The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(2)

“? votre santé,” said the jeweler as the bartender departed with the rattling cart.

The woman, still grinning, lifted her fingers as if she might pluck out the jewel. The old man beside her grabbed her wrist—

“I said the diamond was yours. I didn’t say you could take it out of the fucking glass.”

The woman appeared stung. She looked from the glass to the man, her eyes narrowing.

“I’m fucking serious,” he said, even as he laughed. “If you want it so badly, you can find it in tomorrow’s filth.”

The woman was clearly disgusted. For a moment, I thought she might throw the drink in his face. Across the room, our eyes met. She drained the glass in one go, diamond and all. And then lifted her chin in defiance, her gaze full of ugly recognition: You are starving prey. Just like me.

I hid it well, but she was right: I was always hungry. A single moment of either madness or mystery had shaped my life. Ever since, I have sought proof of the impossible and bent my whole life around the feeding of it.

I fanned out the pages on the marble table, studying my notes for next week’s speech on the myth of Melusine. The print before me showed Melusine with tangled, waist-length hair, bat wings, and a coiling, serpent tail. Her hands were clasped in demure horror, as if she were clinging to some last vestige of genteel shock before she could abandon her husband for his betrayal.

Melusine had been made famous in Jean d’Arras’s fourteenth-century writing. Depending on the source material, she was something of a mermaid or a siren. One day, a nobleman came across her in a forest glade and begged her to be his wife. She agreed on the condition that he never spy on her while she bathed. The nobleman agreed, and for a time they were happy. But eventually, curiosity overwhelmed him and, one day, he spied on her as she bathed, saw her true nature, and lost her forever.

I have always been intrigued by these not-quite women, whether they were sirens or mermaids, kinnari or selkie. The world can’t seem to decide whether to condemn, covet, or celebrate them. They’re damned as reminders of lust, and yet the House of Luxembourg enthusiastically claimed descent from Melusine’s unnatural bloodline, and inside an eleventh-century church in Durham Castle there lived a mermaid carved in stone. Hundreds of years ago, perhaps some pagan entering a church to escape the cold would have seen that carving as a message. A password, of sorts, that even in this strange place and strange religion lay something familiar . . .

Even if she is a devil.

“Sir?”

I looked up, ready to admit defeat to the waitress and leave when I saw that she was holding a platter with two drinks. She held out an envelope: “A gift from another guest.”

The two drinks looked identical: a rich amber whiskey with a perfectly clear sphere of ice. I opened the letter.

The drink on the left will fill your belly for the rest of your days, but you will only be able to speak truths.

The drink on your right will leave you hungrier than before, but it will polish every lie that leaves your tongue.



I looked around the room; a strange tingling worked its way up from the base of my skull. Even before I reached for the glass on the right, I imagined that magic liquid gilding my tongue. I drank. The whiskey tasted like a hot knife, burnt and metallic.

Seconds later, I heard the softest laugh. I turned in my seat, and that was when I first laid eyes on Indigo Maxwell-Caste?ada. Not a man at all, but a woman.

She leaned against the wall, hardly ten feet from me, wearing a column dress of shirred navy silk that looked as if it had been poured onto her body. Sapphires winked at her throat and ears. Silver flashed on her wrists.

She moved lightly. I want to say that it was gentle and serene, like a fawn through snow. But Indigo’s grace was restrained, calculated, as if she knew that people like her could stomp the world into submission and she had no wish to bruise it further.

At first glance, Indigo was attractive. She did not become striking until one looked closer, noticed the way she held herself, or rather, how the light held her. As if she were something precious. Her skin was richly bronzed, her eyes large and dark, nose lightly snubbed, and her lips had a curious fullness—the bottom lip not quite as ripe as the top. This asymmetry transfixed me.

She made her way to my table, sank into the chair opposite me, and announced: “I am Indigo and you chose to go hungry.” Her voice was low and rich. I had the deliciously absurd thought that each syllable was steeped in onyx and chords of music. “Why?”

“Between the two choices, I may not be able to live long without food, but I don’t have a life worth living without the other.”

She smiled.

Some individuals are like portals, the knowing of them makes the world a far vaster place. In Indigo’s presence my world widened. Brightened. There was something about her that made the eye linger. It wasn’t her beauty; it was the way she seemed superimposed on the room. A mirage that might vanish if I looked away.

“What do you recommend I drink?” she asked.

This ease, this exchange of nonsense with Indigo Maxwell-Caste?ada, could not possibly be real. Thus it was from a place of disbelief that I spoke in whimsy.

“I was hoping they might serve us something less human,” I said. “Ambrosia, if they have it.”

“Is it hard to come by?”

“A little. The ancient Hindus believe it resides in an ocean of cosmic milk.”