We were perhaps eight or nine, in the Farrows’ orchard. Petals fell so thickly that the wind wrapped us in restless lace. Gus caught my shoulders and yanked me down into a hollow among knuckled roots.
“The king will kill us,” Gus whispered urgently, “if he finds us before our transformation is complete.”
“Yes,” I agreed. An image flared in my mind’s eye. “We’re like a caterpillar in its chrysalis. If something tears it open before the right time, it dies.”
I had recently found that out for myself, and I was still distressed by the experiment. I’d meant no harm, only to peek into the mystery, and now I could not dispel the thought of the sticky liquefaction that had spilled across my hands.
Gus considered, and approved. “We are together in the chrysalis of our power! Soon, no one will be strong enough to stand against us. The king knows he must strike now!”
It occurred to me that there was a gap in the narrative. No one ever attained exaltation by crouching behind a tree. “So what do we do? To complete our transformation?”
Gus relied on me for this sort of pragmatism, but it irked him nonetheless. I watched him sulk, then recover. “The ritual.”
He ordered me to lie flat on the grass, and I complied. Then he gathered an armful of branches and arranged the plucked blossoms in lines: down the middle of my face and body, then along each of my limbs, as if he meant to diagram me in bloom. Carefully he set a circle of flowers around my head, a ruffling diadem. I shivered. I could feel power lambent at the base of my brain. It wicked inside my skin, hot and nervous, until my fingertips jumped against the grass. I felt as if I could rise into the vaulting blue, and Gus gave a sharp cry.
“What is it?” I raised my head and flowers tumbled down my cheeks. Their soft tussle confused my vision for a moment. But there, at the edge of the woods: wasn’t that another movement? Shoulders angled in retreat, a head drawn back, gone before I could see them properly?
“I almost thought—” Gus shook his head. “You do me, now.”
“Someone was watching!” I hissed. I thought of my unspeaking father, colored gray by disapproval. He would not want to punish me in front of his employers’ son, but I could see the scene through his eyes in all its pagan defiance. It was all too plain that Gus had been arraying me as some sort of vernal queen. None of that—that—my father would say once we were alone, then fall silent and stare at his gnarled fists. It’s not for you, understand?
He wouldn’t beat me. But he might well order me to stay up half the night oiling tack. Our town was not so far distant from Hydesville, where the Fox sisters had lately begun communicating with rapping ghosts. The atmosphere was a ferment of heresy, and young girls were especially suspect.
Gus had a different king in mind, of course. He looked alarmed, then furious.
“The king has sent out his spies!” Even as Gus pursued the game, his face flushed and his eyes welled. “He’ll do anything to stop us from changing! He can’t stand for us to be more than he is!”
This frustration was one we held in common; we both yearned for some nebulous more, for a sort of levitation of the spirit that would let us gaze down on our dull town with confidence that we were not, and never would be, of the same base material as its inhabitants. And if such yearnings are commonplace—indeed, if they are themselves base—we were blissfully unaware of the fact.
I felt a rush of resentment I could hardly put a name to, much less justify. It seemed to surge outward from my feet in concentric waves, and I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sky. I felt brilliant and destructive and immense, as if I had traveled far beyond whatever anyone thought me. I heard Gus exhale, long and amazed.
What had I to fear? I was queen, and I was burning.
“Together,” Gus said, under his breath. “That’s the only way.”