Juniper & Thorn(74)

“It was foolish to bring this man back here,” Rose said sharply. “Don’t you think Papa will remember how you swooned for him that first time? Don’t you remember his promise to turn him to a mass of black snakes at the door?”

Nearly all my certainty and bravado curdled under my clever sister’s stare. With difficulty, I said, “Papa’s spells were dismantled, to let the day laborers through.”

But Rose’s expression did not shift. “Do you really think you can trick him, Marlinchen? One night away has not made you into a powerful witch. If anything, you are less clever now than when you left. This dancer has just infected you with his foolhardiness.”

I shrunk back, but before I could reply, Sevas said, “Perhaps you’ve infected her with your gloom and pessimism.” I’d never heard anyone speak to Rose that way. “I’m not as daft as I look, either.”

I’d never heard his voice so cold before, either. I felt a bit like I had when I’d watched him kill the Dragon-Tsar for the first time, full of a strange bloodlust.

“Go on then, both of you,” Rose bit out. “Papa’s waiting. And he’s hungry. It’s all he’s been able to speak of since you left. How his stomach is eating itself in your absence.”

Another hard blow to the belly. I was swept through the garden as if by a very strong wind, trampling ferns and dandelion fluff that was sticking to the wet soil like a scattering of dirty snow. Rose was leading the way, her steps swift and sure, her gaze forward and knowing. Sevas gripped my hand and squeezed it.

But as soon as my sister pushed open the door and I stepped inside, I felt the fog of Papa’s magic lay upon me the way I had never felt it before. There was the grandfather clock, its shadow planking the wooden floor. There was the staircase that wound up to the second floor like a fat red dragon’s tongue. There was the hallway that led down into the kitchen, and the sitting room on our right, and all the men with their sad hound faces draped over our furniture.

There was Dr. Bakay, feeling one man’s skull, yellow measuring tape cutting the man’s head into halves. There was the waft of warm, stinking air from the kitchen. There was Undine on the stairs, looking beautiful and mean.

And then there was Papa, standing in the mouth of the corridor, tall and narrow and pale, his white shirt and face bright as bone. He did not appear even to see Sevas, or Rose. His gaze was like a cocked pistol and it was aimed only at me.

The grandfather clock gonged three. Papa spoke a word that sounded like a spell, though I couldn’t be sure. It was neither kind nor cruel. It was simply a wheel going into its groove. All I knew then was that I was falling through time, years opening up into a black abyss that swallowed me whole. When they spit me out I was sixteen again, Dr. Bakay’s hands on my budding breasts; I was thirteen, eating my bird-mother for supper; I was eleven and Papa was dragging me down the stairs and into the foyer so I could tell fortunes for men with lust in their eyes. I was nine and lying awake at night as Papa’s footsteps made the wood ache and groan.

It was such incredible magic that it moved my body for me, and I crossed the foyer toward Papa. If I had allowed Sevas’s foolhardiness to infect me, it had left behind holes for Papa’s hunger to seep into me too. My stomach growled so loudly that everyone must have heard it, Sevas and Dr. Bakay and the day laborers and my beautiful sisters, who looked at me with loathing.

I knelt at Papa’s feet and bent down until my nose was brushing the floor. I pressed my lips to the toe of his boot. I wondered what he had done with the black dog, and then knew that he had eaten it, and then wondered if there would be any left for me.

Against the leather of his shoe, I whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll never leave you again.”





Chapter Twelve




Here is what happened when I returned.

Papa welcomed Sevas into the house without even so much as a scowl; it was as if the scene at his flat had all been forgotten. He even took Sevas’s coat and hung it. I stood up, flushing and shaking with the ebbing of Papa’s magic, letting it bleed out of me as the world shuddered back. The day laborers in the sitting room mumbled like crows.

Dr. Bakay took Sevas’s hand and shook it, remarking upon the firmness of his grip and how that related to his overlarge fifteenth Organ, the Organ for Firmness, which he had previously measured. Sevas held Dr. Bakay’s hand so hard it was like he meant to hurt him. When at last he let go, Sevas’s knuckles were white.

Undine traipsed down the stairs, conspicuously tugging the neckline of her dress lower. She shouldered past me and smiled at Sevas and asked if he would like a tour of the house. Sevas smiled back at her, and how could I blame him?

But he declined her offer, and I felt a perverse nip of satisfaction to see the way her face crumpled like last week’s grocery list. Her mouth puckered and she went away, into the garden. Rose stood there in the shadow of the grandfather clock and rolled her eyes with a sigh.

Papa said, “Well, Marlinchen? I’m hungry.”

I could see the bags under his eyes, blue and fat, and the dramatic hollows of his cheekbones, like someone had taken a scalpel to him. It filled me with a terrible pity and guilt, so perfunctory it was as if I’d been made for it, a machine for dispensing grief.

In that moment I forgot all about my own gnawing hunger, and plum stones, and missing hearts and livers. I almost forgot about the card tucked between my breasts and the compact in Sevas’s pocket and the charm bracelet upstairs and the mirror that never lies on the third floor. There was some powerful amnesiac magic running through the whole house, a quiet current that swept me along, through the sitting room, and into the kitchen.