Juniper & Thorn(4)
Two attendants in black velvet bowed to us and pushed open the oaken double doors. Undine and Rose let go of my arms, knowing I had no choice but to follow. I trailed after them, gaze on the ground, my brow shining with sweat, and the ballet theater snatched us up and shut its jaws behind us. Another thread of fear loosed in me. When I raised my head at last, I was dizzy with the lurid brightness.
Volutes of gold clambered up to the domed ceiling like vines wreathing the trunk of a tree. Between each gilded column were a dozen seats, upholstered in crimson velvet. The chandelier whirled gently with candlelight, each flame glinting like a knifepoint. The ceiling was one sprawling fresco, painted the pale blue of the sky in earliest spring. Satyrs—which remarkably resembled Indrik—chased bare-chested nymphs across it, and burly men lounged on riverbanks, wearing nothing but laurel crowns. A flush prickled my face.
In the time I’d spent staring at the ceiling, I’d nearly lost Rose and Undine. I followed the bright pearl of Undine’s blond head and caught up with them as they were sliding into their seats. My throat was dry with anxious embarrassment.
“I think they recognized you,” I told Undine in a whisper. “The ticket attendant, the men in line—”
“Well, of course they would recognize me,” Undine said briskly. “But they won’t tell Papa. They know they’d never get to see me again if they did.”
On my other side, Rose let out a low, laughing breath. She was my ally in exasperation at Undine’s vanity, and she showed her chagrin more openly than I ever dared. Luckily, Undine was usually too preoccupied with herself to notice.
More whispers started. The voice of a silver-haired woman in the row behind lisped past my ear.
“They say his rib cage was crumpled like a sunken roof. They say his eyes had been plucked out and replaced with plum stones.”
I whipped my head around, and immediately Undine slapped my arm. The effect was so instant that I thought my body had punished itself; who else but me could be so in tune with my own aberrations? Undine’s blue eyes were thin.
“Don’t,” she snarled. “It’s rude to eavesdrop, especially here. You really don’t know anything about the world, do you, Marlinchen?”
I couldn’t tell if by here she meant the ballet theater, or if she meant Oblya as a whole, the huge, gray sprawl of the city outside our garden walls. In the theater we were hemmed in by the men and women of the upper curia, as colorful as candied fruits in their silks and satins; outside in the streets we were surrounded by drunken day laborers, with their fox-lean faces and their loose, fat lips. I did not know which was worse. I raised my shoulders and sunk down in my seat. Rose was thumbing through a pamphlet, each page embossed in gold.
“They’re doing Bogatyr Ivan,” Rose said. “They must do it every night. If Papa knew that, he’d have one of his fits.”
I cringed at the thought. Bogatyr Ivan was Oblya’s most famous ballet, and it was a corrupted version of one of the stories in our father’s codex, transfigured by Rodinyan influence and otherwise eroded by time. The titular Ivan had gone from steppe warrior to saint, and his bride had gone from chieftain’s daughter to tsarevna, and any number of other small changes had turned the story into something else, something that was scarcely recognizable to me.
But it pleased the Oblyans, and, more important, the Rodinyans. These newcomers arrived waving the tsar’s banners, talking of things like land development and city planning, or else under the emblems of private companies who squeezed every drop from Oblya’s day laborers and then vanished, only to be replaced by other men, under different emblems but with the same goal of bleeding the city dry. They were the reason Oblya’s port bustled with trade from the east, and the reason why our streets were laid out as neatly as wheel spokes. I did not think much of them, except that when they came to our gate, our father instructed us to ignore them until they left.
But now the theater was packed elbow to elbow to see one Rodinyan incomer grace the stage. I peered over Rose’s shoulder at the pamphlet, searching for his name, like I might glean something important from the particular arrangement of the letters. Her finger went up and down the page, skimming his biography.
“They say he’s the youngest principal dancer in any Rodinyan ballet company, ever,” she said. “Only twenty-one. That’s so sad, isn’t it?”
“Why is it sad?”
“Because,” she said, “what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”
I felt sorry, somehow, that I had asked.
Before I could say another word, the orchestra warbled out its opening notes and the velvet curtains parted and the whispers around me went silent, all eyes drawn toward the single light onstage, round like a rime of ice. Cellos sang languidly under the trilling of flutes and oboes.
I had never seen Bogatyr Ivan with my sisters before, so I could not anticipate the crescendos and decrescendos and when the snare drum would kick in or when the harp would add its sultry voice. With every unfamiliar beat I felt something plucking at me like a string, my bones rattling, my blood singing. I knew the vague shape of the story, but the music added something new to it, something that made it almost too big for my eyes to hold. The first ballerinas flurried across the stage, like snow drifts in their white tulle. Male dancers in red bounded after them; they were the Dragon-Tsar’s animate flames.