The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(25)

“Tati has a surprise for us!” she said, and I felt her smile in my bones. “I didn’t want us to look over the weekend because you know we would, but now we get to see it! Azure . . . Azure, why are you crying?”

Indigo came to me. I lifted my arms to hug her, but she held me apart. Her grip was stern:

“Stop crying,” she said, annoyed. “You know we don’t do that. You know They might be watching.”

They. The fae. The ones we sometimes tried to lure to us. The ones who let us see their magic, even if they never showed their faces.

“Tears are bits of your soul,” said Indigo, her face inches from mine. “We can’t risk letting them hit the ground.”

I lifted my hand to wipe them away as Indigo leaned forward: “What a waste.” Her tongue was hot and smooth as it darted out, tracing the curve of my cheekbone. She smacked her lips as she pulled back.

“C’mon,” she said, turning on her heel.

I followed her, so ecstatic at what I felt had been a near brush with exile that I never paused to wonder why she had taken my tears for herself. In the stories we read, tears were no less precious than a god’s golden blood. I should have told Indigo they were not hers to take. But I would’ve offered anything to follow her anywhere.



The Otherworld.

That was what we named our gift from Tati, though we never considered it as something so ordinary as a “present.” It had been meant for us.

It had always been meant for us.

Destiny shifted into place the moment we walked down the stairs of the back balcony and onto the vast acreage of Indigo’s estate. The gardens had been modeled after a French palace somewhere I had never heard of, and from lawn level the sea was nothing but a flash of silver hundreds of feet away, nearly obscured by the thick row of linden trees that marked the land’s slow melt into the surrounding water.

Today, the grounds were empty. No gardeners pruned the trellis of roses arced over the stone-step pathway we often took to play in the creek. No staff member raced back to the house carrying platters of cut peonies and violets for the sitting rooms. The October wind stirred our hair, nipped gently at our ears.

“This way,” said Indigo, her voice effervescent with excitement.

A tapping sound made me turn my head. Tati stared down at us through the windows of the sitting room. Her smile was wide, and she made a happy shooing motion with her hand. I waved at her, and she blew me a kiss. I caught her kiss and held it to my cheek.

“Tati isn’t coming?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said Indigo, skipping ahead down the path. Light dappled her hair, and when she reached for my hand, my heartbeat had never seemed so loud. “It’s our gift. She said so. She said it was intended for us, so I made Tati swear that whatever it was she’d never trespass.” Indigo stilled, turning to me as her voice took on an air of prophecy. “It’s not for her to see. Other people wouldn’t understand, Azure. Their eyes wouldn’t be able to take it.”

We usually never walked farther than the creek. As far as I knew, there was nothing out there except the remains of a mill that had burned down in the 1700s, and whose giant stones had served as temple ruins and sacrificial altars when we were younger. The mill was surrounded by a high stone wall. From the House it was nearly invisible, hidden behind the tall cypress and spruces lining the lawns. After a worker broke their ankle clearing the place of rocks a few years ago, Tati forbade us from playing there. It was a rule we had agreed to follow in return for access to all her old costumes.

Indigo tugged me farther down the path until we stood before the gate of the mill. It had changed. It was no longer a skeleton of stones but something tall and ornate, wrought of iron with panels of stained glass in every shade of blue. Salt from the nearby sea stung my nose. From here, I could no longer see the House of Dreams. We’d been released somewhere feral and far outside the world we knew.

Indigo reached for my hand, placed something warm and fluttering in my palm.

“Look,” said Indigo, her eyes aglow. “Tati had a blacksmith make them for us.”

I looked down to see a pair of starlings. Each iridescent feather iron-cast with a beveled ruby jewel for one eye and a winking sapphire for the other. I could have sworn they breathed, the feathers rustling in the wind, and even before I realized they were keys, I knew they had unlocked magic, drawing into focus the wonders we’d long glimpsed out the corners of our eyes.

Indigo took the key with the blue eye, and a fine silver chain unraveled from the starling’s mouth. “This way!”

She slid the key into the padlock of the new gate. It sighed as it swung open, and for the first time we beheld our Otherworld. We stepped across the threshold hand in hand, and I felt the slightest resistance in the air, the breaking of the thinnest of membranes. When I looked down, my arms were damp, christened by an unearthly dew.

The light had an opaque quality as if—only here, in this place—we might card it from the air like wool, drape it over our bodies. An inhuman music reached me: the wet unraveling of apple blossoms and the delicate, percussive dance of a line of ants as they threaded through the oak leaves. Gone was that savory autumn smell of bruised leaves and rained-upon cement. It had been replaced with something rare and distilled, a perfect chord of music dissolved in honey and poured liberally over the ground.