Juniper & Thorn(86)

My stomach dipped, and I nearly bent to his magic then, to the thunderous power of his words and the spells that hovered around my head.

“Two men dead by the boardwalk,” I said, choosing my words carefully, so that each one would land with a shuddering heaviness. “Another in the ballet theater. A broker from one of the big firms; I read it in the paper. I found his card in your laundry. And you know that one of our own men has gone missing. You thought Oblya wouldn’t miss just another dull-eyed day laborer. But there is something bad in Oblya and you know it. It is an Old World badness, nothing that was brought here on merchant ships or freight trains.”

“What are you saying to me, Marlinchen?”

The unflappable power in his voice had me reeling, and the question knotted up my tongue like the sash of a dress. Sevas had been right; there was nothing to gain from this, only a thousand new pits to avoid and a dozen more daggers at my back. Only the same risk there had always been: that Papa might find a new way to chain me to this house. To him.

But my tired mind tried anyway: through the haze of his spells, I squinted and squinted at my father. I tried to constellate his face like a cluster of random stars; I tried to find love in his eyes, like some dark water seething under ice. I tried to call him Papa, but my lips would not form the word. All I could see was a flurry of white feathers, and then Dr. Bakay smiling back at me from within the swirling murk of my father’s face.

In the end the force of the vision was what toppled me to my knees, not obeisance. When I did manage to speak again, it was in a desperate and tremulous whisper. “I don’t want it to be true. Please, make it not true. Take it all back. Say you take it all back. Say that none of it was you.”

And then, astonishingly, Papa knelt beside me. He cupped his hands around my cheeks. He looked at me with something I could believe was love, if I didn’t know the curse had stripped that from him like so many steppes had been stripped for new roads and factories.

“Marlinchen,” he said, so gently. “If you want me to tell you a story, then I will. You need only ask. I will tell you a beginning and a middle and an end. I will tell you that your mother flew off to live on a lovely green island in the middle of the sea, where there is always rose nectar to sip. I will tell you that it was some hideous creature that killed your sister, be it monster or man. That little I can do for you.”

“No.” I shook my head, even as he held my cheeks fast. “I don’t want a story. I—I don’t understand.”

Papa sighed, with exasperation and a bit of affection, whatever the curse still afforded him. “I think you do want a tale, Marlinchen. Especially because in this story, you loved your sister. You would never do her harm. And you love your father too. You would swallow any poison so that he didn’t have to.”

“Stop it,” I whispered. We were so close that my breath touched his lips. “Please.”

“You wanted a story, didn’t you? I am simply telling it. I do not think you would prefer the truth—it is ugly and mundane, and stories are safe and sweet.”

I tore myself away from him, a sob wrenching out of my throat. Could you ever escape the story of your own life? Sevas would battle the Dragon-Tsar and kiss the tsarevna, and I would walk the same path from my father’s chamber to the kitchen to my bedroom, like the gears turning behind the face of a grandfather clock, both of us following our fated rotations. And what was a story except a berry you ate over and over again, until your lips and tongue were red and every word you spoke was poison?

I got to my feet and lurched toward the door, but Papa didn’t give chase. I had almost wanted him to. I had almost wanted to see him grasp for my nightgown, tear through the silk with his claws, give me cause to fear him further and believe that what I had told Sevas was true.

I made it halfway down the hall before something began to drag like a sodden dress, slowing me down. Papa’s words were heavy, so unbearably heavy, that I knew I could not bear the weight of them for long. At the top of the second-floor landing, I looked over the foyer, the open door to the sitting room, the cat-lamps and cat-vases and the water-stained portraits of long-dead wizards named Vashchenko. There was nothing in this house that was not part of Papa’s story, that he hadn’t written to please himself. Nothing that I could rely on to speak the truth. Except—

The bolt of knowledge propelled me down the stairs, heart guttering, and sent me racing down the hallway through the disused servants’ quarters, so that I did not risk running into Sevas. I was too buoyant with adrenaline to fear even Dr. Bakay.

I shoved open the door to the garden, gulping cold night air. The moonlight washed pale all of our briars and overgrown weeds, the ivy that crawled up the side of the house with a desperate perseverance. The lavender thistle grass looked white. My eyes searched for something dark weaving through its blanched stalks, something that I shouldn’t be able to see.

So of course I saw it then, so utterly black that it looked like the absence of a thing, just an empty gash in the world. Our fiery serpent. I crept up to it, silk nightgown swishing around my bare legs, as if I might startle it away.

But it didn’t flee, only lifted its head and cocked it toward me. I knelt before it, sinking a bit into the wet soil, and said, “I want—”

It spoke in a human voice, without moving its mouth, and the voice seemed to enter my head as if my own mind were conjuring the words. Be careful what you say aloud, third daughter. Whatever you ask for I am bound to provide, and you are bound to pay for it.