Juniper & Thorn(35)

The tsar wept at the news, but he still loved the girl he had raised as his own. He dried his tears and said to Ivan, “I will give you a sword.”

And so Ivan rode off to find the Kingdom of Winter, but the snow was falling thickly and his horse died right under him, still in its saddle. Ivan stopped for the night and built a fire and cooked and ate his horse.

He was taking shelter under a tall white tree when he saw a white bird fly down from the sky and land before him. Ivan blinked, and the swan changed back to the tsarevna, his bride. Her bare skin was the color of pure frost and her eyes were as black as juniper berries and her nipples were pink and knotted with cold.

“My love,” he said. “Come home with me.”

“I’m so hungry,” she said.

“I have no food,” said Ivan.

“Feed me,” she whispered through her pale lips.

So Ivan took his sword and cut his own throat. His blood landed in the snow. The tsarevna crouched over him and ate his muscle and crunched his bones and swallowed his skin whole. When there was nothing left of Ivan, she turned back into a swan and flew to the tall mountains.

There she found the head of Ded Moroz, broad as a cliffside, his beard vast and pale and made of snow. His knuckles were the frost-capped hills and his long, long legs spread open right under the palace of the tsar, and where his seed spilled, white trees with red berries grew.

“Papa,” she said, “let us feast to my marriage. My heart is full and my husband is in my belly.”

And so Ded Moroz sprouted an ebony tree with huge, fat berries as black as bruises. “Here is my heart, daughter,” said Ded Moroz, “and it is full.”

And then the swan who was the tsarevna coughed up all the pieces of Ivan that she had eaten: his hunks of muscle and shards of bone and the skin that she’d swallowed whole. She breathed on him her own bitter magic—the magic of the tsarevna of winter—and his body stitched itself back together and he became a man again.

He raised his bloody sword and cut down the heart of Ded Moroz, and all through the tsar’s land there was a great howling of wind, and then the snow melted and the plains were green underneath it. All the white trees died and the red berries fell, soft with rot. The black fruit landed in the snow, the last of Ded Moroz’s vanishing beard.

“My love,” said Ivan. “Come back to me.”

And then he kissed the swan on her blood-red beak and she became a woman again. The tsarevna said she was sorry, so sorry, for what she had done, and that she had only been under Ded Moroz’s spell. Ivan forgave her, and he picked her up and they embraced.

Both were eager to return to the palace of the tsar, to celebrate and to consummate their vows, but both had also grown very hungry, so first they sat down in the melting snow and ate.



All was well in the story, and in Papa’s house.

I arranged my hours like holubtsi on a plate, each wrapped up neatly in its own cabbage leaf. From three to four I had buried the compact and stilled my racing heart. From four to five I had hidden away my clothes and crawled on my hands and knees, making sure no grains of black sand had gotten into my carpet. From five to six I had inspected every inch of my skin for sand and secrets.

I had stripped off my dress and removed my shoes and tucked them both in the very back of my wardrobe where you couldn’t smell the ocean air that had seeped into the silk. My hair had eaten up all the salt-laced wind, too, so before Papa woke I turned on the faucet in the bathtub and let the water run and run.

The black sand had washed out of my hair, the color of soot from the chimney. I bit my lip on a cry and stumbled back, watching it circle the drain. I waited and waited, as if balancing on a blade’s edge, but the tub sucked it down and did not spit it up again.

All at once, the same memory inhabited me: my feet against the soft, sucking sand, the close, labored breathing, the heavy, slick moisture on my hand. The hands both felt like my own hands and not. There was an unfamiliar strength to them, a dexterity, and when I closed my eyes some red haze fell over me. It all felt like a strange dark dream. Something else, like the black sand, that I could not explain.

When I opened my eyes again, all was gone, but I felt a deep, stomach-hollowing dread, like meat being carved off of bone.

I did not have time for dread. On the white tile floor, a rosy band of light fell like a dropped knife. I braided my damp hair and hurried downstairs in my housecoat, the spiny-tailed monster scuffling at my heels. I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. In the foyer, the grandfather clock gonged seven.

The water squealed inside the kettle, and I poured it into two teacups. My hands, though shaking, looked as they always did: the old burn mark scored across my palm and my knuckles stippled with tiny scratches where my teeth cut into the skin when I jammed my fingers down my throat.

The most impossible of all impossible things had happened last night: I had gone out of the house alone and come back the same. My lie had not transformed me. Oblya had not sullied me. Foreign men had not ravished me, carriages had not trampled me, street music had not made me bleed from my ears. I had sneaked past Undine and not been caught. I had disobeyed Rose and I had not felt my stomach gnaw and clench in protest.

Perhaps, it occurred to me, I had undergone the most terrifying transformation of all. Perhaps I had become a girl who did not care about lying to her father or betraying her sisters. I thought of the compact I had buried under the tree, but the thought was evicted from my mind in an instant. I could hear Papa’s footsteps on the stairs.