A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel, #1)

by Sierra Simone

They found the roses right away. The thorns took longer.

Proserpina was last because Proserpina was always last. Not because she was disliked or because she was timid, but because she was dreaming on her feet while everyone else was walking.

He knew where everything went in London, where his family lived most of the time. Every road led to another road, every car and bus and train had a destination. Every day had a plan, and every plan had a goal, and every goal had a reason. At Thornchapel, none of this was true. At Thornchapel, time could slip by unmarked and you could walk places no one had walked in years. Maybe centuries.

It wasn’t a quaint name, chosen on a whim. It wasn’t, as he’d once heard his grandfather say, a corruption of a Latin word referencing the thick forest canopy around the house. There was a chapel. It was covered in thorns. Thornchapel. And he had the strangest feeling that as he thought the name of this place, the place thought his own name back to him . . .

He didn’t know why—St. Sebastian irritated him, Proserpina fascinated him, but he wasn’t entirely sure he liked her for having that effect on him—so why now, when the two of them approached the altar and approached him, did he think of the need to hurt and the need to be hurt and why did he want to grab them both and pull them into that need? Grab them and somehow shove them deep into his heart of thorns forever?

But he didn’t need to be somewhere else. He knew that, even if he didn’t know how he knew that. Thornchapel was right. Proserpina and St. Sebastian fighting over the flower crown in front of him felt right. It was only him that felt wrong.

A kiss that was almost a bruise, almost a bite, and how he wanted both, he wanted kissing and bruising and holding and biting—and he wanted to shelter them from the rain and force them to kneel in the mud too, and he didn’t know what it meant or why it was happening or even why they were letting him yank them close.

Soon enough, he was sent off to school, where he burned with all the things he didn’t understand about himself. And though he was popular and well-liked, though he excelled in every imaginable way, he burned alone. Thornchapel was alone too, though it had yet to burn.

He dreamed and he burned. Thornchapel waited. And in a clearing in the woods, in a church ruined by thorns and time, something stirred. Something called all six of them by name.

Everything is possible. Thornchapel waits at the end of my journey, and everything is possible.

“You’re very easy to talk to, you know.” It’s something I’ve heard all my life, and I’m used to it, even if it sometimes makes me feel a little lonely. The person that everyone talks to, but who never gets that comfort in return.

This hit different

Do not fall in love, Proserpina Markham. You are not stupid. But I’m so susceptible to this kind of touch; I bloom like a rose when I’m handled like a weed,

Thornchapel knows my name and the crooked corners of my heart, and it wants me to make promises that I’m going to keep.”

After all, he knows things she doesn’t know. He knows the things the village knows. She can’t be his.

When he goes to sleep, the zeal comes for him in his dreams. It shows him dying kings, dying gods, rain pattering on the summer-spread leaves of Thornchapel’s forest. And Proserpina in the middle of it all, haloed and radiant. Waiting.

Tomorrow, when she goes to Thornchapel, she will know herself again, and in that knowledge there will be no room for wanting the person she also hates.

Delphine. Rebecca. Becket. St. Sebastian. Proserpina. His thorns, his regrets. His hurts.

“I hate him because he deserves it. I hate him because once upon a time, I gave him a piece of my heart.” He closes his eyes, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “And then he fed it to the wolves.”

I try to move, because it must be uncomfortable for him to have my weight pinning it like this, but once I start squirming, he seizes my thigh and spreads a hand at the small of my back. “Be still,” he begs quietly. “For the love of God, be still.” I go still.

for me there’s something fundamentally beautiful about pain and pleasure mixing together, because that’s real life, right? Being alive means the harsh is mixed in with the good, and every time I get to choose the harsh for myself, it loses its sting. Every time I taste the bitter and survive, I’m all the stronger to enjoy the sweet.”

I still feel that primal urge to go to my knees and beg him to pull my hair, but I ignore it. I refuse to kneel to a coward.

“I think we should do this,” Becket says abruptly, before Auden can say anything else. “Why?” Auden asks. “And please try not to forget that you are a Catholic priest when you answer this time.”

I squirm in my seat at the same moment Saint pushes my palm harder against his inner thigh—like we’re both undone by Auden when he’s like this, like we’re both ready to crawl for him, to offer ourselves to him.

“I know who you are, Auden Guest,” I tell him softly. “I can know for the both of us.”