I would hold my breath and take Indigo’s hand. A few strands of my shorn hair lay in a little locket that I planned to drop into the ground as a sacrifice. I’d offer a part of myself as barter for safe passage. Maybe the House wouldn’t mourn my loss this way, for part of me would always be here. Then, I would slip through the sea of guests and vanish. I would end us, and in doing so, we would begin anew. Without me, the Otherworld’s hold over Indigo would loosen. She would see that we did not need each other’s light to exist, that we could be whole unto ourselves.
We could be free.
The House of Dreams did not like my plan though. It whimpered and whined the day I bought my bus ticket and hid it in the Room of Secrets. It did not matter how many times I stroked the stair banister and promised to return.
I chose our costumes from the depths of Tati’s closet, two skies hanging on velvet hangers—one was rich cerulean and silver, lace siphoned off the sea, the other was damson dark and smoky, all the edges of dusk cast into silk. I fashioned us a pair of thyrsus staffs, like the ones once borne aloft by Bacchic maenads. I crowned our spears with pinecones and wrapped them round with ribbons and ivy. We wore no jewelry, but we dusted our arms and chests with pulverized pearls. Indigo spritzed herself with perfume. Normally, I didn’t wear any, but tonight I opened my hand for the slenderglass vial and satin atomizer, wrapping myself in the thick scent of green apples. I tied back the long, curling hair that hung over my breasts with a bone-colored ribbon. The hair was not mine, but Indigo couldn’t tell.
I remembered how she stared at me, her eyes so full of love and her voice so tender I almost lost all desire to leave.
“You’re happy,” she said.
“Of course I am,” I said. I wanted to make her smile, so I added: “I’m with you.”
Her eyes shone.
Before I went to the party, I visited Tati one last time. I heard her singing before I entered, a shrill tune, mixed with humming and growls. She sniffed the air when I stepped inside, her back straightened against her pillows.
“I have kept your secret safe,” she said, rocking back and forth.
And then she began to sing. “I can smell the sweet meat and the gold trail of fat from the tender lamb... I remember what I should not have seen... the honey drip and the clasped hands and the shroud of oak.”
“Tati,” I tried again, my chest tightening. “I want you to know that I love you.”
All I wanted was to hold her, to lay my cheek against her bony shoulder. She had loved us, and she had fallen on that love as if it were a blade. Abruptly, Tati stopped singing.
Behind me, I heard Indigo coming up the stairs. For all that she spoke of the fae and lightness, she had a heavy, mortal tread. I had already backed away, halfway through the door with my hand on the knob when Tati’s head snapped up. Though she was blind, I felt the connection of her gaze as she rasped—
“You should have run faster.”
I couldn’t tell her that there was no need for her to worry,that already I was vanishing from the House. I closed the door behind me moments before Indigo saw me. Through the wood, I heard Tati sigh:
“I am too late.”
Guests poured into the gardens of the House of Dreams. There hadn’t been a party on the premises since Indigo’s sixteenth birthday, and curiosity more than anything coaxed our island to answer the invitation.
The gardens were strung with lights. Huge pillars like temple ruins squatted before the linden trees. Marble tables were laden with ice sculptures and small white cakes, pyramids of apples and towers of Champagne formed a glittering wall between the gardens and our Otherworld. At the center, the dance floors looked like a grand reflecting pool and the strobe lights and music tangled with the rhododendrons and lilacs.
I could not say how many people were there. I could feel the air slendered by their bodies, and that was all they were to us, assembled matter that parted when Indigo and I moved through them.
This was my last gift to her. Tonight, we were the god of revels. We raised our thyrsi and touched madness to the stars. A holy mania glazed our classmates’ eyes, loosened their mouths with raw wonder, painted their spines in primal hues as they hurled themselves against the music. As the revels stripped off veils and sharpened the light, I finally understood why magic loved us so well. We had it all wrong. It was never about who we were, but whatwe were—
Young.
Downy-feathered, soft-skinned, milk-teethed young. Unmarked and limpid, so clear-eyed that where adults saw bitterness andshadows, we saw a language that might still be translated into light. We were so young that even our bones still grew, still dreamt, still performed miracles in the daylight. We could fall and not break. We could alchemize music, make it physical, let it touch our unsettled souls. Our youth was so powerful it could not possibly last, or it would consume us whole.
That’s why magic kissed our bruises, coddled our hearts, and then sent us on our way. Magic hoped we would carry its echo out into the world, for we were never meant to stay here.
This truth broke my heart, even as I understood it. After all, wonder begets wonder, and to play within its borders forever meant never finding out how far we might truly go on our own. I was caught in the teeth of this truth when Indigo touched my hand.
“I have a present for you,” she said. “I’ve been working on it for ages.”
I looked up and realized that we had walked away from the revels and now stood at the stone path. I was ready for this and all that would come later. My bus was leaving soon, my tickets were waiting for me. Around my neck, my ruby-eyed starling key flashed. I felt the softest of brass flutters, as if it wished to take flight.
I followed Indigo into the dark, into the Otherworld, into the realm we had once ruled. I followed her into the shadows of the apple blossoms and the great oak tree, and up the turret where we had spent so many sunlit hours. On the roof, she held out a great floodlight, which illuminated the gnarled trunk and roots of the oak tree. When I beheld what Indigo had planned, I understood Tati’s warning.
I followed Indigo into the Otherworld that night.
I did not come out.
