’d even heard of Assyrian hunting parks or Egyptian funeral gardens. I asked them if they knew that the word paradise came from Old Persian for “walled garden.” Had they heard of Sennacherib? Olmstead? Gertrude Jekyll? Did they understand how different Giverny was from other gardens? Like really understand? Did they even understand the difference between a garden and a park? Between a park and a landscape? Did they even look at the spaces they moved through? Were they oblivious? Heartless? Dull?

The year I went to uni, Daddy took me with him to Istanbul for a conference. He had a birthday present for me after, and I spent the entire conference guessing what it was. Would we go home to Ghana after the conference and see Ma? Would I come home to a car of my own? Perhaps he was finally going to offer me a job at Quartey Workshop—something I’d been craving for the last three years—even if it was only getting coffee and manning the plotter printer?

But it was none of these things.

Instead, after the conference ended, we boarded a plane that took us to a city called Urfa. It was the ancient home of Job and King Nimrod and also home to the oldest life-sized statue of a human ever found, but we didn’t stay in the city long enough to explore any of its history. We took a taxi through it until we were thoroughly in the countryside. And there we found Göbekli Tepe.

Rings of concentric standing stones were scattered around the site. They were carved in the shapes of vultures, scorpions, lions; there were human and animal remains found all over the hill it was perched on and yet no houses. No one had ever lived here. No one had even tried.

The entire site was a strange honeycomb of stone. It was built six thousand years before the invention of writing; it predated the agricultural revolution; it predated metal tools and even pottery. Wheat was domesticated near here. Some might even say the idea of a temple itself was born here, the idea of a holy place built by human hands.

Carved right out of the living rock, the limestone pillars were planted like trees in a sacred grove, the butchered bones from humans and gazelles sown into the earth like seeds. It had been built to be open to the wind and the stars—a garden for gods and men to walk through together, and yet, at some point, it had been buried. The spaces between the stones filled with rubble and dirt and broken tools, never to be gardened again.

My father and I circled the site in silence. All around us was a landscape of olive and umber; the sun was relentless; the breeze was sparing. It felt impossible to believe that this was counted as part of the Fertile Crescent. After growing up in England, a place so damp and green that things just grew whether one wanted them to or not, this place seemed almost barren. Which made the temple all the more striking.

Why here?

Why this place?

“I feel God here,” my father said finally. The excavated site had been roofed and ringed with a walkway, and by this point we were leaning on the railings, staring down to where the pillars rested in their mess of stones and dirt.

I looked around then, at the stark, sloping hills and the dry valley below. It seemed like a godless place—and yet, strangely, I could feel the thread of divinity as well. It was thin and distant, it was as dusty and unused as the buried temple structures themselves, but it was there.

A lone note from a forgotten song. A footprint baked into the earth.

“I think I feel it too,” I said a bit eagerly, and then my father had smiled at me.

He had never become cold, my father, even after my mother finally made good on her ultimatums and moved back to Ghana, and even after our summer at Thornchapel, when I would sometimes find him dialing a number on his cell phone only to hang up before the call could connect. But even though he wasn’t cold, he was undoubtedly cool. He had begun to hold himself back, bit by bit, more and more each and every year, until he was a man of walls, a man of locked doors and drawn curtains. I no longer saw him angry or sad—when we went to visit Ma in Accra, he was unfailingly polite, he was kind, he would even be affectionate in a perfunctory sort of way. But I also no longer saw him happy; his happiness faded into pastel-tinted childhood memories, and the reality of living with him—of bringing my marks home to him, airing my petty grievances, bandaging my scraped knees, and later mumbling my requests for money to buy feminine hygiene products—was a reality shaped by his dispassion and reserve.

So to have seen him smile then…it felt like more of a birthday present than seeing the oldest known designed landscape in the world.

It wasn’t until later—much later, actually—as I was back home in England and preparing for uni that I realized I’d felt that thin thread of the divine only one other place in my life. There was another place that was hidden and strange and holy.

I’d lived there for a summer.

It belonged to my best friend.

It practically called out for a gardener, a keeper, someone who would patiently unravel all its secrets, not as archeologists do, not through digging and scraping. But through tending. Through planting. Through growth.

And I knew then, as I know now, that I was always meant to come back to Thornchapel. Not because it was meant for me.

But because I was meant for it.

Two

Rebecca

I wake with a kitten tucked into my side.

Outside, the sky is the kind of sweet blue that comes only a handful of times in an English spring, and inside my room, everything is orderly and quiet and in its place. Except for the kitten. She’s very much out of place—sleeping with a leg thrown over mine and her face nestled into my shoulder. Her hair is everywhere, and she’s snoring softly, sweet little breaths that puff warmly against my skin. At some point, she’s twisted her fingers into the silk of my nightgown, as if to keep me from leaving.

From this angle, I can only make out the dark fans of her eyelashes and the pert snub of her nose and the coral-colored bow of her upper lip. She’s like a doll, like the perfect doll Sara Crewe is given in A Little Princess, except Delphine is also a doll I get to pet and kiss. A doll I get to pose and lick and fuck.