Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  I pressed the handle of the glass jar into his palm and closed his fingers around the wire. “Don’t go home in the dark.”

  “I know the way,” he said.

  “Still.” I thought of him weaving through the woods back toward the orchard. He moved his head in a way that had become familiar to me, a way that let him take in more of everything around him. It was careful but decisive, like a cat gauging distance before a jump.

  I still wanted him to carry this small light with him.

  He took it. “Good night, Roja.”

  “Watch out for evil wizards,” I said as he faded into the trees.

  “Don’t worry.” He lifted the lantern. “I’m on it.”

  PAGE

  I left her in the morning, so early that the sky still wore its silver. I kissed her, lightly enough not to pull her from sleep. To keep my steps downstairs quiet and soft, I left my shoes off until the back door.

  But when I went out into the chilled air, my breath sharpened to a gasp.

  It had happened overnight, the woods now as odd and beautiful as a dream. It was frost and white feathers and dashes of black as deep as a sparrow’s eyes. It was soft wisps and gleaming edges.

  I followed the scent of apple sugar and leaves back to the orchard, back to where my grandmother may or may not have been waiting to ask me where I’d been all night.

  But I held with me the thought of how Blanca would wake up, how she would go to her window, her eyes catching the spark of discovering it for herself.

  ROJA

  I dreamed I wore red, the same predawn red that draws a line between the sky and the mountains. It marked me, so everyone would know me from Blanca.

  When I dreamed, the woods were wind-bent and silvered with frost. And I found him under the low-hanging branches, between a small tree of red roses I grew and a tree of white that belonged to my sister. The blooms on the white were slender and neat, like glass figurines. The ones on the red were messy as peonies, splaying open one at a time like the shudder of an anemone.

  I ran my hands through the fur on his back and felt him trapped inside the young bear’s body. I kissed the crescent moon of white fur on his chest. His fur fell away like cloth, and the wind pulled my dress from me. But I didn’t feel the cold of the snow under me. I felt only the sharp brush of ice crystals and the heat of him next to me.

  The moon didn’t like it. The story didn’t turn out this way. Snow-White was supposed to end up with the bear-prince. She was the quiet and sweet one, helping with the housework and reading out loud to her mother. She lit small, tidy fires in winter while snowflakes stuck to the windowpanes. I was the wilder one, catching butterflies in the meadows, pricking my fingers on the thorns of summer roses. I was supposed to wait for the yearling’s brother.

  But Snow-White wouldn’t come. Snow-White had grown bored with the bear-prince. She had lost her heart to a boy who held apples as though they were made of frost and moonlight.

  The moon didn’t care. It tried to pull at me, but Yearling’s heat covered me, shielding me. I was soft enough to be pulled on like water, but he wasn’t. The moon couldn’t reach through him to get to me.

  So the force of the moon twirled the branches from the rose trees, like wool off a skein. The thorn-studded vines tethered us to the snow so we couldn’t move. I held my arms against his back to keep the thorns from cutting into him, and the crescent moon on his chest pressed into me. The white roses lay into us like cold glass, and the red sliced against us like the petals had frozen.

  But the moon was too late. My hands were already in the hollow of his back. The rose tree vines bore scraps of my red dress.

  I woke up with my hand below my collarbone, sure the crescent moon had burned a copy of itself into me. But there was nothing there but my own skin.

  BLANCA

  I dreamed she was a cygnet again. I stood naked in the woods at magic hour with her down-covered body cupped in my palms.

  She shuddered, shaking water from her back. I kissed her just above her beak, and in one flickering second she became a grown swan, the ruffled feathers at the tips of her wings like peony petals.

  She flew from my hands. Her wings brushed my shoulders and back, my breasts and hips. They beat against every inch of my skin like she was a whole flock of swans. Some feathers fell soft as petals, others prickled like evergreen needles, and the rest landed like the thinnest blades of obsidian.

  This time I turned with her, my arms to wings, my skin to feathers white as magnolias.

  And in the morning, the world was something other than how we had left it the night before.

  It could have been a world Page had made me, a kingdom this boy had taken from storybooks and brought to life outside my bedroom window.

  I stood at the glass, bracing my hands against the sill.

  The world outside my window had become a forest of feathers and ice.

  The trees wore not only their gold leaves; now fine hoarfrost coated the branches, a covering of frozen needles, delicate and sparkling as raw crystal. Every minute or so, the trees moved enough for the sun to catch them, and they threw out sparks of light. They cast tiny rainbows over the woods.

  Among the frost and the yellow slices of the leaves, feathers sprouted like blossoms. The bleached white and rich black of swan’s feathers, light as pepper tree leaves. The wispy gray fluff of cygnet’s down, stirred by the slightest wind.

  And in the spaces between, the soft film of apple blossoms fluttered their cream petals, the buds edged in pink.

  The trees were all these things at once, birches and birds and a frost-covered fairy tale. The branches were growing all these things we held inside us.

  I ran for the stairs, my lips stinging first to tell Page but then to tell everyone.

  Roja. Especially Roja, because in this moment we were children again, sharing everything we had. Our dresses. Lipsticks I borrowed from our mother to play with on Sundays. Books Roja slid from our father’s shelves. Our best secrets.

  All of us were in the woods, growing from the birch trees.

  But when I flew from the bedroom, the thing that stole the breath from my throat wasn’t the forest.

  It was three of my cousins, standing at the base of the stairs.

  PART FOUR

  The Swan & Her Sister

  BLANCA

  The woods damned us. Their beauty, their strange act of sprouting feathers and frost, told our family the things we’d done. They spoke of the pond-water-eyed boy I’d held the night before.

  Now I stood in the bedroom I shared with Roja, one foot on top of the other, the way I used to wait for Roja on the stairs.

  Two of my second cousins cornered me. I had to close my eyes to keep their words from boring into my temples.

  Do you have any idea what you’re doing?

  Never in all the stories I’ve ever heard in this family …

  You two never could follow rules, could you?

  One voice took over. Isabel, the younger one. “Do you understand what you’ve done? I’m surprised the swans aren’t tearing this house to scrap wood.”

  Tears pinched at the corners of my eyes.

  “You’ll be lucky if they don’t take you both,” Isabel said. “If you ask me, they should.”

  “Enough,” Sofía said.

  My eyes snapped open.

  “Out,” Sofía told her younger cousin.

  Isabel glared, but did as Sofía told.

  Sofía shut the door, her downcast gaze thick with disappointment. I felt its weight more than if she’d yelled or thrown a plate at the wall next to my head, like Isabel probably wanted to.

  Sofía took a sighing breath. “Don’t you want to survive this?”

  I held the truth tight in my throat, the bargains I’d made with the swans.

  “You have a chance.” Sofía lowered her head, as though she was looking deeper into me. “You had a way out.”

  The words turned over in my head. If you’re a good girl,
you can get a blue-eyed boy. They twirled like the mobile of paper feathers my mother had hung over my first bed.

  “Don’t expect your hair to do everything for you,” Sofía said.

  There was no meanness in it, just fact. My hair was yellow but coarse like my mother’s. My skin had the undertone of gold and brown instead of peach or pink like the flower-perfumed girls at school.

  And my eyes were not blue, but the dark-sugar amber of piloncillo.

  What marked me as part of my own family made the world love me a little less.

  Closeness to one always meant distance from the other.

  “And you can’t go against them,” Sofía said, with a glance toward the window, her eyes ticking in the pond’s direction. “Don’t try to push them around. You’ll never win.” She drew her gaze back to me. “I thought the cuts they left on your sister would’ve told you that.”

  The sense of my own body dropped away from me.

  She knew.

  All my cousins and great-aunts must have known.

  I had tried to defy the swans, so they had slashed their feathers across my sister’s skin. I loved her, so they had gone after her as though she was a weak point on my body.

  Sofía’s expression turned sad, her face tilting toward the floor.

  She and Isabel were women who knew. Years ago—ten years ago for Isabel, twelve for Sofía—they had lost their own sisters, girls made into pale birds.

  Sofía must have known what I’d done the night before. The woods told the story. The apple blossoms were the smallest, softest things to have grown overnight, and their spring pink and petal silk whispered Page’s name.

  “I can’t do anything that hurts her,” I said. “Not even to save myself.”

  “The way you’re going, neither one of you will survive this,” Sofía said. “Isabel’s right, and you know it.”

  The air between us chilled.

  “They’ll take you both,” Sofía said. “They’ve done it before. So I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but whatever it is, this is their warning.” She watched the trees, a wary gleam crossing her eyes. “I wouldn’t count on them giving you another.”

  A flicker of motion drew my eye to the window.

  Black feathers were pulling off the trees. They drew away like wind was stripping them from the branches, but the air lay still. With every thought of Page, another gust of feathers ripped away and swirled onto the air.

  I tried not to think of Page. But the harder I forced down each thought of her, the more they rushed back.

  My mouth on Page’s bare shoulder blade.

  The way her fingers played at the hem of my shirt before reaching under it.

  How I kept trying to place what apple she tasted most like.

  With each one, more black feathers tore away from the white feathers, the leaves, the apple blossoms, the frost. With each stray memory, more took off into the air, until they were twirling into shapes almost like wings.

  My own arrogance prickled over my skin.

  I was not smarter than the swans. I had never been smarter.

  There was no winning against them.

  They won, every time.

  These feathers were their last warning, the shape of a girl, my sister, made out of black down and then spinning into a swan’s body. They showed her to me in the paint of dark feathers.

  My shoulders rounded from the shame of what I’d done, how I’d tried to pass the burden of the señora’s words to my little sister. I could pretend it was all for her. But if I stood still for a minute, I flinched under the searing understanding that I had wanted it for me, too. I had wanted her with the blue-eyed boy, not me.

  I had wanted a few more breaths held between my lips and Page’s.

  But it was never mine to decide.

  The swans had nodded their agreement once, to leave Roja as she was if I played their game. That was the first and only bargain I knew they’d taken, marked by the bowing of their necks.

  But last night, they hadn’t appeared. The black and white feathers had not been their reassurance.

  They’d been a warning.

  Los cisnes wanted me to know they weren’t changing the terms again.

  They wanted me to remember that I didn’t set the rules.

  Don’t try to push them around. You’ll never win.

  My second cousin’s words sank into me, as sharp as they were true.

  The blurred shape of the black feathers unfurled into a wide span, brushing the trees.

  “Okay,” I said, out loud without meaning to.

  How hard I struck the word widened Sofía’s eyes.

  It wasn’t enough for the swans that Roja held the blue-eyed boy’s heart.

  Los cisnes wanted me to give up the boy who knew apples like another language.

  There was no arguing. They had seen in me the softest, weakest part of my heart where I held my sister. They knew I would do anything, give up anything, if it meant my sister keeping her own body.

  And now they wanted me to prove it.

  ROJA

  In another family, the fact that Blanca was getting lectured by two of our second cousins, while I endured the disapproval of just one, might have meant she was in more trouble than I was.

  The truth was that, of the second cousins sent to check up on us, only Julieta thought me worth her time. That, or she lost a coin flip.

  Our family had seen the trees, feathers sprouting from between the yellow leaves, the wood coated in jewel-frost, and they knew everything.

  Blanca and I weren’t little girls anymore. We couldn’t look at the sudden appearing of hoarfrost and make up stories about hadas sugaring the trees with rock candy. We had learned that so many beautiful things held something worth fearing. The blood-dyed moon during wildfire season. The lace bells of lily of the valley, and how they gave way to the poison of red berries. Trees dressed in the colors of everything we loved and would lose.

  Julieta pulled me outside.

  “What is this?” I asked. “Are you all placing bets? Is your money on me?”

  “Stop it,” Julieta said. “I’m trying to help you.”

  I slipped into a pocket of light spilled from the house, gold as the lettering on my father’s oldest books.

  “You’re losing,” Julieta said.

  “Of course I am,” I said. “She’s Blanca.”

  “No.” Julieta’s sigh was both weary and impatient. “I mean you’re falling in love when you’re supposed to get him to fall in love with you.”

  The words were so blunt, so unsoftened, that I felt something in me catch, a lock clicking shut.

  “I am not,” I said.

  “Then what do you call all this?” She swept her arm toward the feathered and petaled forest.

  I crossed my arms against the chilled air. “I can do this.”

  “You sure about that?” Julieta tilted her chin toward the upstairs window.

  I made out the faint silhouettes of Blanca and Sofía.

  Sometimes I worried my father’s faith in me was nothing against Blanca’s soft color and demure beauty. I may have had teeth, but Blanca walked through the world with light held on her tongue. I’d read the story in Tess’s book. On the last page, the bear-prince ended up with Snow-White. It was printed and set. It wasn’t a fairy tale I could rewrite.

  Wisps of black flicked around me, like dark candle flames.

  I lowered my eyes, and found black feathers ripping off the birch trees.

  The sight of it broke in my body. Each torn-away plume was drawing me closer to the swans. They were waiting to take my skin and hair and craft it into something more like themselves.

  I looked back up to the window. As my eyes adjusted to the dim room, I could make out my sister’s features.

  Her face was hard as the windowpane, chin held slightly up, lips tight.

  It was a look of pure resolve I had never seen on her.

  Blanca had hands as delicate as cream roses, but the
y were laced with frightening magic. She could spin anything into something shimmering and luring, like straw into threads of gold. Even the feather-covered branches were on her side.

  Every time I was sure Blanca’s soul was clear and smooth as a glass marble, she broke into facets. Instead of light gleaming straight through her, she shattered it.

  She had raw will I had never imagined. It could strip dark feathers from trees. It could leave nothing but pristine ice and blossoms and white down.

  If I wanted to survive this, I had to fight with everything in reach.

  A thick coin of heat bloomed between my legs. Blood, the same time each month as my sister. I wondered if Julieta could tell I was bleeding. I wondered sometimes if del Cisne women who’d survived the swans knew everything about us, the girls who hadn’t yet. Maybe to them we were young and stupid. Maybe Julieta and all our primas could see through Blanca and me as though our skin and muscles were glass. Maybe they could examine our hearts and spirits, displayed in the museum cases of our bodies.

  “Roja?” Julieta said.

  I looked at her.

  “We’re not placing bets,” she said. “But if we were, my money would be on you surviving this, not her.”

  “Really?” I asked, and I hated how small and hopeful the word sounded.

  Julieta’s smile slackened, weighted by the years since she’d lost her sister. “They all thought the swans would take me, didn’t they?”

  I almost reached out to her. I wanted to smooth the jagged place in her that had broken the day los cisnes took Adriana. Julieta was the daughter everyone assumed the swans would steal, so much that they could almost see wings sprouting from her back. They all thought Adriana—as sweet and as determined as honeysuckle vines—would stay a girl.

  I wanted to ask Julieta how it felt, if she thrilled to the moment of being spared, or if, in the second of winning, she only felt left behind. If she still dreamed at night of her hair becoming feathers, if she walked under the weight of wings that never sprouted.