The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(65)

“Otherworld?” I asked, looking down the hall when Indigo caught my hand.

“Not today.”

That day, Indigo had outfitted us in magic—black turtleneck dresses with long, silver-sequined shawls that caught the light when we moved. She’d rubbed glitter onto our eyelids and the crescent of our cheekbones. At school, it had looked foolish. We glinted under the fluorescent lights and my hair caught in the sequins. But in the House of Dreams, she looked like a seer and I could feel the air shift around us when she spoke, as if accounting for the weight of prophecy:

“We should give it time to prepare itself for us,” she said.



A couple hours later, I gathered my things into my backpack to spend the night at my mother’s house. Indigo leaned against the wall. Her expression was lost in the shadows cast by the parlor’s fireplace.

“You seem excited to go back there, Catskins,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said, bristling at the nickname.

“It’s cold out,” said Indigo, rising from the settee and making her way to the coatrack. She pulled out one of Tati’s silvery mink coats. “Here, take it.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“You know, if you wore that coat then you’d really be like Catskins,” she said.

That nickname was a well-placed blade, yet when I looked at Indigo, I saw no malice.

“You know I don’t want to be anything like Catskins.”

She blinked at me, too sleepy-eyed to glare properly. “I don’t know why. It proves that you’re something out of a fairy tale. Which, I guess, makes Jupiter something out of a fairy tale too.”

Even though I hadn’t seen him in weeks, his name conjured an oily memory. The last time I saw him I had dropped a fork while cleaning up after a mandatory dinner in my mother’s presence. When I reached to grab it, I felt him pressed against my back.

“Sorry, princess,” he’d said, each word clinging wetly to the back of my neck. “Bumped right into you.” His hands snaked to my hips. His voice creeped to a place where I did not want it felt. “You’re such a clumsy little thing.”

I’d confessed all these things to Indigo not long after we dropped our teeth into the ground. We were in her bed and my pain lay between us and I was shaking from the effort it took to pull it out of me. I wanted Indigo to hold this with me, but she didn’t understand.

“So what if he wants to fuck you?” she asked, laughing. “Kings and gods have unnatural lust for their daughters all the time. Maybe he’s cursed. Or maybe a love arrow went astray. Or maybe your mom is secretly dying, and she told him he could only be with someone who rivaled her in beauty and that’s you.”

I’d started crying after that, and Indigo, confused, had pulled me to her and wiped the tears into my hair until we fell asleep. Maybe she thought I was crying over Jupiter. I wasn’t. I was crying because magic was not fair. She and I could share the same soul, but not the same pain.

I wished that I could grab her hand and plunge it into the dark spaces between my bones. What lived there would bite at her fingers and maybe then she’d know the weight of my mother’s hands in my hair for the last time or the peppercorn cologne Jupiter sprayed onto his chest.

But nothing could bite Indigo.

Indigo shrugged and hung Tati’s fur coat back on the rack.

“I just don’t get it,” she said, pursing her mouth. “If you hate him so much, then why go home? He’s going to be there. Waiting for you.”

But that’s where she was wrong.

“You know why,” I said, not looking at her directly. “I made a promise to my mom, and I don’t want to break it . . . not when we’re so close.”

Indigo sighed, nodding. “Be here tomorrow at sunset.”

“I will,” I said.

My lies wriggled on my tongue, flirting with the tops of my teeth. I blew her a kiss, shut the door behind me, and clamped my lips together. I told myself that my lies were a penance, a way of keeping this darkness to myself until I understood what to do with it. That I had come to enjoy the time with my mother was another thing I dropped into that yawning space within me.

The whole time I walked home, I imagined entering the Otherworld. I pictured the turret iced over, thick snow on the ground, the apple branches snapped off from the cold, and Indigo howling that I alone had killed it.

Tomorrow would be a reckoning, and I was not ready.



By the time I reached my mother’s house, the sky was beginning to darken. I found my mother sitting at the dining table. Over the past month and a half, she had changed. Her hair was washed, curled neatly around her shoulders. There was color in her clothes and cheeks, and her eyes held a new brightness. She welcomed me with a smile before quickly putting it away. This warmth between us was new and it spooked easily.

“I wasn’t sure you were coming here today,” she said, careful not to say the word “home” because we both knew this had not been one for me.

I shrugged, waiting.

Slowly, she slid something across the table. Her car keys. She looked up at me through her lashes. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” I said, and when I smiled, I let it linger on my face.



Here was something Indigo didn’t know about me, something I didn’t even know about myself until my mother asked if I wanted to learn: