Juniper & Thorn(61)
I looked up into Papa’s brown eyes, the same weak tea color as my own, and upturned slightly at the corners, just like mine were. I looked at the slope of his long nose, as long as mine or longer, and his mouth opening like a black pit, a hole, under the bramble of his beard. Something to fall into.
“I’m hungry too, Papa,” I said. “I need to eat.”
He made a derisive sound and scowled. “And can you not feed yourself once I’ve eaten first? You’re twenty-three years old, a woman now, certainly capable enough.”
“Have I been spoiled?” I asked him. My cheeks were burning hot. “Am I a woman because I was ruined? Was I a girl before? When will I be spoiled enough that you have to turn me into a bird and be rid of me?”
Papa’s eyes snapped at me like a fox’s jaws. “Why are you talking to me in riddles? Speak plainly, or do not speak at all.”
“I’m only speaking the way you taught me to. Girls become women and then women become birds; that’s all true. You and your codex both told me so.” I rose to my feet, stomach lurching like a drink about to spill. “I don’t want any of it anymore. I want to be a girl again, before I knew the taste of my mother’s meat.”
He laughed then, my father, showing all of his half-rotted teeth. “If I could, I would make you one, Marlinchen. You were better for me when you were small-breasted and silent. But transformations don’t work like that; magic doesn’t work like that. You cannot make a flower unbloom.” Papa took me by the collar of my dress and pulled me toward him, until we were so close that I could count every blue hair of his beard, bristly and sharp. “Get down to the kitchen. And you might as well make Dr. Bakay breakfast too.”
Something broke apart inside me and I was filled with the tiny sharp bits of it. Papa hurled me away from him and I fell to the ground, my hair parting in two wild curtains over my face.
I did not look up again until I heard Papa slam through the door and clatter down the stairs, wood groaning under his weight. I stared at my split knuckle again, glistening like a ruby ring. To weep should be easy, but though I tried, the tears would not come.
I stood up, stumbling a bit, my knees humming with nascent bruises. A conversation leaked through the crack in the door, words floating from Dr. Bakay’s mouth up the stairs and into my ears. Papa’s brisk voice followed. They sounded like two conquering chieftains, arguing over how best to divide their spoils.
I knew, then, without even a quiver of doubt—perhaps it was my witch’s instinct rearing—that the next time I heard any footsteps on the stairs, they would be coming for me, a double-headed dragon breathing cold fire. I had thought that Papa had done his worst already. But his anger was insatiable and depthless too. There was always more of me that he could nibble at and gnaw, until he was sucking the marrow right from my bones.
I gathered up my tattered dress in my fists and hurtled out of my bedroom, down the steps, and into the foyer, where the midmorning sunlight made everything gleam like the inside of a snuffbox, gold and hard and close.
Papa and Dr. Bakay were in the sitting room, and when they saw me their eyes narrowed in perfect unison.
They both started toward me, but I was nearer and faster. I burst through the front door and into the garden, cool air stealing into my lungs. An eyeless raven winged past me, scattering black feathers. I waved it off and crashed through the wheat grass, toward the juniper tree.
When I reached it I dropped to my hurting knees and began to claw up the dirt. I was as manic and feral as a mangy dog, soil caulking under my nails. Finally I closed my fingers around Mama’s compact, shaking with both terror and relief.
Papa stood in the threshold, one hand shading his eyes against the sun. “What are you doing, Marlinchen? Get back inside.”
“What in the world has gotten her so distressed?” Dr. Bakay asked bemusedly, adjusting his spectacles.
I did not hear Papa’s answer. I was already running toward the gate. It towered in front of me, so tall that it sliced the sky up into long, thin segments, like wedges of blue-seamed cheese. I fumbled with the lock for a moment before managing to get it open.
“Marlinchen!” Papa shouted.
There was magic in his cry, and it shook white petals down from the flowering pear tree. Even from such a distance, his magic was strong and it chilled in my veins and it made me pause and look back. Papa’s hand was outstretched, and his pale, narrow fingers were curling.
But then something happened, and the spell broke. Mama’s compact started to sing in my clenched fist, black sand rattling inside, a reminder of the secret I had never given up and the lie that I had stuck to unwaveringly, until the very end. There was power in that, a magic of my own, and it cleaved through Papa’s spell like shears through silk.
I pushed through the gate and ran as fast as I could toward Kanatchikov Street.
I paced Oblya’s streets aimlessly until evening, sick with unspent adrenaline. Once I would have been petrified to find myself out in the city alone, but no one except slack-jawed beggars even tried to speak to me. The day laborers who had once terrified me were now, I knew, toothless dogs like Sobaka. The brokers and merchants were busy with their work and I looked like just another unlucky drifter, perhaps a factory worker who had injured her hand and could no longer work a machine, or maybe a woman pregnant with the child of a sailor who had left her for more promising waters.