Juniper & Thorn(16)
“Hear me, Zmiy Vashchenko,” she called in her warbling crow’s voice. “Never again will you feel sated after a fat meal. Never again will you wake refreshed after a long sleep. Never again will you look upon a sunset and marvel at its beauty. Never again will you look upon your daughters and feel your heart swell with vast and mighty affection. From now on your belly will always ache as if it is empty, and your eyelids will always droop as if you have not slept since your cradle days, and every sunset will look drained of its color, and your daughters will always appear to you like nettlesome strangers.”
And then she closed her eyes and fell over and died. Her body turned into a mass of writhing black vipers, which leached into our garden like dark tree roots. It was another year before we finally trapped and killed the last one; our maid fried it in a pan and served it to my father with boiled potatoes.
He was already whittled as thin as a wishbone by then, and our mother had moved up to the third floor of the house, where she combed her hair for hours in front of the mirror that never lies and drank only sour-cherry kvass. I climbed the steps every day to see her, so that she could comb my hair, but I was too big to sit in her lap by then, and I was too afraid to look into the mirror that never lies.
“Don’t marry a wizard, Marlinchen,” she always said. “Your father is a dragon of a man. Even before the curse, he ate up everything his hands could reach. When he was young, he was as handsome as Tsar Koschei, and I was a fool. Wait for your Ivan, dear Marlinchen. He won’t care that you are plain of face.”
Papa guarded his codex on the very top shelf of his study, but by then both my mother and I knew the story by heart. I swallowed her words and let them harden in my belly like a seed.
Indrik came to us soon after, his chest stippled with hack marks from the miners’ pickaxes. Eyeless ravens landed on our mulberry branches and sang in dead languages. Undine discovered her magic, and our father dug her a scrying pool. Rose discovered her magic, and our father planted her a garden. I was nine and still chewed on my knuckles at night.
All around us, Oblya gasped and panted like a woman in a too-small corset. Artisan schools and almshouses burst from between its ivory boning. An eye clinic and an electric station flowered up in two quick exhales. And then, at last, the ballet theater, with a breath that ripped the corset’s seams and exposed Oblya’s pale, heaving chest. Tourists walked from one of her bared nipples to the other, from the Yehuli temple to the onion dome of the oldest church. They gathered at the ballet theater in the valley of her breasts, right above her beating heart.
The tourists were good for our business, too, but it made Papa so angry to listen to them chatter in their foreign tongues, to see the gold-lettered signs that said welcome! thrice-over in Ionik and Yehuli and Rodinyan. Travel brochures called Oblya the city with no infancy. They said it rose up like a mushroom after a rainstorm. I was ten and just starting to shiver when anyone touched me.
It happened in the middle of the night, the moon outside my window as slim as a lemon rind. There was a clattering over my head, and dirt shook from the ceiling. Voices dripped through the floorboards like water: my father’s, low and rasping, and my mother’s, low and wheedling. Something thumped the ground hard. And then there was only the sound of distant wings beating.
The next morning, our father sat us down at the long ebony table. “There has been an accident,” he said.
“An accident?” Undine echoed.
“What kind of accident?” Rose asked.
I gnawed on my knuckle.
Papa took us upstairs to the third floor. The mirror that never lies was covered over with pale cloth. Our mother’s comb gleamed like melted moonlight. Her gold charm bracelet had the bleary luminance of sunken treasure. And in the center of her room was a great gilded cage, and inside it a white bird.
“One of my transformations went wrong,” Papa said. “This is your mother now.”
“I hate you!” Undine shouted, and beat our father’s chest with her fists. Rose began to cry quietly, one hand over her mouth. I approached the cage and stared at my mother, her body cut into white planks by the golden bars.
Later, I stole Papa’s heavy codex from his shelf, but this time I did not read about Ivan and the tsarevna and the kingdom of winter. I read all the stories about women who became birds, thinking there might be a spell to fix what my father had done. There was, of course, in our mother’s and my favorite story: the tale of the tsarevna who became a bird and who was kissed back into her human skin by the handsome bogatyr who loved her.
Mama had told me to wait for my Ivan, but all the bogatyrs were gone.
In the stories there were helpful finches and hopeful doves, and ravens that cawed bad omens. There were grateful sparrows who thanked you for rescuing them from briar patches, and ruby-breasted robins who offered you their chirped wisdom. There were starlings and blue tits with human voices, and a woman-headed hawk that hatched eggs with thunderstorms inside them. There were, of course, firebirds with magic feathers that could tell the wicked and the good.
But there were no stories about wives whose wizard husbands had turned them into birds by accident; I could not even tell what kind of bird my mother was. I squinted at her as she plucked sunflower seeds from my cupped hand. She had violet eyes and a pure ivory plumage, and feet as yellow as egg yolks.
I was eleven, and I had discovered my magic at last, an uncommon talent that would have made me a darling of the Wizards’ Council, if the Wizards’ Council still existed. It was the closest to happy that I had seen Papa since his curse. He drew up posters advertising my services, and as he did he sang to himself, familiar words, turning the stories I loved into songs. For some reason my ears ached to hear them, like someone had rung a bell too loud and too close. Even for days after, in the silence, my body felt shuddery and weak, the echo of the music living on in my bones.