The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(61)

“Let’s go to the Otherworld,” said Indigo, grabbing my hand. “I want to start planning my birthday.”



Spring had begun to trace a warm finger along the branches of the thundercloud plum and empress trees, though the apple blossom buds were still pressed tight as pursed mouths. Around the great oak, the daffodils remained hard and green. And deep in my chest, in the place where I wanted to believe Indigo most, an icy knot of doubt refused to thaw.

I tried to ignore it, even though I could feel it growing, unspooling threads of frost that haunted every movement. Maybe I had let it get out of control. Maybe it had entwined with my veins, and that’s how I found myself a few days before Indigo’s birthday, alone, and inside her bedroom.

The House had been lulled to sleep by afternoon fires in the parlor. Indigo was taking a meeting in the Camera Secretum, and Mrs. Revand was bathing Tati with the nurse they’d hired. I was supposed to be catching up on schoolwork. Instead, I ran my hands along Indigo’s dresser. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, all I knew was that there was something she didn’t wish me to see.

In the first drawer, I found silk camisoles and black panties, hair ties scrunched to one side, and Tati’s favorite polka-dotted headscarf, which Indigo had once complained about Tati wearing too often. The second drawer smelled sickly sweet, like over-ripened fruit. There was nothing inside except Indigo’s blank canvas papers and the neat cedar boxes that held her pastels.

At the back of the drawer lay something crumpled. I picked it up. It had an odd smell, like mushrooms. I unfolded it carefully.

It was a torn corner of canvas paper bearing Indigo’s precise, slanting handwriting—

all of glass

I turned it over.

But that was it. I crumpled it back up and tossed it inside the second drawer. The third drawer was darker, deeper. I plunged my hands to the back, seeking out the feel of cloth only for something sharp to slide across my palm. I winced as I drew out a dull blue razor.

It was so ordinary . . . the kind you bought at grocery stores. I picked it up and saw bits of hair caught in its teeth. I knew it wasn’t mine. My razor was pink and lived in the toiletry bag where I kept all my things.

Indigo had mocked me for shaving my legs. She called it a slippery mortal habit, one that we shouldn’t indulge because we were of the fae and their skin was marble smooth or else made of polished bark from the tender hearts of willow trees. She said she never bothered, and her legs were smooth, polished, and bronze.

“If you believed me, then you wouldn’t have to do any of that,” she liked to say.

I used to let these words shame me, but here was her slippery mortal habit, tucked inside a drawer so no one could see. I ran my thumb along the razor’s teeth. My hand ached, but not where I felt the cut.

I stared at the razor for so long I almost didn’t hear the footsteps approaching on the stairs until it was too late. I dropped it in the drawer and closed it, my heart pounding.

What would happen if I showed it to her? If I demanded to know whether she had as many mortal habits as I did?

I braced myself. The door opened. Mrs. Revand was breathless, wisps of gray hair snuck out to frame her face.

“Azure,” she said. “Your mother called. You’re needed at home. Immediately.”



The whole walk there I was terrified of Jupiter’s shadow greeting me at the front door, but Jupiter, as it turned out, had left. His mother was sick. Of all the things that shocked me, it was that Jupiter had been young once. He hadn’t slid wetly out of some crevice in the world. He had been birthed. Fed.

Maybe even loved.

“Will you . . . will you stay?” my mother asked, her voice small and tender. “Just for the night? Please? You know I don’t sleep well alone.”

She was sitting at the dining table when I arrived, her hands twisting in her lap. A hair clip barely held back her curls. I could hear her the bruise in her voice, and it stole my balance.

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t want to, but I remembered when we’d camped out in the living room, the blankets strung over the chairs like tents. We would lie in piles of pillows and watch movies together. I had never slept so well. Not even in the House of Dreams.

“When’s he coming back?” I asked.

“He’ll be gone for at least two months,” my mother said. “After that, we’ll see where he goes.”

I stayed the night, and my sleep was sweet and dreamless. When I woke, my mother had breakfast waiting—eggs, burnt toast, watery coffee. I didn’t want to sit at that table, so I picked up my plate and brought it to my bedroom. After she left for her Saturday shift, I walked around the house, marveling at how the quiet fell around me like snow. Indigo would be with the lawyers well into the evening, and the day felt like a treasure stumbled upon.

I walked through the woods, where the air sparkled on my skin, and along the highway, down to the gas station where Lyric had once bought cigarettes. It was sad, and kind of embarrassing, to think of him now. Not because of what I felt but because of what I didn’t feel. I thought he had a power not even Indigo possessed. I thought he had translated my every cell to flame. I thought I was his air. I thought no one, surely, knew what this was like, that the marvel of us proved we couldn’t possibly be just human. A piece of me grieved that I was wrong, but another part—one with lengthening teeth and huge, wet eyes—was profoundly relieved. Giddy, even.