“Stop it.” Dalia rubbed her temples. “You sound like a priest.”
“Not a priest,” Calla said. “That’s exactly what the Briars would say. They’ve probably already said it.”
“But she was raised by Marjorie.” Azalea held up a hand. “Marjorie’s as much a Briar as any of them.”
“And Marjorie paid the taxes on this place when they were about five minutes from losing it,” Dalia said.
“It doesn’t matter what’s true,” Gloria said. “It matters what the Briars think. If Bay fights this, they will ruin her. They’ll not only throw her out of here. They’ll cut her off. And if she isn’t afraid of that, she’s afraid of them making her life miserable. I would be. They could tell any lie they want about her and everyone would believe it, because they’re the Briars. They make things true.”
“They would do that to their own family?” Estrella asked.
“Did you hear anything she just said?” Calla asked. “They don’t think she’s family. If they did, she wouldn’t be here alone.”
“She’s not alone,” Dalia said. “She has us.”
Azalea’s eyes found each of theirs in the mirror. “So can we kill him?”
“Anyone falling for him?” Gloria asked. “That’d be one way to do it.”
Azalea looked at them one by one. “Well?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at each of them. “Any stirrings of love?”
Their shared laugh was small, but it was clean and rare enough that it rang. In the days since Reid had come to La Pradera, they had not heard this laugh, the sounds of their voices threading together like they were singing.
It tasted sweeter in their mouths for being a shared joke about the thing they feared most. The way the force and poison of a Nomeolvides woman’s heart was enough to make her lover vanish. How their love was a kind of killing frost.
Another shape cut through the light in the doorway. Not Calla, who was still swinging her legs off the edge of the bed.
Bay.
Estrella and her cousins shuddered, as though they had drawn her here by holding her name between them.
“I thought you should know,” Bay said. “Reid and I are hosting a ball.”
Estrella felt all their hearts rising to the possibility of what this meant. It was as sudden as the smell of lilacs in March. Maybe Bay had broken through the worry that she could never follow after Marjorie Briar. Maybe she was ready to hold her own parties where they sold rich men seeds and brought new health into town shops.
But Bay’s smile was pinched. The name Reid twisted her lips like the bite of a fruit rind.
This was not a summer party to sell seeds. This was not some evening glowing with fairy lights, meant to stir the town’s love for this odd, flowering place.
This was a thing Reid had demanded. He had forced Bay into it.
Marjorie had died, and ever since, the line of Bay’s posture had slumped a little, even as she laughed. Reid would not wait for her to rise from the low valley of Marjorie being gone.
The Nomeolvides mothers and grandmothers had fed and cared for Bay for months, and a little at a time, sureness had straightened Bay’s shoulders.
Now it was falling away like a dusting of snow.
TWELVE
He dreamed, and the tiny horses became things that were alive. They flicked their wooden manes. Their carved legs and wings came to life. A saffron-colored one darted across Estrella’s dresser. A green one flew toward the windowsill. An almost-white one disappeared into the sheets. They cantered into the cracks between floorboards, falling into dark places his fingers could not reach.
They were scattering, and he would lose them, these carved wooden horses that meant something he could not remember.
Their names. Their names were drifting through his dreams, but when he reached out for them, they flitted away from his grasp.
He had to round them back onto the shelf. If they left him, they would never tell him their names. If he lost them, he would never know why touching them made his heart feel both hollowed out and so heavy his chest could not hold it. He chased them toward the windowsill, across the floorboards, behind the dresser.
But he could not find them. They were too fast, and too small. By the time he noticed each flash of color, it was gone. One appeared in the air in front of him, wings beating like a hummingbird’s, but he reached out for it, and his hand found nothing.
Those little horses were so much part of him that losing them emptied him. They were organs that had chosen to leave his body.
A blue one shook its mane and turned blue violet. It skittered off a shelf and landed on an outstretched hand. That palm stood pale against brown fingers.
He followed that hand, the wrist and arm, looking for who they belonged to. He found a girl who looked like Estrella but who was made of petals. She had Estrella’s dark hair, loose and unbrushed, but dotted with blue violet. Her body was covered in forget-me-not petals, like she was growing them from her skin. They caught on her eyelashes. They stood in for fingernails. They followed the curves of her breasts.
Only a little of her showed through. Her lips looked red but unpainted, like she’d bitten them. Her eyes shone brown black. Forget-me-nots covered her body in blue that, on her hip or shoulder or the small of her back, blushed purple.
She laughed, and it sounded like an echo. She lifted the carved horse to her face like she was talking to it, and the world sank underwater. Through the window, the silhouettes of trees against the dark sky turned to streaks of paint. The floor looked like wood-colored waves.
But the petals on this girl’s body, those sharp, papery edges, were clear as a bird’s waxed feathers.
Flickers of forget-me-nots fell past the window, like a rain of blue flames. Those purples and blues softened and brightened. Light from inside caught in their curves. In one minute they looked soft as new snow. The next, hard as slices of a frozen river.
They were her body, her skin, her name. The girl covered in forget-me-nots spoke. But her voice sounded underwater, or like she was calling him across this valley made of flowers.
He woke enough to feel her hands, and know that, this time, he was not dreaming her. But he did not wake up enough to open his eyes, or to speak.
Her touch left the taste of that borraja flower on his tongue, sweet, a little like honey, but also clean as frost. What he imagined it would be like to taste a piece of the sky.
His palms were hot and damp against hers. The heels of her hands pressed into his, pushing him down against the bed, giving his body enough gravity that he would stay and not dream.
She did this first with his hands. Then with his shoulders, her palms weighting him down. Then his forehead, the sweat on his hairline cooling in the spaces between her fingers.