Juniper & Thorn(75)

Dirty dishes were stacked precariously in the sink and the butcher block was soaked through with blood. Knife blades were marbled with grease and forks were clotted with fat and gristle. Who had made such a mess in my absence? Could it have been the day laborers? None of them seemed bold enough.

It must have been Papa, though I could scarcely imagine him pinning the squealing black dog down on the butcher block and slicing open its belly. Papa wasn’t made for such quotidian violences. I was his blade against the banal and grotesque. I butchered monsters and rubbed my knuckles raw scrubbing up their blood. Not him.

I turned on the faucet and let the hot water run over everything, steam clouding up in front of my face.

I did not realize Sevas had followed me into the kitchen until I heard something clatter to the ground. I spun around and saw him bend to pick up a dropped spoon and lay it on the bloody butcher block, then smile beatifically as if nothing had happened at all.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Papa will be suspicious.”

Sevas laid one hand on the counter, his voice low. “Tell me it was all a clever ruse, a false promise. Kneeling in front of your father.”

“Of course.” My cheeks warmed. “I was trying to be convincing.”

Sevas nodded. He believed me, I could tell, or at least he wanted to. I wanted desperately to believe myself. It was better than the alternative: that the ghost of the girl I was still haunted these halls, and she would possess me whenever my body ached like a wound that would let her slip inside. Perhaps she would never let me go.

For a moment, there had been no ruse at all, only Papa’s magic and the grandfather clock ticking as it always had. I had to remember the plan, the mirror, or else I would be lost to the house again.

“And cooking for your father will further convince him?” Sevas asked.

“I have to pretend that everything is as it should be,” I said, “or else he’ll know. But first I have to wash up.”

“I can help,” said Sevas, and without waiting for my reply he began to gather up an armful of dirty plates.

Watching Sevas clean my kitchen felt absurd, more intimate and intrusive even than him thrusting hard inside of me. I felt as if he could see my whole life laid out in the arrangement of dishes, the used teacups, the heap of leftover chicken bones.

He took a wet rag and wiped down the counter with surprising tenderness, the same way he had fondled my nipple with his tongue. I was entranced by watching him work, and even aroused, so much that I hardly noticed the sink filling and filling before me, filthy water lapping at the brim, very near to spilling over and onto the floor.

Hurriedly I turned off the faucet, then looked back at Sevas and said, “You don’t have to do this woman’s work.”

He arched a brow. “What if it pleases me?”

“Why would it please you?”

“Because there’s something useful I can do besides dancing,” he said. “Even if it’s scrubbing dishes. Perhaps I’ll find restaurant work once we leave here. It can’t be worse than the theater.”

I looked down and bit my lip. “There is a story in Papa’s codex,” I said. “It is about a king and a queen . . .”

“Is this Ivan and the tsarevna?”

“No,” I said. “Although the queen dies in this one too. But before she dies, she makes her husband promise that he will only wed someone who is equal in beauty as she. He promises such. But the only person equal in beauty is the princess herself. So the king sets out to marry his daughter.”

“I don’t think I like this story,” Sevas said. On the bloody butcher block, our hands were close.

I continued anyway. “In order to make herself ugly, the princess cuts off her arm and her breast. Her father wants nothing to do with her after that.” I remembered how I had butchered that poor monster. I remembered how its blood had soaked into my skirts. I had killed it to keep my secret. Perhaps that was the magic of it all. Would Sevas think I was something worthy of saving if he knew that I had given the monster such a slow, bad death and cooked it up and served it to my father?

I wondered if he would treat me so tenderly if he knew how I had licked the spoon I’d used to serve up the monster’s meat, and even eaten a little piece of it myself before bringing Papa his plate. That bite had landed softly in my stomach, lonely as a baby bird fallen off its branch.

“If a severed arm is what it takes to free you—” Sevas paused, bringing a hand to his mouth. I could see where my bite marks still circled his fingers. “You would not be ugly, not to me.”

Before I could reply, the sink gurgled. I realized then that the water was not draining. Rolling up my sleeve, I stuck my hand into that oily water and into the drain until my fingers closed around something big and hard. It took me several tries to yank it free, and when at last I did I stumbled back a few paces, dizzy with exertion.

Sevas came over to me and we both looked down at the thing in my hand. It was a long rib bone, curving like a whittled conch shell, still thick with sinew and far, far too large to have once belonged to a chicken.

“Marlinchen—” Sevas started as I held the bone so tightly in my fist that I thought I might crush it to dust.

“Oh,” I said. “Papa must have killed a pig.”

Neither of us spoke. The water circled down the drain. At last, Sevas said, in a quiet voice, “We must take the mirror tonight.”