Roses and Rot (34 page)

“Well,” I said, “at least it’s not impossible.”

“Imogen, I would have told Marin about this because I had to. Because the tithe is what it is, and I can’t change it. But I won’t ask you to do this, and I would have asked her not to mention it to you. The risk is too much, and Marin would never forgive me if you were lost. As much as I’m able, I will keep her whole, and send her back to you when it is over.”

As much as he was able. Which would be not at all. Roses grown in a graveyard, and too late. A fall in a dance studio, and a partner wearing the bruises. “Funny, but I don’t think you love her any less now than you did a few months ago when you begged for my help, so forgive me for not thinking of that as being particularly useful.

“Can you help me at all—tell me anything? Why it’s so dangerous to try, or who broke it before?”

His face twisted; he swallowed hard. “I can’t. Not directly. But know that Faerie suffers, without a tithe, and so anything connected to it suffers as well. The old stories are sometimes true, and not all changelings are stolen.”

Good. Great. That was all very helpful and crystal clear.

“Has anything changed?” I asked. “Do you still think that she might not make it through seven years?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again.

“Never mind,” I said. “I can tell you’re trying to figure out a way to talk around it so you’re not actually lying to me. I have to try, you know. She’s my sister. I have to tell her.”

“There’s one other thing,” Gavin said. “There has to be balance. If you save her, you’d get what the tithe promises. The success. All of it. It would go to you, not her.”

I sucked in a breath. “That’s why you broke the spell. Because you knew she’d never believe me when I told her why I’m rescuing her if she knows that.”

His face was kind. “I’m sorry. But you needed to know.”

“You need to leave. I can’t look at you right now.”

If I was going to break the tithe, save Marin, I needed to see if it was actually possible, if I had better odds than just sheer luck. I needed guidelines, a to-do list, or whatever the situational equivalent was.

“Well,” Beth said, “I don’t know what went on in Faerie, of course, but forty-nine years ago, Melete almost lost its funding. There were other things that went on then, too—someone was disqualified for a major award. I think a Grammy, but I’m not positive. A resident died under suspicious circumstances. And it seems to me that things were quite precarious for two or three years after.”

“Rebuilding years,” I said.

“If I were trying to find years when the tithe failed, that’s where I’d begin.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “It was the one hint of bad press I found when I was first looking into applying here.”

“I’m surprised you found that much. The Fae are good about their PR. Speak no evil is fairly literal in their case.”

Didn’t I know it. “Those are cute.” I gestured at her lap.

Today’s knitting was rainbow-colored yarn, and very small. “I’m making socks for my granddaughter. You would think smaller would be easier, but these are a pain in the ass.”

She jabbed at one of them with her knitting needle, but it was clear that, pain in the ass or not, Beth was delighted by knitting tiny socks for tiny feet.

“Why would losing the tithe mean that Melete loses funding, though? I understand why Faerie would have problems, but why would that carry over to here?”

“Because Faerie is woven into all of Melete. The Fae don’t just benefit by having the equivalent of an artist-in-residence, they benefit by having all of you here. By surrounding themselves in the energy, the emotion, generated by the intensity of this experience.

“And the benefit is mutual. The good fortune that accrues to the tithe also disperses over Melete, and those associated with it. Or did you think all of this happened by generous alumni donations?”

I felt embarrassed, naïve. “I hadn’t thought about it at all, really.”

“Financially, of course, most of it does. But that generosity is moved by Faerie’s influence. Faerie takes care of its own first, so if it suffers, so does Melete. Without a tithe, Faerie will suffer.”

She set down her knitting, tiny socks half-formed in her lap. “Be careful, Imogen. They won’t like it if you try to keep Marin from them.”

I didn’t particularly care what they would like. “Did you ask someone to help you?”

“No, and I think most of us don’t. We agree to go because we want the benefits, even knowing the risks. I know you’re worried for Marin, but it’s more than likely she’ll be fine once she gets back.”

“She fell. At Halloween. From the effects of being there. So I’m
worried.” Spell or not, I couldn’t put Marin and death in the same sentence. It was too big to say.

“Ah. I hadn’t known. That first trip can be difficult, all the novelty. But it can also serve as an inoculation—she’ll know what to expect after that.

“As it is, of course I understand your worry. She’s your sister. But I don’t think you need to worry excessively.”

“Thanks,” I said, and got up.

“Oh, and Imogen. The piece you read was quite good. Whatever else, I want you to know you’ve been worthy of your time here. You might keep that in mind, as you make your decisions about what you’re willing to risk.”

It mattered, hearing her say that. Had it been anyone other than Marin at risk, had the risk to Marin been anything less than Gavin’s fear that she would die, it would have mattered enough to change my mind. But Marin had always saved me, and I had failed her once already. Leaving her to the tithe wasn’t a choice.

Back home, later that afternoon, I opened the door to find Janet standing on the front porch, her hair bound up, her suit precise. “I’ve come for her things.”

“I’m sorry?” I said, not believing what I heard.

“Helena’s things. I want them. Her notebooks, her computer. The rest of it doesn’t matter, but if there’s any of her work that’s worth salvaging, it ought to be published. I’ve already spoken to my editor. If I write the introduction, they expect the volume to do quite well.”

I bit the inside of my mouth to keep from spitting my first response at her. Literally counted to ten in anger before I could trust myself to speak. “They’re not here. Thomas—who, incidentally, did come and visit Helena before she died—took them with him.”

She blinked, whitened. “He was here?”

“Yes. He came to see Helena. Maybe if you had bothered to, you could have seen him, and he could have explained, for the thousandth time, that he doesn’t love you, that he never did.”

She went as hard and cold as stone. “He should have loved me. If Tania had kept to the bargain, he would have. When you get back, you get everything you ever wanted. All I ever wanted was him. Every word I wrote, everything I did, I did for him.”

“That’s not love, Janet. That’s obsession.” I realized then that what Thomas thought was wrong. Janet hadn’t been angry at him for not trying to break the tithe. She had wanted to go, wanted all the promises that came with it. She was angry because he didn’t do what she did—spend seven years waiting on the other side.

“I spent seven years in hell for him, and what did I get out of it?” she said.

“Helena.”

“And she should have been what brought him back to me. I tried everything with that girl, brought her up here, so that she would be closer to Faerie, so that she would be surrounded by art, by artists, by people who understood sacrifice.” She was so calm, so logical, as if she were explaining the rules for the composition of a sonnet. “It should have turned her into an artist, too.”

“Did you ever bother to ask her if that was what she wanted?”

“It should have been. You know what they are. You’ve seen them. Your own sister will go and live with her lover, away in Faerie. You write fairy tales—the Fae are the happy ending everyone wants.” Then there was grief on her face. Not for the loss of Helena, but for the loss of Faerie. Seeing it there made me sick.

“That’s not how the stories end, Janet. The thing that comes before ‘happily ever after’? It’s ‘they lived.’ Helena didn’t. She’s not
here anymore, and neither are her things. Now please. Go. Before I call campus security, and have you removed from my house.”

“They should have let me stay. If they wouldn’t give me Thomas, they should have let me stay in Faerie. They tell you you’ve bargained for everything you’ve ever wanted, but nothing I had was.

“Tell your sister to remember that.”

We kept the door to Helena’s room closed, after. She had kept it like that herself, and we had gotten used to it. Seeing it open was a scar on the wall, an emptiness that looked wrong and out of place. But it was cracked now, a slant of light showing through into the hallway.

I opened the door the rest of the way. Ariel was sitting on the bare mattress, her back hard against the wall. “I never read any of her poems. I keep thinking about that. That was what she was here for, that was what mattered to her, and I never read them.”

“I kept a notebook of hers,” I said. “From when we packed up her stuff. I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it, because I think she’d be pissed that I was reading her drafts.” I imagined her face, the twist of her mouth, and my eyes prickled as I smiled.

“I’m so angry,” Ariel said. “Not at her, but around her. Mostly at Janet. I have never wanted to punch anyone in the face as much as I want to punch her.

“And just . . . everything. Everything that told her that she was only as good as her art, and that her art wasn’t good enough.”

She closed her eyes, dropped her head back against the wall. “And then I feel like an enormous hypocrite, because we weren’t friends, and I never read her poetry.”

“Let’s read one,” I said. “You have a lighter, right?”

“Yes, because I occasionally need to ruin my own voice with smoking. Why?”

“Meet me downstairs. We’ll go to the Wishing Bridge.”

It was a tradition: Write down your fondest wish, the secret one that you tell no one else, the one you can hardly admit to yourself, even as you write it down. Then light it on fire, and toss it over the bridge. If it burns away completely, before the water extinguishes it or carries it away, then your wish will come true.

All the traditions that get built up around wishing, around the ways we tell ourselves that yes, this one time, we did everything right. This time, it has to come true.

This time, we’ll get what we want.

Ariel and I stood at the bridge’s rail, and I opened Helena’s notebook. “Here’s one. It fits all on one page.”

I tore the poem from the notebook, and gave the page to Ariel. She read it out, her glorious, rich voice speaking Helena’s words to the trees, to the Mourning River beneath us, to the air. The page trembled in her hand, but her voice was strong.

Here was the sunlight, bright in the sky, glinting diamonds off the water. The green heart of spring rising from the ground, flowers fragrant in the air. The day was beautiful, and it was broken, because all that was there was a page of words, and not the person who had written them.

Hearing the poem, I cried for Helena again. For the waste. Because, in a way, she had been right. It wasn’t a great poem. It was competent, it was technically skilled. But it wasn’t great.

Yet.

It might have been, though. Because in the words, there was an ear that heard language like music. There was a voice that wanted to be something it wasn’t yet, but that it might have been, if she’d ever once gotten enough support to believe in herself, and in her art.

Helena wasn’t a great poet when she died, but she could have been one, if she had lived.

When Ariel finished reading, she looked at me. I nodded.

She clicked her lighter on, and touched the flame to the corner of the page. The fire licked around Helena’s words, flaring brighter and stronger. Ariel held the page until it burned almost to her fingers, then tossed it in the air. The page was gone, burned to ash and air before it touched the water.

“There,” she said. “Now maybe she gets her fucking wish.”

Because that, too, is a wish we tell ourselves when people are lost. That they go on. That their name is spoken, and so part of them remains. That the truth of who they were lingers, that what matters will never die.