Juniper & Thorn(21)

“Yes, Papa,” I whispered.

He grabbed my face again, holding it tighter than before, and then kissed my forehead gently. “You have always been a sweet and dutiful daughter, better than your sisters. Sometimes I think your mother made you just to look after me when she was gone. So you understand that I have to keep you safe, and keep the rats from the door. They can wriggle in through the very cracks—Yehuli men, ballet dancers, the worst of this whole debased city. But the spell I’ve cast is a good one. If anyone from the theater tries to cross the threshold, they will turn to a mass of vipers, just like that infernal witch Titka Whiskers. I wouldn’t even eat them, Marlinchen.” He leaned close. “It would make me sick to my stomach.”

At last he lowered his hand. I waited and waited, without breathing, to make sure all the daggers at my back had been sheathed, to make sure there was no steel in his smile. I knew I had been released when Papa turned and stalked toward the foyer, but I didn’t sprint up to my room until I could no longer hear his footsteps on the floor.



Upstairs I knelt before my wardrobe and took the compact out of my shoe. In that brief, suspended instant when even the labored breathing of the monster under my bed had gone silent, I wondered if perhaps I had dreamed it. The black sand.

I lifted the lid of the compact. The mirror was flecked with tiny scratches, and the once-ivory powder was now an ashen gray. Salt-smell curled into my nose. I snapped the compact shut again.

Now the desire in my belly began to unfurl, like the smallest shoots of green. I could leave again, if I chose. And there would even be a good reason for it: I could imagine Sevas finishing his performance and running outside to retch again, Derkach finding him in the alley by a puddle of his own sick. He would rail against the guileful witch who had swindled him out of his rubles. He would march in an indignant fury back to our doorstep with Sevastyan in tow, and they would both turn into a spew of black vipers as soon as their boots crossed the threshold.

I remembered how Derkach’s hand had closed over Sevastyan’s knee. Perhaps the other outcome was worse—that Derkach visited his anger upon Sevas instead of me.

Either way I needed to warn him, and now I had the means to do it. But the thought of leaving alone made me grow dizzy and weak. Legs quaking, I stood. The heels of my slippers were still clumped with dirt. I shut the wardrobe door, my mother’s compact clutched in my fist. The taste of Papa’s draught on my lips was like bad mussels, like burnt rubber.

Downstairs there was a half-gutted chicken in the icebox. When evening came on and the sky turned a bruised violet I would cook its liver with onions and parsley. Papa would lick all the grease from the plate, and his magic would swell over our garden like varenyky stuffed to bursting, and I would not sleep for wondering if the next black snake I saw was Sevastyan.

I did not doubt Papa’s spellwork. I had fed our mother from my hand for years.

I was halfway to Rose’s room before I had even made up my mind. My hair was damp against the back of my neck and my heart was rioting in my rib cage. I knocked once and, hearing her voice on the other side of the door, pushed my way inside. My sister lay belly-flat on the bed, paging through her tattered herbalist’s compendium.

“You look like you’ve seen Mama’s ghost,” Rose said with an arched brow, propping herself up on her elbows. “What’s wrong, Marlinchen?”

Suddenly all my words abandoned me. How could I explain the knot of fear and wanting that had coiled in my belly and was now curling up my rib cage? I had never bothered to tell either of my sisters Mama’s and my favorite story. I knew they would just scoff and sneer at it, even Rose. Whatever my sisters’ desires, they were not so bald or so childish or so damning.

I could confess neither my stupid hope nor my stupid terror, so in the end, all I managed to do was hold out Mama’s compact. I flipped it open with my thumb and let the black sand trickle out onto Rose’s carpet, and my sister’s eyes grew wide as plums.





Chapter Four




Rose leapt off her bed and knelt on the floor and scooped up as much of the sand as she could. She snatched the compact from my hand and poured it back inside, and all the while I could hear her breathing in quick little gasps, and her panic leached into me and soon I was on the floor beside her, picking grains of black sand from the bristles of the carpet. Behind me the closed door seemed to ripple and shudder, like a tin roof in the rain. There was still a brine scent rising from the rug in a fine mist.

“You must be mad, Marlinchen,” Rose whispered, shoving the compact inside the folds of her dress. “Where did you get this?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. I could not even explain it to myself. Black sand had somehow peeled off me in the bathtub and then the pipes had coughed it back up. So I only told her that, because it was all I knew, and then I told her how afraid I was that Sevastyan would come back and it would be all my fault when he turned into a mass of vipers at our door.

I did not tell her about the way my hand had slipped between my thighs, or the way that I had spread that small bit of hope so thin that it wore out like an old stringy rag.

But my second sister was canny, and her eyes grew narrower and narrower until they were knives that cut right to the core of me.

“Why did you give him that herb mix?” Rose snapped, when I was done, and for a moment she sounded as angry and mean as Undine. “You could have woken me. I have draughts for men who can’t keep their lips from the liquor bottle. Papa was right. You were stirred by that dancer. You wanted him to come back.”