Juniper & Thorn(98)
“They taste better than anything,” Papa whispered, at last rising from his seat. He came up so close to me that our noses nearly touched through the bars and I could smell the acid and bile of nothing eaten for days on his breath. “Better than sour-cherry kvass and pork varenyky, better than a whole raw chicken and its crunching little bones. Better than the meat of your bird-mother. They were the only things that came close to sating the hunger, the hearts and livers of men. Would you deny me this one small relief? Would you let the curse swallow me whole?”
“It has already,” I told him, very gently, and then took my leave. There was no use telling him of my awful dreams, or about how sometimes the rage in my belly reached its boiling point and I could release it only through my mouth, and I pressed my face into my pillow and screamed and screamed, even though it made the goblin weep. Papa’s magic was good, as good as Titka Whiskers’s had been, and it would outlast our proximity. Perhaps it would outlast even his death. As I went toward the door, Papa rattled the bars of his cell, spittle flying.
“They will not keep me here!” he shouted. “I will turn these bars into a spewing of black snakes and they will poison every single one of the guards and barristers, and then I will eat their hearts and livers with sweet wine. I will curse every single one of the day laborers who worked to tear down my house, so that they wake up with chicken feet or yellow bills, like magpies. I will transform you and your sister into hags.”
His words grasped at the strands of my newly trimmed hair, but I was up the stairs and out of the building before my heart could flutter with the urge to turn back. After the thunderstorm, the sun was exceptionally bright. I had to put up my hand to shield my eyes as I walked along Kanatchikov Street; all around me the rainwater dripping off awnings had turned golden, like honey.
I could have hired a carriage, but I decided to go on foot, nodding bracingly at the women as they bemoaned their ruined gowns and ruined hair, stepping aside to let the tardy stockbrokers hustle past. There were day laborers playing cards in an alley, their laughter carrying down to the road. Carriage horses shook out their damp manes and clopped cheerfully on. In the distance, the sea was just a stripe of glistening color, like a knife of light.
Sevas was waiting for me at the boardwalk, leaning against the railing and looking out at the endless spreading water. I could easily imagine him as a ship’s captain then, bold and dashing and weather-eyed, as he smiled his beautiful, crooked smile.
“I hope,” he said, “that the sky has exhausted all its rain for a very, very long time.”
Our trunks were propped up on the ground around him, and the goblin was sitting on the largest one, rubbing miserably at its one big eye. I knelt down beside it and said, “There are still marshes and lovely bogs for you to live in, but they are far away from here.”
The goblin sniffled. I stood up again and Sevas said, “Anyway, the weather will be different in Askoldir.”
“How different?”
He arched a brow. “You will have to learn to love the snow. Even most in Askoldir do not. But they have great fun grousing about it, the way aunts and grandmothers love to commiserate over the same hated relative.”
“What if your mother hates me?”
“She won’t,” Sevas said. “She only hates my third great-aunt, and parsnips, and her landlord, and the woman down the hall who sings to her cat, and . . .”
He trailed off, and I laughed, and the sound warmed me all over, as if I’d dipped into one of the heated baths at the sanatorium.
There was a clock mounted on the wall of the nearby bank and it said that we were nearly at risk of missing our train. So I leaned down and scooped up the goblin, swaddled it in a blanket, and held it to my breast. If one of the ticket attendants saw me, they would think I was only a mother with her child.
Sevas grasped our trunks, one in each hand, and started to walk toward the train station. Two gulls on the boardwalk pecked at some one’s spilled kumys. A cargo ship released itself from the dock, horn sounding out deafeningly across the blue-white ocean. The sailors onboard clambered to their posts, and I imagined that they were all as thrilled and terrified as I was, to be going somewhere new.
I paused suddenly, the goblin holding in its small fist a loose clump of my hair.
Sevas stopped, too, and turned around. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, righting myself and pulling my hair free of the goblin’s grasp. “I’m thinking of what Askoldir will look like, all covered in snow.”
“Very beautiful,” he said. “Like you. Come on now, Marlinchen.”
I followed him into the train station, which arced over us like the rib cage and vertebrae of some extraordinarily large creature soldered from iron. I imagined that with every train that left, the creature was amputating one of its finger bones, a little piece it wouldn’t miss until the train came back again. I quite liked the thought of that, and resolved to tell Sevas about it as soon as we were in our seats, my head resting on his shoulder and the goblin scurrying at our feet, both of us watching the steppe unfold on either side of the train, the yellow summer grasses resembling parchment that hasn’t yet been spoiled with ink.
Acknowledgments
Thank you first and foremost to my agent, Sarah Landis, who believed in this book even when I didn’t, and who coaxed me back from the ledge all the many, many times I felt like giving up. This book would not exist if not for you.