Juniper & Thorn(2)

The thought of Papa seeing us made me woozy with dread, and our very own garden began to feel terrible and strange.

To outsiders, it was always terrible and strange, even in the daylight; they were not accustomed to it the way we were. There were the glass apples, which tasted sweet and made you wine-flushed if you could bear to put those hard, sharp bits in your mouth. There were the black amber plums, fat as bruises, which were suffused with a fatal poison. Our father had nurtured an immunity in his daughters by feeding us slivers of the fruit from the time we were infants, and now we could bite into the plums and taste only the tang of their rotted bitterness, not the poison underneath.

But even we were warned never to touch the juniper tree, which bore berries of the most dangerous variety: both poisonous and sweet. Whatever sick thing was in them, we could not be inured to it.

In my twenty-three years, I had seen the garden come to be occupied by a number of other things, and I had come to consider these things ours. Our fiery serpent, which looked like a regular snake until it caught the sunlight, and then its black scales glimmered with a flame-bright sheen. It spoke in a human voice, without moving its mouth; the voice seemed to enter your head as if you were the one conjuring its words. It would promise you silken handkerchiefs or ceramic beads, and if you accepted, its gifts would materialize in your hand, spun out of nothing—for a price: the milk from your breast. But even if you paid, in the morning all the gifts would turn to straw and manure. I didn’t know what would happen if you asked it for something more than trinkets, or why it would be so terrible to give suck to a serpent. I watched it wind through our garden now like a slick of oil, leaving pale coils of shed skin in its wake.

There was also our goblin, the poor thing, who had lost its home when the Rodinyan land surveyors drained the marshes outside of Oblya. Its single eye shone like a lantern in the dark, its beard as long and white as lichen grown over a log. In its gratitude for our hospitality the goblin had become excessively protective of my sisters and me, and had taken to trying to bite our clients in the ankle when they crossed through the garden into the house. After the goblin cost us a hundred rubles and nearly brought the city’s Grand Inspector to our door, my father made sure it was always shut up in the garden shed whenever we had visitors. Last time when I’d gone to let it out, it had already chewed a hole through the wood and was sulking in Rose’s bed of tarragon.

We had patched the hole painstakingly, each taking turns keeping an eye out for Papa, and then shut the goblin in again. Undine had wanted to gag it, to make sure its tears didn’t wake him, but such a thing felt unspeakably cruel and I managed to convince her out of it. As we passed the shed I heard its cowed whimpering.

My least favorite of all our creatures was Indrik, a bare-chested man with the legs of a faun or a goat. He was forever bemoaning his fate as a refugee, as he had fled the mountain where he’d lived when Rodinyan miners had begun to plumb it for silver. He languished by Undine’s scrying pool, mournfully examining his reflection, claiming he’d once been a god and everyone in Oblya had worshipped him. They’d left him offerings of slain geese or painted eggs and their prettiest, bleating ewes—I shuddered to think what he had done with those ewes, given the lustful way he’d eyed our milking cow before she’d died. I didn’t know if he’d ever been a god at all, but it was no use trying to argue with him; he would only weep.

To make sure Indrik did not catch us as we left, Rose had fed him a sleeping draught. I saw the blurry shape of him beneath one of the pear trees, the coiled muscles of his back as huge as boulders. His snoring was a soft whistle, like the train that I could sometimes hear very distantly from my bedroom window.

There were other creatures that I could not name, ones that I could only refer to as monsters. Badger-looking things that snuffled the earth for roots and truffles; spiny-tailed weasels with beady red stares, such as the one that liked to hide under my bed; eyeless ravens that winged blindly through our rhododendrons. They ate the rabbits and squirrels that came to masticate Rose’s herbs, so we let them stay, and besides, we didn’t know what would happen if we chased them out. There were no stories about these types of monsters, or maybe the stories had been lost. Either way, my sisters and I were all afraid we might wake up cursed just like our father if we did them any harm.

But all precautions had been taken, and none of those creatures were roused tonight. When we reached the gate, Undine swung it open, and we brushed all the dirt from our shoes and the hems of our gowns. Like we were serpents shedding our skin, we swept the mustiness and sorcery of the house off of us.

While I stared down the cobblestone road that unspooled before us, my stomach knotted with fear.

“Come on, Marlinchen,” Undine said, looping our elbows and giving me a vicious tug. “We only have a quarter hour.”

We sprinted down the street, as quick as our crinolines and corsets would allow. I could feel the cobblestones through the soles of my slippers, all of their hard ridges that seemed to lurch up at me with every step. We passed the day laborers, dull-eyed men slouching toward the brothels and taverns, or back to their apartments above the shops. Whenever their gazes spun toward us, I felt another thread of panic loose in me, but Rose and Undine only pulled me along.

Kanatchikov Street bore us into the city plaza, a glorious facade of buildings that ringed the massive fountain. Dolphins leapt from the stone basin in arrested motion, water shooting from their spouts. A marble sea god sat in his chariot, thick brows drawn over his eyes, frozen and immortal. He was not a god that I recognized from my father’s codex; he had vague and hurried features, as if the man who had carved him was trying to remember something that he had seen only once, many years ago.