The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(54)

I heard the knives in Indigo’s voice. I could see her kneeling in the dirt, pushing mounds of earth and worms over a body whose shape I did not recognize. The room shimmered.

“Where—” I tried to say.

Hippolyta interrupted me. “Shh!” she said. “I already told him!” Her sightless eyes focused somewhere near my face. “The Otherworld kept all from me, and to see you need a key. Indigo wanted a blue-eyed starling and Azure wanted a red, and if I’d never stopped to look then nobody would be dead!”

The Otherworld. That dark turret in the distance.

“Is that where she is? In the Otherworld?” I was close enough to Hippolyta’s bedside that I could smell her breath. “How do I get the key to the Otherworld?”

Her body convulsed. She threw back her head and laughed. The machines she was wired to startled alive and began to wail. The door to Hippolyta’s room was thrown open. A small knot of doctors, nurses, and attendants stormed inside.

“Step aside, sir—” said a brusque voice.

“No, she needs to tell me more, I—”

A physician shouldered past me. My arm knocked into the bedside table and my hands closed around a bottle of sedatives. The machines tethered to Hippolyta’s veins and lungs screeched.

“Sir, get away, now.”

I stumbled away, my head ringing. Outside Hippolyta’s room, I was met with Indigo’s dark silhouette, her smell of apples and honey. A nurse with light skin and pale-green scrubs was speaking to her in hushed tones:

“—not make it through the night, so perhaps you and your husband should stay here to say your goodbyes?” The nurse’s smile was efficiently pitiful. “I’ll leave you two to talk.”

When I looked at Indigo, I could still hear her lilting voice.

Oh, Catskins. Why aren’t you dead yet?

And yet my Indigo possessed an inexorable pull, a trick of turning one solid and visible with a single glance. I’ve never pretended at bravery, and so I let all that was weak within me wish that I’d never heard her say those words. That we could return to who we had been two days ago. If I had any magic, I would’ve used it for that very purpose.

But I was a mere mortal.

At first, Indigo smiled at the sight of me. Then her gaze dropped to my dusty pants, my shoes. Her eyes flicked to my hair. She looked as if she’d been set into glass. When she smiled, I saw that some of her lipstick had caught on her canines, turning them bloodstained.

“Where have you been wandering, my darling?”





Chapter Twenty-Three

Azure




You know that feeling of a loose tooth? The way your tongue seeks out the carrion tang of your own mouth, the disgust and wonder that a part of you is breaking down, that one day you will hold a shard of yourself . . . that was what I had become.

As children, Indigo and I learned that teeth were powerful things and the tooth fairy was little more than a common thief.

We were eleven years old, sitting in the kitchens on a bright summer day, eating from a tub of rum raisin ice cream—Tati’s favorite flavor—and since it was the only ice cream left in the fridge at the time, it was ours too. Tati had come down from her studio. I rose on my heels to greet her, opened my mouth, and wiggled my loose canine for her.

“I think it’s going to come out today!” I said. “And I’m going to leave it under my pillow for the tooth fairy!”

“We’ve been pulling on it all day,” added Indigo.

“The tooth fairy is horrifically cheap,” Tati scoffed.

This was not my first loose tooth, but when I’d left the previous ones under my pillow, no one had come for them. No one had wanted them. I looked down now, my face burning. Tati tipped up my chin. I loved how she always smelled of burning things. I wanted to warm myself on her smile.

“Teeth are memory and therefore precious, and worth far more than a dollar,” she said, smiling and tapping her incisor. “Did you know that once upon a time, the Vikings used to pay children for their teeth? It was said to bring good luck in battle. Other people burned their baby teeth, hoping it would save them from hardship in life.”

Indigo scrunched her face. “Why baby teeth?”

“Because they’re your milk teeth,” said Tati. “They’ve documented you before the world could leave its mark, and above all things, they remember.”

When Tati said that, my mouth ached in mourning.

“I keep all of Indigo’s baby teeth in a jar,” said Tati.

“You do?” we said at the same time.

Tati smiled and nodded. “Baby teeth make beautiful art. Queen Victoria wore an emerald thistle tooth pendant fixed with one of her children’s teeth. She did the same with a pair of amethyst earrings too. One day, I’ll make something for you both.”

“Me too?” I’d asked, folding my hands in my lap so I did not look too grasping.

“If you’ll let me,” said Tati, and the warmth in her voice was like a furnace on my skin.

When my tooth fell out a few days later, I gave it to Tati. She kissed my forehead and made a big show of placing it in a tiny velvet bag, which went into a gold-filigreed box that lived on the highest shelf of her studio. I’d almost forgotten that moment. I wondered if the tooth had kept the recollection all to itself.