Juniper & Thorn(23)

“Thank you, Marlinchen,” he said, like he always did, and picked up his fork. I shut my eyes as he took his first bite.

In the silence, I heard him chew and wet his lips. I heard him sip the kvass and then put the glass back down on the cloven-footed table. I didn’t open my eyes again until he asked, “Is there any more bread?”

Blinking, I stared down at his plate. My lie was there, like bits of eggshell, or a stray hair, but he had eaten without noticing it.

“Yes,” I managed, and then went into the kitchen to cut more black bread with butter.

Finally, supper was done and Papa had gone to sleep. The sky was the color of blood welling under a nail. I ate two slices of the black bread myself and every bite hurt to swallow.

Upstairs, Rose was waiting in my bedroom. She tussled with my hair for nearly half an hour before managing to pin up half of it in a precarious meshwork of braids that looked like a heap of fishbones all piled on one plate. The rest curled down my back, heavy as a tablecloth. I got out my pink dress again, and my dirty slippers, and clasped my gold charm bracelet. On the other wrist I wore my pink ribbon, the one that Sevas had returned to me.

Rose helped me lace my corset, and inside my bodice, right between my breasts, she placed Mama’s clamshell compact.

“Destroy it, Marlinchen,” she said, holding my chin in her hand. “Don’t be selfish.”

I nodded, unable to speak. The metal was already beginning to warm against my skin.

“You’ll have to take this, too, or else you won’t be able to find your way home.” Rose thrust toward me a sachet the size of a closed fist, the drawstring pulled tight. “Drop one of them every few paces, and then follow the trail back. Juniper berries leave the blackest stains.” She tied the sachet around my wrist with a red ribbon. “And this too.” She produced a small vial and tied this one with a second ribbon around my throat. “It’s a tincture for bravery. All you need to do is smell it.”

Her kindness struck me with such a dizzying lurch that I couldn’t help but lean forward and hug her, the sachet pressed between our collarbones. I breathed in the smell of lemon balm and rosemary, and a whiff of spearmint that came on as if it were an afterthought. When I let her go, I could already taste its burn at the back of my throat, like a swallow of hot air, and then when it reached my belly it quelled all the nervous roiling. I felt like I did after I vomited: everything clean and empty, and my mind sharp and clear as glass.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Rose kissed both my cheeks. “Come back by the strike of three, Marlinchen, and remember—nothing in your hands or pockets.”

I nodded.

“One night,” she said, her voice grave now. “One night to indulge this foolish desire, and then no more.”

I understood that she did not mean it cruelly, but all I could think of was how I had fed our milking cow her favorite sugared plums before we slaughtered her for Papa’s supper and hoped that at least she could still taste the sweet on her tongue when we slit her throat.

Without my sister’s tincture I might have been more afraid of crossing the threshold, of the door creaking shut behind me, of Papa’s spellwork filling the air. I was afraid, too, that Undine might see me leave, though it was not so much the fear of her mean words or her stinging slaps. It was that she might take the black sand from me and use it for herself. The black sand was the only secret I’d ever had. The only thing that belonged to me and me alone.

The crickets’ chirped lullabies guided my sprint through the garden, through the clutching roots and the tangling vines. I pushed open the rusted gate and hurled myself into the street, and when it closed after me, I could hear the metal latch sing.

I had done it. I had left, and now Oblya’s black roads stretched out in front of me like bolts of silk unfurled. I drew a breath of lemon balm and pried open the sachet around my wrist, letting the first of Rose’s berries tumble out onto the cobblestones. It landed right in the gridded shadow of our fence.

My first and second steps were so light I scarcely felt the ground under me. And then before I had realized it, I was all the way at the end of our street and turning onto the main concourse that led to the theater.

Puddles of lamplight littered the street like dropped rubles. Shining storefronts and cafés with green awnings scrolled past me, spewing tobacco smoke and laughter. Men in groups of four or five loped down the road, their faces bright and damp, their eyes gleaming with the eagerness of a boy-knight, of a not-yet-bogatyr, on his first jaunt.

I veered carefully away from them, but they didn’t even seem to notice me. Music piped from open doors and cracked second-floor windows. Just on Kanatchikov Street, I counted four languages. If it weren’t for Rose’s tincture, I might have frozen there, foreign words dribbling into my ears, trying to determine which consonants and vowel sounds spelled danger.

But I had her magic, and more, I had a goal set out in front of me, and only one night to taste the sweet thing that my tongue wanted, to fill the aching hunger in my belly. So I kept a brisk pace down the concourse, loosing a juniper berry every third step.

At last there was the theater, which ringed the plaza like a fine bracelet, its white facade as bright as a boiled chicken bone. The fountain was bubbling cheerily for no one; I had come too late and the crowd was gone, the doors closed. Even breathing in the tincture I felt a bit of panic turn loose in me and go skittering up the notches of my spine.