Juniper & Thorn(83)
The man did not say as much, but it was clear in his eyes, in the way his gaze dropped to the ground and he began to back up slowly, toward the open gate. In another moment, the rest of the men followed.
I stood there in the grass, watching my sister’s body go pale and stiff. Papa marched after the men with more vigor than I had ever witnessed before, shoving through the throng until he was blocking their way through the gate.
“Aw, come on, sir,” the freckle-faced man said. “There are fifteen of us, and only one of you.”
Not fifteen, I thought. Fourteen. One less than had entered.
But the man had made more than just a mistake in his arithmetic. Papa threw his shoulders back, and then his magic loosed like a thousand poisoned darts. It spread like a front of cold blown off the frigid Half-Sea. And then, as the men started to press past him, the bars of the fence turned into hissing, spitting black vipers.
The men all leapt back, scrabbling over one another as the snakes lunged and snapped at them. When they had all fallen down fleeing, or cowered behind the flowering pear tree, Papa closed his magic back up in his fist and the snakes ceased their hissing.
They went still and taut, but his transformations only worked in a singular direction. Our fence would never be a fence again. From now on it would be a latticework of black snakes, standing at fixed attention and suspended in the air, but spitting and lunging at anyone who drew too close.
One of the men started crying. Papa gave a loud and exuberant laugh.
“Fifteen of you, yes,” he said. “But there is just one wizard Zmiy Vashchenko. I am the only wizard left in Oblya, and I have the strength and power of all the dozens that I ate before their downfall. If you break your vow to me, I will eat you too.”
And then he was gone, brushing past Undine’s cold body, but his magic lingered in the air like choking black smoke.
We buried Undine right there at the base of the juniper tree, and all I could think of was how I had swept up Mama’s tiny bird bones and put them out with the trash. Rose cried while she dug, watering the earth where we planted our sister’s body, and Sevas and I mostly watched as the wind bristled through our hair, his jacket, the ripped-up hem of my nightgown.
Indrik watched from behind the huge begonia plant, and I thought he might come and eulogize her, or promise vengeance by his divine magic, but he only cried, too, like a man and not a goat. I did not know if goats could weep. The goblin certainly could, but he was nowhere to be found, and still the eyeless ravens were silent.
I had never thought much about how my sisters and I would die, and so it had never occurred to me that Undine, the most beautiful of us three, would have such a poorly attended funeral. Even the day laborers who had slavered over her, both alive and in death, now cached themselves in the shed or under the plum tree; some of them tried to bait the snakes and got bitten for it.
Now that the lurid obscenity of her death had receded, now that her blood had dried to the color of rust and her body had begun the slow and humiliatingly mortal process of decomposition, they were not interested in watching. Witches died just like regular women, or at least they could. That was something I learned by watching my sister’s lips drain of their color.
When it was done, Rose stood up. Her hands were caked in dirt. She came to me, without speaking, to embrace of course, but for some reason I anticipated being struck and flinched away from her. Hurt flashed in her violet eyes.
“It’s not my fault,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“What are you talking about?”
My mouth opened, and all the swallowed poison spilled out. I told her and Sevas everything: how I had revealed my secret to Undine in a fit of spite, how she had threatened to turn it over to Papa, how Sevas had only come back because of Derkach, how we had planned to come and steal Mama’s mirror. Sevas took Mama’s compact, still gritty with the black sand, out of his pocket and showed it to her. It seemed like such a stupid trinket now, this thing I had guarded so jealously for so long, the thing I had imbued with wishful, powerful magic.
I wanted to tell her about the rib bone too. About Sobaka. About the man in the theater with his missing heart and liver, but my voice curdled up in my throat like something at risk of rot.
“Marlinchen, you could not have done this,” Rose said when I was finished, when I was trembling and gasping with the strain of all I had confessed. “Your magic doesn’t work like that. You can’t make a spell out of just a mean thought. If you could, don’t you think we would all have been able to turn Papa into a roach or a toad by now? You being angry at Undine didn’t make her die. Your magic is just for showing; it’s not for doing or changing or making.”
But wasn’t it? I had wished for Ivan, one who would not care that I was plain of face, and he had come. I had buried my secret, spilled blood to keep it, and it had hatched like an egg, full of hope and promise. I looked at the dried blood under my nails, at the worried wound on my knuckle. Words rose in me, but I did not want to upset my sister further, so I let them drift back down again.
“What is it that killed her, then?” I asked instead. “A real monster?”
“Of course not,” said Rose. Her voice was sharp and quick and left no room for argument. “It must have been one of the men; perhaps she refused their advances. I will make a truth elixir tonight and sneak it into their soup and the culprit will reveal himself. But Marlinchen, is there any other tonic or elixir you need from me?”