The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(59)

Eventually, Mrs. Revand opened the door to a guest room covered in faded wallpaper, with nothing but slits in the wall to serve as windows. The air smelled neglected and powdery. The beds were stripped, the mattresses stained. An en suite bathroom boasted a bronze tub shaped like a halved egg.

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Revand said. “If I had more notice, I could have had the rooms properly aired out, but Miss Indigo said you only need them for changing. I’ll have the master guest suite ready for your stay tonight.”

My eye was drawn to a side table between the two beds. It had golden pin legs and a deep green marble circle. Three corvid skulls sat atop it alongside a glass vase holding dried flowers and raven feathers.

“You’ll never leave, you know,” said Mrs. Revand, smiling. “I can tell the House likes you. And when the House likes someone, it keeps them forever.”

“Did the House like Azure?”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Revand, fluffing an errant pillow. “It loved her even more than Indigo, though I’ll never tell her that. Indigo was born to this grandeur. But the House chose Azure.”

“And did the House keep her forever?” I asked.

Is she sleeping under the floor in a plastic bag? Is she in its hearth, in a thousand pieces?

Mrs. Revand laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve never looked too closely. The House loves me, too, you know, so I never stay overnight. It might get ideas.”

She patted the footboard of the bed as if it were an unruly dog and, with a final, gentle smile, closed the door behind her.

I was left alone with the shadows and the dwindling hours. I considered what I had been told. Hippolyta said the girls had a key to the Otherworld. I could just as easily try to climb its gate, but what if the key opened something else? What if it held a message?

“Where would she have hidden it?”

My eye kept returning to the corvid skulls, their gaping ovals and yellowing ridges. The longer I looked, the more certain I was of where the keys might be hidden. I thought of Indigo’s second favorite place, the walls lined with the blank faces of creatures who could say nothing of what they’d seen. The Room of Secrets.

Light dappled across my feet as if in answer. Only Indigo knew for sure, and though she kept her secrets close, there was one thing I knew she could not resist: a game.

The House seemed to purr in response and then the room disappeared. I could not tell if it was trying to reward me. If so, its kindness and cruelty wore the same face.

Look close, it insisted. Look now.

Another truth: folded up so tightly it lengthened and took shape in blips and blurs.

It was the day before my brother and I entered the cedar armoire to look for Faerie.

It was autumn, and the world was gold and woodsmoke. Mother had not made dinner, and my brother and I pretended we were pirates on a long sea voyage forced to quell the grumbles in our bellies with saltines. I told him they were precious hardtack. I lingered in that memory and conjured what I knew. Mother was sweet and playful; she must have been distracted or too busy pretending to be a deep-sea leviathan stalking us from behind the couches to make dinner.

No, said the House of Dreams. Look again.

Mother was slumped over the kitchen table, a lit cigarette smoldering to ash in a teacup. She screamed at us when we woke her. She was the leviathan in the deep, that which had to be maneuvered around.

Father came home early. My brother and I were laughing because he had sneezed like an elephant. Our father wanted to join in on our fun. He was pretending to be another pirate. He ran at us. “What’s so funny?” he boomed. High, golden laughter, deer-black eyes, legs twisting—

Look again, said the House.

I was on the floor. A knee was on my chest. My brother cried and began to cough, his face paling. My mother rose from the table, annoyed, grabbed my brother’s inhaler from inside one of the dark-brown cabinets. She threw it at his feet. She did not look at me as she retreated into the dark.

“Why are you laughing at me?” said my father. “You think it’s funny that I work all day to put food on the table—”

We were only play wrestling, a lion and its cub, our foyer a vast Serengeti—

No, said the House.

I opened my eyes. A wall of a thousand thorns surrounded the secret inside me. The thin gauze I stretched over my childhood ripped, and in the holes, I saw what I had not forgotten but willfully misplaced. I knew why we had to run.

But where did he run to?

One might think this knowledge would lay waste to me. But I had years of practice when it came to avoiding what I knew, and so I held it away from me, to feel at a later time. A time that, if I did not play this game correctly, might never come to pass.





Chapter Twenty-Five

Azure




In the days following Tati’s injury, I struggled to process the truth of it, to call it an “accident,” though it never sat right in my heart. I would find myself repeating everything the doctors had said—she worked late in the night, she was getting older, she was confused.

She must have slipped and fallen in her studio and a bottle of bleach fell into her eyes and blinded her. She must have hit her head for that skull fracture. She must have, for now she was concussed, so confused, and she would never be the same.

Indigo had a few weeks left before she officially aged into her trust, but she took over the household responsibilities when Tati returned from the hospital. For the first week, there was no silence to be found. Workers moved through the House, rearranging furniture, cushioning all the edges. Tati’s workshop was sealed, her inventory emptied, her commissions delivered in whatever state she had left them.