Juniper & Thorn(27)
“We should get out of here before Taisia starts shrieking and Derkach starts scolding,” Aleksei said. His gaze drifted vaguely toward my half of the dressing room; if he recognized me as a Vashchenko girl, a witch, he made no mention of it. “Is your, ah, friend coming with us?”
My heart leapt, and yet I found I could not speak. It would be foolish to go, selfish, to tempt the hours that Papa slept, to test Rose’s patience. She had to be pacing the floorboards now, waiting for me to come home. I felt I had to make a perfunctory protest, even if it made my stomach shrivel like a wilting violet.
“I can’t,” I said quietly. “My father . . .”
Aleksei turned to Sevastyan with a look of great dismay. “Please tell me you haven’t chosen another girl whose father can sharpshoot.”
“He was a half-deaf veteran of the Rodinyan Imperial Army and he owned a rusted flintlock. Always the dramatics with you, Lyosha. And no, even better. Her father is a wizard who wishes to turn me into a mass of black snakes.”
“I thought wizards in Oblya went the way of spinning wheels,” Aleksei said, though he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the existence of a wizard, or by the prospect of his friend becoming an abundance of vipers. His accent, I noticed, was Rodinyan too. All the wizards in Rodinya had been gone even longer.
“It would be just my luck, to draw the ire of the very last wizard in Oblya,” said Sevas, as he buttoned his jacket. He turned to me. “But if your wizard father doesn’t know you’re gone, what could be the harm in staying out a little longer?”
At that, Rose’s words drifted through my mind. You must return by the clock’s strike of three, before the dawn lifts Papa’s eyelids. It could be no later than eleven now, and so many hours stretched out between me and Papa’s waking. But there were a thousand dangers that waited along the way, in the streets of Oblya or the hallways of our house, where Papa might rouse early, hunger-ridden, and pass by my empty bedroom.
Yet none of that seemed to matter now, all my imagined protests vanishing like smoke. Rose had given me one night to indulge my headiest, most foolish desire—when else would I have such a chance spread out before me like a table full of treats? I smelled the lemon balm and the rosemary and the sharp note of spearmint and it went down my throat and hardened in my belly, giving me the courage my sister had promised. With it was the pull of want between my thighs, and when I stared at Sevastyan he stared at me back.
The whole room went wonderfully hazy, like it was all a waking dream. If it was really a dream, it was the sweetest I’d ever had, and I didn’t yet want it to end.
I found myself following the curve of Sevas’s sharp, bright smile, my own lips parting in turn as I asked, “Where are we going?”
Chapter Five
Oblya at night was so full of color and noise that I didn’t know how I had ever been afraid of it.
Happy couples held hands in the puddled glow of streetlamps. The storefront awnings were turned upward at the corners, like smiles. Trams and carriages clattered by, and the horses pulling them were cheerfully huge, like circus bears in ruffled collars. We passed the cafés and restaurants on Kanatchikov Street and I no longer worried that the foreign words would snare me like fishhooks. So many eyes passed over me, but none lingered with suspicion or malice. I figured it must help that I was flush between Sevas and Aleksei, who were pulling me along through the street, laughing in wisps of pale smoke, though I could scarcely feel the cold.
Was Oblya like this every night? I wondered. While I pressed my face into my pillow and a flock of gory things came to roost in my mind, was the city awake and bright outside my window, heaving with a life that was unknowable to me?
Once I had picked up a large stone from our garden and saw what looked like hundreds of small creatures moving and writhing underneath, tiny snakes with red bellies and long insects with a thousand scything legs, woodlice and pill bugs and beetles with iridescent shells. I’d gotten so frightened that I’d run inside and hid upstairs in my bedroom, and I hadn’t gone into the garden for nearly a year after.
It wasn’t that I was so scared of red-bellied snakes and centipedes; they were harmless, I knew that much. I was more afraid that every time I walked through the garden, I was trampling hundreds of living things without even realizing it.
And now, seeing all the joy and merriment before me, I became similarly afraid to impinge upon it. Oblya was no danger to me, but I felt, for one stretching moment, that my touch was ugly and ruinous. What did this city care for a plain-faced witch with too-long hair and only carnage behind her eyes?
But somehow the thoughts sloughed off me. I didn’t know if it was Rose’s tincture or simply that Sevas was standing so close, the heat of our bodies mingling in the knife-slit of space between my arm and his. He led me to a tavern with dark and narrow windows and two gas lamps guttering on either side of the door, which was cracked open and leaking black smoke.
For a moment I shrank back, chest constricting with imprecise dread, and Sevas said, “The most dangerous thing inside is the vodka. I hear it once made a man go blind.”
Aleksei snickered and slipped through the door, vanishing into the crowd of people. I hesitated in the threshold still, thinking of Papa’s stories about taverns full of foreign men who turned to blood-drinking upyry after sunset. But he’d not been quite right about Yehuli men—not quite right about a few other things too—so I steeled myself with a breath of lemon balm and followed Sevas inside.