The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(57)

I needed to forget.

I needed to go back.

As I fell asleep, I thought I felt Tati’s hand on my shoulder, her voice threadbare: “Where is Indigo taking you?”



When we returned to the House, Tati led me to her studio. She patted the walls, and the House gurgled happily. Inside her workspace, her current project was incomplete. A skein of hair lay tugged across her workbench alongside a pair of blue gloves and a bottle of bleach. She bent down, rummaging through her drawers before pulling out the same gold box I remembered.

“You know,” said Tati, “change is the great blessing of mortals. Creatures of the Otherworld are always bound by something—moonlight, iron, running water. But the only thing that can act on humans is time. We are not lovely and static. We are ever-changing, vast as seasons. We are meant to change. Do you understand, Azure?”

Tati’s words reached me warily, like a lynx’s paw testing a frozen pond before bounding across it. But I’d seen what hid in the water: my mother’s hollow eyes, the static of a television screen, a world empty of apple blossoms.

I understood perfectly.



Indigo loved my idea.

She held the jar of teeth in her fingers and rattled it gently before unscrewing the lid and looking inside. I thought they’d have a smell, an echo of meat and marrow like stale dog treats, but they were scentless. Indigo poured some into her hand. The teeth were the milky color of petrified memory.

“These have so much power,” said Indigo. “We’ll bury them around the Otherworld, and the memories will go back into the ground and it won’t be mad at you anymore. We’ll start over.”

She traced a circle on the skin beneath my clavicles.

“Like closing all the gaps so nothing can get in,” she said softly. “No one will get that close to us again, and if they do, we’ll make sure they can never look upon our world.”



We planted the teeth on a full moon, our starling keys dangling from our necks. We dug into the cold earth with our fingers until our nails bore crescents of grime. Over each tooth, we whispered our names and they fell like blue pins, anchoring us to the dirt—

Indigo and Azure.

Indigo and Azure.

Indigo and Azure.

As we spoke our names, our voices climbed in a crescendo, the syllables a spiral of blue. I understood how a pair of words can turn to prayer, plea, or prophecy. I could not tell which one we had become.

All I knew was that together we were greater than ourselves. Together we were boundless, oceanic. Together, we commanded the heft of a planet.

We were impossible to outrun.



In the weeks that followed, a different magic took root in me. Our Otherworld no longer snarled with winter thunderstorms, the vines did not grasp at my ankles, and the winter pansies blinked back to life. These were the days where I was able to ignore the siren song of the outside world. I knew that if I stayed here long enough then that restless, loose-tooth discomfort would settle on its own.

One evening, Tati found us in the parlor, lying on our bellies, stringing together a long rope of marigolds and carnations to make a canopy of springtime for our bed. I kept pricking my hand, which made Indigo wince in pain.

“Indigo,” said Tati, appearing in the doorway. She had drawn her wrap tightly around her shoulders. I’d never heard her voice sound like that—urgent and low, simmering. “I need to speak with you.”

Tati clutched a crumpled piece of paper in her fist. In the seconds before Indigo turned around, I was struck by how startlingly pretty she was: lissome and golden, her skin glazed by the firelight and so delicate-looking you could scratch her with a thought.

And then she turned.

All that softness resolved to stone. I could see a choice glitter in her eyes. Of what, I didn’t know.

“I’ll just be a second,” said Indigo.

I watched her dust the rose petals from her long, white nightgown before they left me alone by the fire. I turned onto my back and continued weaving flowers into a garland. The floor was warm, and my stomach was full of Mrs. Revand’s homemade pasta. All around me, the world was opulent with warmth and the frail satin of petals, and soon, my eyes closed.

But not for long.

A scream woke me, loud and deep. Ancient. I sat up, flowers falling from my face. The fire had gone out, and a cold, silver haze hung over the parlor.

“Tati?” I called. “Indigo?”

I ran down the hall and felt the House panic and vibrate, the halls lengthening as if it wished to put some distance between itself and the awful sound. I stopped at the base of the stairs. On the landing, a creature writhed and squirmed. The moonlight striped across it, revealing the hump of a hip, the elbow bend of a pale, outflung arm. I crept up the stairs and saw a black veil pulled over the figure’s face. One bony hand stretched out while the other clawed at its face—

“Help.”

The House recognized the voice and threw light over the body. Tati, I realized, and my fear melted away. The veil was nothing more than her headscarf come undone. An acrid, ammoniac smell filled my nose. Tati moaned, slowly tugging at the black cloth on her face. I reached out for her. At my touch, she scuttled back like an animal. I didn’t like that I flinched from her.

“It’s me,” I said.

The cloth molded to her face as she sucked in her breath. In, out, in, out. Like she didn’t quite believe me.