Roses and Rot (20 page)

“My voice is who I am, and they can take it from me. I don’t know how to feel okay.”

I gave her my hand, and she held on tight.

“Are you here just to pack your things and go, then?” I asked.

“No, because the sick thing is, leaving doesn’t help with this. The part that’s weird and scary just gets worse if I leave, because there will be no one I can talk to. I won’t even be able to say why I left.

“So no, I’m not leaving. I am here to the end, because if they can do that to me, if they can take my voice, then I am taking everything I can from them by way of payment. I will stay in this house and eat the food and use the time that I have to make something brilliant, and in the end, they will have paid for all of those things.” Cold fury in her voice.

“So what will you do?”

“I’m thinking of changing my project,” she said.

“No more Joan of Arc?”

She finished her drink and smiled, and there were teeth in her smile, sharpness. “Suddenly I find I’m more interested in exploring ideas of silence, rather than of voices. And from sources that aren’t necessarily divine. I think I’m going to work on something that might speak for me a little better when I do leave here.”

“Be careful, Ariel.”

“Come on now, Imogen. You know how this works. No one ever made great art by being careful.”

I reached into the drawer of my desk for a new notebook, and my hand brushed against the packet of letters—
My Thomas, True, Your own, J
—that I had found in the library. So much had happened since then, I had forgotten about them. The scent of rosemary crackled into the room as I took the letters out of the drawer. I unwrapped the ribbon and read them again.

This time, I caught what I hadn’t known was there before. Woven among the promises of love and fidelity was the ongoing refrain of seven years. I sat up straighter in my chair and read them again, slowly.
When your seven years are over . . . When these seven years have passed . . . I would wait even seven times seven years.
She told him she was writing a book of poetry to decrease the hours until he returned. When he returned, he would have her love, and all of his dreams. It was never made explicit, but the evidence was there. Whoever Thomas was, he had been the tithe. J was writing love letters to him while he was away in Faerie.

I tied them back up in ribbon and seal, then went downstairs.

“Hey, Imogen,” Ariel said. “Come outside and look at this.”

She opened the front door. A large box filled with batteries and candles and blankets had appeared on the front porch, a sign reading
BLIZZARD SAFETY KIT
on top of it. Extra firewood was stacked along the side of the house. The dull iron scent of snow filled the air.

“So, are they serious with this, or is this like a ‘be prepared’ sort of care package?” Ariel asked. “Because honestly, all of this stuff seems a bit much. It’s just snow.”

I pulled up the weather report on my phone. “I think they’re serious. This says possible blizzard conditions, over a foot of snow expected by tomorrow morning.” I hugged my arms to myself, bouncing on the balls of my feet for warmth. The wood of the porch snapped and groaned, almost as loud as the trees. Our breath puffed out. The sky was grey and flat, but the only things blowing across it were leaves, the tattered ends of fall that cartwheeled and dipped.

Marin rushed up the steps, cheeks pink. “It’s freezing. What are you two doing out here?”

“Looking for snow. Apparently we’re due for a big storm.” Ariel looked excited.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. My hip is killing me,” Marin said, pressing her hand to her left side. She had taken a bad fall in a pas de deux class when she was twenty, and cracked the cartilage in her hip socket. It ached in cold and stormy weather.

The text alert sounded on all of our phones then, confirming the blizzard warning, and that supplies were being delivered to all of the residences.

“I’ve always wanted to get snowed in by a blizzard. Snow angels and hot chocolate. This is going to be so great,” Ariel said.

“Ariel, sweetie, where are you from again?” Marin asked.

“Miami. I’ve never seen snow fall in real life.”

“You just keep believing that the storm will be fun, then,” Marin said, and went inside.

“I will,” Ariel said. “My enthusiasm renders me immune to cold and to snark.”

I started a pot of soup that we could keep simmering on the
stove. Ariel lit a fire in the fireplace, and we went outside with her when the first flakes began drifting through the sky. She grinned and caught the snow on her tongue, spinning in circles until her hair was dotted with white.

“Can you do the Snow Queen dance from
Nutcracker
?” she asked Marin.

Marin closed her eyes and moaned in mock agony. “In my sleep, probably. Why would you ask a question like that? I thought you were my friend.”

“What’s wrong with
Nutcracker
? I love that ballet. I go every year.”

“You and everyone else in the world. For the entire month of December. Every. Fucking. Year. Hence the problem. I’m convinced hell is actually an eternity of being a snowflake in
Nutcracker.
”

“So you’re saying I just asked you to sing ‘My Heart Will Go On.’ ”

Marin nodded. “I will if you will.”

“Fuck no.” They looked at each other and shuddered. I laughed.

The sky grew darker and the snow fell heavier as the day went on. We lit candles throughout the house and set flashlights in every room.

Helena wandered into the kitchen and got out a bowl. “I’m trying Imogen’s stress-baking idea. I hate this weather.” She baked a tray of flatbread crackers to go with the soup, and the four of us sat down to dinner.

A gust of wind slammed against the house, rattling the windows and howling under the door. Another. Helena cringed. With the third, the lights went out.

“I think this is maybe when I stop being excited about blizzards,” Ariel said. She snuggled into the scarf that was still wrapped around her neck.

“It’ll be okay,” Marin said. “We have lots of firewood, and there
are extra blankets in the closet. We have warm food—the crackers are really good, Helena—and we’ll be fine.”

The wind gusted again.

“I hate this,” Helena said. “Storms like this make me feel like I’m being buried alive.”

“So, we need a distraction,” Marin said.

“I have one, actually. Hang on.” I grabbed a flashlight and went upstairs to get the letters.

“I found these back in September, right after we moved in.” I set the packet on the table. “At first I thought they were just interesting, but I figured out today that whoever this J was, the Thomas she was writing to was the tithe.”

I unwrapped them and handed them around. There was a rustle of paper, and then: “No. No, it can’t be. Oh, fuck.”

“Helena, what is it?” I asked.

“I know this handwriting. I know exactly who these people are. My parents. Fuck.” Her expression shattered like glass.

“Give me the rest of those,” she said.

Ariel, Marin, and I passed her the letters that were no longer a fun distraction, were not clues to the mystery in a party game.

Helena bit her lip as she was reading, so hard it bled. She scrubbed the back of her hand across her mouth, leaving behind a gory lipstick smear, near-black in the candlelight. “
J
stands for Janet. Janet Thomas is my mother.”

That was the first unexpected thing. There were more.

“I’ve never met my father. He abandoned her while she was pregnant. Well, maybe not abandoned. She was away in Faerie, as the tithe.”

“Wait,” I said. “The letters. They were both there? Two tithes?”

“He went first,” Helena said, “and even though she had waited
for him when he was there, he didn’t wait the seven years for her to come back.”

“But—” Ariel began.

“Look. This sucks already. Let me tell it my way, and then you can ask your questions.

“He was a glass artist. Now he’s more like a general sculptor. You’ve heard of him—Thomas Greene. My mom changed her last name to Thomas after I was born. To remind him of us, I guess, but it didn’t work out. He’s a dick. Whatever.”

We had heard of him. He was one of those artists that had a name people recognized, even if they didn’t particularly care about art. He’d done a famous memorial. Designed a museum people were still arguing about. Huge spears of glass that caught the light and reflected it like some kind of alien spaceship. Won a genius grant. His third wife was a supermodel. And only two years older than Helena.

“They met during his fellowship year. This was the house he lived in, up in the tower room, so my guess is that’s why the letters are here. Anyway. Doesn’t matter.

“He was looking for a model. She answered the ad. The glass over the front door of her house. It’s an early piece of his, from before he changed his style. The woman in it, that’s her. They had a relationship. Fell in love, I guess. This is when the story changes from what you’re expecting, because she didn’t get pregnant then. She got pregnant seven years later. When he got back. Right before she left.”

“Oh God,” Marin said. “You grew up there.”

Feral. Like she didn’t know quite how to be human. And of course, she didn’t. The ride through Faerie and the greedy emptiness of it. Not all of the tithes survived their seven years. I couldn’t imagine what it had been like for a child.

“For almost the first seven years of my life.” Helena’s face was splotched with red and streaked with tears. I passed her a napkin, but she ignored it.

“What was—” Marin’s voice cracked. “What was it like?”

“I don’t know,” Helena said. “I don’t remember.

“I need a drink.” She got up, poured herself a glass of bourbon, and brought it and the bottle back to the table. None of the rest of us moved.

“Janet worked her ass off after he went. She wanted the same deal he got, so she decided to be a poet, and she wrote, and she wrote, and she got good enough to get published, and she got good enough to get in here, and she got good enough to be one of the shining ones who get offered the deal with Faerie. Which she took.

“She hadn’t been planning for me to get in the way, but I didn’t really. She was already there. She had what she wanted, so I didn’t matter.”

Ariel was crying, too, silent tears streaking her face, and Marin looked like she wanted to be sick.

Helena continued. “Seven years later, we came back. And Melete gave us a nice little cottage in the woods, some kind of backhanded apology, because while Janet bargained herself into Faerie fair and square and Melete is just fine with that, I got screwed.

“And I got screwed again, because the deal Janet made didn’t cover me. Janet’s famous. She’s won a fucking Pulitzer, a National Book Award. I don’t have any of that. I’m not even good enough to get one of those fucking necklaces.”

“But you were there, on Halloween. You rode with us into Faerie,” I said. “I thought—”

“If you’re here at Melete on the Halloween before the tithe, and
you’ve ever dwelt in Faerie, you must ride in the rade on Samhain night. Seeing the old year out, bringing in the new possibility, blah blah. So I have to ride, every time.”

“Even though you never lived in Faerie by choice,” I said.

“They do love their rules.” Bitterness dripped from her words.

“You sound like you hate it,” Ariel said.

“I do. Hate it, and all of them.” She spat the words like a curse.

“Then why do you want to be the tithe?” I asked. “Hell, why are you even here at Melete? Why not go as far away from here as you can, and never look back?”

“Because being the tithe means being the best, and I want to be the fucking best. Because after I came back from Faerie, I would have power, and then I could leave and never look back, and everybody who mattered would know that I didn’t crawl away because I wasn’t good enough, I left because I was better.

“Because if I’m the one chosen, Gavin has to give Janet back my father.”

“What?” Marin’s voice was a whip crack.

“When he was in Faerie, the Queen of Faerie stole his love for Janet. It’s why he didn’t wait for her, why he can’t love anyone now. I mean, look at the way he is,” she sneered. “But if I go, it redeems him. He’ll remember that he loves Janet. Loves me.”

“Helena, that’s not how this works,” Marin said.

“I’m sure that’s what Gavin’s told you. I’m sure he’s told you a lot of things.” Helena’s mouth twisted around the words. “Just think about what he would get, having you there, with no one else but him to rely on, for seven years.”

The wind howled again, the wail of something ending. Branches rattled against the windows like questing hands trying to get in.

“They can’t lie,” I said.

“There’s a big difference between someone lying, and someone not telling all of the truth,” Helena said.

“Here’s the thing that I don’t understand,” Ariel said. “Even after hearing Helena talk about it, say she hates them, all you—any of you—can see is the end. The thing that happens when you come back. I mean, sure, hurrah for success, but come on. Did it occur to any of you that you’re good enough on your own? Or that the seven years might not be worth it?

“Do you really think you—or your art—come back the same after the time you spend there? Think about what you’re really giving up, because seriously, you all sound like a cult.” She got up, started clearing the dishes.

“It’s easy to think a choice looks simple when you’re not the one who has to make it,” Marin said.

“Thanks for that little reminder,” Ariel said. “And that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that maybe you ought to consider that not everything about this bargain is good.”

“Of course it’s not,” Helena said. “We know it’s not, and we want it anyway. That’s why it works.” She took the bottle of bourbon and the letters, and went upstairs.