The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(19)

“Promise?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Now, close your eyes.”

I did as I was told, and she placed the plum between my teeth. It tasted like gold and honey with an echo of iron and salt. It was the taste of a threshold crossed; a bargain struck. In all that time, I have kept my eyes closed and Indigo has kept me safe.

I knew that Hippolyta’s words were merely words, and yet they conjured an image all the same. As I slouched against her door and caught my breath, I thought of the maiden in the robber bridegroom tale, of the way she must have gasped when the dead girl’s little finger landed in her lap, how she must have counted all the times she had kissed her betrothed’s mouth and thought of the sweetness of his breath, while on the other side of the oven, he sucked marrow from a girl’s femur.

Later, I would recognize this as the moment when the House of Dreams struck. This was the nature of clever places. I thought there was no knowledge the House could tempt me with to convince me to do its bidding. I was wrong.

One moment, I was staring at my feet. The next, I heard that same childish voice sigh.

You lie. It is not enough.

Abruptly, I was thrust into an image that held the shape and weight of memory.

I saw my mother as she looked when I was seven years old. She was too strong-jawed for beauty, and yet she had the most delicate, doe-wide green eyes. We’re standing in the kitchen and someone tugs my hand. It is my brother, chubby and jam-stained, squirming and laughing as I twirl him on the spot. In my mother’s hand is a cigarette. We freeze at the sound of my father’s heavy footsteps in the garage. My mother grins and taps her ashes into the sink.

“Are you ready to play, boys?”

I blinked. I was still outside Hippolyta’s door. The sound of my father’s footsteps melted into Mrs. Revand’s clipped gait as she walked up the stairs. The image vanished entirely. I traced the edges of it in my mind, disturbed at how neatly that lie fit within.

How could such a thing be possible?

In answer, sunlight moved through the stained-glass windows. When I looked down, my hands were soaked in blue.

If you find Azure, the House will reward you.

The House always provides.





Chapter Nine

Azure




My hair was the one thing I possessed that was finer than Indigo’s, and I treasured it as if it were my soul exposed. To me, each strand held a version of my life as it had once been, and I believed if I tended to it, then that version would return.

As a child, my mother used to rub sweet almond oil into my hair, combing it until it poured down my back like a starless night sky. In those days, she would tell me the tale of Rudaba, a Persian princess whose hair was a river of night and who let it spill over the ramparts of her castle so that her lover, King Zal, might use it to climb his way to her chambers.

“You’re my precious fairy-tale girl,” she once said.

That was before she worked extra jobs and the skin beneath her eyes wore shadows. When we moved to Hawk Harbor, I still held on to the dream that things might be as they once were. That first week in the new house, I wore my hope in every knot and tangle of my unwashed and unkempt hair.

I wanted my mother to scold, to sigh, to plant me before her with her knees against my back. I wanted her to comb my hair and hum through the bobby pins clenched between her teeth. It was not her attention I caught though. It was his. At the end of that first week I sat at the breakfast table and Jupiter whistled.

“Well, where’d this little wild thing come from?” He laughed and smiled teasingly at my mother. But when he looked at me, his smile didn’t match his eyes. The air of the breakfast nook turned humid and small, and even though I was hot in my sweatshirt and pajama pants, I wished my hair were long enough to cover me up and swallow me whole.

Jupiter wet his lips with his bright-pink tongue. “Your hair is so long I could use it as a blindfold and still not be able to catch you.”

My mother sat folded up in her chair, legs to her chest, a coffee mug balanced on her bony knees. When Jupiter spoke, she slammed her hand on the table and stood so fast I flinched.

“Why are you always trying to embarrass me, Azure?” she’d said, grabbing my arm and hauling me to the hallway bathroom. “You’re making me look bad,” she snarled. “Look at you. Your hair is . . . disgusting. I’ve been working myself to death to take care of you and you can’t bother to take care of yourself?”

She let go of my arm, breathing heavily as she shoved me into the bathroom.

“Either braid it or cut it off,” she said, slamming the door.

After that, I never wore it down at home. But in the House of Dreams, Indigo insisted I always wear it loose. Only then did I let its heavy, fragrant weight rest on my shoulders.

“It’s like magic,” she would say, combing her warm fingers across my scalp. Her voice stretched tight with yearning. “I bet it is magic . . .”

I had always wanted magic in my life, but one Saturday morning, in the winter of my thirteenth birthday, I didn’t want it anymore. That day, I dressed to go to the House like usual. I didn’t ask for my mother’s permission. I avoided mentioning Indigo around her because her face would twist, and her voice become silken and venomous: “Running back to Miss Caste?ada’s house? She’s going to think you’re clingy, honey. And nobody likes a clingy girl.”