Juniper & Thorn(85)

Still, he did not flinch, and I could have laughed for how grateful I was. I had expected the words to sound like lunacy when I spoke them aloud, but Sevas’s steady look made them seem more solid and real, the way egg whites stiffened up when you whipped them, taking on some strange new shape.

It was terrifying how quick and facile the transformation was. The ground did not roll out from under my feet; the sky did not crumble and come raining down in deep blue shards on my head. It was only this: one moment ago Papa had only been my father, the great wizard Zmiy Vashchenko, and now he was a monster with men’s livers lining his belly.

“He’ll want to eat you now,” I went on in a rush, before Sevas could speak. “That was his reason for this competition, and the reason he welcomed you so warmly into our home.”

“There must be some way to stop him,” said Sevas, but I was already shaking my head. “Some spell, some enchantment—a potion of your sister’s, perhaps? I know your magic is good, Marlinchen.”

But there was no way for whatever little power I had to match Papa’s, and he would turn Sevas into a fish or a frog if I even threatened to try. The stories in Papa’s codex that spoke of great wizards always assured they had weaknesses of some kind. Their soul hidden inside the head of a needle, or their heart guarded in the nest of a firebird. There were wizards who could be burned or frozen; wizards who could be slain by errant knights. Even the Dragon-Tsar fell to Ivan’s blade.

But if Papa had any weakness, it was not the stuff of fairy tales.

“He’s afraid of the Grand Inspector,” I said. “He’s warned us about him and his men ever since we were children, told my sisters and me how he could ruin us. I swear he even shuddered when Derkach spoke his name. If Derkach does intend to bring the Grand Inspector here, perhaps it will be enough. But how will they get past the snakes? And what will we do after?”

“Snakes can be killed,” Sevas said. “They are mortal, aren’t they? And once your father is in chains, we can take the mirror and sell it.”

My mind blinkered suddenly, as if someone had shined at me a beam of bright white light. I could not fathom Papa in chains. It was impossible as any dream I’d had as a child, the dream that I might toss my long braid from my bedroom window and a handsome prince might clamber up it, the dream that a man named Ivan would love me so much he would let me eat him. My empty stomach turned over on itself, and very abruptly I thought I might retch again.

“I have to speak with him first,” I managed. “I have to ask him—I need to hear him speak the truth himself.”

“Marlinchen, he is a monster. He’ll kill you.”

I shook my head, blood rushing in a furious torrent around my ears. “He won’t. I’m of greater use to him alive. The worst he will do is hobble me further.”

“I don’t want you hobbled at all.” Sevas’s voice tipped up at the end; I did not think I had ever heard him sound quite so frayed, quite so close to snapping like a worn thread. He had seen Derkach today, after all, and I had just told him that he was living in the house of a man who wanted to eat him. “What happens when you hold up a mirror to a monster? In my experience, nothing enrages them more than the truth.”

But I had made up my mind. “Papa wouldn’t kill me. Who would fix his meals and clean his clothes and sweep his sitting room, if I were gone? Who would ease the burden of his curse?”

“You blame his curse for too much.”

A heat rose in my cheeks. “Who says so?”

“I do,” Sevas replied. “And if you say you must go, I cannot stop you. But please, Marlinchen—come back. Come back to me.”

“I will,” I said. I kissed him there in the garden, the sky bottomlessly dark. I closed my eyes, and when I did I imagined myself a snow-maiden, a swan, something out of a story, something that was so unreal it could not be harmed. “I promise.”



I floated up to Papa’s room as if I had wings. I knocked on the door.

Papa’s voice sounded from the other side, thick with arrested sleep. How had he slept after slaying his daughter? Strange men were one thing, but Undine was his own blood. It made my skin chill to think, my brow dewing with sweat as I pushed open the door and stepped through the threshold.

Papa was swaddled up to his chin in blankets, the swell of his stomach visible beneath them. His magic suffused the air, thick as the smoke that blew from the Merzani coffeehouses on the boardwalk, and my eyes burned with it.

My legs quivered under me, but somehow I resisted the urge to drop to my knees. If I lowed myself to him now, he could kill me just with gentleness.

“I’m tired, Marlinchen,” Papa said. “I’ve just seen my daughter buried. Why must you disturb my rest?”

The empty space in the bed beside him was where I always imagined Mama’s ghost, if she were real, the sheets rumpling with the shape of her though she was otherwise invisible to the eye. I thought of how soberly Papa had served up the varenyky that night when I was thirteen, when I was freshly mourning my bird-mother. How could I have not known sooner? How had I cut that memory at the root so it couldn’t grow its long black tendrils in my mind?

“Please, Papa,” I whispered. “Speak frankly. Do you know how Undine died?”

Papa pushed himself up with a grunt and threw the covers off. When he spoke it was with no timidity, no hesitation, but as a king delivering a proclamation, as a lord announcing the new tithe to the serfs who work his land. “The doctor said she was killed by a monster. Rose believes it was a man. But what does it matter to me? My daughter is gone. It is a spell that cannot be undone, and certainly not by your cringing and weeping.”