Juniper & Thorn(60)

I blinked hard, and even squeezed my eyes shut, but I could not will that time back to me. Panic fluttered in my belly—what had happened to make me forget it all? Was there a furtive spell at work?

Once I could make my mouth move again, I said, “Would it be all right if I took that?”

“Of course,” Sobaka mumbled, holding the paper out to me.

I took it from him and pressed it against my chest, vision going dim. I did not know what I would do with it, precisely; I only knew that I needed to protect it, like the card and Mama’s charm bracelet.

There was a secret here that wasn’t mine, something bad and hidden like maggots in an apple, and I had the distinct feeling it was something Papa would want stamped out if he found it.

The men fiddled with the fringes of our cat-lamps; they ran their thumbs along the dusty portraits on the walls. I wondered if there were any among them whom I wouldn’t mind marrying. Sobaka would be a kind husband, dutiful and mild. But I was too shy and ugly to imagine that one of them might choose me as their bride.

And, in truth, I would not want them to. The compact was still buried under the juniper tree and that was my secret, the only thing that might carry me back to Sevas. I hurried out of the sitting room and into the foyer, blood rushing around my ears.

I was staring determinedly down at the floor, clutching the paper so tightly that it crumpled, and I did not see that there was someone else in the foyer until I ran into their back. I stepped away, apologizing profusely, then lifted my head.

It was Dr. Bakay. All the rest of the words withered on my tongue.

“Marlinchen,” he said. Behind his spectacles, his eyes looked tiny, like insect eggs. “Do you always wake so early? The sun has hardly risen.”

“I make Papa breakfast.” My voice was not much louder than a whisper. Quiet as a mouse. I had never once tried to protest when he touched me.

“That’s right,” he said, as though I had told him before. Perhaps I had. “Your father always says you are the best and most dutiful of his daughters, even if you are plain-faced where your sisters are beautiful. I never did perform a proper phrenologist’s reading on you—testing the Organs of your Mind. I am so curious about what I would find, if I did. Maybe I will pay your father again for the pleasure of it.”

He reached toward me and took the back of my head into his hand, four fingers cupping my skull while his thumb stroked along my throat.

The dust motes in the room stopped drifting. They hung suspended, like gold veins in marble, like flies trapped under a coat of varnish. Seconds staggered past me. Finally, Dr. Bakay let go.

If he tried to speak again, I didn’t hear it. There was floodwater in my ears. I tore away from him and clambered up the steps, tripping over the last one and collapsing on my knees at the top of the second-floor landing. There was a crack—my bone against the hard wood—but I could only feel the distant echoes of pain, pulling back and then rearing up again, like the tide lapping the shoreline.

When I got to my feet again, it was all but gone. I ran into my room, closed the door, and propped the chair against it once more.



I had meant to simply hide the newspaper under my pillow and then go back downstairs to cook Papa’s breakfast, but once I was inside the safe bunker of my bedroom I found that I could not make my body move again. I lay flat on my back, sheets hissing against the silk of my dress, staring up at the line of split plaster that fissured across the ceiling like a crack in an eggshell. Where the plaster peeled away was a thin mouth of black space, jagged and sneering.

When I was a child, my mind had tried to constellate that blackness into something safe, and not scary. I had imagined it was home to a family of friendly owls with soft feathers or mice that wore tiny aprons and top hats. I had not let myself imagine what I knew to be the truth of it: that the house itself was riddled with thousands of small wounds, and every day they were wrenched further open, hours pulling at the ruptured skin.

Through the slit of my open window I could hear the eyeless ravens, cawing in languages lost to time. When I turned my head to look out at the garden, I thought I saw the fiery serpent, but it might only have been a black ribbon someone dropped in the grass. One of the men was speaking to Undine by her scrying pool, their faces very close. The wind caught up her golden hair and twisted it like it was wet and needed wringing out. I couldn’t see Rose at all.

There was a scrape of wood against wood and my door heaved open. The chair that I had used to jam it shut clattered to the floor, my clumsy defense easily flung aside.

I jerked up, bile rising so quickly in my throat that I nearly retched.

Papa was standing in the threshold, still wearing his robe. His swollen stomach had gone flat again, loose and empty skin flapping as he strode toward me and said, “Why isn’t there any food in the sitting room?”

My mind supplied the words I’m sorry, but my mouth could not speak them. I only stared at him, heart pounding.

“Well? What is it, Marlinchen? You look as dumb as a struck dog. There is more than enough food in the icebox—I checked last night myself when I went downstairs to have another chicken. The men could not possibly have eaten it all. Could they? Most are docile like lambs. But you can see my belly is empty again, and I’m so hungry I’ve forgotten the taste of dumplings and kvass. Those rats in my mind are nibbling away at my memory. I need to eat again. I need to eat.”