The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(24)

I tried not to stare at Indigo during those swims. I couldn’t help it though. I wanted the water to lap at new, secret parts of me too. I wanted to emerge from it smelling like something other than pond scrim. But I was as scentless and hairless as a rock.

Every time we dried ourselves and lay down in the grass, I watched for new gaps between us. I waited for her fingers to flinch away from mine, for her eyes to drift sideways while I spoke, for a yawn to be stifled, but all was the same.

Until the day before fall break.

I woke beside Indigo that Friday. Her eyes were bright and her hair—recently cut to match my own collarbone-grazing length—still damp and spreading puddles on my pillow.

“Time to go to school,” she said.

“But you’re not dressed?”

“I’m not going,” said Indigo. “But you are.”

She tugged me upright, and I tasted panic on my tongue. “Go to school without you?”

Indigo beamed, nodding. I stared at her. We’d never willingly been apart. I didn’t understand. My clothes bruised as I shrugged them on.

I studied Indigo out the corner of my eye, trying to figure out what I might have done wrong. Had I said something in my sleep? How had I offended? Why was she banishing me?

Indigo finger-combed her damp hair, feet tucked beneath her on the bed. She had changed from her set of night-sky pajamas to a thin shift that turned translucent in the autumn light. The trees outside her bedroom window burned scarlet. I felt that color sear through me as if it were an inferno consuming all that I had known and come to love.

“Go on, Azure,” she said, smiling and pointing her chin to the door.

I walked to the door.

“Wait!” said Indigo, her voice warm and playful. She sprang from the bed, ran to me, and kissed my cheek. “Okay now go. Go, go, go.”

I could barely put my feet on those stairs. Was that her goodbye? A fond kiss? I touched the walls of the House. It was cool and silent, too early for it to be awake and thus as mute as any ordinary structure. The staff bustled around me, and I tried not to cry. What if I never returned?

A wreath of berries and gold-foiled branches had been netted over the chandelier in the main foyer. The smell of caramel and cardamom wafted through the House, and I couldn’t move. What if the House could turn me into a statue? Then I’d never have to leave. A loud rumbling echoed from somewhere on the grounds. I froze, leaning over the handrail as Mrs. Revand made a tut-tutting sound.

“Don’t mind that, sweetheart,” she said with a wide smile. “It’s not for you to see.”

The words landed like a slap. I was a guest who had outstayed their welcome. I stared at Mrs. Revand—warm, plum-shaped with henna-dyed hair, crepe-paper skin. She used to praise me for my nice manners, now all that praise looked like pity.

I fled.



The day was a blur without Indigo. I moved like a shorn thing through the halls at school. With every hour that slid by, my fears gained weight and sharpness, hunting me all the way home. Without Indigo, colors bled from the trees. I breathed and tasted only petrol and woodsmoke where the day before I smelled windfall apples and frost.

When I reached Jupiter’s house, I decided on a plan. I would change my clothes and return to the House of Dreams. I would ask Indigo’s forgiveness for whatever I had done wrong—

“Indigo called,” my mother announced the moment I stepped through the door.

Indigo never called. She’d never even been to Jupiter’s place. I used to ask her before our tithe of magic had given me the power to get through those evenings alone. I didn’t even know she had the landline number. My mother’s face was blank, bored, and betrayed nothing. That, at least, was familiar.

“Well, technically Hippolyta Maxwell-Caste?ada”—my mother theatrically deepened her voice at this—“called on Indigo’s behalf.” She paused, eyebrows raised. “They asked that you not trouble yourself to come over for the weekend and said they’ll see you on Monday.”

“What?” I repeated.

“Their words,” said my mother, lifting her shoulder. But her grin was savage. “What’d I tell you? That family will burn straight through you. Now that you’re older, she’s probably getting bored—”

My mother paused. I didn’t know what she saw in my face, but her grin vanished. She shook her head as if remembering where she was, and then stepped toward me. Her hand raised for an instant, only to fall back to her hip.

“Maybe you don’t see it now, but this is a good thing, Azure.”

Her eyes met mine. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother had looked at me so directly. I felt it like a touch, and I shuddered.

“If she kept you around, she would break you into little pieces,” she said. “You’d never be able to put yourself back together. I’ve seen her type before. Trust me.”

But trust was all I had, and it was not my mother who held it. The details of that weekend escaped me—bland mounds of rice, thimblefuls of water, hours lost in the shower waiting for my fingers to prune. I registered those days without Indigo as a single held breath, the release of which came only as I made my way to the House of Dreams on Monday morning.

I rehearsed my apologies and clenched my fists. The fifteen-minute walk from Jupiter’s gravel driveway to the oak-and-alder-shaded sidewalks of Indigo’s estate stretched out for a century. But then, soon enough, there she was: Indigo. A silhouette transposed, the world around her soft with shadows. She wore knee-high green crocodile boots, a high-necked black lace dress beneath a silk robe carelessly belted at the waist.