Juniper & Thorn(18)
I did not entirely doubt Dr. Bakay’s diagnosis, but my stomach clenched nevertheless. “You can come see me whenever you like, but perhaps next time, to save your money, you should try and wait to see if something is truly wrong.”
“But what if I come too late?” Fedir asked. His brow furrowed miserably as I lifted my hands from his shoulders. “What if, by the time I come, there’s nothing that can be done?”
“Then I will come to you,” I said, ignoring the shape of my father in the threshold, tall and narrow as the first letter of a sentence. “Just call for me, and I will come.”
When Fedir was gone, Papa swept through the room, mumbling another cleansing spell. I felt the weight of his magic and his anger settle over me, a cold mantle, and pulled at the ribbon around my wrist. It was hidden under the sleeve of my dress but still I feared that a keen-nosed spell might sniff it out.
There was a certain kind of newt that lived in gently trickling streams with particular configurations of river stones. The newts spent their whole lives in the same water, growing thick with moss and mold, and if a single stone was shaken out of place, they would die. Papa was like that. He could sense the smallest of disturbances, a hairline fracture in a marble bust, a debt gone unpaid, and he repaired and resettled it at once. Even a secret could shift the stones in Papa’s stream bed.
“You should wash, Marlinchen,” he said shortly. He had still not forgiven me for Sevastyan and Derkach, despite the exorbitant sum of money they had paid. Every hour since their visit had been wrapped in his frigid, silent fury like twine around sausage links. “The filth of our clients is on you, and I don’t trust that Ionik man only had an allergy to prawns. Run yourself a bath upstairs. And then come back down, and I will check you and your sisters.
A bad feeling simmered in me, like the last bit of grease in a pan. “Papa . . .”
“Go, Marlinchen.”
And so I did, picking my way up the stairs. I had only reached the second-floor landing when I ran into Undine leaving her room. I stumbled backward, uttering a noise of shock. I had last seen her out in the garden, sat beside her scrying pool, with a client whose face was turned away. Her legs were stretched out like bare birch branches and her blue dress was pulled up over her knee. The client’s hat bill had been angled downward, tracing a line over the curve of her calf. Several yards away, Indrik had looked on unhappily and gummed a mouthful of chicory. There was an odd sullenness in his black eyes that had vexed me.
Now Undine drew herself up with a sharp breath, her blue eyes cold fire.
“Get out of my way,” she spat.
I ducked my head and mumbled, “Sorry,” but my eldest sister didn’t move.
“This is all your fault,” she bit out. “My last client tried to give me tickets to the ballet—expensive ones, orchestra seats. I told him that I couldn’t. Because of you.”
The icy rage in her voice reminded me of Papa. “I didn’t mean to do anything.”
“I should have known you couldn’t be trusted. You’re twenty-three and still quivering with lust over the first handsome face you see? Rose and I never should have brought you along. You’ve ruined everything for us.”
And then she pushed past me, her shoulder clacking mine with such force that I stumbled backward, grasping at the banister to keep from tumbling down the steps.
I listened to my sister traipse down the stairs, gulping my breaths. Guilt pricked me all over like thorns. She was right; I had done this, and now none of us would ever see Bogatyr Ivan again. That story would be like all the others that sat heavy in my belly like a handful of seeds, spoiling, unable to bloom.
Biting my lip against the sting of tears, I went into the bathroom and locked the door. There was the porcelain tub, like a halved oyster, and the mirror that gleamed as brassily as a wet kopek. Slowly I unbuttoned my gown and let it puddle to the floor. The mirror seemed to look at me narrow-eyed, and my reflection rippled like water near to boiling.
As the tub filled, I watched myself bending over to twist the knobs, to scoop my fallen dress up off the ground, my belly folding, my breasts swaying. The first time I had seen my sisters dressing for the ballet I hadn’t been able to keep from staring at the neat lines of their bodies and the unblemished whiteness of their skin. Their breasts seemed polite somehow, unobtrusive; certainly they would never be rude enough to split the seam on a bodice. Their shoulders were slim, their bellies soft and flat. I always imagined they could be easily stowed away in a wardrobe like a starched white dress, slipped in among a dozen identical others. Your gaze would skim right across their bodies; there were no crags to cling to, no crevices to fall in.
I had always thought of my body as something that needed to be tackled and brawled, pelted and pinned down and bruised into submission, then trussed up like a chicken and laced into a whalebone corset. In my childhood I’d wished for well-mannered breasts and an obliging belly, for golden hair and violet eyes. I’d searched for spells that would breathe magic into my wanting. My eyes were the color of weak tea and so was my hair, wavering unenthusiastically between blonde and brown. Taken with my skin, which had a sickly yellowish tint, I looked as if I were trapped in a tintype photograph, sepia-toned and unsmiling.
But I’d only found spells that could drain beauty from their targets like blood from a belly-slit animal, and they all promised some sort of gruesome reckoning for their jealous caster, hideous boils or being turned into a toad.