Page 83 of The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

A ragged voice. I looked up and beheld Indigo.Azure. A split being. The gun dangled from her hand.

“Go now before I change my mind,” she said wearily. “Run.”

I stumbled through the leaves as the Otherworld released me. I limped to the gate, but I could go no farther. I was a mended limb, unfamiliar to this new distribution of memory, and could not remember how I once walked through the world. I stared out the gate, heard the rush of water, the soft tread of a pack of tomorrows moving through the gloaming to find me. I would not survive on my own.

Once, I had let someone I loved go into the dark without me.I did not know if I could survive that again. And so, against the instruction of a thousand stories, I turned my head and looked back.

In the end, a fairy tale is nothing more than a sense of hope. Hope lures and tricks. It tempts with shining thrones, exquisite nectars, and loving arms. It whispers to us that we are extraordinary. Exempt. Thus lured, we follow its path. Sometimes we are led to riches. Other times, we are led astray. But this hope never hides its shape, and for its honesty we reach for it and pull its sweet and stinking furs up to our chins, for to live without it means living without magic.

I held this truth in my bones as I limped back to the woman who was still my wife. She did not disappear. She did not dissolve when I touched her shoulder and offered my hand.

She startled, still kneeling in the dark with death in her lap. Her feathers were soaked. Even from where I stood, I caught the scent of her, washed true by the rain. Honeysuckles.

“You came back.”

I nodded.

“Why?”

There were a dozen reasons, none of which I could easily articulate. I was thinking of her pulse beneath my fingertips and my brother’s small feet vanishing into the armoire. Of the artless way the body had been covered, the plea therein a hope not simply to be discovered but punished. I wondered at the way she had devised to be hurt. Perhaps she thought she deserved it. Just as I had expected her to leave me for the simple reason that I could not fathom a world in which I was not worth being left.

“It’s not you that I wish to leave behind.”

When I looked at her, I saw all the people we had been to each other. Beast, maiden, lover, god: a thousand iterations. I held out my hand farther.

It was dim all around us, but we could clearly see the only future left to us. A wilderness without walls, a place where pointed silences and unanswered questions could not survive. We shrank to behold this future so nakedly, but we did not run. I watched as she took my hand, her grip slippery.

Slowly, silently, we made our way out of the dark.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Azure

My husband finds me on the porch of the House of Dreams and hands me a cup of tea. He’s brought a candelabra and the light flickers weakly on the handsome planes of his face as he sets it on the ground between us.

I take him in—the way his tall frame stoops through doors, the gold of his hair, the ink smudges on those slender, scholarly hands. His hand twitches on his leg, and I am both surprised and relieved he wants to touch me.

When we touch, I am my most honest with him. When we move together, I try to show him the truth of myself. He lovesher, but when I step into the role of a dozen different women, I imagine these are the moments when he can see through all the costumes.

“Azure,” he says, and I try not to flinch.

I let myself meet his gaze and I cannot breathe. When he looks at me, the light in his eyes is soft. And it is for me.

For a long time, I’ve been waiting for judgment. For some god to hurl a lightning bolt at me or strike me dead. I wonder now if I’ve been looking for gods in all the wrong places. There is a bruised recognition in his gaze and that—this singular truth that I am not alone—expands the universe in a way that faith never has.

“Azure,” he says again, and I can tell that he is testing out this name’s shape against his teeth. “Tell me your story.”

Azure. It has been years since that was my name. Years since I remembered how to answer to it. I tried to say the name aloud to Tati, but there was nothing left of her in that body.

My husband reaches for my hand. Our wedding rings touch. I have never before considered what it means to have a good marriage. I thought it was finding intriguing and attractive company. But maybe it is about finding someone whose heart is like a mirror, whose love can make you stand the sight of yourself.

I look into his eyes, aware that we are starting down a path I had not envisioned. I don’t know where it ends, but I know this is not the first time we will sit like this, with our hands intertwined, the space between us aching to be remade by every confession we have folded within the dark of ourselves.

I take a deep breath, and I speak:

“The first thing you have to understand is that I loved her.”

Epilogue

Long ago, there lived a king and queen in a house of dreams, and there they quietly tended to their ghosts and knew all the shadows by name. The house was vast. Sometimes the king or queen got lost. When that happened, they would hold each other’s hands and say—

It was once upon a time.

That was all it was. A prayer and a promise in one. A single page composed of the past.

Eventually, what wasoncesoftened to a palimpsest of lost words and snowfall, starlings and sparrow wings and blue ink. In this way, the king and queen crafted a tale of their own.

In the end, they lived.