Blue stands among the groundlings, watching players strut and fret their hour upon the stage.
She’s an apothecary’s apprentice in this life, a study in dark and bright: black hair cropped short beneath a Aat felt cap, black doublet over white shirt and hose. She has carried out Garden’s delicate opportunity—one womb quickened, another slowed—and lingers, now, on the margins, watching the 1rst performance of a new play.
If Blue were a scholar—and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be—she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Aomeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.
She is not delighted now. She watches the performance with all the tense fervor of awaiting prophecy.
She leaves before the end.
She returns to the shop. A plant—a curious cross, her master said, between hemlock and yew—sits potted near a window. Dark, oily leaves; viciously elegant thorns; berries red as the half-moons she digs into her palms every time she looks at them.
The letter is beautifully composed. She is not. This, more than anything, infuriates her.
She has grown it, dutifully, from a seed—oddly marked, misshapen, glinting blue in a paper packet of pale browns. She has watched for a year— while she coaxed life into one belly and banished it from another—its mocking growth into a promise never kept, a sheet of music never played.
The plant is written in an obvious geomantic script, a kind of crude binary culled from Levantine manuscripts. The number of needles and berries on a branch form divinatory 1gures—conjunctio, 9uella—whose names can be easily parsed for a more elaborate alphabet. Deav Blue, I’ue thought about youv 9vo9osal but need a demonstvation of tvust. It’s visby fov me to communicate
mith you, so I’ue disguised the veal lettev as 9oison—consume it, and you’ll bnom mhen to meet me and mheve.
It doesn’t even sound like her. The thought of some grey-faced Agency hack hovering over Red’s shoulder as she writes 1lls her mouth with helpless fury. In dreams, sometimes, Blue sees herself straddling the goon, punching their face into pulp, except her hands keep slipping oP, sliding away, and she can’t land a hit, and the goon laughs and laughs until a plant grows out of their mouth and says Blue’s name.
On her good days, she pricks her 1ngers experimentally on the thorns and thinks of spindles. On her bad days she takes trips seventy years downthread just to watch London burn.
Today is a very bad day.
A berry dropped. She nearly screamed—suppose it were a paragraph?— and picked it from the soil, held it between thumb and fore1nger, placed it in her palm, made certain it hadn’t been pierced on a thorn, lost an ant’s sip of juice. It wasn’t yet time, she thought; a year is nothing, a year is no time at all to wait for a letter rescinding the letter, a letter contradicting the contradiction of this letter. The deadline for reply is written in the plant’s own mortality.
Truth be told, Blue is insulted. How obvious; how unsubtle. Red said not to read her next letter—and here it is, announcing itself as poison as a test of Blue’s interest, of Red’s success. If Blue eats it, she’ll die—but if Blue doesn’t, then Red’s side will know she’s been tipped oP, will suspect Red, will destroy her instead.
Her heart should have been broken by better. Her betrayal should have had sharper teeth. All that—all that. And now this.
Still, she strokes its leaves. Still, she bends to sniP the stems: a blend of cinnamon and rot.
She was always going to eat it down to the root.
There are as many berries as they have exchanged letters. She eats each one slowly, her eyes closed, crushing some against her hard palate, others between her teeth, rolling their sweetness along her tongue. They have bitter, varied aftertastes, and the numbing properties of clove—frustrating when the thorns begin to tear into her cheeks and throat. She wants to feel everything.
She thinks of ortolan as she chews the plant’s 1bres, considers draping her head in white cloth for closer communion. She wipes bright blood from her lips and laughs, softer and softer, swallowing every stroke of Aavour.
She thinks, loathsome in its omn deliciousness.
She wipes tears from her face and feels them mix stickily with her blood. She thinks she feels, stirring in her, a counterclockwise twist against her being.
She rises, washes her face, washes her hands, and sits down to write a letter.
Stop.
Blue. I mean it.
I love you. But stop. Don’t read this. Each word is murder.
Dearest Blue, beloved Blue, wise 1erce foolish Blue, don’t shrug this danger oP as you’ve shrugged oP death and time before. This is no slight sidling risk, no road-met random monster, no dragon, no woodland beast, no alien god to trick or out-war. Nothing so kind. These are words made to unmake you, and well wrought. You’ll have no second coming after this.
Put the letter down. We’ll have each other still, as memories and rivals. We’ll confront ourselves in the chase through time as it was when I 1rst learned the shape of you. We can still dance, as enemies. Just stop now, and live and love and let be.
Stop, my love. Stop. Find a purgative, a hospital, a shaman-priest, one of your healing cocoons—there’s time. Barely.
Goddamn it, stop.
Each line I write, I must imagine you reading—and imagine what has made you read so far, ignoring my advice, as your body revolts and poison claims you. It twists in my guts. If you have read this far, I am not worth you. I am a coward. I let them use me. If you have read this far, I have been made a weapon, and they have plunged me into your heart.
I am so weak.
Give me up. Leave now. There’s still a chance—however slim. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Go.
Forever yours, Red
And yet you’re still here. Aren’t you. Immune to my ruses, Indigo. I hoped you would leave and save yourself. But you remain. I think I would too. I hope I would be that brave, if you are. That we each would give up as much to read the other’s last few lines, written in water and forever.
I love you. If you’ve come this far, that’s all I can say. I love you and I love you and I love you, on battle1elds, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonAy wings, in stars. In the depths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up—and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.
I know your solitude and poise, the clenched 1st of you, the blade: a glass shard in Garden’s green glowing world. And yet you’d never 1t in mine. I wish I could have shown you where I’m from, hand in hand, the world I set out to build and to protect—I don’t think you would have liked it, but I want to see it reAected in your eyes. I wish I could have seen your braid, and I wish we could have left all those horror shows behind and found one together, for ourselves. That’s all I want now. A small place, a dog, green grass. To touch your hand. To run my 1ngers through your hair.
I don’t even know how that feels, and you’re—
I’m sorry. No. If we’re this far, if you’ve been this sel1sh—I did not mean that. I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned. I would do anything. I have done so much, and would have done as much again, and more. And yet here I am, a fool, writing you one last time, and here you are, a fool, reading me. We’re one, at least, in folly.
I hope you never read these words. I sicken to write them; I know how it will hurt you to reach this far. It is always too late to say what must be said. I cannot stop you now. I cannot save you. Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down. You gave me so much—a history, a future, a calm that lets me write these words though I’m breaking. I hope I’ve given you
something in return—I think you would want me to know I have. And what we’ve done will stand, no matter how they weave the world against us. It’s done now, and forever.
What will I do, sky? Lake, what? Bluebird, iris, ultramarine, how can there be more when this is done? But it will never end—that’s the answer. There is always us.
Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.
Red
