Juniper & Thorn(37)
“I’ll go to the market,” I told Papa. “Just give me some rubles, and I will go. I’ll fetch you the fattiest cuts of meat, the biggest chickens, the ripest fruits—”
But before I could finish Papa was already drawing a breath, air whistling through his nose in a way that my body remembered as danger.
“You aren’t a fool, Marlinchen,” he said, “but sometimes you so persevere in behaving like one. We have no rubles; that’s the problem of it all. You and your sisters don’t work hard enough, and take more than your share. I know what you do, dear daughter, in the garden when you think no one is watching. Eat the food and spit it up again. While your father starves, you bury your wasted food under Rose’s mulberry tree? Is it to insult me? To mock my curse? Do you hate me so much?”
My whole body went slick with a cold sweat. How had he known? What keen-eyed spell had he cast to watch me when his real eyes could not? I started to say something, to apologize, but my lips would not move and my throat was impossibly tight and I could still feel my pulse butterflying under his fingers.
“Never again, Marlinchen, do you hear me?” he breathed against my throat. “Whatever you eat, you keep it down.”
“Yes, Papa,” I whimpered, barely able to talk past his steel grip. “I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again.”
At last he let me go, but I stayed still, afraid to move, afraid that I would fall into a pit I couldn’t see. Papa reached up again and I flinched, though it was only for him to pinch the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. The purple bags under his eyes pulsed.
“Go fetch your sisters,” he said.
And so I did, rousing first Undine, who walloped me hard with her pillow, and then Rose, who woke with such a start it was as if I’d poured frigid water down her back. All three of us came downstairs in our nightgowns and housecoats, hugging our arms around ourselves, trying to breathe as quietly as we could. Papa paced the length of the sitting room. The grandfather clock ticked in time with his footsteps.
“Greedy daughters, selfish daughters, thankless daughters,” he said, staring at the ground. “It’s not enough that I waste away from this infernal curse, not enough that I built this house over your heads and planted the garden that surrounds it and the fence that keeps you safe. Now I cannot even eat. Tell me, daughters, will you rejoice when you find me, dead of starvation, in my bed? Will you make merry over my pile of bones and skin, laugh as you tip my body into its early grave?” He made a derisive sound in the back of his throat. “What would your mother think of the girls that she reared at her breast?”
He did not often invoke Mama’s name, but it was always powerful magic when he did. A pall of dreadful cold settled over the three of us, my sisters and me, and I could not move or speak for how quickly and bitterly it crawled through my veins. Tears gathered wet and fat at the corners of my eyes, like a drawing of blood.
“So we have no rubles now.” It was Rose who finally dared to speak, Rose the cleverest and most unflappable of us all. Papa gave a silent nod, sharp and furious, and I startled at that—hadn’t Derkach just given us a large bag of coins? Rose had not been there, but did that mean it was already gone? “There is still much that we can do,” she went on. “We can go to the printing shop and have flyers drawn up to advertise our services, then hang them around the city. We can charge all our clients a few kopeks more; most of them will not mind. And in the meantime, we can sell some of our things to pay for food and the printing fees.”
Papa’s head jerked up. “You want me to pawn our belongings like some pitiful barfly who needs his next fix?”
“Only the things we don’t need, the ones we have little use for,” said Rose. Her voice was firm, her face placid even as spittle flew from Papa’s mouth and stretched like cobwebs across the carpet. “Some of our jewelry, perhaps. A lamp or two. We only need a bit to keep us going until our clients come back.”
I heard Undine make a little noise of protest, but she did not speak. Papa stopped his pacing. In the foyer, the grandfather clock gonged nine times.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine, then. I will bring the most viperous of Oblya’s merchants to our door.”
First he needed to recant his curses, dismantle his own complex architecture of spellwork like cutting down a dead oak before it falls. These were the spells of so many accumulated years, every whim or moment of fury that Papa had (“I cannot stand to see another proselytizing fanatic knocking at the door,” he had said, and then cast a spell so that our house would look empty and uninhabited to any missionary who passed us by on the street). Papa went along the line of the fence, mumbling to himself, shaking out drops of liquid from various capped bottles. Plumes of violet smoke lifted from the earth and green miasmas trailed after him like leashed comets. I could not tell which by sight or smell or sound, but that last spell warding against Sevas and any members of the ballet theater—it was gone now too.
The eyeless ravens squawked from the tangle of birch branches, feathers ruffled. Indrik looked on from a patch of wormwood, chest swelling with silent indignation. He perhaps liked our rude, ungracious Oblya intruders even less than Papa did. The goblin sat down in the very center of the garden and wept, muddying the beds of at least three different herb plants. My sisters and I watched from the doorway and the spiny-tailed monster gnawed at the edge of my nightgown.