Roses and Rot (27 page)

The older sister knew that the wizard could not mislead her, due to the vows he had made. And so she went out in search of time. She gathered grains of sand and drops of water, and the small ticks of gears. She stole leaves at the turn of the seasons, and the space between now and then.

She could see her sister improving, but still too slowly. There was not yet enough time.

And so she stole her own—greying her hair and wrinkling her skin, and weakening her bones.

“I see you finally understand,” the wizard said.

“Yes,” said the older sister. A clock chimed. She watched her younger sister sleep, true rest this time, whole and peaceful at last.

And then she, too, closed her eyes and slept.

I dropped my overnight bag on the floor of my room and dropped myself on my bed, staring up at the stars on the ceiling.

“How was the show? Was the gallery amazing?” Marin asked.

I closed my eyes and started keeping secrets from my sister. “Well, I walked in on Evan having sex with someone else, and I needed to ask the gallery’s publicist to arrange for a new hotel room for me at the last minute, but otherwise, things went well.”

“Seriously? That asshole.”

I nodded. “She was really nice about it. The publicist, I mean.”

Marin sat down next to me. “Are you okay?”

“Mostly. I’m more embarrassed than hurt.”

“What a fucker.”

“No argument from me on that one. He was really enjoying the whole big success thing, everyone making a fuss about him and his art. And they should. He might be a jackass, but he’s a very talented one.

“He just forgot how to be a decent human being, as the night went on.” And then my voice broke and I followed it, hot tears spilling down my cheeks.

Marin gathered me into her arms, and held me while I wept.

“I’m just so mortified,” I said. “It was like I was nothing. And then he called, and tried to tell me that’s what she was, like that didn’t make it even worse.”

“I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

“Thanks.” I sat up, blew my nose, scrubbed the remaining tears from my face.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

I nodded. “It sucks, and I plan on wallowing, but my heart is insulted, not broken.”

“Not in love, then?” she asked.

“No.” I thought of Gavin, his desperation, and knew what I had felt was nothing like that. “Are you?”

“I think part of me has been since the first time we danced together,” she said. “He makes me feel like I’m safe, and like I could be brave enough to do anything.”

I squeezed her hand. “I’m so happy for you.” And I was, I was. Even as my own heart pinched and folded in on itself, knowing that she loved him made what I had agreed to, hurting her to save her, not easier, but almost bearable.

“Have you talked at all about what happens if you go to Faerie as the tithe?” I asked. I wanted to know what exactly it was I would be hiding from her.

She nodded. “He hasn’t said so directly, but I know he’s worried. He keeps telling me I’m good enough to have a ‘stunning career’—his words—without it, that I should think carefully about my options, that I should talk to Evan about what it’s been like—which I’m certainly not going to do now.”

“But if Gavin’s worried—” I started.

“I know there are risks, but Gavin doesn’t know our mother. I keep a calendar, you know,” she said.

I rubbed my eyes. “Of what?”

“Days since the last time I’ve heard from her. Or seen her. She’s pretty regular about making contact, like she doesn’t want to let
me get too comfortable. So this way I know when to brace myself for the random message delivered through the front office, or the bouquet of headless roses left in my dressing room.”

My hand curled into a claw. I’d never kept a calendar. It was always a clock. Counting down in my head until the next time.

“There is always a next time,” I said, half-aloud.

Marin nodded. “I might have a good career, maybe even a stunning one, without becoming the tithe. But I won’t have a safe life. I need to do things this way to make sure we’re safe. To make sure she can never touch us again.”

It sounded like Gavin had been exactly right in predicting Marin’s reactions. Proof of love, I guessed. The needle in my heart took another stitch.

“You don’t think there’s another way, something else that might work? Gavin can’t curse her?” I asked.

“Apparently not, because I’m sure he would have offered. But nothing else I’ve done to try to get away from her has ever worked. Not completely. I know that’s how it’s been for you, too. She always manages to creep back in. It would be worth going not to hear her voice for seven years, never mind the rest of it. I can’t make him see that, but I know you understand.”

I did, was the thing. That understanding was part of the vise that Gavin had put me in. I didn’t want Marin’s time in Faerie to hurt her—I would do anything, everything I could to keep her safe—but I knew what she meant. There was a freedom attached to going that was worth what being there would cost.

The two years I had been away at boarding school, my mother wrote me every day. People noticed, commented on how much she must love me, how close we must be. Really, what it meant was that every day, there was the reminder that I was pathetic, I would
never amount to anything. I stopped reading them, but it didn’t help, because they still showed up, each new letter a reminder that even though I had left, I hadn’t gotten away. She could still get to me, she was the one in control. It got to the point where the simple act of opening my mailbox had made me sick to my stomach.

“I do understand,” I said.

“People ask, ‘How will you know when you’ve made it?’ When I answer, I talk about roles I’d like to dance, that I want to create a part one day, that sort of thing. But really? It will be when I finally feel like she’s not waiting around the corner to pounce.

“When I don’t go to bed at night wondering if the next day is the day she’s going to show up to try to take everything I’ve worked for away from me. That was what she always said: ‘I gave you this, I can take it back.’ And I knew she could.”

She shuddered. “Ugh. Sorry to be so bleak. I was trying to cheer you up.”

“Yeah, that worked well.” But I forced a smile onto my face.

“I need to go practice, but before I do, do you want me to bring you anything? Chocolate? Wine? Evan’s cheating balls?”

I snickered. “I’m good, thanks. Dinner later?”

“Perfect,” she said.

She hugged me before she left, and I felt how strong she was, how sinewy with muscle, full of grace. Gavin could be wrong about what she was strong enough to survive.

He could be wrong, and it wouldn’t matter. Because I had promised I would hurt my sister to try to protect her. Because even if I hadn’t made that promise, I might hurt her anyway, because we wanted the same thing. Maybe neither of us would be chosen. But only one of us could be.

I told Beth I had decided, I was sure. My fingers wrapped around the hourglass dangling from my neck as I spoke.

“What happens next? Do I need to file paperwork or something?” Throw my name into an eternally burning goblet? Write it on wax and give it to a blind oracle? Even though I had lived with the knowledge of what the tithe was, what Melete was, for months now, it seemed almost ridiculous to have this conversation sitting on the worn grey sofa in Beth’s house, the lilac blanket she had knitted tossed over the back, the scent of coffee mingling with the smoke of lapsang souchong, like the Fae had become an ordinary thing.

“Nothing like that. There will be a gathering, the night of the spring equinox. You’ll be evaluated. Showing up and presenting your work is all you need do.”

“It seems sort of anticlimactic,” I said. It should be harder, or magical. Something that made clear it wasn’t just another story submission.

“It won’t be. What does Marin think of your choice?”

“We haven’t talked about it.” I knew we’d have to, but I wanted to put it off as long as possible. The possibility of the conversation had become so fraught. “I mean, I’m sure she knows, because I’m still wearing the necklace, but we haven’t actually gone into the specifics of the thing.”

Beth set down her empty cup and picked up her knitting. “Well. Remember that you can change your mind at any time up to the equinox. Also remember that you aren’t betraying Marin by choosing to believe in yourself, and in your art, and that doing so doesn’t mean you don’t believe in hers.”

I nodded, throat tight. “Logically, I know that. But part of me feels like it’s a betrayal, to want this. To compete against her.”

“I haven’t ever been in the situation you’re in. I’m an only child,”
Beth said. “I never lived with my daughter’s father. He’s a perfectly lovely man whom I like a great deal, and we would have made each other miserable if we had ever resided under the same roof.

“I love my daughter, but we’re not peers. She has no desire to be a writer, and I have no desire to be an orthopedic surgeon. I don’t know what it would be like to be in competition with her for anything, and I never will. So it’s easy for me to tell you that from the perspective of an artist, Imogen, if you want this chance, you should grab it with both hands and hang on to it.

“But from the perspective of a human”—she leaned back in her chair, set her knitting in its bag—“things are different. People who don’t know any better will tell you that you can have it all. That the people who love you will support you in your choices, and if they don’t, they never loved you anyway. That’s not exactly true.

“I believe that you should put yourself and your art first. In the end, the art is what lasts. But making that choice means sacrifices. Before you decide anything, you don’t just need to know what you want, you need to know what you’re willing to give up to get it.”

I came home to discover that Ariel had occupied the front room. Furniture was shoved to the side, stacked up on each other in haphazard and precarious fashion. The floor was covered with index cards, arranged around x’s of tape.

“What is this?” I asked.

“I’m blocking out my new project,” she said.

“The one that’s not Joan of Arc?”

She nodded. “I’m trying to figure out how much of a fairy tale I can tell about this place, before it turns into something that can steal my voice. Plus I’ve got a main character who can only speak the truth once we get to Act Two, which makes things both easier and not.”

“Pronouns,” I said.

“What?” She sat back on her heels.

“Thomas and I had an entire conversation about the tithe and Faerie when we were at the gallery for Evan’s show. Using pronouns. I think I only got tripped up once.”

“So it’s how you say things, not what you say.”

“I think so,” I said. “So long as you might plausibly be talking about something else, I don’t think it triggers the curse or whatever it is that shuts us up.”

“That helps.” She grabbed a stack of index cards, made notes. “I mean, I can always rewrite in rehearsals if it turns out people literally can’t say their lines, but this is good to know.”

“It looks like it’s going well.” I could see more of the pieces now, bits of songs, dance steps, stage blocking, dialogue. Some cards layered on top of each other. It looked close to complete.

“It is.” She reached over and knocked the table leg, causing it to tilt, and nearly fall off the ottoman it was perched on. “Superstition. But almost all the songs are set. Mostly, I’m working on the book and the staging.

“I was worried it wouldn’t, you know? Like, the magic ‘don’t talk about Fae club’ would kick in, and I’d be up onstage making fish faces while the music played. But it’s working.

“So if I wanted to look for more fairy tales, where would I find them?”

“Like Beauty and the Beast sorts of fairy tales?” I asked.

“Exactly. Not our kind of problem, just general information.”

I sat down on the floor with her, next to an index card that asked,
Does he love her?
It depended, I thought, on who the “he” was. “I can give you some books. Are you looking to add them to your story?”

“Not so much that. But I keep thinking—I wrote this because I
was so angry about not being able to talk, and it’s working. I mean, no one on Broadway will think it’s true, but that almost doesn’t matter to me, because I’ll still have told the story.” She shoved a hand through her hair, puffed out a breath. “Then with what you just said, about the pronouns. It just makes me wonder—how many more of what we think of as just fairy tales might be true? Not true true, but a way of talking about things without exactly saying them? Maybe people wrote them down because they had to say
something
.”