There was a scuffling in the garden, and bare branches tapped the window like something asking to be let in. I rose to my feet and peered through the white petals of our flowering pear tree. There was one of our eyeless ravens pecking at an unripe pear, roughly the shape of a fallen tear. There was the goblin scratching at the shed door. And there were two men rattling the gate.
“Papa,” I said as my face blanched with fear, “there’s someone outside.”
“More Rodinyan land surveyors, probably.” My father tore off a chunk of buttered bread, chewed it, and swallowed. “Or missionaries. Ignore them, and they will go away.”
From such a distance, I could not make out the men’s faces, but they did not wear the brown robes of the devout Sons and Daughters, or the red badges of the tsar’s envoys. One of the men saw me looking, and from his pocket he withdrew a satchel, bunched tight with a drawstring. He held it up and shook it. I could see the vague shapes of coins jostling inside.
“They have money,” I said.
Instantly my father lurched from his seat. I wondered if they might be Undine’s clients, so determined to see her that they would offer twice what she usually charged. I knew they weren’t Rose’s—only women came to Rose with such untimely desperation. My father shouldered past me and stared out the window, eyes narrowing.
After a moment, he said, “We’ll let them in.”
“Papa,” I said, panic rising in my throat, “I’m not dressed—”
But he was already walking toward the door, leaving his plate half-eaten. All I could think as I followed him was that a year ago he would have never let a client through our gate on Sunday, no matter how much they begged and pleaded, and would have even shouted at them from our front stoop that if they kept on rattling he’d turn them into spiders.
From the window, I watched my father speak to the men through the locked gate. I hugged my housecoat around myself, excruciatingly aware that my hair was as tangled as a briar patch, curls falling over my face, and that I reeked of cooking oil and onion. To my father’s credit, he did not care what my clients thought of how I looked. If they wanted to see someone beautiful, they would patronize my sisters.
One of the men passed the bag of rubles through the bars. The other one skulked back, hands in his jacket pockets, head down. He had black hair and looked very pale.
The gate unlatched, and the two men followed my father down the garden path. The goblin’s scratching grew furious. I hurried to the door, heart beating as soundly as footsteps on a marble floor. I told myself that whoever it was, at least it was not Dr. Bakay. I would have known his hunched silhouette and his silver hair anywhere.
As the door swung open, my breathing had steadied. My father stood in the threshold with the two men. The older one was blond, with hair that was gelled thickly, as if to compensate for its encroaching thinness, and he had the jaunty look of a carriage horse, eagerness in the flashing of his gray eyes.
The other man was a dour, unsmiling Sevastyan Rezkin. I choked on air.
“Hello,” the jaunty man said. “I’m Ihor Derkach.”
I waited for words to come, but they only gathered brittle and unspoken on my tongue like burnt sugar. My father gave a rattling cough of annoyance, the loose skin of his cheeks flapping, and stepped over the threshold.
“This is my daughter Marlinchen,” Papa said. “As you can see, she is quiet—and discreet. If you value a secret kept, she is the witch for you.”
“Excellent,” said Derkach. “We’d like to get started right away.”
Sevastyan was staring at the ground, but at Derkach’s prodding he looked up. Our eyes met for the briefest moment, but in that time I saw the flicker of recognition, and under it something odder and unexpected: fear. It was gone again before I could puzzle over it.
Perhaps he was afraid of witches. Rodinyans were superstitious. As I watched him walk toward the living room, I almost burst into tears at the terrible absurdity of it all: Sevastyan Rezkin pacing my floorboards, perched on my chaise longue, scarcely four long steps from the kitchen where I hummed wordless songs to myself while I beat eggs for mlyntsi. Had my furtive nighttime desire somehow summoned him here? I dismissed the thought at once. I didn’t have that sort of magic.
No, this was just a confluence of awful luck, and now everything might be ruined.
Papa sat back on the couch and directed Sevastyan toward the armchair. His voice sounded distant and deadened, the way it did when I held my head underwater in the bath.