The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(27)

I laughed. My whole heart was warm because she hadn’t said “souls” but “soul.” Just the one. Indigo twined her fingers through my hair, and her voice cut through the wind: “Nothing matters except us. Nothing is even real on the other side. You know that.”

I smiled.

“We’ll be here forever,” said Indigo. “I swear it.”





Chapter Twelve

The Bridegroom




If you combed through enough fairy tales, untangled their roots, and shook out their branches, you would find that they are infested with oaths. Oaths are brittle things, not unlike an egg. Though they go by different names depending on the myth—troths and geis, vows and tynged—there is one thing they all share: they must be broken for there to be a story. Only a shattered promise yields a rich, glittering yolk of a tale.

I could feel the promise I had kept for so long, tipping back and forth on the ledge of my own conviction. Promise me you will not pry. Can you live with that?

I am trying, I wanted to say. Truly, I am.

But when I blinked, I saw Hippolyta’s glowing teeth as she laughed: You say she loves you, but what is she anyway?

What was Indigo? She was my bride, and she was my love, but there was something of the inhuman that clung to her. A grace and indifference that struck me as alluring one moment and alien the next.



Two years ago, while I was in the middle of translating a thirteenth-century Breton lai, a lyric poem popularized in medieval France, I became fascinated with oaths and broken promises. I carefully selected each poem so that I might examine the gaps in a story, the details dropped in favor of others. For what is said is not nearly as interesting as what is held back.

My research led me to Wales, and the timing happened to coincide with our second wedding anniversary. Indigo had planned a surprise for us, and thus I found myself in a castle she had bought out for the occasion in the town of Merthyr Tydfil, a place nestled amidst auburn hills and twisting trees, babbling streams and boulders that once knew the heavy tread of a Roman soldier’s boot.

“Sometimes, I can’t believe you’re real,” I said.

Indigo smiled. “Who said that I am?”

We were in the topmost room of the castle, lying in a carved four-poster bed made of wood so dark and glossy it looked wet. A heavy red canopy draped over us. Tapestries of bulging-eyed horses and bears danced on the walls, and outside the narrow windows, rain slicked the countryside.

“True,” I allowed. “Like Blodeuedd. Have I told you the tale of the flower bride?”

“No,” said Indigo with mock hurt. “You have not.”

I wrapped my arms around her, resting my chin on top of her cool, silky head. “Once upon a time, there was a hero who was placed under a curse by his own mother that he might never take a human wife. For many years, he was lonely. In the early evenings, he went on long walks just to see his shadow stretched out so long before him that it seemed to belong to someone else entirely.

“Fortunately, the man was not alone, and a pair of great magicians found a way around the curse. They gathered flowers of broom and meadowsweet and oak, and from this, they fashioned a woman of extraordinary beauty and named her Blodeuedd, or ‘Flower-Faced,’ and gave her as a bride to the lonely hero so that, finally, he had a wife of his own.”

“She was made for him,” said Indigo, walking her fingers up and down my chest. “Crafted for him just so despite his curse.”

I smiled. “Curses are made to be broken. They aren’t so static as one might think.”

“He never broke his mother’s curse.”

“No?”

“No,” said Indigo, her smile sly and lupine. “He couldn’t have a human wife, so he was given a bride of flowers. His flower bride was never real at all, but he didn’t care because she had been made to please him.”

There was more to the tale of Blodeuedd—it ended unhappily, as so many of these tales do—but I had to leave for my lecture, and so I was gone from her side that whole day. By the time I returned, I had almost forgotten the story. Indigo had not though. That night, I found the castle cold and silent, the table set with food, silverware, and thick, flickering candles.

“Hello?” I called out.

No one answered.

I made my way up the narrow stone steps and into the bedroom with its vaulted ceiling. There, Indigo greeted me from a bed thick with flowers—rose petals, hibiscus whorls, meadowsweet, and broom. She greeted me shyly, eyes warm, a marigold perched in the curve of her neck.

Indigo had never looked more beautiful to me than she did in that moment. It wasn’t her features—though they had always been lovely—it was the way she molded the atmosphere of the room. She looked like the nostalgia that settles in your ribs at the end of a story you have never read, yet nevertheless know.

In the dark sheaf of her hair, I saw the forest floors where wolves stalked milk-skinned maidens. In the hollow of her neck, I saw the light of precious jewels kept safe in the stinking jaws of a slumbering sea monster. In her parted lips, I glimpsed something that—in my own unpracticed, sloppy awe—struck me as holy. For a moment, I saw a window and not my wife. When I walked to her, it was like peering straight into something primordial and desperate, where the inscrutable space between stars had once birthed myths and gods, built palaces of story and scripture in which human doubts found a place to rest their weary brows.