Juniper & Thorn(76)

“No,” I said hurriedly. “Papa has warded the third floor with spells. I have to speak to him. I have to know what the magic is and how to break it.”

Sevas nodded once, slowly. “But you must be wary, Marlinchen. Wary of his claws and his toothless smiles.”

“I know,” I said. “But now we need to eat.” I was very hungry.

I cooked varenyky with leftover filling, enough for Papa and all the men and my sisters, and made two jars of plum preserves. The plums in our garden were ripe as bruises, pulsing with the risk of rot. I wondered about the stones inside of them.

There was no kvass, so we drank water, all of us sitting around the big ebony table. I couldn’t remember the last time we had eaten here. Or eaten together, let alone with guests. Watching Sevas eat the food I had prepared filled me with an unspeakable feeling, somewhere between yearning and grief. I wanted to kiss the streak of sour cream from his mouth and the grimace from his face.

I ate, too, ravenously, even knowing that I could not throw it up later. But when everything was finished the food sat in my belly without roiling guiltily. More, I now had even more reason to keep it down: I knew Sevas would not like it if he found out that I had been making myself sick in the garden. Already he was glancing between Dr. Bakay and me around every bite, gaze sweeping down the long table like a scythe.

Papa ate double portions, and when he was done his stomach was bulging over the band of his trousers. I could not bring myself to look at him; I was afraid of what the glare of his magic might do. Perhaps it would jerk me up on the table and make me prostrate myself in front of him, limbs splayed like a belly-slit chicken. Sometimes before I went to sleep at night I imagined myself laid out on this very table, naked, while my clients all cut small, neat bites from me with forks and knives. Sometimes I imagined that Papa plucked out my eyes and ate them.

Now I could only think of the curved bone I’d found, the rib of some large creature. Too large for even a pig, though I could not let that thought settle in me like yeast at the bottom of a kvass jar. Instead I rose and gathered the plates, counting the sound of each one as they clinked against the others. Three for my sisters and me, one for Sevas, one for Papa, one for Dr. Bakay, one each from the fifteen men—

It should have tallied to twenty-one, but when I got back to the kitchen I realized that I had carried back only twenty. I peered around the corner, back into the dining room, narrowing my eyes as I tried to focus on each of the day laborers’ faces. Guiltily I realized that they all had blurred together to me, that I had not spoken to any of them, save for just one.

Sobaka. He was nowhere to be seen.

I nearly opened my mouth to ask, but already the knowledge was calcifying in me, the seed of a secret that I could not speak until it bloomed. I went back to the sink wordlessly. I washed the grease of strangers from our cups and bowls and plates.

I was afraid of how Papa had said little during the meal, and even smiled at the men and Sevas, his yellow teeth wolfish. I was afraid of how Dr. Bakay had his papers strewn out all over the little bedroom in the disused servants’ quarters. He was keeping a log of the men’s skull shapes and sizes, and divining their futures accordingly. I wondered if he would ask to measure Sevas’s head again, and the thought made me want to wrap my own fingers around my throat and press down hard until there were stars behind my eyelids.

At last, dusk washed over the sky like a tide slick with spilled oil, starless and complete. I left Sevas in the sitting room with the other men, after more assurances that I would be fine, after more promises that had the taste of warm tap water. I went upstairs to my room.

All of it was how I had left it, the dresses strewn all over the floor, my bed an unmade wreck. The white feather on my boudoir. The charm bracelet glinting under the bed. I dropped to my knees and fished it out, blowing dust off the little owl with pearls for eyes.

I had the bracelet and I had the card and I had the strange, large bone from the sink and I was trying to piece them all together, to turn them into something that I could wield like a blade or barter with like ceramic beads, but before I could make sense of it, I heard the floorboards creak behind me.

Papa pushed the door open just a crack and wriggled through it like he was a knife trying to saw a bit of gristle off a chicken bone. His stomach was still distended, and I thought, I did that. I made him full. Who said my magic was only for showing?

His power was crackling in the air like distant gunshots, but I didn’t yet feel the urge to grovel or kneel. We only stood there in perfect silence for several moments until I said, “Papa, we are short one day laborer.”

He raised a brow. “And what makes you so sure of that?”

“I counted the plates at dinner. There were twenty when there should have been twenty-one.”

My father only made a gruff sound. “Oh, I sent one of the boys on his way after he tried to sneak up to the third floor.”

My heart lurched in two directions, like frogs leaping off the same lily pad. I could have accused him of lying. I could have flashed the card and Mama’s bracelet at him; I could have spit up the secret half-bloomed. Or I could take the opportunity to ask, “What spell did you cast over the door to the third floor?”

“That’s nothing for you to worry over,” Papa said. “Sit down, Marlinchen.”

Another leap of my heart, this one jagged and painful. “Are you going to punish me, Papa?”