Juniper & Thorn(20)
“I would never tell Undine anything I wasn’t proud to speak aloud,” I said, and Rose smiled at last, our mother’s violet eyes filling with affection. She put the knife down on the table, patted both of my cheeks, and followed me out into the corridor.
Papa was leaning over Undine now, holding the capped vial in his fist. As a child, my oldest sister had been the one who wailed the loudest and the longest, the one who tearfully protested every perceived injustice. The years had bled most of that petulance out of her, but there was still a clear outrage even to her silences. Her fury lifted off her in vapors, like steam rising from boiled water. My shoulder still ached where she’d shoved me.
“Open your mouth, Undine,” Papa said.
Her pink lips parted, eyes wavering with anger. He poured a bit of the red-black liquid onto her tongue, and she shut her mouth and swallowed.
Seconds trickled past us, the grandfather clock keeping their time. When the minute hand had gone a full circle, Papa gave a curt nod, and Undine let out a breath and stood and stalked out of the room at once. As she brushed past me wordlessly, I saw that her lips and tongue were dyed a garish red.
“Now you, Rosenrot.” Papa beckoned her toward him.
I watched him pour a swallow of the potion into her mouth, feeling my damp hair drip down my neck and onto the carpet. The dark spot of water grew and grew. Rose licked her red lips.
After another moment, our father nodded. “Good. You can go.”
She went, and it was only Papa and me. The flaps of his cheeks quivered under his beard. When I did step toward him, I could smell the breakfast I’d cooked for him on his breath: mlyntsi with cottage cheese and six boiled eggs, kasha with butter, and the last of our blackberry kvass. My own empty stomach began to roil.
He held my chin and tilted my head back and said, “I trust you, Marlinchen. You most of all.”
The draught tasted as it did every time, like sulfur and ash, like the end of a tobacco pipe if you licked it. Tears gathered in my eyes as I swallowed, but Papa didn’t notice and I was so glad, because this time I was more afraid than I had ever been.
Papa’s potion was a test to see if we had kept our thighs unbloodied, our maidenheads unspoiled. I was always careful when I touched myself never to let my fingers slip too far inside, never to break what Papa wanted intact. He told us, too, what would happen if we drank the potion when we were ruined: we would vomit it back up along with our livers, and then he would hold up our own naked organs to us as proof of our deception, proof that we were thankless and debauched daughters who would sully the Vashchenko name.
Papa measured his own virtue by our virtues; our patronymic, he said, could not be noble and clean if there were any blackened, putrid parts. I knew that a single rotten branch would kill an entire tree, so he was right about that.
But I did not know the scope of his spell, how many lies the potion could dredge out of me. It had never made me spit up my other secrets before, but none had ever bloomed so quick and bright in my mind, like flowering marigolds.
The clock ticked its remorselessly steady rhythm.
Finally, Papa let me go. I put my hand to my mouth and wiped; my fingers came away smudged, as if with blood. My cheek stung where his nails had dug their small divots. My ribbon was still on my wrist, my compact was still tucked inside my slipper, and Sevastyan was still safe in the vault of my mind. My stomach lurched, but nothing threatened to come back up, least of all organs. I nearly shuddered to the floor in relief.
“You know why I have to do this, Marlinchen, don’t you?” Papa asked, returning the empty vial to his pocket.
Another trap laid at my feet. “Yes, Papa.”
“The city has taken so much from me. The tsar forced me to auction off my land to foreign tradesmen and scheming merchants, and watch them build apartments and factories and municipal banks upon it. I had to watch the tsaritsa coax foreigners to Oblya like a shepherd calling down his flock. I had to watch them tear up the beautiful steppe—do you know what they used to say about Oblya? That it was the place where two oceans met: there was the sea itself, and then the steppe, and the covered wagons that navigated it were like ships with white sails. They killed an entire ocean, Marlinchen. And there are so many little deaths as well. When the cotton-spinning factories ripped up the grasslands, they took with them the last steppe foxes. We on the Wizards’ Council used to do so many spells with the fur or eyes or teeth of a steppe fox. I even used its tail once for a cleansing ritual—when I spoke over it, the tail flew up and swept the grime from the mantels and lampshades!”
We had all seen Papa’s fox tail. I still used it every Sunday to dust the sitting room. But I didn’t dare remind him of that. I was still dangling over his pit of spikes.
“But worst of all is how much they love it.” Papa’s hand was on my face again, thumb stroking my cheekbone. “You would think this town was forever on holiday, with how the night air is always filled with music and laughing and the tobacco smoke floating from cafés. The day laborers stumble drunkenly from flophouses to gambling dens with giddy smiles on their faces. I have to hear their joy in five languages. And the ballet theater, the wretched ballet theater. How many rubles did they spend to raise up that monstrosity, to lure performers from all over Rodinya, to costume them in feathers and gold? I have lost so much, Marlinchen—you understand that. The least they could do is not dance on the ashes of it all.”