The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(76)

“Stop speaking.”

“This isn’t you.”

Indigo laughed. “You don’t know me.”

But her voice broke.

“I thought you—” She stopped. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

I was not scared of death, but in those final moments, I felt cheated. I had found Azure, and yet my own memory remained incomplete. I was missing something.

The light slanted across the corpse, catching on the starling necklace. It was still bright, the jewel in its eye shining. Somewhere in the House of Dreams, Tati lay dying, but her singsong voice slipped from her bones and found me here—

Indigo wanted a blue-eyed starling and Azure wanted a red, and if I’d never stopped to look then nobody would be dead.

The starling key on the corpse’s chest beheld me with a blue eye.

I lifted my hands off the glass pane.

“What are you doing? I said don’t move—”

I looked into the face of my wife.

“Azure,” I said.

Her arms dropped a fraction.

“Azure, I see you.”





Chapter Thirty-Three

Azure




You never forget the moment when beauty turns to horror.

And at first, all I saw was beauty: the coffin made of glass and silver, its joints a calligraphy of ivy scrollwork and starlings. It was the sort of thing that might be used to display a saint. I could see it in the future, the white quilting within stained and yellow with bodily seepage, the bones untethering from tendons, falling in the cracks between satin and glass. The glass casket would hold it all together.

Forever.

“What is this?”

“My gift,” said Indigo, touching my cheek. “This is where we belong, Azure. This is how we leave the mortal world for good. And then we’ll be in the Otherworld forever.”

My ears were ringing. I had dreamt, for years, that Indigo knew something I didn’t. That when she said we would be transformed, she did not mean . . . like this.

Indigo stepped toward me. She was as vast as the sky, star-strewn and infinite, her black hair dissolving into the night. Indigo held out the ivory hilt of her father’s hunting knife. ?’leos. Mercy.

Indigo thought the glass casket was her greatest gift. But to me, her greatest gift had been the belief that I might be so much more than what I was. Because of her, I believed I was someone who deserved things, someone for whom destiny itself had fashioned a cozy, starlined pocket. The sight of the hunting knife cut through all of that.

Around us, the Otherworld wept. The sky trembled with lightning. In the distance, the shrieking laughter of the guests and the harsh flapping of the tents barely registered. The Otherworld’s tears were hot on my face.

“What have we done to each other, Indigo?”

I rarely cried. But now, great heaving sobs ripped out of my chest. I wept for the girl we had called Puck. I wept for the boy I wanted to love. I wept for my mother, for Tati, and myself. I wept, the most, for Indigo, for she was lost, and I could not save her from the dark.

“Don’t you see?” she said, smiling. “No one will kiss us awake when we fall asleep. We’ll be untouched, forever, folded into the roots. We’ll have toadstools in our arteries and ant nests in our mouths. We’ll sprout roses in our eyes, and we’ll be knitted together, and I will never leave you, and you will never leave me—”

She lunged.

The sudden jerk of her body startled me. I had forgotten how fast she could move. When we raced as kids, she always won. The blade blurred in her hand.

I stepped.

I thought of the revels, of Fate pivoting on her ankle, her heel not yet connecting to the wooden floor. Indigo’s heel skidded on a rain puddle, flinging her against the stone of the turret. Her gasp was childlike, startled. She arched over the stone, hair streaming behind her, the open mouth of the glass casket far below. The blade clattered to the wood and the rain hit the metal, and I ran to her because I loved her.

I would always love her. Even when she hurt me. Even when she held a blade to my throat. Perhaps especially so, for no one else had ever bothered.

I offered my hand, but Indigo didn’t take it. I tried to stop her, but she reached, instead, for the hair that was not mine. She meant to take me over the edge with her so we might fall together, but at that moment, Fate’s heel slammed down. The Otherworld’s grief was a bellow of thunder as Indigo fell, the false hair I’d taken from Tati streaming from her grasp.

She made no sound, and so I screamed for us both. I screamed until I heard the thud of her skull, and after that I was mute. I held still. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, doing it over and over as if they could reveal another reality, but I was locked in this place.

Cold rain sluiced down the back of my neck. I was exposed now, the chopped edges of my hair clumped together in the rain.

“Hair is memory,” Tati had said. “That is a lot of sacrifice, and for what, child? What do you hope to gain by losing all that life?”

I had been quiet. I thought of Indigo and me playing by the pool, hunting for rusalkas in the creek, packing suitcases for the Otherworld and wondering how we would carry Tati’s heavy silver samovar across the ends of the world.

“Freedom.”



Rain filled Indigo’s mouth. Her eyes were open and staring. Her hair a spill of ink, pleated around the edge of the gilded casket that had broken her fall. Her body was already half inside. I knew she would not like any sign of sloppiness, and I refused to leave her like this.