Page 15 of Those Fatal Flowers

Cora is quiet for a few steps, but we don’t make it far before she whirls around to face me, those green eyes flaring.

“Master Thomas seems rather fond of you,” she says. The subtext is clear. She’s warning me.

I raise my hands in submission. “I have no interest in your betrothed, Mistress Waters.” Not in the way she’s implying, anyway—what I have in store for him is far, far worse, but what good would saying such a thing do for either of us?

Her smoldering gaze lingers on mine for the span of abreath, then she turns on her heel without another word. We walk back to the Bailie house in silence. When the shadows of the cottage finally catch me, I open my mouth to thank her. But she’s already several paces down the street, and soon, darkness engulfs her completely.

I stare after her, mouth agape and eyes wide, watching the last place her form is visible before it’s overtaken by shadow. After a time, I step into the warmth of the foyer, but the image remains with me deep into the night, long after the Bailies have returned, when the house is as silent as a crypt.

I can barely stand it: Proserpina and Cora, both swallowed by darkness. When it took Proserpina, it was over so quickly. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, devoured by a stygian mouth that carried her straight to the Underworld. I always believed nothing could be worse than the shock of her sudden disappearance, but now I wonder if I was wrong. For it’s Cora’s dissipating shape that haunts me tonight—the shade slowly eating away at her, piece by piece, until nothing is left but black.

5

Before

On Scopuli, years feel like days. The chill of morning is spring, and summer is the glow of the afternoon sun. Autumn arrives at twilight with winter in tow once more under the blanket of night. And when the passage of time starts to take its toll, when our food stores grow slim, we scan the horizon for sails, and we sing. We sing for Proserpina, we sing for ourselves, for all who’ve felt unwanted hands encircling their wrists, their throats—we sing those dark souls into the sea. And when a sailor loses his battle against the waves, or is torn to ribbons by coral, or chokes on his own blood after meeting our blade, we feel it: The ache in our limbs dissipates; our skin grows firmer, brighter. Our youth is restored once more, but their deaths alone don’t sate the growing hunger in our bellies.

Their meat does.

It’s during these centuries that I learn Scopuli’s location isn’t fixed in the physical world. Overhead, the positions of the stars change. When our exile began, it was in Mare Nostrum, the Tyrrhenian Sea, but ships from all over the world have crashed here since those early days. Survivors insistthey were sailing on the Sea of Sanji, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Sea of Antilles, the East Sea, the North Sea, the South Sea. I don’t know why Scopuli appears to certain ships and not to others. Perhaps it depends on who’s aboard and whether the gods believe they must be punished.

Life here is monastic, lonely. But it’s also safe. Or at least it was, until the ships stopped coming.

Without the ears of men to hear our song, without their deaths to roll back time, and their meat to feed us, we begin to die. Our feathers turn white, as does our hair. Our skin wrinkles, breasts sag. Teeth loosen, talons crack. Pisinoe tries to hide her aging form beneath the treasure that washes ashore, her arms and neck draped in emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and other gems with unknown names. Raidne finds this habit irksome, but she’s always been more ready to torment herself, preferring to live an ascetic existence, still hoping to atone.

When it seems like we can’t get any older, we shrink. We once stood more than six feet tall. Now we hover closer to four.

“How small will we get?” Pisinoe asks one day. She’s recalling the story of the Cumaean Sibyl, a great oracle who asked the gods for immortality but didn’t specify her wish to remain forever young. The gods revel in punishing mortals for lack of clarity, so when the Sibyl spurned Helios’s advances, he granted her wish. As the years passed, she grew so small that she fit inside a bottle, and then she continued to shrink until she was no more than dust.

Did she reach a point at which she died, when her frame became too diminutive to support any life? Or is she stillshrinking, a creature so infinitesimal and alone that she prays for a death that will never come?

I think about the ceiling of our cottage—how I once could brush it with my fingertips. But I haven’t been able to reach it for years now, and each day, the distance grows larger.

“We won’t find out,” Raidne insists. “More ships will come.”

It’s not that she believes our supply of sailors is unending; she clings to the hope that even after eons, Ceres’s anger still burns hot enough to find pleasure in our suffering. Time has given us droughts before, she’s quick to point out. “Remember that first harsh winter?”

How could we forget? The unusually bitter season came after a year without ships, and its freezing temperatures sent the rest of Scopuli’s already scarce animal populations into hiding. How quickly we deteriorated without those willing ears and without any source of food.

But then Proserpina came to me in a dream.I won’t let you starve,she said, and the next morning, a single lily had pushed through the snow. An hour later, a ship graced our horizon. As we sorted through the survivors fit for sacrificing, I realized what Proserpina meant. Mortals offer only an animal’s organs and blood to the gods; the meat they keep for themselves. Raidne and Pisinoe would never agree to hold anything back from Ceres, but what of the sailors too old and too battered to offer her?

I told myself if my sisters reacted poorly to the idea, I’d lie and say I was simply speculating out loud and had no intention of eating human flesh. But more shocking than my suggestion was how quickly Raidne and Pisinoe agreed to it. The allure of a meal simmering over the hearth after several frigid months without one was simply too enticing to dismiss.

Besides, do our sisters Scylla and Charybdis refuse the men they ensnare? Like us, they were women once, before heinous acts of magic turned them into something unspeakable. Scylla by Minos, as he gleefully dragged her behind his ship bound for Crete. The gods supported his cruelty because instead of simply dying, she was transformed into a creature that could survive it. And Charybdis by Jove himself for helping her father, Neptune, in a petty sibling feud. We were all made into monsters, and what do monsters do?

They feed.

Nearly a decade passes without sightings of lilies or ships. In more fruitful times, the passing of ten years feels like the passing of days, but without the ships and the men they bring, we wither away, and withering is painful.

The first year without them is the hardest. Their numbers have dwindled for years, but Raidne insists if we continue to sacrifice the survivors, continue to send their spirits upward on the ritual fire’s smoke, Ceres will finally forgive us. In the early days, our prayers were for mercy, to regain our divine forms, to be free of the prison of rocks and cliffs. Now we simply pray for the return of eager ears, for an end to our slow and painful rot. But nine more years pass, and my messages whispered into the earth go unanswered.

I watch my skin turn pallid, see the strawberry kiss drain from my hair, feel my breasts shrivel. No one speaks it out loud, but we all fear we’ve entered the final stage of Ceres’s curse, and now there’s nothing left to do but wither away. Until we’re only dust and shadow, too, companions for the Sibyl. Sometimes I consider throwing myself from the cliffs to cut my suffering short, but the thought never lasts long. It’s not death itself I fear, nor the fact I’ll be prohibited fromentering Elysium. It’s that even after all these years, I’m still not ready to face her—my darling, dreadful Proserpina, the queen of the world of darkness.

Watching my sisters slowly decay is the cruelest part of Ceres’s curse. If we were human, these gnarled bodies would never last longer than a few years. But here, we’ll endure for centuries. It’s the sight of Raidne’s grimace as she limps slowly to her bookshelf that brings me to my own aching feet. She’s clutching another tooth in her palm. It’s the fourth she’s lost, and she means to add it to her jewelry box where she stores the others.

My heart sinks. How is it that Raidne, the most pragmatic of us, still clings to hope? If a miracle brings us another ship, she plans to nestle those fallen teeth back into the gaps in her gums where the curse’s magic will help them take root again.

“I’ll gather some mullein leaves,” I say. Brewed in a tea, they’ll soothe some of her pain. The only thing that can ease it completely is the snap of Morta’s shears.

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