The bolt of knowledge propelled me down the stairs, heart guttering, and sent me racing down the hallway through the disused servants’ quarters, so that I did not risk running into Sevas. I was too buoyant with adrenaline to fear even Dr. Bakay.
I shoved open the door to the garden, gulping cold night air. The moonlight washed pale all of our briars and overgrown weeds, the ivy that crawled up the side of the house with a desperate perseverance. The lavender thistle grass looked white. My eyes searched for something dark weaving through its blanched stalks, something that I shouldn’t be able to see.
So of course I saw it then, so utterly black that it looked like the absence of a thing, just an empty gash in the world. Our fiery serpent. I crept up to it, silk nightgown swishing around my bare legs, as if I might startle it away.
But it didn’t flee, only lifted its head and cocked it toward me. I knelt before it, sinking a bit into the wet soil, and said, “I want—”
It spoke in a human voice, without moving its mouth, and the voice seemed to enter my head as if my own mind were conjuring the words. Be careful what you say aloud, third daughter. Whatever you ask for I am bound to provide, and you are bound to pay for it.
“I know,” I said. I had heard Papa’s stories, but it was not silken handkerchiefs or ceramic beads that I desired. “I want the truth.”
You know the truth, Ms. Vashchenko. What you want is the courage to believe it.
My head started to pound again, that ice-white ache teeming up behind my eyelids. “Then give me that. I will pay whatever price.”
The serpent’s black tongue flicked out of its mouth. I’ve been so hungry for so long. If you feed me, I can give you the thing your heart desires.
Without hesitation I stripped off my housecoat and pulled my nightgown over my head. There were two slashes cut into the back of it, right where the blades of my shoulders were; I had not noticed them before.
My nipples knotted with cold. I knelt there in the dark garden, naked and shivering, and the serpent began to slither up my thigh. The scales on its belly were smooth as river stones. It circled my breast the way I imagined it would curl itself around a mouse it meant to eat. And then it latched itself onto my nipple.
The bite of pain was sharp and brief, like the prick of a needle. I could feel the leak of blood, too, as if some faucet in me had been turned, and that was worse than the pain itself, the sensation of unbidden release.
A whimper came out of my mouth, and then the fiery serpent’s voice once again crowded my mind. Go to the third floor, young maiden. The door will open for you.
I rose to my feet a bit unsteadily, the serpent still curled around my breast, and walked back toward the house with the bone-deep purpose of a dog following a scent.
I scarcely had to touch the door to the third-floor stairwell before it swung open, old wood groaning. If Papa really had put some sort of enchantment over it, I passed through it easily, like it was no more than a veil of cobwebs.
The stairwell was dark, but I felt along the wall with one hand, and the serpent’s voice in my mind was a better guide than any candlestick might have been. Two more steps to the top. There’s a loose floorboard here; be careful not to trip. You’re so close, Marlinchen.
I paused to catch my breath, and farther down the hall there was a square of white light gridded across the floor, cut in two pieces by the shadow of an open door. The serpent did not need to tell me to go toward it.
The last time I had been to the third floor, my mother was a bird in her cage. The ten years that had passed in between then and now piled on me like snow; I felt both ancient as a crone and young as a child, before my breasts had budded. I felt both like the girl who had tended so fastidiously to her bird-mother and also like the girl who had eaten her. I felt both like a witch of indeterminate power and like a mortal woman who danced in taverns and bled between her legs.
I stopped in the threshold and stared at my naked silhouette in the moonlight. Right there before me was my mother’s cage, golden door flung open, and the mirror that never lies, with the white sheet laid over it. The fiery serpent let go of my nipple and slithered up to my shoulder, where it curled around my neck like a string of pearls. A few beads of blood gathered in the small wounds that its teeth had left.
I had not heard anyone come up behind me until Sevas’s voice drifted into my ear. He was standing beside me in the threshold, our breath mingling in white clouds. “Marlinchen, what are you doing here?”
“How did you find me?”
“I followed you. The door was open.” He did not mention the snake, but his gaze went up and down my naked body with some amalgam of desperate yearning and bewildered fear. “What did your father do?”