Juniper & Thorn(25)
“You let go of me so quickly I thought I might have been bruising your hand, but now I wonder if you just find me repugnant.”
“No, I—”
“And you were so eager to get me out of your house that day, you and your father both. I can’t help but conclude that your stomach turns at the very sight of me. I know I didn’t make the finest of first impressions, retching on your shoe in a half-lit alley, but—”
“No,” I managed, nearly stumbling upon just the one word, cheeks furiously warm. “I don’t find you repugnant. I didn’t want you to go, but my father was furious. You don’t know what his rages are like. And this time, it was my magic that pulled me away. I don’t want to drain your secrets from you.”
Sevas only stared at me, a bright cheer in his blue eyes. He loosened the feathered cloak and let it pool at his feet. “Well, I’m happy to know I don’t repulse you.”
If he’d known what was really running through my mind when I’d stood with him in Rose’s storeroom, he’d have me thrown out of the theater for obscenity. The thought only deepened my flush.
Sevas began picking at the gold paint on his shoulders and chest, the lacquer flaking off him like rust. Where a bit of it peeled away I could see the beginnings of black ink, symbols scrawled along the line of his collarbone, down his forearm, over the back of his hand. I squinted at them, for a moment all my flustered panic vanishing, and asked, “What are they?”
“Blessings,” he said, and drew his thumb across the one on his shoulder blade. “Some of them, at least. My mother wanted me to take a copy of the holy book with me when I left for Oblya, so I told her I would compromise and get her favorite prayers inked on me, instead. When I came home from the tattoo shop she threw the book at my head.”
I could recognize the letters from the storefronts in the Yehuli quarter. “Why?”
“Because the tattoo artist was a Rodinyan man who misspelled our word for heaven?” A smile pulled up one corner of his mouth. “No, I’m only joking. More likely because my people have prohibitions against inking your skin. But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry. They say they won’t bury you in one of our cemeteries, but why should I care what happens to my body after I die? Cook up my heart and liver if you have a particular craving for the flesh of Yehuli men, though I think I’d be a bit gamy with all my years of dancing.”
As he spoke, he drew a white blouse over his head and buttoned it to his throat. I couldn’t help my mouth falling open a little bit, trying to square the humor in his voice and the glimmer of jest in his gaze while he spoke of such gory things. I saw Ivan’s wooden sword lying across the boudoir; from this close it looked even more obviously like a prop, the silver paint offering none of the luminance of real steel. Sevastyan ran his fingers through his hair, disheveling it with careful intention.
Then he began to strip off his stockings.
“Wait,” I choked out. “I can go—”
He glanced up, brows quirked. “I don’t have much of my modesty left to preserve, Ms. Vashchenko, so don’t leave on my account. But if it’s your propriety you’re worried about, feel free to turn around.”
I did, my face as hot as a stovetop. With my back to him, I whispered, “Marlinchen.”
“Marlinchen,” he said. His voice sounded odd when I couldn’t see his face, quieter somehow, more like a boy’s than a man’s. “I didn’t forget. But since I’d started wondering if you despised me, I thought you might prefer me to address you with some formality.”
“No,” I said, still staring with utmost concentration at the wall. “There are three Ms. Vashchenkos, and only one of them is me. Whenever I hear it I always think someone is asking after my sisters.”
I heard Sevas draw a breath. “You can turn around now, if you’d like.”
Cheeks still burning, I did. Sevas was now wearing black trousers, his flesh-colored tights balled up and abandoned on his boudoir. Looking at him, the beautiful line of his mouth, the bright, clear blue of his eyes—all rational thought flooded out of me.
“I really am glad to see your face again, Marlinchen,” he said. “I wasn’t sure that I would.”
The softness and uncertainty in his voice drew forth a memory: Derkach’s hand closing over his knee. It reminded me that I had come to the theater with a purpose. I drew a breath, tasting the lemon balm from Rose’s tincture and letting the courage leak into my stomach, and said, “I really do have something to tell you.”
Sevas assumed a solemn look. “Go on.”
All at once my words curdled like bad cream. He would think I was a fool, maybe a madwoman, a witch with her Old World ways, a slave to the moth-eaten lunacy of her father. That’s what the other Oblyans thought of us, when they weren’t staring down my sisters’ dresses, and even sometimes when they were. Their debasing curiosity drew them to our doorstep, a magic that seemed sometimes even more powerful than the fear my father tried to instill in them.
To the women we were party stories, yarns spun between close faces. To the men we were imagined conquests, a dreamscape wherein they acted out their wickedest fantasies, the ones they would never inflict upon their sweet, blushing mortal wives. They asked my sisters and me if we fornicated with our father, or with each other, and the thought seemed to make them perversely aroused. I had watched so many mustaches grow sweat-damp as the men picked apart my answer with their teeth, biting down on the lusty bits. If I flushed, it was as good as a confession, and more fodder for their vulgar dreams.