Juniper & Thorn(12)

“I suppose that depends,” he said, “on what you would call a witch.”

I stared at him in silence, breath held. Rose’s storeroom was small and windowless, with scarcely enough space for us to stand without touching. The walls were lined with homemade cabinetry, white paint peeling in long strips. Filmy candlelight clung to Sevastyan’s profile, to the dusty workbench, and when I inhaled again I tasted basil and thyme in the air.

I could still hardly believe he was here, in our dragon’s hoard of nefarious sorcery. It was impossible, improbable, dangerous.

“I didn’t want to lie to my father,” I said at last. “Or to Mr. Derkach, but . . .”

Sevastyan stiffened again at Derkach’s name. “I think you have already lied to your father, Ms. Vashchenko.”

He rolled up his left sleeve. I saw another black tattoo scrawled across the back of his hand. Looped around his wrist, discolored with filth, was Rose’s pink ribbon. My heart shot into my throat.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t say a word—I’ll give you a draught for seasickness; Derkach will never know the difference.”

Sevastyan only stared at me, incredulous. “I don’t have any plans to reveal you, Ms. Vashchenko. I just wanted to give this back to you. And to thank you. I don’t think many people would have stopped to help a man being sick on himself in an alley.”

“Oh.” I must have been the shade of a ripe beet by now, with how much I had been flushing since he’d walked through the door. “It only seemed like a decent thing to do.”

“You are likely the only person in Oblya who thinks so.” He laughed, but there was something hollow in it. “Did you enjoy the show?”

Could he possibly have guessed how I was thinking of him? Could he smell my desire like some scent on the air? Sometimes I worried that when I was reading my clients, they were reading me back. As if my touch leached secrets into their skin too.

But Sevastyan just arched a brow at me, looking expectant. Not smug.

“Of course,” I said softly. “You—it was beautiful.”

If he noticed my near slip, he didn’t comment on it. He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it to a state of perfect dishevelment, then began to pull at the ribbon on his wrist. When he struggled to get it loose with one hand, I cleared my throat and said, “Let me.”

Obediently, he held out his arm and I unlaced the ribbon, fingers quivering when they brushed the inside of his wrist. His skin was so pale that it had a marbled look to it, blue veins webbing beneath it like a river with many tributaries. I got the ribbon off him and closed it in my fist, feeling the heat that his body had left on it.

It occurred to me, suddenly, that he hadn’t taken the ribbon when Aleksei had guided him into the theater again. “Did you . . . go back for it?”

“Not for the ribbon.” Now I saw the faintest beginnings of a flush spread over his face. “I went to look for the kind girl who’d tried to help me, even though I’d been sick on her shoe. But you were gone by the time I was sober enough to walk straight.”

“You really shouldn’t drink so much,” I found myself saying, as if I were some chiding nursemaid, but really my heart was pounding like hoofbeats. He had come back for me. “I don’t know how you managed to dance at all, in that state. I felt how drunk you were when I was doing my reading—I could hardly see, and I couldn’t think.”

“I don’t need to think when I’m dancing,” he said. I could hear his Rodinyan accent now, the harder edge to his consonants. “I’ve been performing Bogatyr Ivan since I was twelve years old. It’s natural to me, like breathing.”

“It doesn’t seem nearly so effortless for the other performers.” I was thinking of the tsarevna. He’d made her look clumsy by comparison.

“That’s why they are not the principal dancers,” Sevastyan replied, lips thinning with a smirk.

I remembered what Rose had said—that he had his whole life ahead of him, and nowhere else to go. I imagined a long hallway unspooling before him, black and endless, like one of the unlit corridors on the third floor of our house. “I suppose so.”

Sevastyan’s smirk lost a bit of its brazenness. “What else did you see in your reading, Ms. Vashchenko?”

“Marlinchen,” I said quickly, automatically. “That’s—just call me Marlinchen.”

“Marlinchen,” he said. “What else did you see?”

My name in his mouth made my knees go weak. I remembered the snow-maiden and felt a kick of jealousy in my belly. I had to swallow hard before answering. “I only tell my clients what they need to know.”

“And do you enjoy peering into your clients’ heads, seeing all their tawdry secrets?”

“No,” I said, surprising myself with my vehemence. “I don’t enjoy it at all. Most of the things I wish I’d never seen, and most of my clients are people I’d never had to touch.”

I thought, horribly, of Dr. Bakay, and my stomach folded over on itself. Sevastyan’s face shifted at once, his eyes taking on a limpid softness. It reminded me of the way he’d looked at the tsarevna, when she’d first leapt between him and her dragon father.

“Right,” he said. “I can imagine that.”