Juniper & Thorn(77)

I had never asked him such a thing so bluntly before. I had only tried quietly to evade the traps he had laid in the floor, not to squirm against the daggers he pressed to my back. Yet this boldness was not Rose’s or Undine’s; it was mine. It was the boldness of the girl who had danced in a tavern and let a dancer rut between her thighs. Her ghost inhabited me for a moment, and I felt my chest swell.

For a long while Papa did not answer. At last, he said, “I knew you would return to me.”

“Well,” I said, still with too much boldness, “you are a wizard.”

“Not because of that. A father knows his daughter the way a tree knows all its branches, the way a serpent has memorized the pattern of scales on its belly. That is its own sort of magic, the hereditary kind, the kind that can’t be learned or taught.”

But you don’t know me, Papa, I thought. You know the girl who cooks you dinner in dutiful silence. You don’t know the girl who bled out her maidenhead in a room full of mirrors and who felt only a dark, bitter pleasure in remembering your prohibitions against it. I did not have quite the boldness to say it.

There was another stretch of silence.

“Do you know what I thought when you were born?” Papa asked, eyes snapping to me in the dark. “I despaired, in truth, because I had divined that you would not be lovely like your sisters. I didn’t know then what use a plain-faced daughter could be to me. Now I understand. This competition has made it more apparent than ever before. If you eat black plums, Marlinchen, I will never let you taste the poison. If you bathe naked in streams, it will be without ever drawing a hunter’s wanton eye. I will make certain that all the bears you meet are friendly and pliant, and never men in disguise. I will never let you fall prey to the banality of the world. I will never let you fall in love.”

You have failed in that, Papa, I thought, but the words were stuck in my throat.

With one hand, he reached up and cupped my skull, drawing his thumb along the back of my neck, as if he were doing a phrenologist’s reading. I realized that there was something in his other hand, a glass filled to the brim with murky liquid. It was not kvass; we were out of kvass.

“What about Dr. Bakay?” I asked, my heart still racing, the brave girl’s ghost still possessing me. I could take out the card at any moment. I could hurl the charm bracelet at him so hard that it hit his face and hurt.

“What about him? He is a wizard in his own way. I know you are a bit simple-minded, Marlinchen, but can’t you see? That was my spell to keep you safe. In the old days of Oblya, before it was Oblya and it was just a steppe that ran into the sea with nothing to stop it, we had a chieftain who made his own laws. He punished criminals harshly, but he never killed them. If they thieved, he took their hands. If they raped, he had them gelded. For smaller offenses you might only have to part with an ear or an eye or a little finger. None of these men ever broke a law again—it was like teaching your dog the sting of the whip. But best of all, no one would hire these men anymore, and their wives wouldn’t touch them, and their children cringed away when they saw them. They could not walk to buy bread without everyone knowing that they had been spoiled, that they were rotted to their core like bad plums. They could not stand the stares and the slurs, so they stayed in their houses, hidden away from the cruelty of the world.”

His words fell into my belly like sleet on snow, washing away the dinner I’d kept down. I grew cold, too cold for the brave girl’s ghost to inhabit me, and she fled, leaving me alone with myself. Now I felt so hungry, so terribly hungry, as if I hadn’t eaten since my cradle days.

All this time I had blamed the rubles and only the rubles. I had let Papa’s greed absolve him. But he’d wanted more than money after all. Papa had let Dr. Bakay saw off my leg so I could only ever hobble around this house, from the kitchen to the sitting room to my bedroom, like a lame dog. He had tied the tourniquet himself.

A whimper fell out of my mouth. I was seventeen again, and I knew how the doctor’s blade felt against my breast.

And then a fantastic transformation began to take place before me. Where Papa’s face had been, there was now only a skull, flesh and muscle stripped away. In the pits of his eyes were two plum stones. His jaw was fitted with some large creature’s rib bone. In his teeth he held the broker’s card and his hair had turned to white tail feathers. I choked back a scream, and abruptly the terrifying metamorphosis reverted. I was once again looking at a man, a wizard, my father.

It’s not true, I told myself. Papa loves you and he loved Mama and he didn’t mean to turn her into a bird or eat her. He only wanted to keep us safe from the world.

Papa regarded me queerly, as if he could see the tumult in my mind. “Are you thirsty, Marlinchen?”

All of a sudden my throat was parched.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m so thirsty, Papa.”

“Here,” he said, holding up the glass to me. The dark liquid bubbled like a cauldron. “Drink.”

For a moment I thought, with a sluice of panic, that it was the potion he would use to test our purity, but I quickly saw it was not. It was the same black juice I had seen before, left out for me in the kitchen, offered to me by Papa as I limped around him in the sitting room. It had not tasted bitter like the potion; it had tasted sweet.

No moonlight spilled through my window. I was not thinking of Sevas, of the mirror, of the card, of the bracelet, of Sobaka or the missing broker or the man who had been found dead at the theater. I was only thinking of how to slake the terrible thirst. I put the juice to my lips and swallowed.