Juniper & Thorn(8)

“No, of course not; don’t be stupid. You aren’t stupid, Marlinchen. I don’t want to eat poisoned plums, even though they wouldn’t kill me. We have a purple plum tree too.”

“Right.” I blinked. “I can make plum preserves.”

“I’ll eat them with mlyntsi.”

My father licked the blade of his knife. I sat across from him, fists curled in my lap, watching the food vanish. Flecks of it were caught in his beard. It was a relic of earlier days, before the Wizards’ Council had been disbanded. Once you were approved for your license from the council you got a new title and some arbitrarily deigned feature that meant you could never hide your status. Titka Whiskers had a cat’s yellow eyes, and lids that closed vertically, like pulling a long drape over a window. My father had a beard of deep indigo. He kept it long because it hid the paunch of his cheeks, which were sagging and distended from the early days of his curse: when he’d cram his face full of cheese wheels and stale bread loaves, thinking he could sate that depthless hunger.

Now it fell to me to keep my father fed. But no matter how much he ate, his belly still ached at the end of it. And nothing could stave off his gauntness either—his wrist bones pushed up against his skin like air bubbles in cake batter. Thinking of it made me feel so terribly sad that my own belly growled in sympathy. I would eat the rest of the black bread and cabbage when my father was done.

While my father ate, green-hued light trickled in from the garden, sieved through the meshwork of leaves and branches. Sundays were my favorite days, when the house was quiet and empty, only my sisters and me doing our work in silence, and no clients at the door. Not that they had been much of a nuisance recently. Our stream of visitors had been dwindling as of late, so much that even I had noticed, and Rose and Undine whispered about it, but none of us dared to broach the subject with our father. After what he had done to earn our monopoly on witchcraft in Oblya, it seemed cruel to suggest that his sacrifice was perhaps beginning to wear thin.

I told myself not to worry about it. My sisters were cleverer and more beautiful than me, and Papa was a canny businessman. They would come up with a way to restore our clients to us.

If the Wizards’ Council still existed, Undine would have been officially called a water witch, though she was not a very good one. She could see the future by staring into her scrying pool, or into the polished backs of our silver dishes. (Of course, Rose and I liked to joke, Undine’s divination involved gazing endlessly at her own reflection). Her predictions were as muddled as stagnant pond water, but she had more clients than Rose and me put together, even now. While Undine stared and stared into her scrying pool, her clients stared and stared at her.

They never touched her, though. She was like a winter’s first snow, and no one wanted to be responsible for spoiling her ivory perfection.

I couldn’t blame Undine too much. In all the stories the eldest sisters were wicked, and Undine was still less wicked than most. It was only her birthright to cruelly lord her beauty over me.

Rose would have been called an herbalist, and her magic was good. She made healing poultices that worked better for wounds than leeches or bloodletting, and she could even cobble together mixtures of herbs that made you dizzy with joy for an hour, or, if slipped into an enemy’s soup, would make him mad enough to tear his hair out until the poison abated.

She charged fat handfuls of rubles for those, and only gave them to customers she could trust, usually fretful women with pinch-faced husbands. Rose was beautiful, too, with her long black hair that turned iridescent in the sunlight, and her deep violet eyes. But she was usually covered in dirt and smelling of wormwood or catmint, and always carried with her a pair of gardening shears, their blades flashing at her hip. So the men didn’t dare to touch her either.

There was a scuffling in the garden, and bare branches tapped the window like something asking to be let in. I rose to my feet and peered through the white petals of our flowering pear tree. There was one of our eyeless ravens pecking at an unripe pear, roughly the shape of a fallen tear. There was the goblin scratching at the shed door. And there were two men rattling the gate.

“Papa,” I said as my face blanched with fear, “there’s someone outside.”

“More Rodinyan land surveyors, probably.” My father tore off a chunk of buttered bread, chewed it, and swallowed. “Or missionaries. Ignore them, and they will go away.”

From such a distance, I could not make out the men’s faces, but they did not wear the brown robes of the devout Sons and Daughters, or the red badges of the tsar’s envoys. One of the men saw me looking, and from his pocket he withdrew a satchel, bunched tight with a drawstring. He held it up and shook it. I could see the vague shapes of coins jostling inside.

“They have money,” I said.

Instantly my father lurched from his seat. I wondered if they might be Undine’s clients, so determined to see her that they would offer twice what she usually charged. I knew they weren’t Rose’s—only women came to Rose with such untimely desperation. My father shouldered past me and stared out the window, eyes narrowing.

After a moment, he said, “We’ll let them in.”

“Papa,” I said, panic rising in my throat, “I’m not dressed—”

But he was already walking toward the door, leaving his plate half-eaten. All I could think as I followed him was that a year ago he would have never let a client through our gate on Sunday, no matter how much they begged and pleaded, and would have even shouted at them from our front stoop that if they kept on rattling he’d turn them into spiders.