Juniper & Thorn(97)
There were, of course, the nights where I needed to feel him brace his arms around me and he recoiled at even the brush of my fingers, but still, somewhere in the black space of those conflicting desires, we found each other.
Autumn froze over into winter, and winter cracked open into spring.
Neither of us returned to the ballet theater; nor did we ever venture too far down Rybakov Street. Sometimes I heard whispers in the coffeehouses: that Rodinya’s most famous principal dancer had quit at the peak of his career and now the theater was broke and scrambling; that the wizard on Rybakov Street had died and now his manor home and garden were being turned into an orphanage or an infirmary. Sometimes they even whispered about his witch-daughter—how brave and strong she was! I clenched my fist around the edge of the table and the wound on my knuckle was so old now that it didn’t bleed.
Sevas met Aleksei for tea and they laughed at their shared memories of Kovalchyk, of Taisia, even of Derkach, on good days. On bad days his face shuttered at the very mention of the ballet theater, or when he spied a head of meticulously gelled blond hair. The mangle of calluses on his heels turned soft, and his feet began to resemble those of a normal man.
When he entered me, I did not think of Ivan. As he spent, Sevas whispered Marlinchen, Marlinchen, Marlinchen into my hair.
The most banal thing of all was this: my father lived.
When Sevas had stabbed him that day in the foyer, the knife had propitiously missed every single one of his major Organs and arteries. Luck, the doctor who was not Dr. Bakay said. To myself, I said: perhaps a bit of lingering magic.
If this had been Old World Oblya, when it was ruled by chieftains and the steppe fell into the sea with nothing to stop it, he would have perhaps been executed for his monstrous crimes, or at least been relieved of a hand or an eye. But since this was gridiron Oblya, municipally planed Oblya, and the tsar and the gradonalchik were both seething to prove that we were as progressive and metropolitan as the cities in the West, no longer did they summarily hang criminals.
There was a trial that stretched out for weeks and then months, as spring was swallowed up by summer. I took the stand and so did Sevas, and so did the Grand Inspector, and so did Rose, though I was careful to never meet her eyes. All the while Papa sat there in chains, pressed between his two Yehuli lawyers.
On the day of his sentencing, there was a terrific thunderstorm that broke the sky like it was an overlarge ostrich egg, rainwater spilling out of it like a yolk. It rinsed all the garbage into the sewers and washed the cobblestones clean. Carriage horses flicked droplets of water from their ears. Couples ran to take cover under grocery-store awnings. Brokers from the stock exchange waited out the storm miserably from beneath their enormous black umbrellas. I watched the courtroom window turn marbled with rainwater, as if it were a puddle of oil catching the light.
In the end, they sentenced Papa to prison for the remainder of his life. Already the trial had taken its toll on my father; when I went to visit his holding cell beneath the courthouse, his skin was mottled and gray like cream gone bad and his beard was grown as long as the untamed ivy that had once crawled over our house. There were flecks of silver in it, where time had begun to eat away the Wizards’ Council’s enchanted blue.
His eyes did not snap like a hawk’s but wavered dully, like a dog in its kennel. He looked skinnier than I had seen him since the earliest days of his curse.
When I came over and leaned up against the bars of his cell, he did not rise from his seat. There was a tray of untouched food on the small table beside him.
“Papa,” I said. “Won’t you eat?”
“Do you think I care to taste even a bite of this slop? They are feeding me the same kasha that they feed the other prisoners, kasha with no butter. They give us only water and not kvass. And we get beef stew and borscht instead of pork varenyky. Why should I eat?”
“So that you do not die,” I said.
He scoffed. “I would think you wished me dead, sweet Marlinchen. You fed me poisoned berries, and your Yehuli lover stabbed me in the belly.”
“You fed me those same berries. And your doctor friend took from my breast like a serpent.” I curled my fingers around the bars, knuckles whitening, that old wound stinging. “Do you really think you are innocent of it all? That there was no blood spilled through your orchestration?”
My question was a hole in the floor, Papa hovering above the spiked pit below. His teeth came together with a sound like coins rattling in a can.
“What do I care for these city laws, made by mortal men?” he said at last. “Whether I am guilty or innocent by their determination, it does not matter to me. I am the great wizard Zmiy Vashchenko. Even the laws of sorcery bend to me. You were always so small-minded, Marlinchen. Can you not imagine a world beyond this city?”
“I can,” I said. “I do.”
Papa scoffed again. “How is it that the ugliest and most simple of my daughters orchestrated my demise? I would loathe this cage less if it had been your clever or beautiful sisters who had put me in it.”
“You made a bad mistake, Papa,” I replied, sighing. “You put too much of yourself in me. Those little bits whispered the truth. My bones hummed with it and my blood sang with it. If we had been less the same, I might never have known. But now we both remember the taste of hearts and livers.”
Those were the worst nights: when I woke from dreams of dying men and frantically checked my belly and breasts for the spreading of black scales. Sevas held me then, and kissed my fingers, reassuring me of their blunted ends.