Juniper & Thorn(7)
I thought of him, and my fingers slipped between my thighs. As I stroked myself, I bit down hard on my pillow, so that I would not risk making a sound.
Chapter Two
Pieces of light fell on my face like dead leaves. I bolted upright just in time to hear the tapping of the monster’s claws against the floorboards as it scurried out from under my bed. I caught sight of the end of its spiny tail before it vanished into the corridor.
The clock gonged seven. I stripped off my covers. A stalk of wheat fell out of my hair. Dust motes drifted through beams of latticed sunlight, illuminating the fine gray film that covered my mirror and my dressing table, and the bone-white handle of my mother’s comb. My pink shoes were peering like blind kittens through the crack in my wardrobe door, the heels clotted with dirt. Above them, a flash of cranberry silk, the drooping, unfastened laces of my corset. A thrill of something loosed in me, a memory shaken free: Sevastyan’s gold-daubed chest. Flushing, I closed the wardrobe door tightly, sealing my dress and shoes and evidence of our night of revelry inside.
I had half an hour to bring my father his breakfast—less time than usual. I had slept too indulgently, dreaming of Ivan and the tsarevna. I hadn’t even dared put myself in her body; I had only watched as they spun and spun, like the figures in a music box, like Ivan and the princess from my favorite of Papa’s fairy tales.
I pulled on my housecoat and hurried barefooted down the stairs, my steps echoing dimly. My eyes followed the monster’s path, the furrow its tail had traced through the thick carpet. I guessed it had already found its place beneath the juniper tree. It rose early, as did our eyeless ravens. I didn’t know if the fiery serpent slept at all—you could see it only out of the corner of your eye, and whenever you turned to look at it head-on, it would vanish. Half the time you would mistake it for a black ribbon someone had dropped in the grass. Even without Rose’s elixir Indrik slept most of the day, his snores rustling sprigs of lavender. The goblin was still shut up in the shed.
Undine herself would sleep for another three hours at least; we saw no clients on Sundays. Rose would wake with the sound of our father’s discontented clamor but wouldn’t always come down. Until then, the house was mine, all twenty rooms branching out around me like the canopy of an enormous oak. I could have paced my way through it with my eyes shut, feeling along the polished mahogany banister, fingers running through the fringed lampshades.
Where Rose and Undine owned the garden, the kitchen and adjacent sitting room were my domain. The hanging copper pots jangled like wind chimes above my head. Since I had already rolled out the dough for varenyky last night, I floured my hands and cut it into neat diamonds. A tray of ground meat, congealing and pale, was chilling in the icebox. I didn’t remember making the filling, but I must have—no one else entered the kitchen except for me and our spiny-tailed monster, snuffling for crumbs on the counter or licking grease off the pan with its long barbed tongue.
While the varenyky boiled, I sliced two fat hunks of black bread and smeared them with butter. I cut two onions, eyes stinging, and browned them with the varenyky. There were three heavy jars of pickled cabbage, so I took a scoop from one and added it to the plate, staining the edge of my sleeve purple. I heaped sour cream beside the varenyky and poured a glass of milk.
When I was finished, I stuck the spoon in my mouth. I could taste the smooth richness of the cream and the sour bite of cabbage, and underneath the lingering smokiness of onion and browned butter. I licked and licked until all I could taste was rust-tinged metal.
I brought the tray to the sitting room and placed it on the walnut-inlaid table. Its four iron legs ended in hooves; it always reminded me of Indrik when he crouched in the grass, nibbling indignantly at Rose’s sage grass. I wiped the dampness from my brow and let out a breath.
Overhead, the chandelier quivered like willow fronds in the breeze, and the wood groaned with my father’s footsteps.
He lurched down the stairs, still in his dressing gown. His feet were ensconced in velvet slippers. Papa’s hands made me think of white spiders, his skinny fingers clenching down hard on the banister. The belt of his dressing gown was wrapped twice around the wisp of him, like how the sailors at the port would tie their sails to the mast with a length of rope, so their ships wouldn’t be wrenched this way and that by the wind.
Papa brushed a dry-mouthed kiss to my forehead and sat on the couch. He surveyed the tray with his usual resigned misery. The bags under his eyes were as blue and fat as a rich woman’s purse.
“Thank you, Marlinchen,” he said.
“Of course, Papa.”
He always thanked me, so how could I begrudge him anything? For the hours he took from me while I washed plates in the kitchen and poured vinegar into jars of cabbage. Unlike my sisters, who took after our mother, I could see foggy mirrors of my features in his. The length of our noses, certainly, with their low bridges and dramatic slopes, the distinctly sallow tone to our skin, and the slight upward slant to our pale brown eyes.
They said my father had been handsome, once, but his curse had whittled away at him like a lubok carving. Now there was something distinctly inhuman about him, a wooden falsity to his rare smiles.
“Next time, you should put cheese in the varenyky,” Papa said. “And plums. Do we have plums?”
I stiffened. They say his eyes had been plucked out and replaced with plum stones. “Do you mean the black amber plums?”