The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(26)

“Do you feel that?” asked Indigo, looking at me.

I nodded.

The millstones were gone, re-formed into a high turret the color of thunderclouds. Beside the turret stretched an old oak, flanked by silver firs and red alders, scraggly apple trees, and a lonely willow, its branches languidly drifting in the creek that hugged part of our small kingdom. The land was roughly a half acre sectioned off from Indigo’s property by the rock wall, bursting with deer and sword ferns, fairy bells and pink columbine, dog’s tooth violets and hyacinths.

From that moment on, we stopped playing games in which we looked for the Otherworld, and instead, we went to it directly. It was our responsibility, and Indigo and I took our role as guardians seriously. Now that we knew where it was, it felt wrong to exploit it. We left out dishes of milk for the solitary fae, threw raw meat for the selkie in the streams. But we no longer tried to summon them. We didn’t want to force magic’s hand.

Instead, we tried to be worthy of it.

We were educated the way monarchs might be, fed on a steady diet of history and poetry, dance, and music, all the graces that might serve us in the realm we were meant to rule. But what we were most fascinated with, the one thing that held us in constant thrall and swayed from hubris and humility depending on the time of day, was, of course, ourselves.

Why had the Otherworld revealed itself to us?

Why had magic curled about our feet?

Who were we?

Soon, we were fifteen years old. The air smelled of heartbroken daffodils crushed by April’s rain, but it was still cold enough that we dragged blankets from the House to our Otherworld and lay bundled on the turret roof. We did this most evenings after school, which seemed less like a place and more like a penance. In those halls, we moved like ghosts and existed only to each other. I thought we were invisible, but as I would find out, Time was not the only thing that watched us.

“Maybe we’re exiles,” Indigo mused.

“Oh.”

I didn’t like the idea that I had been thrown out of something, but I was comforted by the thought that at least we’d been thrown out together.

“Supernatural beings cursed to a mortal life,” said Indigo. “Like this life is one grand test and if we grow up wrong, then we’ll end up as Cast-Out Susans.”

Her mouth pinched at the idea. That week, Indigo and I had finished rereading the Chronicles of Narnia and were once again obsessed with Susan Pevensie. A queen locked out of the realm she’d once ruled, exiled for the crime of growing up.

Susan Pevensie was our nightmare.

“We’re not going to end up like that,” said Indigo, curling her fist beneath her chin and closing her eyes. “I’m not worried.”

But I was.

I pictured my mother as she had once been—burning and bright—before she began to collapse. My mother had given me little of herself. Not her mouth or her height or her laugh, and I was terrified that of all the things she hadn’t passed down it would be this slow unrecognizableness that I inherited, like a vicious disease that would eat me from the inside out.

“Let’s look into the future,” I said.

Indigo blinked open one eye. “Why?”

“Just to be sure.”

She looked at me, waiting for me to elaborate. I said nothing. The branches scratched, catlike and curious, against the walls of the turret.

“All right, fine,” said Indigo.

It turned out there were thousands of ways to divine the future. There was aruspicina, alomancy, daphnomancy, gelescopy, ceraunoscopy; the examination of entrails, the study of a trail of salt, the divine hidden in the smoke of burning laurel leaves, hints of the future layered in the cadence of someone’s laughter, the revelation of time through a pattern of lightning.

I didn’t want to kill something. The salt merely blew in the wind. We couldn’t find any laurel leaves. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be looking for in someone’s laugh, and the lightning disappeared too quickly.

For two weeks, which seemed interminably long to us, I tried everything I could think of.

“Boiling the shoulder blades of donkeys and reading the fissures of their bones?” read Indigo aloud from my research notebook.

She laughed. I wanted to laugh too. But soon the spring would ripen and end, and we were growing too fast, and there were days when my mom summoned me home to her and Jupiter, and I didn’t have a choice except to lie there and listen to them scream and pant through the wall we shared. I looked out over the jagged edge of the turret and beheld the Otherworld. This was our realm of honeyed light and apple blossoms, a place so steeped in wonder that if we were to plant a sonnet in the shade of the oak, we might return the next day to find it had become a tree that grew poem-plums and all who ate of it would speak sweetly.

I imagined being shut out of it, unable to cross the bridge, and I began to cry.

“Azure?” said Indigo, reaching for me.

I didn’t know how to share my fears with her, and I didn’t have to: Indigo knew. Of course she knew.

“There’s no need to worry about the future,” she said. “I’ve already seen it.”

“You have? What happens next?”

She wrapped her arms around me. “This is our home forever, Azure. One day, our bones will go in the ground and our soul will wriggle into the House of Dreams and we can grow ballrooms on Sundays, eat shadows for dinner . . . we can do whatever we want.”