The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(38)

Chapter Sixteen

The Bridegroom




Fairy tales often make demands of silence. Your lips must stay sealed. Even if you are standing on a pyre, knitting a shirt of thorns to break a spell for all your kin have turned to swans. Even if you are weak from childbirth and a maid replaces your babe—and there have been several since you became queen—with a rat. Even if you strike a bargain with the devil to offer the first thing you see and then return home to lock eyes with your only child.

We hear such tales, and we despise them. We point at loopholes, the lack of logic, sneer at the characters and their passiveness, yawn when some inevitable pain takes out the kindhearted girl, the last-born son, the fair-of-face fools we think we will never be. Our frustration is perhaps the point. These stories run on faith’s inexhaustible fumes, and what is faith but an unknowable tangle? To know and to believe seems the difference between fact and fantasy, and it may have stayed that way for me forever had I not glimpsed my brother in a rush of silver and a flash of wings.

Until that moment, my life had been about the collecting of knowledge. Now, the House of Dreams was tempting me with a different ending if only I would do its bidding. This new ending promised I would not find myself alone, that it would fill my coffers with gold and silver, cloak me in the raiment of a king, and win me the hand of a peerless princess.

Thus, like all the fair-of-face fools before me, I rejected my knowledge and I believed.



When Indigo opened the door to our hotel suite, I kissed her with a closed mouth so the secret could not wriggle past my teeth. I will free you, I thought. And I will find him.

But the question of Azure gnawed at me too. I was certain Indigo knew where she had gone, but to press my wife on the subject would be to throw my vow in her face. And though I was sure I’d break it eventually, I was determined to do so quietly.

I thought the only price would be Indigo’s fury. A fury I was convinced would be short-lived once she saw how I had freed her and how I loved her.

Indigo drew back from our kiss and sniffed the air. Perhaps she caught a whiff of the House’s bargain on me.

“What happened to you?” she asked, her gaze traveling to the blood spatter on my pants.

“A bird flew into a fan.”

“A starling?” she guessed.

I nodded.

“That’s quite the omen,” she said, stepping back to allow me to enter the room. She had not changed her clothes. Her coat was still buttoned, and she hadn’t removed her gloves.

“The Romans believed that starlings spoke for the gods,” I said.

“The future revealed in a murmuration of starlings,” said Indigo, raising her chin. “I already knew that.”

About a year ago, we had seen such a murmuration at the Aberystwyth Pier in Ceredigion, Wales. Hundreds upon hundreds of starlings took to the skies like a scream given shape, flexing and pulling, dimpling into valleys and strange peaks that towered over the sea. I had been so transfixed that it was only after the birds dispersed that I realized Indigo was crying. I could not ask her then, and I could not ask her now, but the question lived in me all the same:

What did you see?

“I’m drawing you a bath,” she said, heading toward the bathing suite. “I don’t have much of a desire to go out and eat, so I’ve placed an order with the kitchens.”

“Why did you leave me behind?”

The words hung in the air. We rarely spoke to each other so plainly. Indigo paused, her back to me.

“You clearly wanted to be alone,” she said. “Otherwise, why would you go to her room without me? I was merely giving you what you wanted.”

Ah, I thought. So this was how we would play.

“How do you know what I want?”

Indigo turned. Her lips slid over her teeth in the manner of a predator. It took me several seconds to understand that she was trying to smile. “Maybe I read it in an omen.”

I pointed at my blood-spattered clothes. “And what omen do you read on me now?”

Indigo’s smile briefly faltered. “Danger, certainly. Perhaps even death if you’re foolish.”

The light from the windows to my left slashed across her face, casting a shadow of prophecy over her words.

“Tati only has days left after all,” said Indigo, her voice light again. “Although, if you really wanted to be certain of the future, you could’ve brought the bird. We could have picked apart its liver and heart like true soothsayers.”

“Do you have a lot of experience looking into the future?”

Indigo stood beside the large clawfoot bathtub and turned on the faucet. It was difficult to hear her response over the rushing water.

“I used to. I even thought I knew the future. I was wrong.” She looked up at me, and her smile turned haughty, almost pitying. “Three years of marriage and all it takes is one afternoon in that House for you to look at me as if I’m a stranger. As if you don’t know me at all.”

“Whatever you have let me know of you, I have loved,” I said. “And still love.”

Indigo turned off the faucet. With her hand still gloved, she touched the surface. “Your bath is ready.”

I took off my clothes and stood before her. There were rusty smudges on my ankles. When I flexed my foot, the blood cracked. The heat of the water made me shiver. I sank into it anyway.