Juniper & Thorn(13)

Papa’s words listed through my mind. Fodder for wealthy hags whose husbands won’t touch them. I remembered the way the women in the audience had stared at Sevastyan, lips wet and red like glazed cherries, and the way Derkach’s hand had closed over his knee. We looked at each other for a long moment, and then I couldn’t stand it anymore, both the proximity and the space between us driving me different degrees of mad. I whirled around a plucked a sachet of chamomile and borage from the shelf, heart stammering, and held it out to him.

I couldn’t remember if it was a cure for seasickness. I couldn’t remember if it was a cure for anything at all.

“Here,” I said in a trembling voice. “Take this. Sevastyan.”

His name leapt off my tongue like a spark vaulting over the grates of a hearth, just before someone snuffed it out. Quick and bright. Sevastyan took the herbs from me, his lovely brow furrowing, and said, “You might as well call me Sevas.”

Sevas. I tried out the diminutive in my mind, and even thinking it made me feel hot. Then I spoke it, quietly: “Sevas.”

The corner of his lips lifted in a smile.

“You know,” he said, “if watching the same story play out over and over again doesn’t bore you as much as it bores me, perhaps you can come back to the theater. I think it would make me very happy to see your face in the crowd, Marlinchen.”



When Derkach had settled his account and Papa was holding his rubles, when Sevas had tucked his poultice into his pocket, when both of our guests had left through the garden gate, white petals falling over them like rice thrown at a bride and her bridegroom, when I had looped the ribbon around my own wrist and hidden it under the sleeve of my housecoat, when Rose and Undine began traipsing sleepily down the stairs, Papa turned to me.

“Marlinchen,” he said, “tell me why we live in Oblya?”

This was one of Papa’s questions that was not a question at all but a trap laid at your feet. You had to speak carefully, considering every syllable, every intonation, to keep yourself from tumbling into it.

“We have lived in Oblya before it was even Oblya,” I said, chewing my lip. “When there was only the long, flat steppe that fell into the sea with nothing to stop it. Since the days of the bogatyrs and their gods, when you couldn’t pass by a stream without a rusalka calling to you sweetly, when you left your third-born sons in the woods for the leshy, and when you prayed in four directions to please the domovoi that lived in the cupboard.”

Rose and Undine had stopped halfway down the steps, sensing the danger. You could hear the beginnings of Papa’s rage from anywhere in the house, like boiled water squealing inside its pot.

Papa gave a brittle nod, which was the best I could have hoped for. My answer had not pleased him, but it had not riled him further. He turned to my sisters on the stairs.

“And you, lazy girls, thankless girls, wretched girls, what were you doing sleeping away the morning while your sister worked?” He shook his bag of rubles; it sounded like the gnashing of iron teeth. “Do you think it brings me joy, to take this tainted gold from the coffers of Oblya’s ballet theater? You must think me no better than a Yehuli moneylender, swallowing up rubles without a care for where they came from, when they might as well be coated in poison and filth? Shall I go crawl on my hands and knees on the cobblestones in search of dropped kopeks? Shall I polish the tsar’s boots with my tongue? Is this what my own daughters would ask of me?”

“Papa, please—” Undine started, fisting the pearl necklace at her throat. It was one of our mother’s.

“Silence.” Papa held up a hand. “Have I not done enough for you, my vain, ungrateful daughters, to keep you in fine silks with your bellies full? I took Titka Whiskers’s curse for you, that ugly, jealous witch. Have I raised my daughters to be no better? Shall I write a spell to give you cat eyes and hooked noses and chicken feet? Perhaps I shall. Perhaps I shall turn you all into hags.”

Undine made a choked sound. Rose was silent, her face pale. None of us were certain exactly how strong Papa’s magic was, only that it was stronger than all of ours put together. That was precisely what he’d been known for, when he had sat on the Wizards’ Council, and it was what had earned him his license: transformations.

“And you,” Papa said, wheeling toward me. “I saw the way you went weak in the knees for that dancer. He’s Yehuli, you know. I should have spied it right away, and then I wouldn’t have let him in for anything. He has an unscrupulous set to his jaw, and the brow bone of a man with capitalist schemes in his mind. You are not a stupid girl, Marlinchen. But you are a girl. Wipe away the dewiness in your eyes and scrub the flush from your cheeks. Do you think he desires sallow-faced witches with the stink of the kitchen on them? Do you think I would ever let his serpent’s jaws close around you, even if he did? You are far too dear to me for that.”

Papa did not raise a hand to me now; he never had before. He only let his fury unfold from him like a mist, until it dampened our brows and snuck into our veins and made us freeze there, as still as graveyard statues.

It was good magic. I couldn’t move and scarcely breathed as he paced the foyer, the loose skin of his cheeks flapping under his beard like our eyeless ravens beating their wings.

“Enough now,” he said to himself, then looked up at my sisters and me. “I have two spells to cast. I will tell you what they are. The first is that no one from Oblya’s infernal ballet theater will ever pass through our gate again, or else they will turn into a pile of vipers. And the second is that no one will leave this place without a bowl of black sand.”