Juniper & Thorn(65)
Sevas dropped Ivan’s sword, chest heaving. Derkach let go, leaving a small welling of blood in the crescent-shaped cuts he’d made. His chest was rising and falling, too, with each arduous inhale, and then he spat into the broken glass at Sevas’s feet.
“It would bring me no greater pleasure,” Derkach rasped, “to see you try and survive a week, a day, even an hour without me. You’ve been coddled and cosseted and you know nothing of a world beyond the theater, where dancing well is enough to make everyone worship you. The rest of the world is not so kind to Yehuli boys, no matter how pretty their faces or coy their smiles. I have done little more in these past nine years than try and protect you from it, and all you’ve given me in return is your spite and loathing. So I welcome you to try and live this grand life you’ve imagined for yourself outside the theater, freed from my oppressive care—just remember, Sevas, I always loved you.”
With that, he leaned forward and took Sevas’s face into his hands and kissed him, right on the mouth. I could scarcely breathe for the awful, searing pain that the sight loosed in me. Derkach released Sevas and turned toward the door. Mr. Kovalchyk’s eyes darted between them, and then over to me, looking as if he’d just been blown back by an exceptionally strong wind. His jaw unlatched like a wooden doll’s.
After several moments passed, he cleared his throat and said, “Sevastyan, I will leave you to your own devices for now. I hope that in the morning we can come to an agreement that is tolerable to all parties.”
It seemed such an absurd thing to say, hysterically reasonable, as if there were any sense to make out of the shattered mirrors and Derkach’s kiss—still burning on Sevas’s face like a live ember. I put my arms around myself, skin suddenly prickling with an unexplainable cold, and watched as Mr. Kovalchyk slunk through the yawning threshold. He walked carefully backward with his hands up, like he was trying to evade an angry bear, like he was trying to keep from riling it further.
The door clattered shut behind him, leaving Sevas and me alone in the extraordinarily loud silence.
I stayed quiet for as long as I could stand it, staring at Sevas as he stared, in turn, at the closed door. Then guilt boiled up in me and I couldn’t bear it.
“I’m sorry,” I mewled. “I never should have come here.”
At last Sevas turned, his blue eyes shining darkly. I looked for evidence of Derkach’s kiss, a mark left by that cruel tenderness, and found only Sevas’s tremulous smile. The great effort of that smile snatched me up and closed over my heart like a clenched fist.
I wanted to wipe away everything that made his smile so difficult to erect. I wanted to do an impossible transformation—I wanted all the hurt to unbloom, all the glass to unshatter, all wounds to close and the skin made new. I wanted to weep, and this time the tears came easily, pearling hot at the corners of my eyes.
“Oh no,” Sevas said, striding toward me. “I can’t bear to watch a woman cry on my account. Unless I’ve moved her to new heights of ecstasy.”
But his jest lilted slowly to the ground in front of me, like a shed white feather. I scarcely even flushed. Sevas came close enough that I could see the places where gold paint was peeling off his chest, the beginnings of his black tattoos leaching out from underneath. I noticed after a moment that his slippers were pricked all over with bits of glass, red marks blossoming on the pale satin like the tenderest, newest poppy buds. I had the feverish urge to kneel down and take off his slippers and pick out the glass and lick the blood from his skin until it was clean.
“Your feet,” I managed to say, hoping that my lewd imaginings hadn’t somehow scrawled their way across my face. “This is my fault, all of it.”
“You didn’t force me to leap down from the stage. You didn’t force me to shatter the mirrors.” Sevas moved closer still, until I felt the whisper of his breath across my cheek. “And you didn’t force Derkach to be his ordinary, awful self. He hardly needs any prodding to turn mean and monstrous.”
“He kissed you.” Even the words sounded bald and ugly, laid out like a dead sow on a butcher’s block.
“He’s been known to do that.” A muscle twitched in Sevas’s jaw, smile waning. “That and more, but not since I was a child. I think it makes him angrier than anything to know that I don’t desire him, that he repulses me. Dancers are supposed to love no one more than their handlers, and forswear all other bonds as idle distraction. Derkach is meant to be my father and my master and my lover and I’m not meant to want for anyone else.”
I thought of my bird-mother in her golden cage. I remembered how I had fed her from my palm and whispered my secrets through her bars and hummed to myself while I cleaned her droppings. I remembered how desperately and happily I had administered to her and wondered if I had more than a bit of Papa’s badness in me after all. I had loved my mother most when she was shuttered and safe, when mine was the only hand that tended her.
It was with a rush of rising acid that I said, “I don’t think that’s right. And even if it is, Derkach is too late. Oblya is already in love with you.”
Sevas exhaled a humorless laugh. “And how long will its affection last? Not much longer than it takes to recover from a night of drinking, I’d expect, or to dissolve a bar of lavender soap. By the time I’m thirty, the ballet will be done with me. I’ll be washed up and ugly and there will be a new boy to whet their appetites. I might as well die before then, when my face is still pretty and my smiles are still coy.”