Juniper & Thorn(51)
And then she pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind her. I stood in the echo of the sound, run over and over again by the wave of my sister’s words. By the time I managed to follow her, I felt exhausted and drenched, my throat raw with saltwater.
Maybe it wasn’t cruelty Undine had chosen, just the truth, as mean and banal as it was. And maybe I hadn’t picked kindness at all. Maybe I’d just shut my eyes and sat as still and silent as one of the women at the cotton looms, face made sallow by the factory lights, waiting for the machine to teach me what to do with my hands.
There was something sick in me, something wrong. Even baby birds knew how to shriek, even kittens knew how to mewl, even puppies knew how to whine. Papa had told me I hadn’t even cried when he’d pulled me from between my mother’s thighs. I hadn’t protested when he dragged me through the streets of Oblya, hadn’t protested when Rose had chided me or when Undine had slapped me. My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.
I walked down the stairs without hearing my own footsteps.
Papa was in the sitting room, perched on the chaise longue. The front of his shirt was stained with pink juice and I could see the bulge of his stomach under his robe, huge with everything he’d eaten. My own belly growled and I felt terribly embarrassed at the sound, wondering if everyone else could hear it too.
My sisters and I stood in a straight line before him, like saltshakers in dour observance of a feast, waiting for the moment when we would be snatched up and used.
His eyes plucked me up first. “I must thank you, Marlinchen, best and most dutiful of my daughters. If you hadn’t taken me to that stinking slum, I never would have landed on the idea that will keep this family from ruin. It is not just the simple thing of marrying off my daughters, my witch-daughters, nor to whom. It is the choosing of your bridegrooms that will save us.”
Papa was like this sometimes: speaking words that only he understood, but with the grandiloquence that imagined an audience of rapt thousands. When I dared to glance at Rose and Undine, I saw that their faces were as blank as mine. I turned back to watch Papa’s bare feet crush the fibers of the carpet.
“This city is full to bursting with desperate, penniless young men,” he went on, rising now and beginning to pace, certainly killing hundreds of dust mites with every step. “Who among them would not leap at the opportunity to wed one of Zmiy Vashchenko’s daughters, and to someday inherit his estate?” Papa gestured vaguely at the ceiling with its splitting plaster, at the last of his cat-vases. “As soon as I announce this competition, we will scarcely be able to keep the crowds of men from our door.”
“Competition.” Rose dropped the word in front of us like a butcher slapping down a cured liver on the counter. “You want these desperate, penniless men to compete for our hands?”
Papa seemed barely to hear her. “I will do as you suggested, Rosenrot. I will go to the printing shop and buy a thousand flyers that all say the same thing: zmiy vashchenko’s daughters to be wed—come to his house on rybakov street if you would like to one day own it. I will post them all around Oblya and by nightfall, daughters, I guarantee it: half the men of this city will be rattling the gate into the garden.”
“But how will you choose?” I managed to ask. My face was growing hot. I was thinking of how big a man’s hands could be when they were reaching for you.
“I will give each man three nights to spend here in my home,” Papa said. “Three nights during which he may speak to each of you, if he chooses, and explore the house as he sees fit. The only rule I demand he observe is not to venture to the third floor; I have already warded the door to the stairwell against any intruders. And, at the end of his three nights, he will tell me how my daughters managed to escape the house without a bowl of black sand. If he does speak the truth, I will give him his pick: golden-haired and sharp-tongued Undine, violet-eyed and clever-minded Rosenrot, plain-faced but kindhearted Marlinchen.”
“I don’t see how that solves anything,” Undine snapped. “Our bellies will be just as empty as before, except with a new host of mouths to feed. Do you intend for these men, our guests, to eat goblin meat or glass apples?”
“I will charge each of them a petty fee,” said Papa, scratching at a small red spider bite under his beard. “For three days of lodging and food and of course for the chance to wed one of my daughters. I do not think many of them will refuse. After all, what better prospects do they have in this city?”
I thought of Sevas’s flat with its three cots and single grease-smeared window, of Niko’s small sack of rubles and how quickly it had emptied. I thought of the smirking men on the stoops and the drunkards and beggars slumped over in alleyways. They were all stretched out and skinny like a length of dirty gray rope, their ends fraying and their eyes dull as knots. If you lifted up the large stone that was Oblya, how many of these ashen-faced men would you find writhing under it? How many had Undine and Rose and I swept by on our way to the ballet theater, our jewelry winking like the points of kitchen knives, our silks hissing like mean whispers?
We did not have much, and sometimes we did not have even enough to feed ourselves, but we always had this: a house with three stories and a sprawling garden and a solid black fence around it, water that ran when we turned the faucets, lamps that flickered when we yanked their pull chains, and of course magic to make everything a little easier, a little brighter. I felt suddenly so guilty and sad that my stomach turned over on itself. The desperation of these men had repulsed me, even terrified me, but really I ought to have pitied them.