Juniper & Thorn(73)
The day laborers went away, and Sevas guided me off the stage, down the long hallway, and through the door. Sunlight poured on us like hot melted butter. At last he turned to me and said, “Marlinchen.”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about the dead man.” I was thinking of plum stones. I was thinking of missing hearts and the small, ground-up pieces of meat that made the filling of varenyky. All of a sudden I wanted to crumple up the card and cast it into the wind, and not let its bad magic seep into me further. I wanted to uproot the ideas that it had planted in my mind.
Sevas nodded, hand slipping off my back. And then we went down Kanatchikov Street together, the ground rolling out slowly under our feet, toward my father’s house.
The garden was soft and damp, the way it was after a rainstorm, but I didn’t think it had rained at all. There were no dirty puddles gathered on the cobblestones. It was as if one fat, dark cloud had gathered around our house and our house alone.
I pushed open the gate with my breath burning in my throat, and when I stepped through, my shoe sunk into the wet soil. I took another step, the mud still sucking at my slipper, and then beckoned Sevas after me. He was squinting in the sunlight and then a gust of wind went through his hair and I was so afraid and filled with tremu lous affection that I wished that I could scoop him up and tuck him into my bodice and keep him safe and warm there between my breasts like a she-wolf nursing her cub.
He stepped through the gate and did not turn into a spewing of black snakes. That was my first relief.
My second relief was that no profound transformation had taken place in my absence; the garden did not look very different from how I had left it, except that most of the white petals were gone from the flowering pear tree. They stuck on the ground like shed feathers. The goblin was digging a little hole in the dirt to sit in. The eyeless ravens were stretching their wings and cawing out vowel sounds that no mortal knew how to make.
From behind a marvelous begonia plant, Indrik emerged, his chest slick with oil and his goat’s tail lashing. He saw Sevas and huffed loudly through his nostrils.
Sevas made a startled noise and darted behind my back. “Marlinchen, what is that?”
Indrik drew himself up to his full height, shoulders rolling, and narrowed his man’s eyes. “Well, mortal man, when you hear thunder from the mountaintop or see clouds gather overhead, when winter melts into spring and wheat flowers up out of the ground to make into your morning kasha—”
“That’s Indrik,” I said.
“My dear supplicant, is this man imperiling you?” Indrik asked, huffing again with even greater indignation. “Would you like me to strike him down with a precisely aimed bolt of lightning?”
“No, thank you,” I said as Sevas blanched. “Indrik, where are my sisters?”
I had been afraid that Papa would punish them in my stead, but I’d tucked that fear away like an earring in the bottom of a jewelry box, and only now did it shake loose again, shining. What if I had ruined them already? I began to feel the plan I’d made was foolish and doomed, and how would I manage to get up to the third floor and take Mama’s mirror at all, and even if I did could I find a broker to sell it, and what if Papa found me out before then?
There was a crunching sound as Rose stomped out from behind the black plum tree. Her hair was loose and knotted with briars and her hands and wrists were filthy all the way up to the elbow and she looked just the way I remembered her.
I had thought she would be angry. But to my great surprise there were tears rolling down her cheeks, and she came toward me and wrapped me up and kissed my temple and smoothed back the frizzing curls from my forehead. She smelled like soil and sour-cherry kvass. When she finally let me go she wiped her tears from her violet eyes and I felt like an imp, a scoundrel, for making my sweet sister cry.
“Marlinchen,” she said breathlessly. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come back.”
My throat constricted. “I had to.”
Her gaze darted over my shoulder, to where Sevas stood. Her eyes narrowed. I saw Sevas run a hand through his hair, mussing it to intentional dishevelment, and begin to pin up his coy and beguiling smile. I wanted to tell him not to bother, that it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I had never met anyone more resistant to being charmed than Rose, and she looked at most men with beetle-browed disdain, as if they were nothing better than the squirrels and other pests that menaced her garden.
He was undeterred. “My name is Sevastyan,” he said, smiling brilliantly, and held out his hand. “Sevastyan Rezkin.”
Rose gave him a dour stare. “This one won’t last long here.”
Sevas’s smile waned, just a little bit. “I’m less fragile than I look.”
I dug a nail into the cut on my knuckle. “What has Papa done? In the meantime? And all the men . . .”
“Well, he was furious, of course.” I heard the edge of blame in her voice, and I felt like I had caught myself against the side of the counter, one brisk, hard blow to the belly. “So he raged for several hours, and turned one of the men’s leather boots into a yapping black dog and killed it. Dr. Bakay tried to soothe him, but Papa is resistant to being soothed.”
Sevas was no longer smiling. A powerful wind came through the garden, shaking big pink petals loose from the begonia plant, and nearly blowing up my skirt along with it. Hurriedly I pulled it down again, wondering if Rose had seen the dried blood there on my thighs, or if she had noticed the bruise on my throat in the shape of Sevas’s mouth, or if she had noticed that my corset was gone, abandoned to that broken-glass room. Was her magic good enough to sense the way I had changed?