It hurt badly, to even linger on the thought. I was glad when my middle sister took her leave. I was afraid that my anger might kill her, the way it had Undine. I had considered such a thing before: that if there was magic in keeping a secret, surely there was magic in spending one too. My magic might only have been for showing, but it was magic.
When Rose was gone, I turned finally to Sevas, hoping that the flush had faded from my cheeks. I drew a breath and a long silence stretched between us, broken only by the sibilant noises of the vipers and the men baiting them. At last, he said, “Marlinchen, I’m so sorry.”
“Why? You didn’t kill her.”
“Yes, but she’s your sister, and she’s dead. And if one of the men here is a murderer, it means that he might strike again. Why does your father want so desperately to keep them here? Not that I don’t feel relieved he didn’t hand me over to Derkach like a spoil of war, but why has the great wizard Zmiy Vashchenko begun tending to the day laborers that he claims to despise?”
In the dark, with only the pale drench of moonlight and the fireflies glittering like a fistful of tossed coins, for a moment I thought that I could pretend. I could go on acting as if I believed we were menaced only by a sick and twisted mortal man, an enemy that could easily be killed. But it would be like Sevas dancing Ivan, or me smiling and batting my lashes while someone tied a tourniquet around my thigh.
“Sevas,” I said. “Do you remember the dead man from the theater?”
“You said you didn’t want to speak of it.”
“But now I do.” I chewed my lip. I barely resisted putting my knuckle in my mouth. “If the murderer is a mortal man, he could not have managed to get the body up into the rafters. It took five day laborers and a rope-and-pulley system just to get him down. And his heart and liver were gone, just like the two men they found on the boardwalk.”
“Those were dogs, I thought.”
“And dogs carried that man to the theater?”
Sevas frowned. “And what sort of creature do you think could have gotten that man into the rafters?”
“Something with wings,” I said, my voice trembling.
“Speak frankly, Marlinchen.” He took my face in his hands; even now I was thrilled a little by his proximity, by the way his bitten fingers were inches from my mouth. “I want to hear what’s inside your mind.”
He could not want that, not really. How could I explain the things that ran through my head whenever I closed my eyes, whenever I heard a door slam too loudly, whenever I caught my own reflection in the back of a teaspoon? He could not want to know how I imagined clipping off my nipples with Rose’s gardening shears, two neat cuts so they fell like flower petals, bloodless and pink. He could not want to know how I imagined pulling back the white band of flesh around my nail, peeling it in spirals like potato skin, until my whole hand was gloved in red. He said that he loved me as plainly as any man loved any woman, but he did not know how much of Papa’s poison had seeped inside of me. And, in truth, neither did I.
“I think my father is the monster,” I whispered. “I think he killed those men and ate them.”
Sevas did not wince or blink, and for that, I loved him so deeply and completely that I could barely stand it. He did not let go of my face. He only said, “And your sister?”
“I don’t know.” The memory of Undine’s naked, blood-ruined breast flashed against the insides of my eyelids. “Her heart and her liver were still in her body. But Dr. Bakay said it could not be the work of a mortal man.”
Sevas inhaled sharply. “The doctor has been wrong before.”
I loved him for saying that, perhaps even more. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes, for the first time since I’d seen my sister’s corpse. “Before I left there were fifteen men in Papa’s sitting room. Now there are fourteen, plus you. I think he wants the men here so he can eat them too.”
Still, he did not flinch, and I could have laughed for how grateful I was. I had expected the words to sound like lunacy when I spoke them aloud, but Sevas’s steady look made them seem more solid and real, the way egg whites stiffened up when you whipped them, taking on some strange new shape.
It was terrifying how quick and facile the transformation was. The ground did not roll out from under my feet; the sky did not crumble and come raining down in deep blue shards on my head. It was only this: one moment ago Papa had only been my father, the great wizard Zmiy Vashchenko, and now he was a monster with men’s livers lining his belly.