Juniper & Thorn(49)

Papa thrust her away from him with a mindless, animal twitch, like a bull shaking off a gathering of flies. She lilted to the ground, limp and bodiless as a white linen dress. On her hands and knees, golden hair falling in twin curtains over her face, Undine began to weep too.

“How did you do it?” Papa grasped me by the shoulders and shook me hard enough to make my teeth rattle. “Selfish daughters, thankless daughters, wretched daughters, tell me how you broke my spell!”

Sevas had tried to stop him. As Papa had taken my wrist and yanked me down the stairs, Sevas had called out my name. I could hear his footsteps following after me until, suddenly, they ceased, and then I heard only Derkach’s hushed and livid voice. I thought of Sevas’s beautiful face in the moonlight, the white boardwalk stretching out before us like some large creature’s spectacular vertebrae.

I thought of the mark that Derkach’s hand had left on his neck. I thought of Mama’s compact, buried safely under the juniper tree. My secret. My lie.

I did not say a word.

Finally, Papa let me go. He was breathing so loudly and his magic was all heat instead of ice, his rage like oily smoke that made my eyes burn. Undine looked up through the curtains of her hair. Rose wiped at the tears on her cheeks.

“Just get it over with,” Undine bit out. “Feed us potions that will rot our lungs like bad fruit. Turn us into hags with chicken feet. It would be just as well. I can’t stand another moment being trapped here with you.”

But Papa only laughed, and it sounded like wine spilling from the spout of an overfed wineskin. “No, it’s not magic I have to visit upon you. That would be a waste of my power. Yet what am I to do with such useless, deceitful daughters living under my roof, daughters whose magic can scarcely bring in enough money to feed me? What would another man do, if his wife had died without using his seed to sprout any sons? There’s no spell that can transform inept witch-daughters into capable wizard-sons. But there is tonic that Oblya can provide. It is time for my witch-daughters to marry.”





Chapter Eight




When I woke that next morning, I thought at first that it had all been a dream. Niko rattling our gate, Fedir lapping water out of my hands, Sevas cowering under Derkach’s stare. Papa tearing through all our gowns and jewelry, crushing Mama’s comb. But I lifted my arm from under the covers and held it over my head, a band blocking the pale drench of sunlight, and I saw the small black scabs pitted across it like a scattering of leeches, and I knew that it was real, all of it.

My dresses were still heaped on the floor and when I threw off the quilt and stood, I found my heel gouged with a loose pearl. I peered under my bed, but the monster was gone. It had been killed and eaten.

I pawed through the pile of dresses until I came upon the pink one that I had worn that night with Sevas in the tavern. The silk of the skirt had been shredded, as if with claws. But the pocket was intact and so was the white feather. I clutched it to my chest, inhaling a painful breath.

The feather had magic, but only as a talisman of my hopeless and agonizing and dashed desire. I laid it on my boudoir, where Mama’s comb had once been. The comb she had used to brush my hair, weaving stories into my braids. The same story, over and over and over again, like the kneading of dough: Ivan and the swan-princess, Ivan and the winter king, Ivan Ivan Ivan who would not care if I was plain-faced and would come for me anyway.

Had Papa truly meant it, that he wanted to marry us off? He had spent all our lives keeping us safe here. But a change had come over him recently, a greater hunger, a new appetite. I could not predict its ebbs and flows the way I once could. I did not know how to navigate all these new holes in the ground, the changing arrangement of swinging daggers and snagging thorns. Derkach’s revelation was terrible, yet something that was not my secret had shifted the stones in Papa’s stream bed, and done so before today.

It seemed impossible that I could go downstairs and cook my father breakfast like nothing had happened, but truthfully I didn’t know what else to do. Everything that had once been familiar felt foreign and strange.

My body remembered what I was meant to do even if my mind was a tumult of dark waves. I put on my housecoat, tied up my hair, and went downstairs.

Sunlight beamed through the half-rounded windows; the stairwell and the foyer were as still as the morning after a snowfall, everything obliterated in white. The grandfather clock’s hand ached toward seven.

When I came into the sitting room that was when I first heard it—the sound of metal scraping wood, silverware clinking on china. And when, finally, I got to the kitchen, I saw Papa hunched over the butcher block. His chin and beard were streaked with strawberry kvass, pink and sweet-looking, and in his fist was a hunk of raw dough, what I had set aside for more varenyky.

The plate in front of him held the carcass of a chicken, still half -feathered, sinew draped from the scaffolding of its bones like a corset undone. The chicken’s beak and comb were lying on the wood several inches away, and before he noticed that I had come in, I saw Papa put his fingers in his mouth and suck off the gristle and blood. A moan filled the silent room.

And then his gaze snapped toward me. “What are you doing here, Marlinchen?”

“I was going to make you breakfast.” The words fell out of my mouth and clattered too loudly on the floor, like marbles dropped.

“I’ve already eaten,” Papa said. He took the chicken’s comb and tore off a piece of it with his teeth, then chewed and chewed and chewed. It must have been as tough as salt pork for how long he chewed it. Finally, he swallowed. “Go wake your sisters. Don’t think I have forgotten your treachery.”