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If he didn’t have tea, she wouldn’t have gone. The kingdom was heavy with late light, the hiss and sigh of the forge bellows sinking one by one into a sleepy afternoon silence, and Saint Lily’s morning meditation had crept furtively into midafternoon by the time she startled back to herself. Absentia, lately, was its own drug; shame curdled her frosting as she greeted the sun for the first time in days.
In the kingdom, everything smelled gold — fresh-baked crumb, the toasty edge of marshmallow, honeysweet in the air. It had been long since Saint Lily had walked the streets of such a prosperous neighborhood, even longer since she had not felt hunted whilst doing so. Right now, all she felt was a faint, if persistent, hunger, as was to be expected for a guest late to her own invitation. No eyes followed her down the street, but she hurried along anyway, skirts whisking over the grass.
He lived in an undecorated hut, sturdy with ginger and cloves, its sole luxury the wide and lovely isomalt windows that he’d stained and affixed himself. She had never pegged him for hard labor; it had been a running joke in their academy cohort that someone had to stand by his elbow whenever he fetched burners from the shelf or attempted to open a sealed jar. The windows glinted like jewels, leaving impressions on the backs of Saint Lily’s eyelids. She had to force her fingers to loosen around her staff to knock. Before she could even take her hand back the door flew open, and there he stood, rumpled, alight, divested of his waffle hood and diadems, dressed in a plain frock. A lock of his frosting hung askew on his forehead, and he was so rich with life that for a moment Saint Lily could hardly breathe.
“Saint Lily!” Pure Vanilla beamed and reached for her hands, which she had clutched unthinkingly to her chest. “It’s good to see you. Please, come in. Make yourself at home.”
Pure Vanilla’s hut stood with its back to the forest’s edge, and inside it smelled even more strongly of spices, deep and warming, fringed with the frosty green of pine. Saint Lily allowed herself a deep breath as she sat at Pure Vanilla’s cramped dining table. Beyond, in the equally cramped sitting room, an open window ushered in the breeze.
“I’ve got rosehip, cardamom, earl grey — and I’ve been putting together my own blends,” Pure Vanilla explained over his shoulder as he banged around in his cupboards. Saint Lily stifled a smile; his hastily-tied frosting swung urgently between his narrow shoulders. She’d never thought him homely — Pure Vanilla, other than perhaps Golden Cheese, was the most extravagantly beautiful cookie she had ever met — but there was something about his carelessness with himself in his home, with certain cookies, that made him all the more wonderful.
And gave Saint Lily all the more reason to mind herself. She straightened on her stool and asked politely, “Oh? What kinds?”
“I’ve put together some orange and rooibos, and earl grey with vanilla and lavender, that one is my personal favorite. I could make some chocolate tea if Cocoa Cookie hasn’t run out of nibs yet…”
“No! Please don’t— don’t strain yourself on my account.” The doubtful note in Pure Vanilla’s voice had been so frank, and because of this so distressing, that Saint Lily found herself shouting. The surprise in Pure Vanilla’s gaze as it snapped to her cleaved her back to her senses.
She collapsed into her stool. Control, always control. She kept forgetting — her body, ever traitorous, failing to obey her superior mind — what she had been made for, and the totalitarian fear of purpose, and that she must refuse to bend to the base whims of reflex.
“I didn’t mean— I’m sorry, Pure Vanilla,” she said, barely audible, frightened by herself. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”
Pure Vanilla looked wordlessly upon her for a long moment. She couldn’t bear to lift her head, though she could feel the weight of his eyes. And then he made a soft noise, the barest essence of vanilla that accompanied his smile, and he said, “Never you mind. I think I’ll make us some orange rooibos tea.”
“Th-that sounds nice. Thank you.”
He turned his back with not a hint of urgency, as though this afternoon, vivid and unhurried, and this kingdom, lush with its hard-fought peace, was nothing out of the ordinary at all, and as if her temper was not injustice enough she had the gall for a stir of resentment, that he could open the door of his home to her, after everything. She couldn’t believe him. His trust was once a marvel; now it rankled, like sawing rusk against the grain, the seethe of a grater on fresh-baked dough. How could he be so steady, so disciplined, how could he show his back to her now? How could he place a teacup and saucer before her, so white and dainty, and expect her not to blacken it all to ashes?
Orange, undercut delicately with cinnamon, the bright burn of rooibos forming its backbone. Saint Lily cupped her hands around her tea, startled by the ferocity of Pure Vanilla’s blend. Pure Vanilla, balancing a plate in one hand and his own cup in the other, observed her expression, then gave her a quiet smile.
“I brought castella from the bakery,” he said, setting the plate in the center of the table. “I’ve cream and sugar too, if you want some.”
“No… This is enough. Thank you.”
Another smile, his icing curling at the edges. “You don’t like sweets. I remember.”
“There is a difference between sweet and too sweet,” Saint Lily retorted automatically, then clamped her mouth shut, but Pure Vanilla only let out a laugh, high and sweet and delighted.
“You remember, too! Ah, this brings me back. Here, have a slice. It’s best fresh.”
It was, indeed, fresh. Saint Lily brought her slice to her face and inhaled the rich scent of butter and milk and sugar, pale and plush and so soft it feathered apart in her hands when she pulled. Inexplicably, it brought moisture to her eyes. She quivered, dipped her chin, let her hands drift gently to the table.
“I don’t understand,” Saint Lily whispered, “how you aren’t angry with me.”
Pure Vanilla’s hand paused over the rim of his plate. Slowly, he set his cup down, and the aroma of orange wafted past Saint Lily’s icing.
“I hurt a great many cookies, Pure Vanilla. In the pursuit of a truth I valued above everything else, I hurt everyone. Most of all you.” She couldn’t forget the dizzying stab of realization, ironically so much like being rent asunder. The horror that had fractured GingerBrave’s bright, boyish face. They had led her to her cairn, seen the last of her flayed by her insatiable thirst for knowledge, and they had forgiven her, and they had brought her to—
There was an ugly sliver inside Saint Lily, marbled through the level gray of her crumb. It was not so simple as the monster wearing her frosting a continent away; everyone and their cake hound seemed to know about her guilt at that by the time she was presented before the kingdom, battered and brittle. No, what haunted her most was the face of her oldest, dearest friend, and the ruin she had made of him. The toddling healer trussed in bandages who did not even recall his own name, banished to the dustiest reaches of what was once a glorious land.
Saint Lily could understand the mercy of those who only knew her as the castoff of Dark Enchantress Cookie’s birth. She could not understand Pure Vanilla Cookie at all.
“I wish you would fear me, or despise me. I wish you would hate me and have me gone,” Saint Lily said wretchedly, fully aware that she was ruining their nice afternoon tea, just like she’d ruined the soft white of their youth, the late candlelit nights in the laboratory, the mornings woken between library shelves, crumbdust in her mouth, to see the weak light drape itself over the back of Pure Vanilla Cookie’s neck, how none of it had been enough, she needed to know, and so she had, and so it had undone her, and so she would unmake everyone else. There was nothing but the stark truth and the pain it caused her. Her beautiful friends, the cookies she had met and loved, the faeries and the forests and the wisdom she sought — none of it was enough at all, and to make matters worse, here she was, having obtained, against all odds, friendship and kindness she in no way deserved, and she was blighting it, in that way that only she could.
Pure Vanilla Cookie was silent. “Why?” she begged him, hating and hating herself for hating the stillness of his face. “Why won’t you hate me?”
“Because I will not.”
His voice was quiet, but not soft. Buttered and sugared, it had met heat. It was molten and it was unyielding. And when he opened his eyes, one honey-yellow and the other the bright blue of jellybean jam, the look in them turned every last crumb in Saint Lily’s body to ash.
“To fear or despise you,” Pure Vanilla said, dulled, “would be to live without you. And I will not live without you again. I will not.”
Steam curlicued around them. Outside, the rhythmic clunk of churning butter came to an abrupt halt, and the imperceptible tremor of their teacups in their saucers with it. Pure Vanilla stared levelly at her over the plates. Saint Lily smelled orange, and vanilla, and could think of nothing but tea.