Juniper & Thorn(70)
“It’s not a riddle that cleverness can solve.” But something was turning in my mind. “He wants to know how I managed to escape from under his spell. To come to the theater.”
“Your secret,” Sevas said. “You never told me how.”
I opened the compact, my fingers shaking. The black sand was still there, smelling faintly of brine and sea air, as impossible as it had always been but now imbued with the strange new magic I hadn’t known I’d possessed. “This came off me in the bath. Papa’s spell was that none of us could leave the house without black sand from Oblya’s beaches.”
“It came off in the bath?” Sevas frowned. “But you told me you never visited the beach until that first night with me. How could it have gotten there?”
I had put the thought out of my mind for so long that returning to it now made my stomach lurch. I could only explain it the way that Papa always had, when there was a question that was like a steep drop off the edge of a cliff, when there was nothing but a black chasm instead of an answer.
“Magic,” I said. The word seemed somehow feebler in my mouth than it ever had in Papa’s.
“Whose magic? Yours?”
That, in truth, I still did not know. If my wanting could be transmuted into real power, surely I’d have been able to alter the course of my life far sooner. Maybe I’d been told to want nothing more than Papa’s happiness, and that had stifled any magic of my own. Or perhaps I had never wanted anything so badly as I had wanted Sevas. I only blushed and did not reply.
Something else had slipped out with the compact. A square of paper, folded once. I leaned down to where it had lilted to the ground and picked it up. A few shards of glass were stuck in the paper and they pricked the pad of my thumb as I opened it.
The ink was blurred with water, but I could still make out that it said fisherovich & symyrenko 3454 vorobyev street.
With a bolt of knowledge, perhaps even cleverness, I snapped the compact shut and held the paper out to Sevas wordlessly.
He frowned, brow furrowing as he tried to read it. “What is this, Marlinchen?”
So I told him about how we had sold all our things, Mama’s pearls and charm bracelet, and how this broker had come to try to buy some magic off us. He had wanted things like bottled spirits and haunted amulets and dolls that stood up and moved of their own accord. I supposed that was the capitalist view of magic, that it was something that could be neatly packaged and sold. That was what these developers and brokers had wanted to do to Oblya, after all: they wanted to wrap up the city in muslin and twine like a bar of lavender soap. They wanted to lock it up inside a pearl-enameled snuffbox for the tsar to fondle as he pleased. Well, we did not have any bottled spirits or haunted amulets, and Rose’s herbs turned ordinary in the hands of mortal men.
“But Mama’s charm bracelet came back to me,” I said in a rush. “Perhaps—perhaps my wanting has magic after all. The broker paid a lot for it.”
“A lot,” Sevas repeated slowly. “How much?”
“I don’t know exactly. But it was more rubles than I could get from my clients in a month. Perhaps enough to rent a flat in the slums.” My cheeks were pinking as the words came out. Even so far away from Papa’s house, speaking it felt treasonous. “And there’s still something that hasn’t yet been sold. A mirror; my mother had a mirror.”
“A mirror?”
“A magic mirror, one that never lies. If you look into it, it will tell you the truth, no matter whether it pleases you or not. If not this broker, I know there would be one or the other who would buy it off us.”
“But the mirror is not here.” Sevas’s lips thinned. “Nor is the bracelet.”
No. They were not. I took the card back from Sevas, feeling that bolt of cunning dissipate. If I had truly thought of escape, I would have brought something with me when I left—the bracelet, stolen rubles, even just a coat for when the day turned to night—but I had only been reckless and desperate.
“You should not have bothered with me,” I said. “The only thing I’ve brought here to you is blood and ruin and a lot of broken glass. If Papa’s potion kills me, it will only be because of my own foolishness, and no fault of yours. Sevas, you should let me leave here alone, and excise all thoughts of me from your mind.”
Sevas drew a breath, stepping away from me. His eyes turned incandescent and for a moment I wondered if he might pick up Ivan’s sword again. But he only clenched his fists, still dark with my blood, and said, “Marlinchen, don’t you understand? I would rather die than play Ivan again. I would rather hurl myself off the docks and into the sea than put on that gold paint. I would rather go vodka-blind than twirl for Kovalchyk one more time. And I would rather set myself aflame than return to Derkach.”
His voice trailed off by the end of it, low and tremulous, and his gaze dropped to the ground. I stared at him with a tightness in my chest, watching a spectacular and awful metamorphosis. I had seen Sevas don Ivan’s feathered cloak and bogatyr’s resplendent smile; I had seen him smirk like a man who knew the way it made women swoon, who knew in that moment he was untouchable. I had felt him kiss me with the fervent yearning of an ascetic before the altar.
Now I saw only this: a boy who was terrified of being alone.
I went to speak but he caught up my face in his hands again, bitten fingers brushing over my lips. Still I went weak-kneed at the way he looked at me, like he wanted never to look at anything else.