Juniper & Thorn(33)
I held up my stained fingers, as if they were proof of anything. Sevastyan’s lips pressed into a pale line, and he said, “I’ll bring you back. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid. It isn’t as far as you think.”
The tip of my nose was burning. “I don’t know any of the street names.”
“I do,” he said. “I’ve walked them all, four times as drunk as I am now. Everything will be fine. Come with me.”
There was something in my throat the size of a millstone, but I drew my arms around myself and followed Sevas down the boardwalk. The street that threaded alongside it was mostly empty, lined with black-windowed beer shops and inns that advertised a bed for two rubles. In one of the doorways a woman stood only half-dressed, baring one of her breasts to the cold starlight. I looked away, stomach roiling.
At the corner of the street was a carriage drawn by two huge horses, white smoke curling from their nostrils. The man in the driver’s seat leaned down, gave a gap-toothed smile, and said, “Half a ruble for an hour, one ruble for three.” I could tell he was Ionik from the sound of his consonants, like pistols cocking.
“A quarter hour is all we need,” Sevas said, though he pressed a gold coin into the man’s open palm.
The man leapt down from his seat and swung the carriage door open, and I looked into the black mouth of it and felt the same nebulous dread I had felt staring through the threshold of the tavern. Papa warned us that carriages had their own magic about them: once you accepted a ride, you could not leave until the driver let you. You ceded the power of your legs to carry you as soon as you clambered inside.
That was a powerful magic indeed. I would have been less afraid to climb on the back of a seven-headed dragon. But Sevas didn’t hesitate. He pushed himself onto the first step and held out his hand.
Only a witch wouldn’t have taken it. A real witch, like Titka Whiskers, or the various extinct forest hags who ministered to motherless girls. It was not yet three, and I was still a feather-haired maiden under the peeled-apple moon, so I threaded our fingers and let him pull me up into the carriage after him.
The door shut, and our bodies were close on the bench, and then I heard the driver climb up and spur his horses and we went rattling down the streets of Oblya, window glass fogging with our breath.
“Why have you been so kind to me?” I managed. I couldn’t help how miserable I sounded, like a lashed dog, my dream slipping away from me like snow melting in the sunlight. “You could have let me leave right from the theater, after I’d told you all that you needed to know.”
“And you could have let me turn into a mass of black snakes at your door,” he said. “I don’t need a life debt to compel me to take a girl to a tavern, or walk with her down by the shore. Can’t I enjoy those things without a wizard’s curse hanging over me? I told you I wanted to see your face in the crowd. I’m happy that I did.” He hesitated. “I want to see it again.”
All the air in the carriage seemed to stiffen like tree roots in the cold. I could see the red flush traveling down my throat, over the cleft of my breasts, all the way to the gold clamshell pressed between them. The reminder of it hurt, like a pour of boiling water over ice, and it made my whole body hiss and steam. I wanted to press the heels of my hands to my eyes and weep.
The window was so thoroughly fogged that I had to rub a bleary circle on the glass to see through it as the carriage bore us down what I recognized as Kanatchikov Street. I could see the horses trotting, panting their pale smoke. Farther in the distance I could see my father’s house, our wood-rotted turret wearing a gray shawl of clouds. I could not bring myself to look at Sevas.
When the carriage finally drew to a halt outside of our gate, I was thinking that not even Papa could have managed a transformation like this: to turn a plain-faced witch into a blushing mortal girl, and then back again by the clock’s strike of three. All of Papa’s magic had a singular direction—you couldn’t make a flower unbloom. I watched my own face in the window wither and bloom and wither again in the span of seconds, a shuddering metamorphosis: Witch, swan, girl. Witch-swan-girl.
The carriage door opened and all three vanished.
I climbed out of the carriage, unsteady on my own legs, and Sevas followed close behind. In the shadow of our fence was my first dropped juniper berry, fat and taut with juice. Rose’s words needled through my mind: don’t be selfish.
“I think it might be a minute or two past three,” Sevas said. “Will everything be all right?”
My voice dried up in my throat. When I did manage to speak, it was only in a whisper. “I never finished telling you—only sons are always heroes. Things always end well for them. They must end well for you.”
Now it was his breath that spread white in the cold. “Who says so?”
With difficulty, I swallowed. “I have to go.”
And then I turned and unlatched the gate and ran through it into the garden without looking back.
The night opened its black wings and took flight. I stood in a bed of purple hyacinths, as still as if my own feet had grown roots, as if I had only ever stood in this place, nothing before me or behind. From across the garden our goblin gave a muffled wail, nails dragging against the shed door where it was trapped—where it had been trapped for hours in the darkness, not even knowing that day had bled into night and was about to bleed into day again.