Indigo smiled. “Who said that I am?”
We were in the topmost room of the castle, lying in a carved four-poster bed made of wood so dark and glossy it looked wet. A heavy red canopy draped over us. Tapestries of bulging-eyed horses and bears danced on the walls, and outside the narrow windows, rain slicked the countryside.
“True,” I allowed. “Like Blodeuedd. Have I told you the tale of the flower bride?”
“No,” said Indigo with mock hurt. “You have not.”
I wrapped my arms around her, resting my chin on top of her cool, silky head. “Once upon a time, there was a hero who was placed under a curse by his own mother that he might never take a human wife. For many years, he was lonely. In the early evenings, he went on long walks just to see his shadow stretched out so long before him that it seemed to belong to someone else entirely.
“Fortunately, the man was not alone, and a pair of great magicians found a way around the curse. They gathered flowers of broom and meadowsweet and oak, and from this, they fashioneda woman of extraordinary beauty and named her Blodeuedd, or ‘Flower-Faced,’ and gave her as a bride to the lonely hero so that, finally, he had a wife of his own.”
“She was made for him,” said Indigo, walking her fingers up and down my chest. “Crafted for himjust sodespite his curse.”
I smiled. “Curses are made to be broken. They aren’t so static as one might think.”
“He never broke his mother’s curse.”
“No?”
“No,” said Indigo, her smile sly and lupine. “He couldn’t have a human wife, so he was given a bride of flowers. His flower bride was never real at all, but he didn’t care because she had been made to please him.”
There was more to the tale of Blodeuedd—it ended unhappily, as so many of these tales do—but I had to leave for my lecture, and so I was gone from her side that whole day. By the time I returned, I had almost forgotten the story. Indigo had not though. That night, I found the castle cold and silent, the table set with food, silverware, and thick, flickering candles.
“Hello?” I called out.
No one answered.
I made my way up the narrow stone steps and into the bedroom with its vaulted ceiling. There, Indigo greeted me from a bed thick with flowers—rose petals, hibiscus whorls, meadowsweet, and broom. She greeted me shyly, eyes warm, a marigold perched in the curve of her neck.
Indigo had never looked more beautiful to me than she did in that moment. It wasn’t her features—though they had always been lovely—it was the way she molded the atmosphere of the room. She looked like the nostalgia that settles in your ribs at the end of a story you have never read, yet nevertheless know.
In the dark sheaf of her hair, I saw the forest floors where wolves stalked milk-skinned maidens. In the hollow of her neck, I saw the light of precious jewels kept safe in the stinking jaws of a slumbering sea monster. In her parted lips, I glimpsed something that—in my own unpracticed, sloppy awe—struck me as holy. For a moment, I saw a window and not my wife. When I walked to her, it was like peering straight into something primordial and desperate, where the inscrutable space between stars had once birthed myths and gods, built palaces of story and scripture in which human doubts found a place to rest their weary brows.
“If you are a figment of my imagination, some wild dream, I hope I never wake,” I said.
Indigo reached for me, drew me down to her, and I forgot everything else in the hot press of petals and skin.
When I woke the next morning, I was bloodied. We hadn’t noticed the small thorns forgotten in the bouquets the night before. Indigo was horrified.
“There weren’t supposed to be any thorns,” she said, touching my broken skin.
I was scratched, but she was unscathed.
I remembered that night, those petals, the marigold falling from her neck when she rose up on her knees to touch me.
His flower bride was never real at all, but he didn’t care because she had been made to please him.
I have closed my eyes to be with Indigo. I have chosen not to care about the waking world.
Now, waiting in the hall for Indigo to take us away from this place, I looked at my palm and noted the small scar, puckered and colorless on the heel of my hand, a reminder of that night. In this, too, I saw a warning:
Even an illusion can wound.
Perhaps more so than anything.
Later, I would remember this as the moment where some part of me knew that I would break my vow. Later, the knowledge would be sharp, bright as a match struck in the darkness.
But even so, I could never have foreseen how it would end.
