Roses and Rot (29 page)

“What letters, Imogen? What email? I didn’t get anything from you. Before you left, you said you were sorry, you promised you’d help me get out, and then you disappeared into your new life. I get that she hurt you, and I know it was bad, but I was stuck there. Every day, waiting for her to snap again, waiting for that to be the day that I did something wrong, something that would make her turn on me. Something that would make her hurt me the way that she hurt you, something to take away my dancing.

“You got away, and I had to live with that, and I had to do it alone, because you left me there alone and never looked back.”

“Marin, I wrote. I wrote you that whole first year. I didn’t stop until I was sure you didn’t want to hear from me.” The horrible truth roared into my head. “She must have found them. The letters, the emails. Everything. She must have hid them, kept them from you.”

“That’s easy for you to say now, isn’t it?”

My stomach clenched and turned. “You think I would lie about that?”

“I don’t know, Imogen. You’re my sister, and I don’t know. All I know is that you left then, and you want to leave again. Off on your own to be amazing, and me left behind. I know that it doesn’t matter
to you that I want this, that I need to be the tithe so that I can have a career, a future when I get out of here, so that I can have a chance to make up for the time I’ve wasted here trying to make things better between us, that I wasted trying to figure out what I did that made you hate me so much that you left.”

“Marin, I don’t hate you. I never have. Moving out had nothing to do with you.”

“I guess it didn’t,” she said. “Considering how little I seem to matter to you now.”

Her words were a kick in the stomach, stealing my air. “You do matter.”

“Then take the charm off. Show me that I matter more to you than this does. Show me that you trust me enough, that you believe in me enough to think that I can do this, that I can be the one who gets us away from her for good.”

My hand went to the charm around my neck, holding on to it like it was a shield against shock, Gavin’s dire certainty echoing in my ears. “Marin, I can’t. I have to do this.”

She shook her head. “Mom always said that you were jealous of me. That you wanted to be the sister who was the star. I guess she didn’t lie about everything.”

You think you get free when you grow up, when you get out of the house. Mostly, you do. Eventually, you stop only ever letting yourself half-sleep, because you’re bracing for footsteps and angry hands. You stop looking for hiding places to keep safe your most precious things, to make it harder for someone to take them from you on a whim. You choose your clothing based on style, rather than on how well it hides bruises. You grow your hair out, and almost forget the metallic snick of scissors.

The muscles relax in your shoulders. You remember how to take a deep breath, how to unclench your hand, how to share a secret. Until.

There is always an until.

When it happens, everything goes back to the way it was, and you embrace your two best friends, loneliness and fear.

I closed the door behind my sister. Then I picked up my pen and went back to work. There was nothing else I could do.

And so I hid. I hid from Marin—and everyone else in the house—locking myself away in my tower, a Rapunzel who refused to let down her hair. I worked harder than I’d ever worked before, writing all hours of the day and night, leaving meals unfinished and half-drunk cups of coffee to go cold and sludgy on my desk while I wrestled with words and phrases.

I didn’t leave my room.

There are fairy tales where silence matters. Where a particular truth must not be told to a particular person, where shirts of stinging nettles must be woven without even the smallest whimper of pain or else a curse will not be broken. The silence binds back like thorns, wrapping and stopping the mouth of the person who could speak the truth and save herself, who must instead stand, tied to the stake, waiting for the voice of the fire.

I didn’t speak of the bargain I had made with Gavin, except to the silence of the page.

But a curse wouldn’t be a curse if it were easy to bear, and my tower wasn’t ringed around with thorns, or set apart like a stylite in the desert. It was in a house full of people, a house with my sister in it. Every time I saw her I wanted to speak, but I swallowed my words, and I choked on my silence.

There was nothing I could say that would help.

The shattering of glass brought all of us running, from the library and down from our rooms and into a storm of wings and feathers.

The birds flocked and swooped, moving in tandem like a murmuration of starlings, down the hall to where Marin stood, circling back and up the staircase again toward me. A sea of them, in radiant colors. They flew past us again, the circuit tightening, a feathered whirlwind.

With no obvious signal, they changed course, flew back into the night, disappearing through the window their entrance had shattered.

“What was that?” Ariel, standing in the hallway near Marin, asked.

“It’s getting close to the equinox. The Fae are checking out their potential houseguests,” Helena said from below me on the landing. All of us were frozen, still.

“Those were Fae?” Ariel asked.

“Or their emissaries. Not all of them look human.”

“So if they’re coming here—and next time, I wish they’d knock, because it’s cold and that glass is going to be a bitch to clean up—does that mean it’s Marin for sure?”

“Or Imogen. She’s got a necklace, too,” Helena said.

“You could still change your mind, Imogen,” Marin said.

I walked the rest of the way down the stairs, began picking up the larger pieces of shattered glass. “I can’t, Marin.”

“You could,” she said. “You just won’t.”

“Oh my God,” Ariel said, her awe breaking through the beginnings of another fight.

“They were Fae,” Helena said. “Look at the feathers.”

They had fallen in the wake of flight, breadcrumbs to mark a path. Smoke rose from them now—violet, midnight, grey—a thick haze that smelled equally of roses and of rot. When the smoke cleared, the feathers were gone.

“Is this going to keep happening?” Ariel asked.

“Probably,” Helena said. “It did before.”

“Why did they come here, though?” Marin asked. “It’s not like I dance in the house.”

Helena stared at her. “Because talent is only a piece of the tithe. It’s also about who Faerie wants. I thought you of all people would have figured that out.”

The next morning, I stumbled out of bed to hear Ariel come into the house singing, belting the glory note so long that I wondered if it was true that the right note could shatter glass, and if we were about to find out.

“Are you drunk?” Helena asked.

“Just happy. You should be, too, because look what I got!” Ariel dangled a chain from her hand. An hourglass charm spun at the bottom of it.

The equinox was only a week away. “The new project is done?” I asked.

“It is.”

“What new project?” Helena asked.

“I got grumpy at Angelica for telling me I was doing art wrong, and at the Fae for taking my voice at Thanksgiving, so I wrote
this whole thing about this guy, Thomas the Rhymer, who was this amazing poet, but then he hooked up with the Fairy Queen and she stole his voice, and when he finally gets it back, he can’t be a poet anymore because he can only tell the truth, and no one goes to a poet for that. It’s a musical.” Ariel was all delight.

Helena looked at me, and I shrugged. I had no more idea of what was going on than she did.

“Angelica says the Fae like stories about themselves, and I guess they liked mine.”

“Good for you,” Helena said. “Really. But why is that supposed to make me happy?”

“Because this is for you.” Ariel offered the chain to Helena. “That’s all you need, right? You put this on and go kick ass, and then tell Janet to fuck off.”

“You’d just give it up?” Helena’s hand twitched, almost reaching out, then falling back to her side.

“Going to Faerie for seven years, that whole thing’s not for me. I’ve known that pretty much since the beginning. I need to hear people screaming along with my songs. But if you want the chance, you should take it. Here.”

Helena swallowed hard, nodded. She took the charm from Ariel’s hand, and fastened it around her neck. It fell to the floor. She tried again, and again the necklace wouldn’t clasp.

“Let me try,” Ariel said. The necklace fell again.

“Stop,” Helena said. “Thank you for trying. But it knows, or they know. Whatever. It’s not for me.” She stepped over the charm and walked back up to her room. The door closed behind her.

“It was kind, what you tried to do,” I said.

“I thought I was helping,” Ariel said. “I thought if she just had
a chance, maybe it would be okay.” She picked up the charm and shoved it into her pocket.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try yourself?” I knew Ariel was good; she could be one more obstacle in front of Marin.

“Very, very sure. Even if it weren’t seven years off of a stage, I do not want to go hang out with things like those birds that broke in here. It’s just too much. I will happily stay here, and make my art on my own.”

We weren’t the only ones afflicted by the curiosity of the Fae. As the clock ticked closer to the equinox, they were taking themselves out of hiding all over Melete to observe and consider.

“I’ve been standing here for an hour, and I still can’t figure out where the motor is, how it’s being controlled.” A tall man stood on the bank, staring at the moat around the house that Marin hadn’t yet staged her invasion of. “It” in this case was the smallish sea monster, acid-yellow and serpentine, swimming lazy circuits around the house.

“The motor?” I asked.

“It has to be. Some kind of engine that’s propelling it. It’s solid, so it can’t be projected or CGI.” The man’s voice was distracted, his face distant, as if part of him were somewhere else, marking theories on a whiteboard or adjusting gears.

The sea monster spiraled into a coil at my feet, casting a cat-like eye on me. Then it sank beneath the surface of the water.

“Amazing, the things people are working on here. I’m going to see if the artist lives there—I’d love to collaborate with them.” Shaking his head in awe, the man walked toward the house.