The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(68)

My mother’s words filled me with light. I knew my answer. I smiled, and she smiled back, and I was Helios in his chariot, pulling the sun behind me so today could become a tomorrow.

But I’d forgotten about the other story. The one of Phaethon, the son of the sun, who yoked his father’s fiery steeds and crashed into constellations, scorching the Earth until he was thrown from his blazing path by Zeus hurling a lightning bolt at his head.

Perhaps Phaethon didn’t know that bolt of brightness would be his death.

Perhaps he couldn’t tell all that splendid illumination apart.





Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Bridegroom




My story was nearly over.

The words of closure rose through me like a hymn. The light shifted. The food had cooled, and Indigo’s face was monstrous in its stillness.

“Eventually the king discovered that the beautiful woman he had seen at the ball was none other than the serving girl who wore a coat of many furs,” I said. “When she tried to escape, he tugged off her coat, revealing the shimmering dress of starlight that she had worn only the night before. Overjoyed, the king and Catskins married the same day and she lived happily ever—”

Across from me, Indigo swayed. Her eyes slitted. Until that moment, her composure was like glass heated slowly, betraying nothing more than a wrinkled translucence. She had always been good at this game. She had always known how to hide her feelings. But those final words hit her like a gust of ice.

She swiped her plate and wineglass off the dining table and onto the floor.

Happily ever after.

The words shattered with the porcelain plates.

Who can say for certain what happened in those private nights after a fairy tale? Whether the princess turned from her new husband in bed and longed for her coat of camouflage? Whether the king, having satisfied his pursuit, now allowed his eyes to wander to a girl in the village?

Of all the things fairy tales demanded I should believe—dogs with eyes as big as saucers, maidens felled by spindles, queens who do not remove red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until they die—this is the only thing that stretches credulity. That happiness demands so little to stay. That it will curl willingly between two bodies every night, wrap ’round their children’s brows and take root in a kingdom’s earth whose peasants would thresh joy in the autumn and pickle smiles in winter and, come spring, watch it all bloom anew.

“You have the tale all wrong,” said Indigo, rising.

I leaned back. “And you have lost the game.”

She was breathing hard. She flashed her teeth at me. Her feathered gown billowed around her. “Quite right, my love. And what was the wager? That I should tell you where I keep my secrets? What good is that going to do when I’m done with you?”

I reached for my wine and sipped. “Humor me.”

Indigo skulked, feathered and beastlike. She was a creature of the Otherworld through and through, and though I knew she meant to hurt me, she would honor her word first. Even monsters were bound by the rules of their world.

“Well, let’s see,” said Indigo, tapping her lip. Her eyes darted around the room. Her face settled into a jagged, determined grin. “I hid my secrets inside an egg, inside a box, inside a beast the opposite of foresight.”

Now, her hand went to some secret fold in her feathered pocket. Behind her, the baboon skull grinned. The bleached crocodile skull unhinged its jaw.

“I told you not to pry,” she said, stepping toward me.

Still, I did not move.

“I begged you not to,” she said, and for a moment, the wounded tinge to her voice was a noose that looped around my heart. “But now you—”

Indigo swayed, grabbing the edge of the table. She missed. A candelabra crashed to the floor, the candles spitting wax and droplets of fire. Indigo heaved. Her body hunched over, and the black feathers of her gown lifted and fell before she raised her gaze to mine.

“The wine,” she said, her voice thready. “You put something in the wine.”

“No, my love, I put something in your wine.”

Indigo listed to one side, and I shot out of my chair, catching her before she fell. Her head tipped back, throat bared. Sweat sheened across her brow as a metal object clattered to the floor.

I looked over Indigo’s shoulder and saw the reason I had crushed three of Hippolyta’s pills into her wine. A curved hunting knife had slipped out of her pocket. It looked crude, like a misshapen letter. On the walls behind us, the animals and their bones shuddered.

Indigo clutched me. Her mouth looked greasy with animal fat, her eyes were full of tears, and I felt my heart break. Her voice was small, like that of a cornered child.

“Was our life so terrible that you had to destroy it?”

“I’m not trying to destroy anything,” I said. “I’m merely trying to survive you.”

Indigo clawed weakly at the front of my blazer before her eyes fluttered shut.

I lowered her gently to the ground, far away from the bits of glass where she might hurt herself when she woke up. I stood over her. My flower wife, my sly blue sky. I had not fully registered, until that moment, that I was destined to lose something that night. The House had gambled on whether it would be my life, my love, or my memory.

I faced the wall of animal heads. The oryx and wildcat leered. The alpine goats smirked with their square pupils. The chamois and musk oxen looked bored. And the roe deer peered through her lashes.