Juniper & Thorn(62)
Night robed the city in a gown of opulent black, storefront windows glittering like sequins. That was when the men and women of the upper curia began to trickle in from their beachfront dachas, from their cream-colored townhouses. They trailed down Kanatchikov Street like a spill of good wine, jewel-toned dresses flashing. I pressed myself against the side of a Yehuli grocery, mouth going dry as I watched. Their laughter feathered the air with pale smoke.
All this time I had not considered what I might do. I hadn’t allowed myself to sift through my meager prospects, or to think of Papa at all. But as the sky darkened and the air grew pitilessly cold, panic started to turn in my stomach like swallowed poison. I had no money, nowhere to go, and without the heady, blood-warming thrill of my previous outings, my dress felt paper-thin. Already my skin prickled and my breath clouded when I exhaled.
My first instinct was to think of my cleverer sisters, and what they might do. But Rose and Undine would never have found themselves in such a predicament. They would have no wisdom to speak to me. And how could they? They had never been made to bleed from their breasts.
The men and women kept moving past me, smiling their pearl-bright smiles. I did not know my way around the city very well, but I knew Kanatchikov Street like a vein on the back of my hand. They were going toward the ballet theater. Possibility pricked in me.
Without considering it further, I fell into step beside them. Certainly I would be singled out at once, with my mussed hair and my torn dress, and of course I didn’t have a ticket. But I followed the busy thoroughfare anyway, until it bore us into the plaza with its great golden fountain, and the theater like a bright, shining bracelet made out of bone.
I stopped then, chest tightening. The stream of men and women continued past me, river water splitting around a rock. I watched them file in, one after the next, women in fox-fur stoles and men with greased mustaches, until all were gone and the double doors were closed behind them. I stood there for so long that my fingers went numb with cold and the wound on my knuckle cracked open again, blood leaking onto the cobblestones. I stood there for so long that certainly the show was almost over, and then with a rush of feckless courage I strode down the half-lit alleyway.
I paused at the door, clenching and unclenching my freezing fingers. Perhaps it would be locked this time. Perhaps there would be an usher waiting to hurl me back out. But what had been my life was in a ruin behind me and Dr. Bakay was perched on the chaise longue in the sitting room, laughing so loudly with Papa that all of their teeth gleamed in their mouths.
I turned the knob and pushed through the door, into the ballet theater.
By the swell of music I could tell at once that the show had reached its climax. The inside of the theater was as bright and gold as a honeycomb, and the violins were pricking with alarm. I crept forward, still hidden in the shadow of the cold white pillar, until I could see the stage.
Flame-men were leaping and twirling. Snow-maidens were simpering and cowering. And in the center of it all was Ivan, bare-chested and wearing his feathered mantle, wooden sword arced over the laughing Dragon-Tsar.
Every time seeing him was like the first time, when I could scarcely breathe for how beautiful he was. But now my gaze searched for pits of dried blood on his lips, for a red mark on the back of his throat. I searched for Sevas’s face lurking somewhere behind Ivan’s heroic grimace, like a blurry shape under ice.
I hardly realized I was creeping closer and closer to the stage until I felt my eyes water beneath the glare of lights. Sevas plunged his sword into the belly of the Dragon-Tsar (really between his chest and arm; from this angle I could see the perfect falsity of his death), and the cellos warbled and the flame-men wilted and the snow-women rose up like puffs of whipped cream on a pastry, all soft and white. The tsarevna went leaping across the stage, toward Sevas, and I knew it was the moment for their mimed kiss.
But before she reached him, Sevas turned, and somehow his eyes found me. His lips parted, and all of Ivan’s false, preening victory drained out of him.
Just as the tsarevna readied herself to vault into his arms, Sevas dropped his dancer’s pose and strode forward, to the center of the stage, and then leapt off it, still holding his wooden sword. His face was luminous with awe, jaw taut with determination.
The violins stopped so suddenly it was as if their strings had snapped and the snare drum trailed off like a dwindling heartbeat. Murmurs rose from the crowd, and then shouts of jilted fury, but I scarcely heard them. Sevas paced down the aisle toward me and I moved toward him, as if in a haze, as if in a waking dream.
When we finally met he threw his arms around me, and the audience members lurched to their feet, howling at us like wolves.
Chapter Ten
As soon as Sevas let go, the crowd rose and nearly swept him away from me. It took almost a quarter hour for the ushers to press everyone back into their seats, and even then some had already stormed up to the ticket booth, demanding refunds. The curtains drew quickly shut over the stage, erasing the befuddled snow-maidens and the gaping, blank-faced Dragon-Tsar. I locked eyes briefly with the tsarevna before she vanished, and my breath caught with how balefully she stared at me.
As the chandeliers winked back on, I could better see all of the outraged expressions from the audience members, the hard, sharp gazes that cut me down like scythes. I shrunk back against Sevas’s chest, still naked and gold-daubed and heaving. A man in a velvet suit dashed out onto the stage and began to make wheedling reassurances, summoning invented excuses with the showmanship of a street-corner magician.