Juniper & Thorn(34)

You must return by the clock’s strike of three, before the dawn lifts Papa’s eyelids. Sevas was right. I could not hear the gonging of our grandfather clock, which meant the hour of three had already passed. So that was one promise to my sister, broken.

You must bring nothing more back with you. Your hands and pockets must be as empty as when you left. I let my fingers card through the folds of my skirt until I found Sevas’s feather, gossamer and still warm. Another promise broken.

You must take the black sand and destroy it. Use it to leave once, and then never again.

In the safety of the velvet dark, I removed the compact from my breasts. It was marbled and damp with sweat, hot as a bullet just fired.

I picked myself free of the hyacinths, careful not to crinkle their petals, and flung open the door of the shed. The goblin went tearing out into the garden, single eye blinking wildly as it adjusted to the ghostly starlight, open-shut-open-shut, and nearly tripping over its own great beard. It trudged through the wheat grass and vanished.

There was magic in the number three, maybe bad magic, but I didn’t care. What was one more promise broken? I drew up my skirts and got on my hands and knees in the dirt and buried the compact right at the base of the juniper tree.





Chapter Six




Here is the story I did not tell Sevas.

True enough, it starts with a happy couple: a rich man and his beautiful, pious wife. In this case, the rich man was a king (a tsar) and his wife was a queen (tsaritsa). They ruled over a domain of both wide plains and tall mountains. The people loved them, and the land was fertile, and many things could grow, except for in the tsaritsa’s womb. No matter how many times her husband spilled his seed in her, nothing would take root. Her body was as barren as a salt flat.

And because she didn’t know what a bad thing it is to be a mother in a story (and did not know she was in a story at all), the tsaritsa went out into the garden, into the snow, and peeled an apple. While she was peeling it, she cut her finger and a drop of blood fell into the snow.

At once her blood vanished, and then the snow said, “I’ve been hungry for so long. If you feed me, I can give you the one thing your heart desires.”

“I want a child,” the tsaritsa said.

“Feed me,” said the snow.

So the tsaritsa cut all four of her fingers and her thumb and let her blood fall and the snow ate it up greedily. That night, her husband took her inside and kissed her cut fingers and put his seed in her again, and she went to sleep smiling.

The next morning when she woke, the tsaritsa looked out into the snow-blanched courtyard and saw that a white tree had flowered up in the place where she’d bled, tall and full as any of the other ancient oaks. She ran outside.

The tree was blooming with bright-red berries, so sweet-looking that the tsaritsa couldn’t help herself: she put one in her mouth. It burst on her tongue and she swallowed all its juice, and then her thighs went slick with a bolt of pleasure and she felt something stir at last in her womb.

The snow melted, and the tsaritsa’s belly grew. In nine months she gave birth to a baby girl, with berry-bright lips and hair the color of frost. And, because this is a story, the tsaritsa took one look at her daughter, smiled, and then died.

Between her legs was a spewing of ruby-hued blood. The tsar wiped it clean and took his daughter and held her close. The snow came again and blanketed the fertile land. Birds landed on the branches of the white tree and ate all the berries. The daughter blossomed into a beautiful tsarevna, the most beautiful girl in all her father’s domain, and she was as kind and pious as her dead mother besides (if a mother is dead, she is allowed to be kind).

When she turned sixteen, the tsar decided it was time for his daughter to marry. Rumors of her beauty had already spread far and wide, beyond even his land of wide plains and tall mountains, to other kingdoms where the sun shines for only one hour a day. Men came from all over to seek the tsarevna’s hand, and when they met her they were even more charmed by her lovely white hair and her lovely red lips and her lovely black eyes.

The tsar let each suitor spend one evening with his daughter, where they talked and made merry, and by the end it was not a rich man she fell in love with, or even the prince of the kingdom where the sun shines for only an hour a day. It was a warrior named Ivan, a bogatyr who was a simple farmer’s son. The tsar set out to have them married right away.

On the day of their wedding, a fierce snow came and blanketed all the land in white. Ivan and the tsarevna were married happily, and went off to their chambers for the night. But as Ivan began peeling off his bride’s wedding gown, he found underneath that the tsarevna was not a woman at all but a swan, with white feathers and black eyes and a blood-red beak. There was a great howling of snow and the swan flapped her wings and flew out the window and vanished.

Ivan ran to the window after her, and heard the snow speak.

“Your once-bride is my daughter, and the tsarevna of the Kingdom of Winter,” it said. “Now that you have wed her, you are my son too, and a father has the right to kill his sons and eat them, if he so desires.”

And then there was another great howling and the snow blew in through the window and nearly buried him. Ivan shook himself free and went to the tsar and told him what had happened.

“Your wife must have lain with Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost, the tsar of the Kingdom of Winter. She took his seed and gave birth to a daughter of ice and bitter magic. If I am to be reunited with my love, I must journey to the Kingdom of Winter and defeat Ded Moroz in battle.”