Juniper & Thorn(29)
He had already taken my hand and begun to lead me out onto the floor before I realized what he meant. “Oh no,” I said. “Please. I don’t know how—”
“Marlinchen,” said Sevas, with a bit of impatience, “you are with the Oblyan ballet company’s principal dancer. No one will notice your missteps.”
“Or perhaps they’ll only be thrown in harsh relief by your grace and assuredness.” My face was burning.
Sevas considered that. “A compromise,” he said.
And then he put an arm around my waist and pulled me forward, so that my feet were on top of his. Our bodies were nearly flush, our right hands joined. My heart clattered; there was nowhere else for me to put my left arm except to rest it on his shoulder.
We began to rock, a bit unsteadily, and my nails dug into the fabric of his jacket. Where our fingers were interlaced I felt my palm grow slick, my skin buzzing with burgeoning magic. His thoughts and memories began to seep into me like the slow trickle of water, just flashes of color behind my eyelids, and quickly I blurted out, “If we keep touching bare-skinned I’m going to know all your secrets.”
“I don’t have any secrets,” Sevas said. “At least, none that I would mind you knowing.”
My flush only deepened. The music skipped and twanged, too upbeat for our awkward swaying, but how could I care about such a thing now? Our hands were knitted; our bodies close. I smelled him, catching the faint note of liquor on his breath, and the lingering scents of the ballet theater: acrylic paint and cold sweat and nylon, all the things that he’d been trussed up in to turn him into Ivan.
Sevas moved faster and I tripped a little bit, stumbling backward. He caught me before I fell.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a terrible partner.”
“Don’t be sorry for anything,” he said, with such firm conviction that I wasn’t sure if he was actually telling me such things, and not some other girl over my shoulder. “This is the most enjoyable dance I’ve had in years.”
I frowned in bewilderment. “Surely you must enjoy the applause and the adoration and the pretty tsarevna.”
“Oh, Taisia loathes me to my marrow,” Sevas said with a laugh. “She says she hates kissing someone who stinks of booze and has a dozen other girls’ perfumes lingering on him, even if it’s just pretend.”
Jealousy knotted in my belly, but I bit my lip and stayed quiet.
“And besides,” Sevas went on, “this is the first time in a long while I’ve gotten to dance in a place that I chose, with a partner of my liking, without playing the same role in the same insipid story.”
“You don’t like Bogatyr Ivan?”
“What’s there to like? It’s a fairy story for children and a doctrine for zealously patriotic men. Besides, how can anyone be entertained when the ending is so obvious? Of course the Dragon-Tsar will fall. Of course Ivan will win the tsarevna’s hand.”
“I like it,” I ventured, surprised at my own boldness. “It reminds me of a story my mother used to tell me, before she died.”
“Before she became a bird.”
“Yes. There was an Ivan and a tsarevna in that story too.”
“And did it have a happy end?”
“It did,” I said, and my chest tightened suddenly, as if my body had become aware of all the strings that bound it. The clamshell compact between my breasts, the juniper berries and the charm bracelet circling my wrists, the memory of Rose’s words wrapping around my brain like endless lengths of twine: Come back by the strike of three, before the dawn lifts Papa’s eyelids. Nothing in your hands or pockets. Don’t be selfish. I was so tangled in all of them that I felt like an insect trapped in a spider’s twisting, snarling web.
“Well,” said Sevas, “you’ll have to tell it to me someday.”
Another lurch in my belly, strings tightening further. “Maybe.”
Sevas gave a soft laugh. “You’re so inscrutable, Marlinchen. I think you like bewitching me.”
And that drew a laugh from me, too, unexpected and genuine. “No one else has ever said such a thing. I’ve never been able to keep a secret or to tell a lie.”
“But you escaped your wizard father’s house to come here.” Sevas arched a brow. “Surely that involved some subterfuge.”
My cheeks pinked. “Well, you’re my first secret then, my first lie. Does that please you?”
“Only if it pleases you.”
I was blushing so furiously then I could no longer meet his eyes, and the closeness of his body was so intoxicating that I was certain I’d do some manic, lascivious, animal thing if I couldn’t get away from him. My gaze caught on something white on the floor.
In a heartbeat I managed to remove myself from Sevas’s grasp, bend down, and pick it up. It was a white feather, smooth and glistening with a faint brush of gold paint.
“Here,” I managed. “This must be yours. From your cape.”
Sevas’s mouth fell open. I could tell that my odd behavior was perplexing him, but I wasn’t doing it by design. I was only trying to keep him safe from the strange and garish thoughts in my mind, from the desires that would doom us both, even if they were only mine.
“Why don’t you keep it?” he said. “You can use it in one of your witch’s brews.”