The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(51)

I looked over and saw a boy. He was my age and rumpled, with light-brown hair and a wide grin. He wore a red flannel shirt rolled to his elbows and on his wiry, pale forearms I saw the smudges of words written in ballpoint pen.

“Indigo, right?” he asked, strolling toward me.

“You’ve got the wrong girl,” I said, summoning Indigo’s wry smile. “I don’t know you.”

I tried to move past him. He reached out and caught my hand.

“But I do,” he said. “I’m sorry I got your name wrong, but I do know you.” His words tripped in their haste to reach me. “You always come on the weekends with your sister. You’re the one who dances. You close your eyes when you like a song. You lick your teeth after a set like you ate the music.” He blushed. “I know because I’ve noticed. I noticed you.”

His name, I learned, was Lyric. His too-long arms were covered in song notes, as if all he wished for in life was to be set to music. I studied the elfin point of his chin and the honeyed clumsiness of his smile. This was the most beautiful he would ever be, and he was offering all of it to me.

I’d always wondered why the sailors in the myths can’t resist the sirens’ call. Why they let themselves drown if only to be close to them. Indigo said the song was so beautiful they couldn’t help it, but I think it was more than that. Lyric showed me that a siren’s song was about more than music; it was a slant of light, and in its glow, I was drawn into resplendent focus.

“I’m Azure,” I said, smiling.



For the next two weeks, I comforted myself with the knowledge that whatever I felt, Indigo must too. After the night we met, Lyric took me to see a loud action movie and I drank sugary, fizzing soda, my fingers sticky with butter and popcorn, and when he kissed me, he tasted like salt and caramel. His kiss turned me drowsy and frayed, a ribbon held over an open flame.

A few days after that, I went to hear his show and his eyes clasped on mine. You’re my favorite blue, he sang, and I knew he sang to me. For me. Me, singular. Me, alone. The thought, which had felt so treacherous before, had been gentled, tamed by the coaxing pressure of Lyric’s soft mouth and softer kisses.

“I want you, Azure,” he whispered one night, and a need awoke within me.

Maybe he shouldn’t have said my name. Maybe the sound of it on foreign lips stirred my starling key to life and it flew to warn Indigo while I slept. Maybe that was the reason she returned early, for when I woke the next morning, I felt a shadow pass over me and I blinked to see Indigo standing at the foot of the bed. Her hair was greasy at the roots, the strands frizzed and sticking to a herringbone wool coat two sizes too big for her. She smiled with all her teeth when our eyes met.

“You’re home?” I said.

I waited for my heart to sag in relief. Instead, I felt a stab of irritation. I mourned the hours spent alone, or better yet, with Lyric.

“I hated being away from you,” said Indigo, drawing her arms around me, burying her warm face in my neck, and turning my irritation into shame. I was a fool. “Let’s go to the Otherworld. I can barely breathe when I’m away from it. I know it was difficult for you, too, I could feel it.”

But in this, she was wrong, and that truth was a blade cutting straight through my doubts. Indigo had once said that my fears were a test of some kind. What if she was wrong about that too?

Indigo hummed as I trailed after her in the cold. I tried to numb myself to the whip of the icy wind, convinced that if my teeth chattered, it meant that I deserved the pain. At the gated entrance, we took out our keys, and I held my breath as the gate swung open.

My eyes flicked over the stately turret, the harsh lines of the oak branches, the veins of ice and silver along the apple trees. The Otherworld I had known was transformed, but it was no longer wholly unfamiliar.

“It’s not destroyed,” I said.

If anything, it seemed refocused, reshaped by the light of a truth I had come to understand, the glow of which now revealed pieces I hadn’t noticed before—snowdrops glistening like tears, moon-pale winter pansies crowding a boulder, holly berries bright as blood spray. There was a solemnity to the place. Winter had woven a hymn, and I had been too distracted to hear it.

Indigo laughed. “Why would the Otherworld be destroyed?”

“Because . . . because I think you’re wrong about us,” I said. As each word left my mouth, I felt lighter. “Last time we were here, I thought something was wrong with me for thinking that maybe we’re not the same soul. But now I know that’s true, and the Otherworld hasn’t collapsed. It’s still here. It’s still beautiful.”

Indigo did not move. A cloud passed over the sun, leaching the gold from her skin. She looked like a statue carved from granite and when she spoke, her voice came out graveled. “What are you saying, Azure?”

I reached for her hand and tried not to shudder at the cold of her. “Maybe we’re exiled fae sisters . . . maybe we’re made from the same moonlight, but we don’t have to share the same soul, Indigo—”

“Of course we do,” she said.

“But you didn’t feel it all week, did you?”

“What are you talking about? Feel what?”

“Him,” I said, and my hand went to my heart. Indigo’s gaze narrowed at the gesture. “Lyric. I met someone who wants me.”