Roses and Rot (31 page)

Silence, so well kept that I wore it like a cloak, the glitter of the Market around me like the inside of a shattered mirror.

One sharp sob barked from my throat, and I slapped a hand over my mouth in an effort to stop another from following.

Overwhelmed by the night, by the Fae, I clung to my gifted finery and walked home, alone in the cold and silent darkness.

The first day of spring dawned grey, misty and close, water dripping from newly budded leaf and tree. The ground squelched underfoot, and the air smelled wet.

There was a card on my desk that hadn’t been there the night before, sitting on top of pages I had printed out, the ones I would read tonight.
You will be called for at sunset.
Words written in ink the iridescence of butterfly wings, such a pleasant invitation.

Follow the instructions I was given, Beth had said. I would be called for. I would go. I would will that my art would be enough.

The sun lanced through the clouds, illuminating the forest. Spring was regreening the trees. No longer the winter skeletons that had no secrets except those beneath their bones, the new leaves brought shadowed spaces, places to hide. Secrets grew up from the loam, and the roots, and the fallen leaves of the past.

In an easier life, I would have gone downstairs and talked to Marin. Told her that I loved her, that I thought she was an incredible dancer, that I believed in her. But I couldn’t say that I wanted her to be the one chosen tonight. And as much as I hadn’t been able to bring myself to undermine her before, I also couldn’t bring myself to support her now. Speak something and make it so—what if my words were what gave her the strength to be the best, and then she was chosen, and then she died? Because I couldn’t separate the one from the other in my head
anymore. I wanted her safe. So I stayed where I was. I kept my silence.

I dressed too early and sat, straight-backed, on the edge of my bed in my fake-professional black dress that I never wore because it felt like zipping myself into someone else’s skin, and heels that rubbed the sides of my toes. My feet would bleed like a dancer’s if I had to walk too far in them.

On my finger, the rose ring from the night before. The Fae woman had said it was for luck, after all, and I needed some.

Around my neck, of course, an hourglass.

The knock on the door came just as the edge of the sun dipped below the horizon. Helena was standing in her doorway as I walked downstairs. “Are you coming?” I asked.

“Past tithes enter Faerie separately. I have to cross over with Janet.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“At least it will be the last time.”

“You’ve made up your mind to leave? I’m glad. Go be yourself.” I hugged her. For a breath she stood, stiff, then her arms crept around my shoulders, and she hugged me back.

A voice came from downstairs, one I didn’t recognize, one that sounded like the tolling of a clock. “It is time. You must come now, or not at all.”

Helena stepped back, nodded, and I went.

Ariel was at the bottom of the steps. “I still think you’re crazy, and I’m not wishing you luck.” She pulled me into a hug, tight and fierce.

Marin was already at the door, standing next to a Fae woman whose dress was nearly as dark as her eyes, her hair the green and weeping branches of a willow. Neither of them said anything. The Fae woman turned on her heel, assuming we would follow.

“Marin—” I said.

But she only turned and walked away.

And so, in silence, I followed my sister down the stairs, and into the darkening forest.

We walked through the campus, past the mentors’ houses and the artists’ studios. Past the thorned shadows of the rose garden. Through the Commons, and along the shore of the Mourning River. To an old bridge, its worn stones faintly green with moss.

The bridge was whole tonight, as it had been the first time we crossed it, on Halloween. The stars changed overhead as we crossed, and I stumbled sideways, my heel skidding on the stone. My skin went hot, then cold. I felt watched, as if even the trees could see through my skin. I wanted to run forward, to turn back, both at once.

My shaking rattled the pages clutched in my hand, recalling me to myself, reminding me of what I was here for. I pulled in a breath, let it shudder out, and kept walking.

No Fae lined our path through the forest tonight. There was no need. We were coming to them, in slow progress, and my feet were already bloody in my shoes, the toll for the crossing paid. I matched my breath to my footsteps, trying not to quake in fear, trying to dampen the nerves sizzling beneath my skin.

Trying not to hear the fear that had been in Beth’s voice. Not to hear the silence when she hadn’t spoken of what would happen tonight. The only sounds now were that of the ground, crunching beneath our feet, and the whispers of our breath. The stars of Faerie were bright against Marin’s hair, and I remembered another night, following my sister through the woods when we were children. She had brought me out safe, then, and I wished, oh, I wished that she would return safely tonight.

All of us who hoped to be chosen were there, gathered. Fifteen.
Both too many and not enough. In clothing to dance in, holding violins, or like Michelle, whose face looked drawn, with painted canvases tucked under her arms. I waved to her, and she turned away. I wondered if she had read the fairy tales she was looking for, if she had found any help in them if she did.

The Fae woman who’d brought Marin and me led the others away, one at a time. From where we were, those of us who remained couldn’t see or hear anyone else. Maybe it was supposed to make the waiting easier. It didn’t.

“Fuck this. I’m done.” The snap of a chain, and a charm tossed to the ground. A tall man with a voice like warmed honey, his face all strong bones and rich dark skin that a camera would have worshipped. “This isn’t worth it.”

No one stopped him when he walked away. One less person to compete against.

“Here.” The Fae woman stopped. “You.” She summoned me with a wave of her hand, and I followed her through what looked like a thicker grove of trees.

It was, and it wasn’t. I could see the trees, smell the dark green of them, hear branches rub against each other. But it was also a stage, spotlit and set in some vast amphitheater. The one layered over the other in palimpsest, each simultaneously real and not.

My stomach slid sideways. The pages I clutched rattled in my shaking hand as I stepped into the light. I could see them, the Fae in all their terrifying glory. The humans stood out like flaws in a gem. Janet, arrogant and unblinking. Beth, who nodded, and Evan, who dropped his gaze from mine. Helena, whose eyes were shadowed. I took a deep breath, and began.

Once upon a time.

“Once upon a time, there was a mother, and she had two daughters.
One of the girls was as dark as the night, and the other girl was as bright as the day. But their mother promised them that she loved them both, each the same, and would never give one more than she gave the other.”

The world shifted, and I wasn’t standing, reading for an audience, but sitting in the backseat of my mother’s car, upholstery pricking against the backs of my legs. Second grade, I thought. Not a memory, or if it was, one so complete that every piece of it was tangible and real. My heart beat in that moment, not this one.

“You’ll never be anything, Imogen. It’s time for you to face that. You’re the weird little girl who sits in the back because no one else wants to sit by her. I’ve tried to help you be normal, but you won’t even make an effort. It’s no wonder no one likes you.”
My mother’s voice, on the way home from school, and even as the past ended, and I stood again in my present life, the floral scent of her perfume burned in my nostrils.

I held the pages in my hand tighter, reminded myself that the past was over, done, and kept reading.

“A promise such as that is all well and good, and who is to say if one girl’s shoes were small and tight, and the other girl’s were comfortable and new? They both, after all, had shoes. Equally impossible to measure whether a mother’s hand contained a pinch or a kindness, when it touches both girls’ cheeks.

“But one girl grew dimmer and the other grew brighter.”

The shift, again. The world dropping away below my feet. I was twelve this time.

The feel of the scissors, cold against my head, the snick of the blades as they cut through my hair. It fell to the ground in hanks. “I told you not to talk to boys. Do you want people to think you’re a slut?” When my mother finished, my hair was cut so close to my head that there was less than an inch of it left.

My scalp ached, and I wanted to reach up, to check that the hair I had always kept long after it had grown back out, that was twisted and pinned into a knot at the back of my neck, was still there. That it hadn’t been shorn again, wasn’t heaped at my feet. It had been the one thing I had thought was beautiful about myself, and she had taken it from me, and smiled when she did. My hand fisted at my side, trembled, but I kept it there, kept reading.

“The bright sister watched as her darker sister diminished, and it grieved her. A sister, she thought, was a half of a whole, a reflection in a glass, the echo of a heartbeat. One was not possible without the other. She did not understand what she saw from her mother, but she knew it was not love.”

The word cracked as I spoke it. I swallowed hard, called my voice back into my throat, and kept reading.

“So the bright sister took herself from home, and set out to find a way to help the dark sister. She had heard there was a witch in the woods. A witch, she thought, could help.”

Sickness burned in my gut, bile rushed up into my mouth, and my hands shook with rage. The next year. Three days before Christmas.

All of the contents of my drawers spilled out on the floor—pens and pushpins and bookmarks mingled with sweaters and leggings and underwear. Books were unshelved, the sheets ripped from the bed.

My notebooks, all of the stories I had ever written, were gone. Burned to ash. Marin’s cry as she tried to save them.

My own screams.

My hand. Oh, God, my hand, burning and burning.

“You have to learn to do as I say. I’ve told you and told you, and obviously that hasn’t made an impression. I’m only doing this for your own good.”

“You’re not,” I whispered, and there was a rustle from my audience. I could still feel the agony as the flames ate my skin, could smell the smoke, settling in my nose and throat, choking me. I looked up, out, but I couldn’t see their faces. I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood, pushed my feet harder against the elegant cages of my shoes, leaned into the pain there because that pain was real, found my place on the page, and continued to read.

“ ‘Of course I can help you,’ the witch told the bright sister. ‘You and your sister both. But it will cost you.’

“ ‘I’ll pay anything,’ the bright sister said, because she loved her dark sister, and because she did not understand the ways of bargaining with witches—how you tell them no two times, and only the third say yes.

“ ‘I need a servant. The last girl got rescued by a dragon. Can you work?’ the witch asked.

“ ‘Yes,’ said the bright sister.

“And so she did. Cleaning the witch’s cottage and cooking the witch’s meals and doing the witch’s sewing, for a seam sewn by a witch will never hold.”

Pain. Pain for each relived moment.

The bruises on my skin. A pinch for fidgeting. A slap for talking back. Stripes from a ruler on the back of my legs when I hadn’t gotten straight A’s on my report card. The calm promises that no one would believe me if I told. After all, I was a liar—that was what people who made up stories were. I was a liar. I was nothing. I was nothing. I was nothing.

Her voice was a litany in my head, a counterpoint to every word I spoke, as I continued to read.

“The bright sister worked until she was barely a shadow of herself, until she was smudged with dirt and dark as a corner. But witches keep their promises, and after a year and a day, the witch gave the
bright sister two finely worked chains of silver. ‘They will bind you together,’ she said.”

Something new. Something I hadn’t lived.

Marin dancing. Our mother’s voice. “Imogen is just jealous. She knows she’s not as pretty, not as talented as you are, and so she doesn’t want you to succeed. She doesn’t want you to be happy.”

Marin turning and turning, her eyes spotting the wall opposite to where our mother stood.

“It’s why she left. She doesn’t love you, and she’s not coming back.”

Marin missing her spot, and falling.

My heart broke as she fell. But wasn’t that what I wanted, after all? For her to fall again, to not escape, to be good, but not quite good enough?

“When the bright sister returned home, she found that the dark sister was gone. Dead and buried, with only a hazel tree to mark her grave. The bright sister put one chain on the hazel tree, and the other one on herself, and then she lay down upon her sister’s grave. She did not rise from there again.

“Soon, a rose grew from the grave as well, with flowers a color unseen anywhere else, petals of purest silver. It wrapped itself around the hazel tree as it grew, so close the two could not be separated.

“And the mother came from the house every day, and in her grief at what she had done, she watered both the rosebush and the hazel tree equally with her tears.”

The end. I let my hand, still screaming with pain, fall to my side, the papers rattling. There was no applause, no visible reaction from the Fae, from anyone. It was like performing to a room full of statues, marble and cold. I was led through trees to a seat with other residents of Melete. Still that uncanny double vision, the forest and a stage, strobing one to the next.

I wanted not to be there. To be gone, to be home, to be away somewhere no one would see me shaking, where my mouth didn’t taste of ashes, where I could put myself back together again. My feet throbbed with every beat of my pulse, and the left-hand sides of my pages were smeared with red, the blood from a paper cut.