Juniper & Thorn(26)
Sometimes I thought of telling them what they wanted to hear, reciting all the tawdry details that I could already see playing behind their eyes. Sometimes I thought of telling them what really happened after I crawled into bed at night: how I imagined clipping off my nipples with Rose’s gardening shears, two neat cuts so that they fell like flower petals, bloodless and pink. I imagined pulling back the band of white flesh around my nail, peeling it in spirals like potato skin, until my whole hand was gloved in red. I visited upon myself one small violence after another, inside the safe bunker of my mind. I concluded that it would probably arouse them too; sometimes I even felt myself go slick under the sheets.
But Sevas was not looking away from me, though it certainly had been too long since he’d said a word, and my face must have looked flushed and miserable. I thought of the way he’d spoken about such horrific things without flinching, and I found within me a courage to speak too.
“My father is a great wizard,” I said at last. “He can fill the air with a mist so cold that it makes you freeze and tremble while your mind goes black with terror. He can pry open your lips and see the lies pooling on your tongue before you’ve even said them aloud. He can build glass walls that you can’t see but that never shatter, and holes in the floor that you don’t notice until you’ve fallen into them. But he likes transformations best of all. When Oblya was older, or newer, his clients would pay him whole sacks of rubles to turn their pocket watches into water clocks or their music boxes into songbirds. He even turned my mother into a bird, by accident. But because the Rodinyans came and started transforming gas lamps to electric and changing fields into factories, my father doesn’t see clients anymore, just my sisters and me. He says that now Oblya has no appetite for his brand of magic, and so he hates all the Rodinyans, and the ballet theater most. He was so angry when you came that he put a spell over the whole house, so that no one from the theater could cross the threshold again or else they’d be turned into a mass of black snakes. Last time a witch turned into vipers at our door my father ate them. And since I’d given you the wrong elixir I was afraid you would come back, not knowing about the curse, and maybe I wouldn’t even realize it until I was sitting in the garden and a black snake slithered over my shoe.”
I was so breathless by the time I finished that I had to put a hand up against the wall to steady myself. Sevas blinked once, lips parting, and I thought he was preparing to laugh me out of his dressing room. After another moment passed, he said, “Thank you.”
“What for?”
“For warning me,” he said. “For treating me at all. If your father is as powerful and cruel as you say, it was kind of you not to turn me away.” His gaze drew up and down me, and then I saw the tips of his ears go pink as dawn. “He must not know that you’re here now, in the loathsome ballet theater with its most loathsome principal dancer.”
Fear noosed me like a yoke, and not even Rose’s tincture was enough to stop it. “No, he doesn’t. But he’s not cruel; he only cares for his daughters so much that it terrifies him, the thought of anything happening to us.”
I was too afraid to say more, like speaking it aloud might imbue the words with a magic that would make them real. Sometimes I did wonder if my father would kill my sisters and me, rather than lose us to the world. I considered, not infrequently, that we would be safest in ashes and in urns.
“So now I’ve told you,” I went on, my voice wavering, “and now you know not to ever come back. I can give you the right elixir so that Derkach won’t be angry. My sister has draughts to keep men’s lips from liquor—”
“I’m not a completely hopeless sot, you know,” Sevas said, and he nodded toward the glass bottle under the boudoir, still a few fingertips full of clear liquid. “You’ll be pleased to learn I haven’t touched any vodka since I came to see you, and not just because Derkach has been more hawkeyed than usual. I can’t say I have too much experience with sorcery, but I didn’t think breathing the smell of borage would keep half a liter of vodka from coming back up. And I didn’t want to bring Derkach fuming to your door and rile your father even more.”
Several more moments ticked by before I realized he’d done me a kindness. Just as I hadn’t wished to visit Derkach’s anger upon him, he hadn’t wished to visit my father’s anger upon me.
We stared at each other from across the warm and narrow dressing room, him nearly a head taller than me, both of our brows dewy with sweat, my baby hairs curling out of Rose’s careful braids. Everything looked golden and bright, like sunlight through a jar of kvass, and my father’s house felt so tremendously far away. Even the air tasted sweet and my desire curled its long tendrils out of my belly, blooming in the light and the heat.
Sevastyan opened his mouth, and my breath caught as I waited for him to speak. And then there was a scuffling noise followed by the door clattering open.
It was the other dancer, Aleksei, his right cheek smeared with fiery orange paint. When he saw me he gave a low chuckle and said, “Taisia is going to strangle you with her stockings.”
“It isn’t like that,” Sevas said, but his ear tips were still discernibly pink. “Though she did watch me undress.”
“I turned around!” I protested. Sevastyan was grinning now, and Aleksei was laughing, some joke happening in the space around me, and even though it went vaporous between my fingers I didn’t sense any sharp edges to their smiles. No lidded meanness in their eyes. I felt welcomed in the laughter. I could not remember the last time I’d been part of something so warm.