Juniper & Thorn(15)

Papa had given us our confounding names on purpose. Undine, Rosenrot, and Marlinchen were not names for people in the city of Oblya, in the empire of Rodinya, in the smog-choked mortal world. They were characters in Papa’s codex, monsters, maidens, minor gods. Marlinchens did not lose their fingers in the machinery of cotton mills; Rosenrots did not gag on tobacco smoke in the back rooms of cafés; Undines did not marry lecherous sailors from Ionika. Our names were the best spell that Papa had ever cast, better than rabbit’s feet or burning sage. They were a veil of protection, a caul that never came off. I imagined my father murmuring a prayer for each of his daughters as he pulled us from between our mother’s legs.

Let her eat black plums and never taste the poison. Let her bathe naked in a stream without ever drawing a hunter’s wanton eye. Let all the bears she meets be friendly and pliant, and never men in disguise. Let her never fall prey to the banality of the world.

Let her never fall in love.





Chapter Three




Here is what happened to our mother.

You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead. I told myself so many times I was lucky to have the dead kind. Further, when your mother is a witch, it is almost impossible for her not to be wicked, so our father married a pretty blushing woman who was not a witch at all. Most of the wizards in Oblya took mortal women as their brides, due to the fact that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. Some, I had heard, even grew a second set of sharp teeth and ate their husbands.

I could hardly imagine having a witch as a mother. It would have been so dangerous! I pictured my sisters and myself cradled above boiling cauldrons, or reaching with our fat infant fingers toward capped vials of precious firebird feathers and bottled sirens’ screams.

But our mother wasn’t a witch. Before she was dead, she was pretty and quick to flush, with skin that reminded me of the inside of a conch shell, it was that smooth and pale. She had Undine’s golden hair, bright as an egg yolk, and Rose’s shining violet eyes. I got nothing from my mother except our identical half-moon nail beds, and maybe the little leap of our brows when we were surprised. I also inherited my mother’s love for the fairy tales in Papa’s codex, which was why she had wed him in the first place. She fell in love with the story more than she fell in love with the man. She told me so when she took me on her knee and used her comb to smooth the knotted coils of my hair, whispering her secrets into my ear.

She wed our father in the early days of gridiron Oblya, municipally planned Oblya, right before the tsar freed the serfs with the slash of his pen. The tsar’s edict hacked up the land of the feudal lords like it was a big dead sow. My father wrapped his land in blood-soaked butcher paper and sold each parcel of it to the highest bidder—mostly Yehuli men, but some Ionik merchants as well. Meanwhile our mother worried in the foyer, her measured footsteps matching the ticks of our grandfather clock. She held me on her hip; Undine and Rose hid in her skirts.

The Yehuli man in the sitting room had a horned devil’s silhouette, Undine said when she peered out. The Ionik man was soaking wet and had silverfish crawling all over his suit, Rose said. They left with Papa’s land in their teeth, or so our mother said, and then she blew her nose into a lace doily. There was a water stain on the chaise longue that never came off.

Then Papa had only the house, and the garden, and half the number of servants that we used to because he had to pay them all the tsar’s wage instead of mortgaging their work in exchange for tilling his squares of land. That was the time when our goblin came to us, weeping out of his one big eye, when the marshes were drained and made into the foundation of a beet refinery.

Our mother’s tears splattered the mahogany floor. She wiped them onto the cheeks of our marble busts.

“My mother warned me not to marry a wizard,” she sobbed. “What will we do now, Zmiy? There is no market for sorcery in Oblya, not anymore. The poor want to smoke narghiles in Merzani coffeehouses and play dominoes in gambling dens, and the rich want to build dachas along the shore and take mud baths at the sanatorium. No one wants to see their cat turned into a cat-vase, or their carriage turned into a gourd. There is already magic lining every road—electric streetlamps!—and inside every newspaper print shop—rotary presses!—and at every booth on the boardwalk where you can get a daguerreotype of your children for two rubles. They only charge two rubles for a photograph, Zmiy. How much do you charge to turn their parasol into a preening swan?”

“Quiet, woman,” Papa said. “If you didn’t want us to starve, you would have given me a son instead of three useless daughters.” He didn’t know, yet, that we were witches.

But he went anyway to one of the copy shops and asked them to print up a hundred notices that all said the same thing: Titka Whiskers asks for the gouged eye of a second-born son as payment for her work. Titka Whiskers has Yehuli blood. Titka Whiskers fornicated with a leshy and gives birth to stick and moss babies, and then they go out and brawl with the day laborers at night.

Soon all her clients fled from her doorstep in fear. Soon the Grand Inspector came and boarded up her shopfront and gave it to a Yehuli couple who opened a pharmacy. Soon Titka Whiskers was outside, pale-faced and dressed in dark rags, rattling our gate. I remembered her yellow eyes opening and closing sideways from behind the bars of the fence, her fingers so thin and white they looked already dead.