Juniper & Thorn(53)

And then she was gone too. I stared at the absence of her, the vacant foyer, the grandfather clock’s shadow planked across the floor. I didn’t know what to do with the time that suddenly bloated up in front of me: hours swelling like dough left to rise, empty of all my usual tasks. Even the perfunctory sounds of the garden—the goblin’s wailing and the eyeless ravens beating their wings—had momentarily gone quiet. Dust motes drifted within tracts of sunlight.

Like a trough, the empty space in my mind filled at once with thoughts of Sevas. There was his gray-washed face and the violet bruises under his eyes and his bloody, bitten lip. There was the red mark that Derkach’s hand had left on his back and the shell of his ear as Derkach’s lips brushed against it. I wondered about the words that he was pouring into Sevas’s head, and that wondering held me so tight that suddenly it ached to breathe. It was like someone had twined whalebone around my chest, had made my heart its own strangling ivory corset.

I couldn’t bear it, the not-knowing. I put my knuckle in my mouth and bit down on it hard, but the tears came anyway, crowding my eyes until I couldn’t see anything through the blur of them. I thought of the grinning boy on the boardwalk and he seemed so very far away, nothing like the Sevas who had lowed himself to Derkach and my father. The tremulous smile he’d given me when he stepped between Papa and me kept playing over and over again in my mind like a bad vision. The bad visions were ones that took weeks to exorcise, that hung on the periphery of my gaze when I was awake and unfolded their black tendrils when I slept. Tears drenched my cheeks and dribbled into my mouth, stinging the newly opened cut on my knuckle. I was very hungry.

If Papa came home and saw me weeping he would punish me. Undine would slap me again and Rose would roll her eyes. I drew in a long breath that seemed to press up against the bones of my rib cage painfully. I dried my face with the sleeve of my housecoat and took my knuckle out of my mouth.

I could have breakfast, but the urge to throw it up afterward would be too strong. I let the possibility of it play out in my mind: I would have to eat the pickled cabbage first, marking the beginning of my feast with its violet color so that when I vomited purple I’d know that I was through. I would have to evade Indrik and bury my sick and wash all the plates and silverware that I dirtied. It was too much, and Papa had forbade me from it anyway. I would rather go hungry than try to keep all the roiling food down.

I blinked the last teardrops from my lashes and went upstairs instead. Undine was still in her bath; I could hear the water sloshing from the other side of the bathroom door. The door to Rose’s bedroom was shut, locked.

At the very end of the hallway was the door to the stairwell that led up to the third floor. The brass knob gleamed like a copper bucket at the bottom of a well. Papa had already warded it against intruders, and I wondered why. None of us had gone up there since Mama had died. The only things left were her empty cage, full of ossified droppings that no one had cleaned, and the white sheet that was draped like a languid ghost over the mirror that never lies. I had sold her charm bracelet and Undine had sold her pearls. There was nothing left of value to be looted.

As if in a trance I walked toward it, eyes trained on that gleaming knob, but before I reached it I turned abruptly, into my room.

Everything was just as I’d left it after waking up: the pawed-through pile of dresses on the ground, in floaty, gossamer pastel colors like beached jellyfish. The monster was still gone, in my father’s belly. Sevas’s feather was still on my boudoir. I snatched it up again, and the pain tore through me like a gut wound.

I had kept my secret, I had buried my black sand, but none of it had saved me. I couldn’t save Sevas, whose throat still bore the tender, merciless wound of Derkach’s hand. I couldn’t save my sisters from the fate that Papa had planned for us, and I couldn’t save myself from the story that had sprouted up around me like weeds, like ivy, like the smothering greenness of a garden left untended. Whatever story I was in, it was not “Ivan and the Swan Princess.” My father would let in dozens of men to vie for my hand, but they would all be day laborers and the sons of freed serfs and not bogatyrs at all. They would take one look at my plain face, my carnage-filled eyes, and hurry toward the unspoiled safety of my sisters.

Tears came hotly to my eyes again, and what was the use in stopping them? I sat down in front of my boudoir to catch my breath, and I began to clap my hand over my mouth but then I remembered what Undine had said: you would just blush and bat your lashes as someone tied a tourniquet around your thigh and prepared to saw your leg off.

I choked out a sob and it sounded so strange coming from my mouth, like the noise belonged to a creature living in my body that was not me.

I was weeping into the palm of my hand when something gold caught the corner of my eye. It was glinting through the crack in one of my boudoir drawers, bleary but bright, like a coin in a fountain. I opened the drawer and took it out.

It was Mama’s charm bracelet.

I would have known it blind, by the sound of it jangling, by the feel of all its charms: the tiny hourglass filled with real pink sand, the miniature bicycle with wheels that actually spun, the thimble-sized whale with a mouth that opened on a hinge, the bell that really rung, the golden box with the paper note folded infinitesimally small, the whistle that sang faintly, the owl with pearls for eyes, the book with mine and my sisters’ names in it. I squeezed it in my palm until the chain left little indents on my skin, and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the bracelet was still there, metal warming to my body.