Indigo steeled herself. The feathers at her neck fluttered even though there was no wind. She had warned me that knowing her secrets would destroy us, and so I fashioned my words into a knife and began:
“Once upon a time, a king promised his dying wife that he would not marry unless it was to a woman who equaled her in beauty. As time passed, the only one who fit that description was his own daughter.”
The Room of Secrets still loved Indigo. It threw protective shadows on her face, revealing only the shuddering of her feathers. It was like the first time I beheld her in that Paris apartment, when she looked like a woman assembled from squares of light. Indigo drank from her glass of wine. I continued.
“Desperate to hold off her father’s advances, the princess requested three dresses. One as golden as the sun, another as silver as the moon, and the third as shimmering as the stars. And last, of course, a mantle made from every feather and pelt of all the birds and animals in the kingdom,” I said. “The night before her wedding, she donned her mantle of every fur, covered her hair and face in soot for she longed to be invisible, and ran away until she found shelter in the palace of another king. The young king pitied her miserable appearance and agreed to give her work. And since she had no name, she was called Allerleirauh.”
The wineglass trembled in Indigo’s grip. We had been dancing around what we both knew, careful not to step too close to the edges, but with my next words, I would reveal my hand:
“Or, depending on the tale, her name was Catskins.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Azure
I wanted to believe Tati had cursed me.
With little over a month left until we transformed into our new selves, that dark space within me had grown. Every now and then, I looked over its edge and beheld all the things I’d dropped into it—the envelope and bank account information from my mother, the college brochure I hid under the lumpy mattress in Jupiter’s house, the way I had come to hate the taste of tea.
I knew what Indigo would say. This was the behavior of a Cast-Out Susan, and it must be stopped. I didn’t want to stand on the other side of a door full of light knowing it was locked to me forever. I was almost scared to enter the Otherworld with her—terrified that it would set me aflame if I stepped over the threshold—and so I was relieved when Indigo announced that we must not enter anymore.
We had just returned from school. The House was quiet, which meant Tati was asleep, pulled under by the strong sedatives she kept at her bedside. Now that Indigo ran the House, it seemed emptier. She had retained only half the staff, and there were no more fresh flowers in vases. The creamy tapered candles that Tati so loved were no longer lit for dinner, and insidethe crystal bowls of the parlors, no one had replaced the brightly wrapped truffles.
“Otherworld?” I asked, looking down the hall when Indigo caught my hand.
“Not today.”
That day, Indigo had outfitted us in magic—black turtleneck dresses with long, silver-sequined shawls that caught the light when we moved. She’d rubbed glitter onto our eyelids and the crescent of our cheekbones. At school, it had looked foolish. We glinted under the fluorescent lights and my hair caught in the sequins. But in the House of Dreams, she looked like a seer and I could feel the air shift around us when she spoke, as if accounting for the weight of prophecy:
“We should give it time to prepare itself for us,” she said.
A couple hours later, I gathered my things into my backpack to spend the night at my mother’s house. Indigo leaned against the wall. Her expression was lost in the shadows cast by the parlor’s fireplace.
“You seem excited to go back there, Catskins,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, bristling at the nickname.
“It’s cold out,” said Indigo, rising from the settee and making her way to the coatrack. She pulled out one of Tati’s silvery mink coats. “Here, take it.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“You know, if you wore that coat then you’d really be like Catskins,” she said.
That nickname was a well-placed blade, yet when I looked at Indigo, I saw no malice.
“You know I don’t want to be anything like Catskins.”
She blinked at me, too sleepy-eyed to glare properly. “I don’t know why. It proves that you’re something out of a fairy tale. Which, I guess, makes Jupiter something out of a fairy tale too.”
Even though I hadn’t seen him in weeks, his name conjured an oily memory. The last time I saw him I had dropped a fork while cleaning up after a mandatory dinner in my mother’s presence. When I reached to grab it, I felt him pressed against my back.
“Sorry, princess,” he’d said, each word clinging wetly to the back of my neck. “Bumped right into you.” His hands snaked to my hips. His voice creeped to a place where I did not want it felt. “You’re such a clumsy little thing.”
I’d confessed all these things to Indigo not long after we dropped our teeth into the ground. We were in her bed and my pain lay between us and I was shaking from the effort it took to pull it out of me. I wanted Indigo to hold this with me, but she didn’t understand.
“So what if he wants to fuck you?” she asked, laughing. “Kings and gods have unnatural lust for their daughters all the time. Maybe he’s cursed. Or maybe a love arrow went astray. Or maybe your mom is secretly dying, and she told him he could only be with someone who rivaled her in beauty and that’s you.”
I’d started crying after that, and Indigo, confused, had pulled me to her and wiped the tears into my hair until we fell asleep. Maybe she thought I was crying over Jupiter. I wasn’t. I was crying because magic was not fair. She and I could share the same soul, but not the same pain.
