Juniper & Thorn(39)

“We don’t have any of those things,” I said. “We have poultices and tonics, but you need an herbalist like my sister to make them do what they ought, and we have a scrying pool in the garden but only my sister Undine can see anything in it. And you could take my hands for their flesh divining, but I don’t think they would work if my brain wasn’t still attached to them.”

The broker looked at me as if I were some fascinating thing he’d just peeled off the bottom of his boot. “Well, then, I’m sorry to trouble you, Ms. Vashchenko.” His gaze went up and down me, and finally caught on the charm bracelet around my wrist. “That looks like quite a unique piece of jewelry. Is it for sale?”

Papa was watching me intently from the top of the stairs and his eyes were hard and small like fruit seeds. Very slowly, with shaking fingers, I lifted my hand and unclasped the bracelet from my wrist. I held it in the flat of my palm, the charms jangling quietly and then falling still against my skin.

“There are eight charms,” I said, in a voice so small it embarrassed me just to hear it. “There’s an hourglass with real pink sand and a miniature bicycle with wheels that actually spin; a thimble-sized whale with a mouth that opens on a hinge and a bell that really rings. There’s a golden box with a paper note folded up so small and tight you can’t pry it out. I don’t know what the note says, if it says anything at all. There’s a book that opens up and has mine and my sisters’ names etched onto its gilded pages, along with the years of our births. If you take it into the bath with you and press your tongue to our names, the wet gold tastes like bloody meat.”

The broker studied the bracelet splayed in my palm. There were three lines between his brows that looked as if they’d been carved there with a hand rake. His horn-rimmed glasses gave him the appearance of a beetle with spiny pincers, like his eyes were made for snatching things up.

“Fascinating,” he murmured. “And is it a family heirloom? A talisman of ancestral sorcery?”

I did not really understand what he meant. “Sort of. It was my mother’s. But she was not a witch. She was only a woman, and then a bird, and then she was dead.”

“I’ll take it,” he said, standing up straight again. “How much?”

I only looked back at him, blinking mutely, but in another moment Rose came marching over. She asked the man how much he would pay and then haggled with him and got him to give her almost double. I didn’t know how she managed to do it, what special kind of magic she had that could ply and twist the broker whichever way she wanted, as if she were braiding dough for kalach. Before I knew it she was taking his rubles and putting them in her sack, which was so full I could see each coin’s shape, its load pulling the drawstring shut, and didn’t notice that my eyes were wet until after the broker had walked away.

“Oh, Marlinchen,” she said. “Don’t weep.”

“That was Mama’s bracelet,” I said. “I wore it every day.”

Rose let out a breath. “Would you rather have Mama’s bracelet and Papa’s rage or no bracelet and Papa sated?”

It was a question just like Papa’s one that did not require an answer and, in fact, dared you to try and speak one at all. I wiped my eyes.

Undine was sulking by the grandfather clock because she’d sold her favorite pearls, which were also Mama’s favorite pearls. I could hear the goblin wailing plaintively all the way from the garden shed. At last most of the visitors had gone, and Papa came stomping down the stairs to usher the rest out.

But the broker who’d bought my bracelet was still there, examining one of our marble busts with tremendous interest. When he saw Papa he went over to him and said, “Do you have any more of your wife’s belongings to sell? Incidentally, I’m very sorry for your loss. Perhaps earning a pretty sum will ease a bit of your grief. I have some buyers who would, I think, be quite interested in baubles previously owned by a mother of witches.”

I could hear Mama’s charm bracelet jangling softly in his pocket. Papa looked hawkishly between the broker and me. His cheek paunch was rippling the way it did when he chewed the inside of his mouth.

“Your mother did have some other things, didn’t she? Women’s things, mostly. I remember a gold compact in the shape of a clamshell.”

My blood went cold so quickly that I thought for a moment Papa was using more of his magic on me. But there was no shimmer of spellwork in the air; it was just my own lie turning over in my belly like a corpse in a river, churned this way and that by the current, bloated and foul. I opened my mouth but all that came out was choked air.

The seconds bruised past me, the grandfather clock keeping their time. And then at last something surfaced in me, a hasty idea that I hoped would distract him from the broker’s question.

“Papa, I only just remembered,” I said. “There’s food here already. I can cook a monster for you.”

It wouldn’t have worked if my father was not already anxious to see the broker go. Papa told the man no, thank you, and pressed him toward the door and then slammed it shut as soon as he’d gone through. He was the last of our visitors, and the house was silent again, vacant of magic, and picked clean like a chicken for roasting.

I stood there in the foyer, trying to see all the places where Papa had laid holes in the floor or set out wires to trip on, trying to breathe shallowly so as not to tighten the noose around my throat. I held myself still and kept my lips taut, Rose and even Undine just as motionless, all of us doing our own silent arithmetic.