I pictured my mother as she had once been—burning and bright—before she began to collapse. My mother had given me little of herself. Not her mouth or her height or her laugh, and I was terrified that of all the things she hadn’t passed down it would be this slow unrecognizableness that I inherited, like a vicious disease that would eat me from the inside out.
“Let’s look into the future,” I said.
Indigo blinked open one eye. “Why?”
“Just to be sure.”
She looked at me, waiting for me to elaborate. I said nothing.The branches scratched, catlike and curious, against the walls of the turret.
“All right, fine,” said Indigo.
It turned out there were thousands of ways to divine the future. There was aruspicina, alomancy, daphnomancy, gelescopy, ceraunoscopy; the examination of entrails, the study of a trail of salt, the divine hidden in the smoke of burning laurel leaves, hints of the future layered in the cadence of someone’s laughter, the revelation of time through a pattern of lightning.
I didn’t want to kill something. The salt merely blew in the wind. We couldn’t find any laurel leaves. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be looking for in someone’s laugh, and the lightning disappeared too quickly.
For two weeks, which seemed interminably long to us, I tried everything I could think of.
“Boiling the shoulder blades of donkeys and reading the fissures of their bones?” read Indigo aloud from my research notebook.
She laughed. I wanted to laugh too. But soon the spring would ripen and end, and we were growing too fast, and there were days when my mom summoned me home to her and Jupiter, and I didn’t have a choice except to lie there and listen to them scream and pant through the wall we shared. I looked out over the jagged edge of the turret and beheld the Otherworld. This was our realm of honeyed light and apple blossoms, a place so steeped in wonder that if we were to plant a sonnet in the shade of the oak, we might return the next day to find it had become a tree that grew poem-plums and all who ate of it would speak sweetly.
I imagined being shut out of it, unable to cross the bridge, and I began to cry.
“Azure?” said Indigo, reaching for me.
I didn’t know how to share my fears with her, and I didn’t have to: Indigo knew. Of course she knew.
“There’s no need to worry about the future,” she said. “I’ve already seen it.”
“You have? What happens next?”
She wrapped her arms around me. “This is our home forever, Azure. One day, our bones will go in the ground and our soul will wriggle into the House of Dreams and we can grow ballrooms on Sundays, eat shadows for dinner... we can do whatever we want.”
I laughed. My whole heart was warm because she hadn’t said “souls” but “soul.” Just the one. Indigo twined her fingers through my hair, and her voice cut through the wind: “Nothing matters except us. Nothing is even real on the other side. You know that.”
I smiled.
“We’ll be here forever,” said Indigo. “I swear it.”
Chapter Twelve
The Bridegroom
If you combed through enough fairy tales, untangled their roots, and shook out their branches, you would find that they are infested with oaths. Oaths are brittle things, not unlike an egg. Though they go by different names depending on the myth—troths and geis,vows and tynged—there is one thing they all share: they must be broken for there to be a story. Only a shattered promise yields a rich, glittering yolk of a tale.
I could feel the promise I had kept for so long, tipping back and forth on the ledge of my own conviction.Promise me you will not pry. Can you live with that?
I am trying, I wanted to say.Truly, I am.
But when I blinked, I saw Hippolyta’s glowing teeth as she laughed:You say she loves you, but what is she anyway?
What was Indigo? She was my bride, and she was my love, but there was something of the inhuman that clung to her. A grace and indifference that struck me as alluring one moment and alien the next.
Two years ago, while I was in the middle of translating a thirteenth-century Breton lai, a lyric poem popularized inmedieval France, I became fascinated with oaths and broken promises. I carefully selected each poem so that I might examine the gaps in a story, the details dropped in favor of others. For what is said is not nearly as interesting as what is held back.
My research led me to Wales, and the timing happened to coincide with our second wedding anniversary. Indigo had planned a surprise for us, and thus I found myself in a castle she had bought out for the occasion in the town of Merthyr Tydfil, a place nestled amidst auburn hills and twisting trees, babbling streams and boulders that once knew the heavy tread of a Roman soldier’s boot.
“Sometimes, I can’t believe you’re real,” I said.
