The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(63)

I will grow wings and become a queen, I thought. But I said nothing. Part of me believed I kept quiet because it was a sacred destiny that only Indigo and I knew about, another part knew I stayed silent out of doubt and shame. Shame that when I tried to say those words, they no longer sat easily on my tongue. What had once tasted true had gone slanted.

Or maybe I didn’t want that to be the truth anymore.

I clutched my mother’s envelope to my chest. Her gaze was a painful invitation. I couldn’t bring myself to answer it directly, so I reached for the chair beside her, and for the first time in ages, I sat down.



A week later, I found Tati alone in her bedroom. Lucidity came to her in short spells those days. She stiffened when she heard me enter. She sniffed the air, and goose bumps trailed along my skin. Tati always said that she could tell who we were on scent alone because Indigo smelled of apples, and I of honeysuckle.

“Does Indigo know you’re here?”

“I told her I wanted to read.”

Tati smiled. “But you did not say that you wanted to read to me.”

Tati was working her own enchantments on me, that quiet coaxing, nearly undetectable, like hair slipping loose from a braid. Tati was right. I hadn’t told Indigo that I was going to read to her. She didn’t like it when I was alone with Tati.

“Come,” said Tati, rasping.

She gestured me closer, and I obeyed. I could smell the food dropped onto her dressing gown, unnoticed by the nurse and now pungent. Tati parted her lips. Her breath was medicinal sweetness laid over the rot.

Tati reached out, her hand patting up my arm. I bent down, thinking she wished to whisper in my ear. She stroked my cheek once, and then grabbed me around the neck, pulling me close.

“My eyes may be useless, but we both know that I am not the one who is blind,” said Tati in a fierce whisper. “Open your eyes.”





Chapter Twenty-Six

The Bridegroom




Once, I gave Indigo my heart.

It was our first Valentine’s Day together. I knew she abhorred the holiday, and I had nothing to offer that she couldn’t already buy herself ten times over. But on that morning, I slid into bed beside her with a plush rabbit toy in my hand.

“I have something for you,” I said. “A present. A gift inspired by Koschei himself.”

Indigo’s eyes flew open. She saw the toy rabbit and the corner of her mouth lifted. “And who is Koschei? The rabbit?”

I pulled her to me. She was sleep-mussed, her bronze skin like newly pressed satin. “No. He was a sorcerer who could not be killed. He separated himself from his very soul which he hid in a duck, in a sheep, in a tree.”

Indigo didn’t look at me. She traced circles on my chest. “Nested souls and nested secrets.”

“Precisely.”

She reached for the rabbit. “Is your soul my present?”

“Alas, only my mortal heart. But I’ve hidden it in a rose, in an egg, in a box, in a rabbit,” I announced.

Indigo found the seam in the toy rabbit and prized it open. I cried out and clutched my chest, and she laughed. Inside was a box, and inside that an eggshell, and inside that a packet of Indigo Rose tomato seeds.

Not long before she had told me she sometimes dreamt of a garden where things grew bright and nourishing. I thought she would be delighted. Instead, her fingers shook. Before I could ask whether she liked the gift or not, she drew me to her, and the packet of seeds fell to the floor.

She never planted them, and now I knew she had lied that day. Indigo had always known how Koschei had separated his soul from his body and drawn out his death as if it were a pin holding cloth in place. She knew because she had done the same thing.

Inside the Room of Secrets, I smoothed down my tie, glanced at the gold-and-crystal clock that stood beside a dead, snarling black bear. The clock read fifteen minutes before dinner. I waited for Indigo. This would be the last time I waited for her.

The staff had left once dinner was prepared, and the House was empty. Normally, the cook informed me, they would have stayed to clear up after the meal, but considering it was a final feast in honor of the nearly deceased, Indigo had told her the dishes could wait for morning. I pictured Hippolyta in her great bed. I wondered if she could still see the blinking lights of the machines surrounding her. I hoped she mistook them for stars.

While I waited for my wife, I surveyed the Room of Secrets. It appeared restrained. The shadows neatly pinned beneath the preserved faces of roe bucks and oryxes, hares and bison. Opposite the shadows, candlelight lacquered the femurs, fangs, and bleached mandibles.

On the table lay a final feast—a haunch of roasted venison stewed in its juices, flanked with plums and sour cherries. Blue-veined and moon-white rinds of cheese stood in towers beside bowls of fruit. Several glass decanters of garnet-red and honey-pale wines sweated beads of quartz.

Soon, Indigo and I would play our final game.

What happens next? I wanted to ask the House, but it was silent, so silent that it hid Indigo’s footsteps on the carpet until she was almost directly in front of me.

“Is it wrong that death gives me such an appetite?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m starving.”

This was the truth. I was starving to be at an end of something.

“How are you?” I asked, and immediately regretted the empty platitude.