Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid
Dedication
For Dorit
Epigraph
Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking, “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh
in front of the mirror.
—“Author’s Prayer,” Ilya Kaminsky
Map
Chapter One
I checked under my bed, but the monster was gone. It had been gone since morning, when the pink fingers of dawn flushed it back to its favorite hiding place in Rose’s garden, spiny tail banded around the trunk of the juniper tree. It would lie there, belly-flat and hissing, until I or one of my sisters went to feed it our leftover chicken bones or give it a rub behind the ears. Of all the creatures that lived in our house, it was the most easily sated.
By evening, the garden was lucent with the speckle of fireflies, rustling with the susurration of wind through the willow branches, but otherwise quiet and still. From my bedroom I could see the whole brindled sweep of it, the stout, swollen hedges and the ivy that trawled over the rust-checkered gate. If anyone in Oblya walked down the road past our house, they might feel green tendrils curl around their ankles, or hear the whisper of ferns through the fence. The pedestrians whispered back: rumors about Zmiy Vashchenko and his three strange daughters.
When I was younger, their mean words made me cry. At twenty-three, I learned to close my ears to them, or even to relish them with a resigned, perverse bitterness, closing my fist around the old hurt. After all, the meaner their words, the better their business. The rumors deposited clients at our doorstep like a cat leaving its mangled prey at the feet of its master. The more jagged and gruesome the rumor’s shape, the more our clients gawked at my sisters, as if their beauty were a velvet carpet laid over a hole in the floor, something that might fall out from under them.
My sisters were beautiful without ruse or artifice, which was my curse, really, not my father’s. My father’s curse was never to be satisfied with anything, so to him my sisters were beautiful, but not beautiful enough. He had been cursed by Titka Whiskers, the last true witch in Oblya. My father had done all he could to run her out of business, to make himself the last true wizard in the city, so she’d repaid him the only way a witch knew how. Of course, then he was the last true wizard in the city, and he wasn’t satisfied with that either.
The clock gonged nine. I had heaped old throw pillows and a sack of scrolled autumn leaves under my quilt, molding them to a shape that approximated my sleeping body. Rose had cut a sheaf of dried wheat stalks for my hair, the color slightly too pale, and with none of my real hair’s untended frizz. But if, when, our father rose from his bed and stumbled half-dreaming past my room, I hoped he would not look closely enough to know the difference. The curse, too, meant he could sleep for hours and hours and still wake with the faint itch of exhaustion under his skin.
Outside, the sky darkened in increments, like an obsidian blade lowering over Oblya’s pale throat. The sound of footsteps, quick and light, on the wooden threshold. I turned around. My sister, Undine, stood in the doorway.
“Dear Marlinchen, no one will believe we’re anything but witches if you don’t put a comb through your hair.”
A flush crawled over my cheeks. I left my bed and sat down at my boudoir, scrutinizing my face in the mirror. My sallow cheeks now bore two splotches of red. My hair was a mess of coils that fell as heavy as a quilt over my shoulders.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “It’s too long.”
All of our hair was too long, and far too long for the current fashion, those slim curls like rolled tobacco that the other women in Oblya sported. Our father would not let us cut even an inch. The clients, he said, liked that there was something charmingly rustic about us, our untrimmed hair the relic of an older, simpler time. To them we might be sweet singing milkmaids, torn right out of some wealthy man’s pale pastoral wallpaper. I did not have a dulcet singing voice, but I smiled at our clients as sweetly as I could.
“Rose,” Undine called softly. “Come here and help. Quickly.”
My second sister swept through the threshold in a crinoline gown, her bared shoulders as sharp as kitchen knives. She took in my hair, and Undine’s angrily flared nostrils, and sighed. Our mother’s ivory-handled comb lay on our bureau, a bit of my dark-blond hair snarled in its teeth.
But Rose, being the second sister, was gentler. She began to work through my curls with the comb. The last time anyone had done so was my mother, and that was years ago.
Rose managed to tie up my hair with a ribbon, in some butchered emulation of the Oblyan women’s hair. The pink silk ribbon matched my dress, a crinkled cranberry with a neckline low enough to make me blush. Not that it mattered very much. Pinned between my beautiful sisters, I was little more than a piece of furniture, a particularly elaborate candle stand.