Juniper & Thorn(87)

“I know,” I said. I had heard Papa’s stories, but it was not silken handkerchiefs or ceramic beads that I desired. “I want the truth.”

You know the truth, Ms. Vashchenko. What you want is the courage to believe it.

My head started to pound again, that ice-white ache teeming up behind my eyelids. “Then give me that. I will pay whatever price.”

The serpent’s black tongue flicked out of its mouth. I’ve been so hungry for so long. If you feed me, I can give you the thing your heart desires.

Without hesitation I stripped off my housecoat and pulled my nightgown over my head. There were two slashes cut into the back of it, right where the blades of my shoulders were; I had not noticed them before.

My nipples knotted with cold. I knelt there in the dark garden, naked and shivering, and the serpent began to slither up my thigh. The scales on its belly were smooth as river stones. It circled my breast the way I imagined it would curl itself around a mouse it meant to eat. And then it latched itself onto my nipple.

The bite of pain was sharp and brief, like the prick of a needle. I could feel the leak of blood, too, as if some faucet in me had been turned, and that was worse than the pain itself, the sensation of unbidden release.

A whimper came out of my mouth, and then the fiery serpent’s voice once again crowded my mind. Go to the third floor, young maiden. The door will open for you.

I rose to my feet a bit unsteadily, the serpent still curled around my breast, and walked back toward the house with the bone-deep purpose of a dog following a scent.



I scarcely had to touch the door to the third-floor stairwell before it swung open, old wood groaning. If Papa really had put some sort of enchantment over it, I passed through it easily, like it was no more than a veil of cobwebs.

The stairwell was dark, but I felt along the wall with one hand, and the serpent’s voice in my mind was a better guide than any candlestick might have been. Two more steps to the top. There’s a loose floorboard here; be careful not to trip. You’re so close, Marlinchen.

I paused to catch my breath, and farther down the hall there was a square of white light gridded across the floor, cut in two pieces by the shadow of an open door. The serpent did not need to tell me to go toward it.

The last time I had been to the third floor, my mother was a bird in her cage. The ten years that had passed in between then and now piled on me like snow; I felt both ancient as a crone and young as a child, before my breasts had budded. I felt both like the girl who had tended so fastidiously to her bird-mother and also like the girl who had eaten her. I felt both like a witch of indeterminate power and like a mortal woman who danced in taverns and bled between her legs.

I stopped in the threshold and stared at my naked silhouette in the moonlight. Right there before me was my mother’s cage, golden door flung open, and the mirror that never lies, with the white sheet laid over it. The fiery serpent let go of my nipple and slithered up to my shoulder, where it curled around my neck like a string of pearls. A few beads of blood gathered in the small wounds that its teeth had left.

I had not heard anyone come up behind me until Sevas’s voice drifted into my ear. He was standing beside me in the threshold, our breath mingling in white clouds. “Marlinchen, what are you doing here?”

“How did you find me?”

“I followed you. The door was open.” He did not mention the snake, but his gaze went up and down my naked body with some amalgam of desperate yearning and bewildered fear. “What did your father do?”

I was already crossing the room, past my mother’s empty cage, standing before the white sheet and what was hidden beneath it. “This is the mirror that never lies. The only thing in this house that will tell the truth instead of a tale, even if you don’t like what it is that you see.” I paused, the snake’s head coming to rest in the hollow of my throat. “Stand here with me and look.”

Sevas shook his head, smiling thinly. “I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid that I’ll be ugly,” he said, no longer smiling at all.

My own heart filled up with tender affection. “That’s impossible.”

He sighed, then crossed the room to join me. His shoulders were tensed the way they were when he played Ivan, when he prepared to slay the Dragon-Tsar. They were tensed as if he still wore his feathered mantle. I wondered if that was what he was truly afraid of: seeing Ivan staring back at him.

Exhaling a breath of my own, I took his hand and twined our fingers. Then, with my other hand, I reached for the white sheet that covered the mirror.

I was scared, too, as scared as a little girl who saw horned silhouettes painted against her bedroom wall at night, as scared as a young woman who heard men asking after her while she cowered under her covers. But some transformation had happened inside of me, where no one could see.

I yanked the sheet off with a flourish, letting it puddle to the ground, as bodiless as a dress flung off the clothesline. Sevas’s grip on my hand tightened, and I heard him stammer out my name.

In the mirror, I watched my own shuddering metamorphosis as my reflection warped and cringed and bloomed, all in the span of seconds. I watched black scales pattern my naked belly and cover my bitten breasts. I watched my lips part, redder than red, my forked tongue lashing over rows of blade-sharp teeth. I watched the truth unfold before me, just like the wings that spread from my back.