“You heard her,” said Indigo, glancing upstairs, like she could see through the kitchen ceiling and into Tati’s bedroom. “She sawsomething she shouldn’t. Maybe she tried to get into the Otherworld when we weren’t there, and the fae punished her. Divine things don’t like to be exposed like that. She’s lucky it wasn’t a goddess who could send packs of wild dogs after her or a god hurling thunderbolts.” Indigo shivered, and only then did the cold in her voice thaw. “But that’s how you can tell the Otherworld loves us. They kept her alive for us when they should’ve done so much worse.”
Indigo loved Tati. She wept when we went to the hospital. She tested every tea and broth in the morning to make sure it wasn’t too hot, and when we left Tati’s room, Indigo always kissed her on the cheek. I knew she didn’t mourn like others did. Even when her own parents died, she told me she hardly wept.
“The sacred world has its own calculus,” she said.
There was no reason for me to look closely at the set of her mouth or the angle of her shoulders. Still, I did.
“Where were you when Tati got hurt?”
Indigo frowned. “Why?”
“I never had a chance to ask you,” I said carefully. My eyes must have given me away though. Indigo was wearing the same black linen shift from the night of Tati’s accident and I stared at it now, certain that she had worn something else earlier in the evening.
“I thought you were wearing a white dress that night,” I said.
“Oh, that,” said Indigo, plucking at the cloth. “I’d gotten some paint on my white nightgown, so I was changing in the laundry room when I heard you scream.”
I nodded. I wanted that dark space inside me to disappear... but I’d looked in the laundry room and I’d found no sign of the white dress.
“Let’s go to the Otherworld,” said Indigo, grabbing my hand. “I want to start planning my birthday.”
Spring had begun to trace a warm finger along the branches of the thundercloud plum and empress trees, though the apple blossom buds were still pressed tight as pursed mouths. Around the great oak, the daffodils remained hard and green. And deep in my chest, in the place where I wanted to believe Indigo most, an icy knot of doubt refused to thaw.
I tried to ignore it, even though I could feel it growing, unspooling threads of frost that haunted every movement. Maybe I had let it get out of control. Maybe it had entwined with my veins, and that’s how I found myself a few days before Indigo’s birthday, alone, and inside her bedroom.
The House had been lulled to sleep by afternoon fires in the parlor. Indigo was taking a meeting in the Camera Secretum, and Mrs.Revand was bathing Tati with the nurse they’d hired. I was supposed to be catching up on schoolwork. Instead, I ran my hands along Indigo’s dresser. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, all I knew was that there was something she didn’t wish me to see.
In the first drawer, I found silk camisoles and black panties, hair ties scrunched to one side, and Tati’s favorite polka-dotted headscarf, which Indigo had once complained about Tati wearing too often. The second drawer smelled sickly sweet, like over-ripened fruit. There was nothing inside except Indigo’s blank canvas papers and the neat cedar boxes that held her pastels.
At the back of the drawer lay something crumpled. I picked it up. It had an odd smell, like mushrooms. I unfolded it carefully.
It was a torn corner of canvas paper bearing Indigo’s precise, slanting handwriting—
all of glass
I turned it over.
But that was it. I crumpled it back up and tossed it inside the second drawer. The third drawer was darker, deeper. I plungedmy hands to the back, seeking out the feel of cloth only for something sharp to slide across my palm. I winced as I drew out a dull blue razor.
It was so ordinary... the kind you bought at grocery stores. I picked it up and saw bits of hair caught in its teeth. I knew it wasn’t mine. My razor was pink and lived in the toiletry bag where I kept all my things.
Indigo had mocked me for shaving my legs. She called it a slippery mortal habit, one that we shouldn’t indulge because we were of the fae and their skin was marble smooth or else made of polished bark from the tender hearts of willow trees. She said she never bothered, and her legs were smooth, polished, and bronze.
“If you believed me, then you wouldn’t have to do any of that,” she liked to say.
I used to let these words shame me, but here was her slippery mortal habit, tucked inside a drawer so no one could see. I ran my thumb along the razor’s teeth. My hand ached, but not where I felt the cut.
I stared at the razor for so long I almost didn’t hear the footsteps approaching on the stairs until it was too late. I dropped it in the drawer and closed it, my heart pounding.
What would happen if I showed it to her? If I demanded to know whether she had as many mortal habits as I did?
I braced myself. The door opened. Mrs.Revand was breathless, wisps of gray hair snuck out to frame her face.
“Azure,” she said. “Your mother called. You’re needed at home. Immediately.”
The whole walk there I was terrified of Jupiter’s shadow greeting me at the front door, but Jupiter, as it turned out, hadleft. His mother was sick. Of all the things that shocked me, it was that Jupiter had been young once. He hadn’t slid wetly out of some crevice in the world. He had been birthed. Fed.
Maybe even loved.
