The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(69)

I hid my secrets inside an egg, inside a box, inside a beast the opposite of foresight.

The opposite of foresight was hindsight. I smiled as the riddle became clear. A hind sight. A hind was nothing more than a female red deer, and there was one in this room.

I grabbed the hunting knife and went to the deer mounted behind me. I sank the knife below her whiskered chin and tugged. Dust puffed into the air and dried rose petals fell to the ground. My blade hit something solid. A little golden box.

Inside, a ripped bus ticket. The name of the ticket holder had been torn off and dark-brown spots marred the paper. I pushed the paper aside to what lay underneath. There, on a square of red velvet, was a rusted starling key on a golden chain.





Chapter Twenty-Nine

Azure




You can know a person in totality—as they are revealed in the angle of light hitting your eyes, in a poem of photons and particles, in the particular wavelengths adjusted to your height, the contours of your nostrils, the private landscape of your synapses. Your mind makes a map of them and even barefoot and blindfolded, this terrain becomes a truth.

And it is a truth.

But only at an angle.



A week before my birthday, I decided to tell Indigo my decision. I wasn’t ready to join the Otherworld just yet, and I wasn’t going to be a Cast-Out Susan either. The Otherworld had told me as much, and its beauty was a promise: it would never abandon me.

I’d been trying to tell Indigo ever since I accepted my mother’s offer, but each time I straightened my shoulders and practiced what I would say, my resolve deflated, punctured by the iron gates of the House of Dreams. Each time, I hesitated. One afternoon, Tati had a screaming fit and slapped Indigo across the face so hard she’d wept for half an hour. Another time, Indigo was in a dark mood, having thrown all her paints onto the lawn because something about our “gift” had gone wrong.

But today was different.

Today, I missed Indigo.

A couple days ago she rang me at my mother’s house, explaining that some work being completed on the grounds would make it too noisy for the two of us. I’d been happy to stay back—relieved, also, that she hadn’t asked to come to my mother’s—and it was only now when I stood outside the House of Dreams that I realized how much I had missed my friend.

For the first time in what felt like eons, I missed our tea parties on the turret, the way she’d hang jewels in my hair and let me lie in her lap and read me stories where clever men caught seal wives and kingdoms grew on the other side of a grandfather clock.

I missed the easy wonder that came with living with Indigo. When I tried on her pigeon’s-blood ruby earrings, I could see where they had come from, the outline of spired palaces crouched in mist and lavish green mountains. When I slept on a pillowcase of raw silk, I dreamt of colorful tents and horse musk, the dusty roads that bore its name.

In my mother’s house, there was none of that. There were trips to the library, documents to be faxed, research over the cost of college programs, and the endless fine print of applications. On this side of the world, there were no pigeon’s-blood rubies and raw silk pillows, no gilded books beside a chest of drawers bought from the palace of a guillotined viscount.

The difference was clear: in the Otherworld I would want for nothing, whereas in this world there was nothing I couldn’t want.

Even so, the moment I stepped into the House of Dreams, I felt like crying. My mother had begun to look at apartments for us on the mainland. They were dingy, cramped rooms with no chandeliers, no medieval tapestries hanging from polished wooden walls, no magic soaked into the floorboards.

I froze at the threshold, sagging against the door. The House pitied me.

Don’t be sad, it said. I will wait.

The House wrapped up the Sunday-afternoon light in sleepy carelessness and hung diamonds and dust motes in the air. It pulled close the fragrance of gardenias and lilies and threaded a sweet, delicate humming sound from upstairs around my neck. I knew that humming sound. It was a sign that Tati was awake and lucid. Perhaps even happy.

Indigo stepped out of the parlor and laughed to see me clutching the doorframe. “Why are you standing like that? Come in!”

She was dressed in a long emerald satin robe with nothing but a T-shirt and boxers underneath. Her hair was tangled and crimped from braids she must have worn earlier. Her skin shone, and I felt overwhelmed by her beauty.

All this time, I had been thinking of what it would be like when I left, all the things I would do and places I would see. Part of me must have assumed Indigo would come, too, but the longer I looked at her, the more I realized this was all of her I could ever take with me—the curvature of her smile, an abundance of dust motes, this echo of honeysuckle.

So often we had dreamt the same thing that I’d imagined they slipped between our skulls, passed back and forth like breaths. But how far and fast could a dream run from one mind to the next? What if ours got lost over the sea between us?

“Azure?” asked Indigo, her eyebrows rising. “Are you all right?”

I threw my arms around Indigo. “I missed you.”

She stiffened, then relaxed. Her fingers carded through my hair. She smelled so sweet, apples on the edge of ripeness.

“It’s painful for me too,” she said.

That day was like our earliest adventures. It began to rain shortly after, and the House offered up all its treasures for our amusement. We had tea by the fire, stacked our cups atop small towers of precious books with painted, cracking spines. Indigo had found another of her mother’s jewelry boxes, so we sleeved our arms in pearls and ate cake with our fingers. We were so light that I almost didn’t feel the starling key hanging from my neck. I imagined it had flown off and would return to my breast when I grew drowsy. It was only when the rain stopped and the sky outside turned the color of damsons that I remembered I had something to tell her.