Roses and Rot (17 page)

I ripped the sheets from the bed and curled up on the mattress with blankets piled on top of me. After an hour of wide-eyed sleeplessness, aching joints and itchy skin, I gave up. I would go do laundry, something I could pretend was normal.

On the way down, I checked Marin’s room again. This time, it was clear she had been back—her dance bag was open, its detritus scattered about the bed.

She was in the laundry room, hanging tights and leotards to dry. Perfectly composed, normal looking.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She waved away the concern. “Totally fine. I wasn’t even thrown. My horse got jostled, and I just sort of slid off. I’d had a hard enough time staying on anyway—you know I’m rubbish around horses.”

That much was true. For all her grace onstage, she had fallen off a pony ride when we were kids, one of the kind that spring up in hardware store parking lots in the summer, the ponies tethered in a slow circle. When she poofed into the sawdust at his feet, the pony looked as shocked as everyone else.

“Really,” she said, “I’m fine.”

She seemed like she was. There was color in her cheeks and no shadows under her eyes. And she thought I was asking about the fall, and not the rest of it.

“How much of last night was a surprise to you?” I asked, stuffing my bedding in the washing machine.

“I didn’t know we were actually going into Faerie, but otherwise, nothing.”

“Even about Gavin?”

“He told me everything when he gave me the charm. It would
have been kind of ridiculous if he hadn’t.” She answered, like all of this was normal, ordinary. As if we hadn’t ridden through an imaginary place by way of a bridge that only partially existed. As if the world hadn’t been knocked sideways.

As if her boyfriend wasn’t the King of Faerie.

“You couldn’t tell, before? I mean, about him?”

“Imogen.” She shook out a leotard with a snap. “It’s not like he does magic when we’re together.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I mean, not about him, specifically, but about the tithe?”

“Because I thought Beth had told you. You didn’t even blink when you saw my necklace. You were even dressed for riding last night.” She hung the last pair of tights and looked at me. “You didn’t know.”

“Nothing. About any of it. Not Faerie, not the tithe. Well done me and all my fairy tales.” I leaned against the washing machine, exhaustion a weight in my bones. “I thought all the hourglass meant was extra time, a few nice things at the Market.”

“You can refuse it,” Marin said. “No one has to go.”

I almost asked what would happen to Faerie, if there were no tithe, but realized it was a ridiculous question. There would always be people willing to make that bargain.

I was.

For all I felt turned inside out by the last few hours, that was the one thing I knew. If I had the chance, I would go. Like Evan, the fine print didn’t really matter, and any consequences paled in the face of what it meant for my art.

“Will you go?” I asked. “If you’re the one chosen.”

“Yes,” she said. No hesitation.

“But—seven years of not dancing, Marin.” I hadn’t realized how much stress one year off to be here would cause her, but even I
knew that a dance career couldn’t survive a seven-year hiatus. The loss of training, and the merciless toll that time takes. It would be impossible. I couldn’t understand how she could even consider it.

“Gavin says the time won’t matter while I’m there. It’s part of the magic. And when I come back, I’ll finally be able to save us. I’ll be able to make sure Mom never comes near us again.”

“Marin, what are you talking about? How would she be part of this?”

Her voice was low and harsh. “What do you think success—real, true, top of the profession, your name lives forever success—means, Imogen? It’s not just fame. It’s everything that goes with it. Including money and power.”

“Great. I still don’t understand how that keeps our mother away. You’re talking about the woman who always managed to talk herself backstage, and past dorm security, no matter how hard either of us tried to keep her out.”

This was how it would start, every time. She’d start by telling nice stories. It was my birthday, and she was there as a surprise. When I let people know that was one of her favorite lies, she’d try penitence and crocodile tears—she knew she had hurt me, she had so much to apologize for. There was always someone willing to believe her, and open the door.

“I know she did the same thing to you,” I said.

“Yes, but when I’m the one paying the security, or the doorman, when I can have them fired if she gets in, it will be different.”

I wanted so much to believe her, but I had thought I was free before, and been wrong every single time. Our mother had always managed to find us, to be there, waiting. Some days I felt like we’d never be truly safe unless she was dead.

“It will be,” Marin said again. She reached out, took my hand. Her scars were so faded, I could only see them because I knew they
were there. Mine were stark against them. As I held her hand, I could feel mine burning.

That afternoon, I knocked on Beth’s front door, then shoved my hands in my pockets against the early November chill.

“Imogen. I thought I might see you today. Come in.”

I had been braced for her house to look different, to be able to see the smears of Fae glamour that still clung to her. But no. Nothing had changed, even though everything had. “Your first book, the one that won the Orange Prize—it came out just over seven years after your residency here.” I knew her bibliography, had read everything she’d published, and I’d never noticed the gap before.

“You’ve done your research, I see. Yes, I served as the tithe for seven years after my fellowship. Coffee? You must be exhausted. The ride takes so much out of us, especially the first time you pass through. I know some people decide not to go after that.”

“No. No coffee.”

“And you’re angry with me. You think I should have told you. You think I owe you answers now, and Imogen, I’m happy to give them to you.” She spooned Earl Grey into a teapot that looked like a pink piglet. “But think: What would you have said if, when I had given you that necklace, I’d told you it might be your ticket to fairyland?”

“I wouldn’t have believed you.” I leaned against her counter, trying not to fall over.

“Good. You shouldn’t have, then. But now you do, and now you have some idea of the stakes, so it’s time for you to think seriously about how much your writing means to you. Is it enough to accept the bargain, and go to Faerie? More important, is it enough for you to push yourself to be better than your sister so that you’re the one who gets there?”

Hearing things actually spoken, even when you already know what’s going to be said, makes them more real, more absolute. Because of course that was the flip side—if I were the tithe, Marin wouldn’t be, and she wanted it, too, at least as much as I did. My stomach clenched.

Beth pushed a steaming mug into my hands. “I know you drink coffee, but the way you look right now, you’d bring that right back up. This is mint tea. It will settle you.”

The tea tasted like liquid breath mints, but it did calm the roiling in my stomach. “Do I have to do anything about it now?”

“You’ll have until spring to decide. Though, if you’re considering it, you should move the timeline for finishing your book forward, because you’ll need that to be in good shape.

“There is an audition process.” Her gaze went very far away then, before it refocused on me. “But we’ll deal with that then.

“This opportunity isn’t any different from anything else at the end. The only thing you can control is your writing, so make that as strong as you can, and let the rest go.”

My hands cramped around the cup, so hard I couldn’t set it down. I shook, and my vision greyed.

Beth put one arm around my waist and carefully took the cup away from me. “Come on now. Let’s get you over to the couch. You’re tired, and you’ve had some shocks.”

She guided me over to the couch, helped undo my boots when my hands were too clumsy to unknot the laces. She tucked a blanket around me, soft and hand-knit.

“Get some rest. Sleep. Stay as long as you want.”

I tucked myself deeper into the blanket and closed my eyes. The simple quiet comfort of it was like a fairy tale—or at least what I thought they had been like, before I knew better.

Let the rest go, Beth had said. As if the tithe, Faerie, everything I ever wanted, were all the same sort of thing as wondering if an editor would like my writing style, or as having a day where my words were flat enough to make me doubt myself. I couldn’t let the rest go; I lived in a house right next to it.

So I ran, as hard and as fast as I could, through Melete’s forest. Through trees gone skeletal and a marble-grey sky. Through the snow that fell like fat, white feathers. Not sticking to the ground, not yet, but chilling everything. Through the branches that whipped at my arms and plucked at my hair, through the burning in my lungs and thighs as I ran away, away, away.

But the Melete I ran through looked strange to me, and I was compelled to look for the places where Faerie overlapped. The trees, the grounds, the river looked unchanged, everything the same as it had always been, and the sameness haunted me, because I knew it was a lie. I couldn’t trust it, and I couldn’t trust myself, because I had been blind to the truth of what was all around me.

This Faerie tale was nothing like the ones I’d read.

I was also running away from the knowledge that I looked strange to myself. I spent too much time thinking, trying to see what it was in my words that had translated into a chained hourglass, wondered what would be the thing that would or wouldn’t mean that I was chosen. I didn’t know the rules, suspected it wouldn’t make a
difference even if I did, but I still wanted to know them, wanted a list of what to do, to make the Fae choose me.

But in all the strangeness, the feeling that I had stepped through the looking glass instead of stopping at the reflection in it, I knew that it was only my perspective that had changed. The lie was only there because I knew what I wasn’t seeing.

The grass beneath my feet was still Melete. My writing was still my own, and I had still come here to try to change my life with it. I could still do that. That part hadn’t changed. Even if I hadn’t seen Faerie all around me, I could still write my fairy tales—mine might not be real, but I could still write them true.

I said those words to myself, but I didn’t believe them.

Everything had changed.

The wind picked up and the snow fell harder, sticking to the ground. The hourglass charm bounced against my breastbone as I ran past the mentors’ houses, through the falling light. The first days here had seemed to stretch out forever, but darkness came early now, even the sky helping to keep the secrets.

Past the dancers’ studios, and I looked for the light in Marin’s. I couldn’t outrun the ugly voice that told me I needed to be twice as good if I wanted to be chosen, because being Gavin’s girlfriend gave her an advantage. I could smash it to the back of my head, tell it to shut up, ignore it, but I couldn’t keep it from speaking, and I hated that about myself.

My being the tithe meant that Marin wouldn’t be. Never mind the other fellows—they didn’t fit into jealousy’s calculus that told me there was one place, and two sisters, and that all of this would come down to the two of us. One would speak diamonds, the other, toads. Never mind that both were uncomfortable and a curse—one was still better.

I felt like I should want Marin to be chosen—if I were truly the good sister, I would yank the chain from my neck and step out of her way. I knew she wanted the chance. She’d had time to think about it, to weigh the loss of seven years against the gain of absolute freedom, and it was a freedom she offered to share with me.
Keep us safe,
she had said. Us. I loved my sister. I felt like I should want this for her. And I did. But only if it couldn’t be me.

Then, at the forest’s edge—feathers spinning and twisting in the wind. It wouldn’t have even been a strange thing, not something to notice at all, except the rest of the day was windless and still.

More feathers, different shapes and sizes, colors from an entire aviary of birds, until the air was thick with them, until they were all around me, blanketing me, shutting out the sun.

Between one heartbeat and the next, all of the feathers fell to the ground.

A woman stood, looked at me. Her eyes banded, yellow like an owl’s. A close crop of feathers rather than hair on her head.

Words formed just behind my teeth, and then—

She exploded into a flock of birds.

I swallowed everything I might have said.

Echoes of wings faded across the sky and one feather—iridescent grey, almost silver—floated to the ground at my feet.

I picked it up and turned away from the studio lights, ran home. There was no escape from the strangeness, there was no putting Faerie and the complications of the tithe aside. The world had changed.