Juniper & Thorn(78)
I woke the next morning with a spectacular headache, the sun laying ribbons of light across my eyes. I blinked dust from my lashes and sat up, which made everything in my stomach jostle like an overstuffed jewelry box.
My conversation with Papa seemed as hazy and half-remembered as a dream. Perhaps that was all it had been. I was lying here in bed, the softest place I had ever lain, and my body remembered the comfort and curled into the memory like a crab into its conch.
But then the grandfather clock gonged six, and my wheel fell into its groove. I stood and drew on my housecoat and went downstairs. Everything was still and silent. The men were asleep in the sitting room, draped over furniture, as if someone had strewn out a basket of laundry. Sevas was lying near the chaise longue, head resting on his own bent arms. He looked beautiful and peaceful.
I did not want to risk waking them as I made my way into the kitchen, so instead I opened the front door and stepped into the garden. It was pleasantly cool, autumn just starting to light up the foliage like a brushfire, greens making their transformations into yellow and orange and maroon. The sky was the tender, throbbing blue of a frostbitten finger. My head badly hurt.
Something made me want to pick down the rest of the plums before they rotted. Perhaps I could make kvass out of them. Perhaps it would please Papa. The garden was oddly silent, the eyeless ravens still dozing on their branches, the goblin nowhere to be found.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something black gleam in the wheat grass. At first I thought it was a dropped ribbon, but when the clouds rinsed away and the sun beamed through the trees at a perfect angle, it looked like a tongue of flame. The fiery serpent. I blinked again, and it was gone.
The plum tree was behind the shed, past Rose’s herb plantings, and half-ensconced in a ring of vividly blue sage flowers that grew nearly waist-high. When the sunlight glanced off them they were as bright as live wires. I trampled through them, gathering burrs in my nightgown, but stopped only when I heard a strange panting sound.
Short, sharp breaths that cut the air like thousands of little thrown darts. I thought for a moment that it must be a trick, that it was only the wind trapped in some small space, and with each gust trying to escape. But then I heard a labored grunting noise, and followed it around the back of the shed, as if in a trance.
Undine was on her knees in the dirt, blue dress rucked up over her bottom, her hair spilling over the ground like a slow pour of honey wine. She was gasping and gasping, her cheeks splendidly pink, and one of her breasts loosed from her corset so that it swung with the heaviness of a pendulum. Her nipple brushed the ground. Indrik was crouched behind her, his hands braced on her hips, rutting. His goat’s fur was all mussed and his tail was flapping with every thrust.
It was not even the mere fact of it that shocked me, but the violence—he ground himself into my sister with determined fervor, but absolutely no warmth. There was none of the aching gentleness I had felt when Sevas moved inside of me. It felt like hours that I stood there, watching, but it could not have been longer than a few moments before Undine saw me and screamed and Indrik pulled out of her and stumbled back, still hard and glistening.
“You idiot!” Undine screeched, rising to her feet. Her skirts tumbled back over her bottom but her breast was still hanging over the top of her corset, and it flopped with her every movement. “What are you doing out here?”
“I wanted to pick the plums.” My voice sounded so obscure and distant, it was as if it belonged to someone else. My sister was staring at me with such venom in her eyes that I went on in a rush, “Undine, I swear, I won’t tell Papa—”
She laughed, a high and keen sound that startled the eyeless ravens from their perch. “Tell Papa if you wish, or don’t. It matters little to me. He’s a fool. It’s been seven years since his daughter has been coupling with a monster in his own garden and he never lifted his head from his plate long enough to notice.”
My mouth was hanging open like a dead carp’s. Her words landed on me, but they left no mark; I couldn’t understand.
Indrik huffed with indignation, but I was surprised that he did not contest Undine’s description of him as a monster. Whatever Indrik liked to boast, the gods in Papa’s codex did not couple like this with mortal women; they did not even couple like this with witches. They turned to swans and left their flushing consorts with three eggs in a wicker basket; they transformed into showers of golden light and spilled themselves onto maidens trapped in towers. It was never anything so brute, so rough, so mundanely human.
The ache in my head sharpened to a blinding white pain behind my eyes, and only when it cleared again was I able to say, “But Papa’s potions . . .”
Undine made a hacking noise in the back of her throat, and then spat in the dirt in front of me. “You are so much more simple-minded than I ever imagined, Marlinchen. Do you really think that Papa’s potions have any real magic at all? He’s not even an herbalist! You must not even know that Rose takes her clients to the garden shed or the storeroom and does the same with them, all those women that come to her with desperation in their eyes. But of course Papa’s stupidest magic worked on you anyway—he convinced you that it was real. Did you fall asleep at night worrying that one of us might cough up our livers?”
She laughed again, loudly and terribly. “Of course, you would never worry such a thing about yourself! Plain-faced, kindhearted Marlinchen would never dream of defying dear Papa, nor would she ever catch a man or woman’s lustful eye.”