The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(64)

Indigo raised an eyebrow and spared me an imperious glance. She wore a black, feathered gown with a high, funereal neck. It looked less like a dress and more like a pair of great wings folded against her body. Her hair was shiny, pulled away from her face. If she was crying as her aunt died, there was no evidence on her smoothly arranged features.

“I am tired,” she said.

We beheld each other. I didn’t know Indigo, and yet I loved her in spite of this. Or perhaps because of it. In the unknown of our marriage, I became known to myself and that was an incarnation of love too.

For the first half hour, we ate in near silence. She hardly looked up from her plate. Indigo was not focused on her meal so much as she was avoiding being the focus of something else.

Behind her, a stag’s face swiveled in our direction. The shadows of its antlers were vast and oddly mobile, as if poured onto the walls in thick, black syrup. The room had come alive. It was time.

I wiped my hands and leaned forward. “I figured that tonight you would be in need of a distraction. I thought we could play a game.”

“A game?” asked Indigo, looking up from her plate. Her voice was careful, strained by her eagerness. I was reminded, anew, of how Indigo moved through the world with the infinite precision of one who knows that she can break it with a well-placed heel. “What kind of game?”

“Your favorite kind,” I said. “One with a story and a bit of a sacrifice, where the key to winning is nothing but restraint.”

Indigo’s face stayed blank. “What are the rules?”

“I will tell you a fairy tale, and you must listen. No sound can escape your lips. No emotion can ghost across your face.”

Something playful touched the corner of her mouth. We have played games like this our whole marriage. Games of touch where a sigh was punished with a kiss, and even the loser delighted in defeat. Indigo was always better at those games. I was always hungry to touch her, too eager to lose.

“And if I do?” she asked.

“If you do, then you must tell me where you keep your secrets.”

She could walk away. She could refuse me. But instead, she sat still and held my gaze. She twisted her wedding ring, a plain band of iron.

“You lied,” she said mildly. “You told me you could live without knowing. You made a vow.”

“It was not a lie,” I said. “And it was a vow I intended to keep to a woman, not a bride made of flowers, no matter how lovely I find her.”

No matter how much I have come to love you.

I could tell the barb landed by the sudden tightness around Indigo’s mouth. She didn’t flinch though. She nodded with an air of reluctant approval. We had made a world for ourselves, and even as I set out to destroy it, I would honor its rules.

“Then let’s play your game, husband,” she said, reaching for her wineglass. “Begin your tale.”

Indigo steeled herself. The feathers at her neck fluttered even though there was no wind. She had warned me that knowing her secrets would destroy us, and so I fashioned my words into a knife and began:

“Once upon a time, a king promised his dying wife that he would not marry unless it was to a woman who equaled her in beauty. As time passed, the only one who fit that description was his own daughter.”

The Room of Secrets still loved Indigo. It threw protective shadows on her face, revealing only the shuddering of her feathers. It was like the first time I beheld her in that Paris apartment, when she looked like a woman assembled from squares of light. Indigo drank from her glass of wine. I continued.

“Desperate to hold off her father’s advances, the princess requested three dresses. One as golden as the sun, another as silver as the moon, and the third as shimmering as the stars. And last, of course, a mantle made from every feather and pelt of all the birds and animals in the kingdom,” I said. “The night before her wedding, she donned her mantle of every fur, covered her hair and face in soot for she longed to be invisible, and ran away until she found shelter in the palace of another king. The young king pitied her miserable appearance and agreed to give her work. And since she had no name, she was called Allerleirauh.”

The wineglass trembled in Indigo’s grip. We had been dancing around what we both knew, careful not to step too close to the edges, but with my next words, I would reveal my hand:

“Or, depending on the tale, her name was Catskins.”





Chapter Twenty-Seven

Azure




I wanted to believe Tati had cursed me.

With little over a month left until we transformed into our new selves, that dark space within me had grown. Every now and then, I looked over its edge and beheld all the things I’d dropped into it—the envelope and bank account information from my mother, the college brochure I hid under the lumpy mattress in Jupiter’s house, the way I had come to hate the taste of tea.

I knew what Indigo would say. This was the behavior of a Cast-Out Susan, and it must be stopped. I didn’t want to stand on the other side of a door full of light knowing it was locked to me forever. I was almost scared to enter the Otherworld with her—terrified that it would set me aflame if I stepped over the threshold—and so I was relieved when Indigo announced that we must not enter anymore.

We had just returned from school. The House was quiet, which meant Tati was asleep, pulled under by the strong sedatives she kept at her bedside. Now that Indigo ran the House, it seemed emptier. She had retained only half the staff, and there were no more fresh flowers in vases. The creamy tapered candles that Tati so loved were no longer lit for dinner, and inside the crystal bowls of the parlors, no one had replaced the brightly wrapped truffles.