Juniper & Thorn(31)
“I don’t give much thought to it. I may very well be dead before that day comes. I try to live each night like death is riding for me at the very first hour of dawn, so I’ll have very few regrets when it does finally appear in the tavern door.” He glanced toward the threshold, as if he really did think he might see a black-clad figure there. In Papa’s codex, Death was a man with willow fronds for hands and drooping ears so huge you could fold yourself into them and fall soundly asleep. “I think I would regret it deeply, if I died at dawn knowing it’s been so long since you’ve seen the ocean. Won’t you let a rude intruder show you your own sea?”
And selfishly, like a feather-veiled maiden, I did.
Overhead the moon was as pale as a woman’s face on a cameo pin, its reflection so bright and solid it seemed a dredge boat could scoop it right up out of the water. The black shoreline bunched and flattened, like the sash of a dress. Running alongside it, the boardwalk was still busy even this late at night, studded with flat-roofed pavilions piping organ music and stalls that sold tall, frothing glasses of kumys. A little ways down the boardwalk was the white coronet of the carousel, and as far as I could squint my eyes to see, the electric lamps burned like live embers.
Couples ambled past us: women in dresses with huge sleeves and even more enormous bustles, and men in top hats that seemed each to grow taller than the last, as if they were in private competition, trying to outdo one another in height. Even in my dated dress and with my wind-snarled hair, nearly all of it now come loose from Rose’s braids, it filled me with a very pleasant warmth to know that these strangers looked at Sevas and me as if we were another couple, with ordinary lives before us and behind.
I tried not to think of the snow-maiden that had kissed him, of the other perfumed women that he’d spoken of, or of Derkach’s hand on his knee. Deep down I knew, even in the haze of this waking dream, that Sevas would never imagine me the way I imagined him, with such futile desire. But still I grew hot all over when he laughed, blushing down to the hollow of my throat.
The black tide lipped the blacker shore, with a sound like hundreds of riled serpents, and suddenly I remembered something.
“Do you ever read the penny presses?” I asked him, training my eyes on the vanishing tongues of foam.
“Of course,” he said. “They’re always good for a laugh. Just yesterday I read a lascivious story about the gradonalchik’s wife and her unseemly consorting with a postman. Why do you ask?”
“I heard a story,” I said, slowing my pace, “that there were two men found on the boardwalk, dead. I think it was in the penny presses. They said that the men were missing their hearts and livers, and that they had plum stones where their eyes had been.”
Sevas cast his gaze out toward the sea, and then turned back to me. “There were two men found dead here not long ago, and of course the penny presses were astir, printing stories about a monster. They only thought so because the bodies were so thoroughly butchered it couldn’t have been a man who did it. I did read that their hearts and livers were gone. The city police scoured the whole coastline and found a pack of stray dogs living under the boardwalk with blood on their muzzles. They were all put down, but the penny presses will never print a story about that. It’s funny, isn’t it, how much the city is salivating to imagine a monster in its midst? I suppose with all but one of its wizards extinct, and with its only witches sweet and gentle, they need something else to sate their desire for violence.”
I felt my heart stutter crookedly. “Sometimes I do think my clients wished I were more wicked.”
“Perhaps you ought to consider it—as a business opportunity, of course. Feed them draughts of newt’s eye and cackle over your cauldron. Turn your spurned lovers into pigs.”
The notion that I had any lovers, spurned or otherwise, was so absurd that I choked out a laugh, even as Sevas raised his brow. “Papa is the one who does transformations, not me. And there would not be any pigs.”
Sevas gave a quick nod, and I thought I could see his ear tips pinking again, though perhaps I had wishfully imagined it. We stopped at one of the stalls and bought two glasses of kumys, cold and sweet. It occurred to me that I had never had anything to eat or drink outside my father’s house. Inside, when I did eat, I was usually wracked with panic, wondering when and where I would throw it up afterward. The kumys went down as easily as water. Organ music swooped like a gull through the air.
In the distance, the carousel scythed with blades of orange light, casting them out over the water, as bold as lighthouse beacons. I wondered how deep it was, and how many strange things were adrift in its waves. I wondered what was on the other side.
Sevas had stopped walking and placed one hand on the iron railing, staring out over the sea as though he were a weather-eyed captain at his ship’s helm. In that moment I could imagine him a sailor as easily as I could a bogatyr, both dashing and brave.
“Is it how you remember it?” he asked me, very softly.
Was it? I could remember the wind in my hair and the salt smell in my nose. I could even remember the sand under my bare feet, the way that it yielded beneath me. But such a thing would have been impossible—even before my mother was gone, I never would have been allowed to play barefooted on the sand.
A strange memory inhabited me; it possessed me like a ghost. I was standing on the shore beneath a blade of silver moonlight. Even the gas lamps had been extinguished. There was a copper taste on my tongue. There was someone else’s labored breathing, loud and close enough that it drowned out even the ceaseless roll of the tide.