Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Read online

  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

  The prologue of this book contains a depiction of suicide by poison in the nineteenth century. This section can be skipped and its events inferred from later chapters.

  This book also has a character who experienced sexual violence once; this violence happens off page, before the events of the story, but it is referenced throughout.

  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”

  Part I

  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, 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 love for her. She loved how wild and beautiful they became when he made love.

  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 loved her more than he loved anything else.

  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 slightly 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 be unhappy—but today was a day for exceptions.

  Normally, Lammas day was a good day, a day 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 high 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 feas
t 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 through 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 it 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 for the first time in her life, Estamond wondered what the God of the Bible would say to her now as she passes through the menhirs and follows the stone rows to the thorn 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, Esta
mond 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.