The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(71)

When she stepped inside, the cheap lightbulbs showed the crimp of her mouth and the slight crinkle of her brow. It revealed her disappointment.

Indigo liked imagining that I lived in a stone cottage with sloped walls, with a lonely fireplace and a mat of cinders where I made my bed. She had wanted Jupiter to be an ogre, for my mother to be slim and transparent with her frailties. She had wanted a story, and the truth would have spoiled it.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice harsher than I intended.

Indigo looked at me, confused. She smoothed down her chiffon gown and her silvery mink coat, tucked her hair shyly behind her ear. Maybe in the House, she would have looked lovely and intriguing. But here, she looked ridiculous.

Whatever fury I had felt quickly curdled. I saw the disappointment in her eyes, but there was longing there too. For me.

“I, um, I thought we could walk home together and celebrate all the new things ahead.”

She held up a bottle of Champagne and two flutes. The Champagne had already been opened, and even from where I was I could smell it: like nectarines and rain-washed stone.

“But we don’t drink?” I said.

“This is a special occasion, silly,” said Indigo, grinning. “We’re crossing a threshold. Soon, you’ll be the age of a Cast-Out Susan.” This last sentence, a barb. She winked. “I’m joking. We’re trying something new, right? I think that’s worthy of a toast.”

Indigo poured some of the Champagne into her flute, then mine. The last time Indigo and I had gotten drunk, I remembered her standing on the turret, her shoulders shaking as she screamed at a silhouette draped in smoke and moonlight. I looked at her, she grinned, and the movement eased my hesitation.

When I blinked, I saw those daydream cards spread out before me—our hands interlinked, our lives taking root and yet always tethered. I saw my mother and me picking out new carpet. I saw the willow branches quiver, heard the Otherworld sigh. I touched my glass to hers and threw it back.

I remembered looking at Indigo through the prism of the Champagne flute. She was not drinking. She wavered; her face warped through the glass like a scream birthed into human shape. A white sediment filmed the bubbles and Indigo whispered:

“I told you I’d always keep you safe.”

I did not remember what happened after that.





Chapter Thirty

The Bridegroom




I was coming to the end of something. It hemmed me in the way a sunset traced a brutal red line around the day, drawing it to a close. I found my way to the Otherworld in the dark with a flashlight in hand. In my other, the rusted starling key hummed and fluttered.

I walked down the stone steps, past the linden trees, through a long path overgrown with ivy and rhododendrons until I came to a small stream that fed into the waters nearby. On the opposite bank rose a high stone wall. I shined my flashlight on the stones, and the light caught on an ornate gate. At the center was a lock that looked like a birdcage.

The stream was narrow but surprisingly deep. When I climbed out the other side, my pants were sopping wet. I bit down on the flashlight as I slid the key into the locked gate. The light caught on the jewel in the starling’s eye. Dirt and dust glommed the stone. I wanted to look closer, but right then the gate swung open, and I was pulled into another world entirely.

I had always imagined that the Otherworld longed to stay hidden, that it was only ingenuity or innocence that forced the doors open from one world to the next. If the doors opened easily, then whatever waited on the other side had not lured you there for delight but for devouring.

Indigo and Azure’s Otherworld was none of these things. It was lonely, a place obsessed with its own emptiness. When I stepped past the gate, the land stirred miserably awake in the same way a neglected animal can be at once dulled to hope and driven by instinct to lift its head at the sound of approaching feet.

Perhaps this Otherworld had long ago been the devouring kind, like a witch’s cottage hidden in a deep, dark wood. Once, it had been made of gingerbread walls and sugar pane windows with a panting, red-bellied oven at its core and a cleverly hidden cage for children just behind the curtains. But the witch had abandoned it, and the house had lost its appetite. Now it was simply looking for someone who might occasionally tend its hearth and sing within its walls.

There was a large oak tree with a tarp-covered table beside its trunk. At the center loomed a tall stone turret covered in ivy and wild roses. Off to its side wobbled a crumbling staircase whose steps vanished in midair. Behind that, a row of dead trees. I could smell the ghosts of apple blossoms in the air. A lonely wind combed through the branches, and the Otherworld released a low sigh of disappointment.

I was not who it had expected.

Or wanted.

I cast my flashlight over the ground. Perhaps these grounds had once been well maintained, but they’d reverted to wilderness over time. As I walked, I sank up to my ankles in dead leaves.

Here and there, the beam of the flashlight picked out memories—a yellowed ribbon, a vial of glitter, rotting satin slippers. I moved closer to the turret.

A pair of staffs twined with plastic ivy lay on the ground, their juncture marked through with an iron stake so that they’d kept their shape even after all these years. X marked the spot. Like treasure on a map.

A prickling crawled up my spine. I pointed my flashlight to the end of the staff and followed it in a straight line toward the black tarp covering the table. The wind rippled the fabric, and the light bounced off a corner of glass and metal. It was not a table at all but a kind of glass box.