The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(21)

Indigo’s eyes widened. “What do you want to gain?”

I was glad she didn’t try to stop me. I thought of the heat rising off Jupiter’s body, the cold locket on my skin.

“I want to be invisible,” I said.

Indigo was silent and then she nodded. She glanced toward the staircase, held a finger to her lips. “We’ll have to ask Tati, but step quietly. I think the House is napping.”

As I slipped off my shoes, I noticed that the House did seem more quiet than usual. All the staff had already left for the night. Tati preferred everyone, even the housekeeper, to live away from the grounds. I wondered if the House preferred it that way too.

The House was more than a building, you see. It was a body. The dark oak floors smooth as skin. The smell of mulled spices wafted in a rhythm like breathing. In the twin fireplaces on either side of the vast sitting room, sparks lazily spiraled through the air like a sequence of dreams.

Quietly, we took to the stairs.

I skimmed my hand along the mahogany banister. The carpeted steps purred beneath my bare feet. I loved Tati, but I had never liked her wing of the House. Here, the walls were painted scarlet, the crimson rugs woven with gold. Intricately cut lanterns flickered through the narrow hallway as if it were a pulsing artery. It even smelled like blood, salted and rich in iron.

The door to Tati’s workshop was red and slender, affixed with a small centered doorknob shaped like a child’s hand cast in gold. Indigo pushed open the door and announced: “Azure wants you to cut off her hair.”

As I entered Tati’s workspace, my heart began to race. Seven small windows shaped like stars let in the afternoon light. On the left wall, a series of seven white columns held up black jet vases with dozens of bouquets. The wall to the right was covered in gold oval frames showing everything from abstract curlicues on a white background and illustrations of a three-legged horse to elaborate black lacework and ships sailing across a thready sea.

All of it made from human hair.

Tati called it mourning jewelry.

“You know why she does it, right?” Indigo had once whispered to me in the night. I couldn’t see her face, though I knew she was smiling. “Tati was married once, but her husband ran away when their baby died, and she had to bury it alone and so she shaved its head and turned its hair into a rose. She wears it sometimes.”

On the rare occasions when I went to Tati’s studio, I avoided looking too closely at the pieces, especially the ones where only the smallest wisps of hair had been used to make a flower. It was unsettling to me, the knowledge that a wreath had been made from the crimped, gray strands of a dead woman.

“Sometimes I think it should be called memory jewelry instead,” Tati once told us. “A strand of hair is a thing of remembrance—it bears witness to our joys and our pain. It is nothing to be afraid of.”

Tati looked up from her work. In front of her was a tall black stool with a hole in the middle. Strands of hair weighted down by steel bobbins hung over it. Today she wore a black silk scarf around her head. I wasn’t sure whether she had any hair of her own.

“Azure needs you to cut off her hair,” repeated Indigo.

Tati frowned, setting down her tweezers and the boar-bristle brush she always used. “That’s rather drastic for a Saturday, don’t you think?”

“She needs it as a sacrifice so she can turn invisible,” said Indigo matter-of-factly.

“And why would a beautiful girl like you want to be invisible?”

I opened my mouth then quickly closed it. If I said it, I would make the reason I needed this power real. I knew there was danger in naming things. I treated the truth like a monster that could be summoned by speech alone.

“You know what I do every day?” asked Tati, smiling.

“Witchcraft,” said Indigo, a note of longing touching her voice.

“Of a kind, perhaps,” said Tati. “I preserve.”

“With hair,” I added, relieved that I didn’t have to explain why I wanted this magic so badly.

“With hair,” Tati repeated, nodding. “Hair has power. It helps us communicate to the outside world how we wish to be seen, or not be seen. It is a language of identity.”

Tati got up from her table and walked over to us.

“Look, sweetheart,” she said, placing her hands on my shoulders and turning me toward the wall.

A small mirror hung there, its borders decorated in elaborate curlicues of finely worked hair.

“If you cut off all your beautiful hair, you would be making a great sacrifice, but it’s a sacrifice of yourself,” said Tati. “You would be severing a part of you.”

A spot of cold opened behind my ribs. I ignored it. Maybe that was true, but I didn’t want this part of me. I stared straight into Tati’s face and felt the pressure of Jupiter’s fingertips on my bare shoulder.

“Please,” I said.

Tati sighed. “I’m not doing anything unless I’ve got your mother’s permission. Why don’t you ask her and then we’ll talk?”

But talking to my mother meant I had to go home. I’d left so quickly I didn’t have any of my things for school, but after spending the day hiding, I had no choice. I let the House relinquish me back into the cold. I could tell it didn’t want me to go. My foot caught on a trail of ivy poking out of the ground. The iron finial of the gate bit down on my scarf as I left.