“This way,” said Indigo, her voice effervescent with excitement.
A tapping sound made me turn my head. Tati stared down at us through the windows of the sitting room. Her smile was wide, and she made a happy shooing motion with her hand. I waved at her, and she blew me a kiss. I caught her kiss and held it to my cheek.
“Tati isn’t coming?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Indigo, skipping ahead down the path. Light dappled her hair, and when she reached for my hand, my heartbeat had never seemed so loud. “It’sourgift. She said so. She said it was intended for us, so I made Tati swear that whatever it was she’d never trespass.” Indigo stilled, turning to me as her voice took on an air of prophecy. “It’s not for her to see. Other people wouldn’t understand, Azure. Their eyes wouldn’t be able to take it.”
We usually never walked farther than the creek. As far as I knew, there was nothing out there except the remains of a mill that had burned down in the 1700s, and whose giant stones had served as temple ruins and sacrificial altars when we were younger. The mill was surrounded by a high stone wall. From the House it was nearly invisible, hidden behind the tall cypress and spruces lining the lawns. After a worker broke their ankle clearing the place of rocks a few years ago, Tati forbade us from playing there. It was a rule we had agreed to follow in return for access to all her old costumes.
Indigo tugged me farther down the path until we stood before the gate of the mill. It had changed. It was no longer a skeleton ofstones but something tall and ornate, wrought of iron with panels of stained glass in every shade of blue. Salt from the nearby sea stung my nose. From here, I could no longer see the House of Dreams. We’d been released somewhere feral and far outside the world we knew.
Indigo reached for my hand, placed something warm and fluttering in my palm.
“Look,” said Indigo, her eyes aglow. “Tati had a blacksmith make them for us.”
I looked down to see a pair of starlings. Each iridescent feather iron-cast with a beveled ruby jewel for one eye and a winking sapphire for the other. I could have sworn they breathed, the feathers rustling in the wind, and even before I realized they were keys, I knew they had unlocked magic, drawing into focus the wonders we’d long glimpsed out the corners of our eyes.
Indigo took the key with the blue eye, and a fine silver chain unraveled from the starling’s mouth. “This way!”
She slid the key into the padlock of the new gate. It sighed as it swung open, and for the first time we beheld our Otherworld. We stepped across the threshold hand in hand, and I felt the slightest resistance in the air, the breaking of the thinnest of membranes. When I looked down, my arms were damp, christened by an unearthly dew.
The light had an opaque quality as if—only here, in this place—we might card it from the air like wool, drape it over our bodies. An inhuman music reached me: the wet unraveling of apple blossoms and the delicate, percussive dance of a line of ants as they threaded through the oak leaves. Gone was that savory autumn smell of bruised leaves and rained-upon cement. It had been replaced with something rare and distilled, a perfect chord of music dissolved in honey and poured liberally over the ground.
“Do you feel that?” asked Indigo, looking at me.
I nodded.
The millstones were gone, re-formed into a high turret the color of thunderclouds. Beside the turret stretched an old oak, flanked by silver firs and red alders, scraggly apple trees, and a lonely willow, its branches languidly drifting in the creek that hugged part of our small kingdom. The land was roughly a half acre sectioned off from Indigo’s property by the rock wall, bursting with deer and sword ferns, fairy bells and pink columbine, dog’s tooth violets and hyacinths.
From that moment on, we stopped playing games in which we looked for the Otherworld, and instead, we went to it directly. It was our responsibility, and Indigo and I took our role as guardians seriously. Now that we knew where it was, it felt wrong to exploit it. We left out dishes of milk for the solitary fae, threw raw meat for the selkie in the streams. But we no longer tried to summon them. We didn’t want to force magic’s hand.
Instead, we tried to be worthy of it.
We were educated the way monarchs might be, fed on a steady diet of history and poetry, dance, and music, all the graces that might serve us in the realm we were meant to rule. But what we were most fascinated with, the one thing that held us in constant thrall and swayed from hubris and humility depending on the time of day, was, of course, ourselves.
Why had the Otherworld revealed itself to us?
Why had magic curled about our feet?
Who were we?
Soon, we were fifteen years old. The air smelled of heartbroken daffodils crushed by April’s rain, but it was still cold enough that we dragged blankets from the House to our Otherworld and lay bundled on the turret roof. We did this most evenings afterschool, which seemed less like a place and more like a penance. In those halls, we moved like ghosts and existed only to each other. I thought we were invisible, but as I would find out, Time was not the only thing that watched us.
“Maybe we’re exiles,” Indigo mused.
“Oh.”
I didn’t like the idea that I had been thrown out of something, but I was comforted by the thought that at least we’d been thrown out together.
“Supernatural beings cursed to a mortal life,” said Indigo. “Like this life is one grand test and if we grow up wrong, then we’ll end up as Cast-Out Susans.”
Her mouth pinched at the idea. That week, Indigo and I had finished rereading the Chronicles of Narnia and were once again obsessed with Susan Pevensie. A queen locked out of the realm she’d once ruled, exiled for the crime of growing up.
Susan Pevensie was our nightmare.
“We’re not going to end up like that,” said Indigo, curling her fist beneath her chin and closing her eyes. “I’m not worried.”
But I was.
