Tears came springing to my eyes, and when they fell, the fiery serpent opened its mouth and lapped them up off my cheeks.
“No,” I whispered. “I won’t let you take their deaths from me. Your love cannot make me less of a monster.”
Sevas let out a breath. “I wouldn’t presume my love could do such a thing. I would have you as you are, nothing less.”
Again, I said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Does the mirror tell the truth?”
“Yes,” I said, barely a whisper.
“Then look.”
A great tremor went through him, and his chest swelled. He drew himself up to his full height, assuming Ivan’s glorious bogatyr’s posture, shoulders raised high.
And then he took a rough fist to my hair, wrapping the wild, loose curls around his whitened knuckles, and jerked my face to his and kissed me. He kissed me so hard that it almost hurt, and I whimpered into his mouth, but he did not let go. I braced my arms around his neck and he gripped me at my waist and the serpent moved between us and in the mirror I saw a terribly scarred, terribly beautiful man embracing a monster.
His hand moved down my belly and I parted my thighs for him, moaning against his lips. I unfastened the button of his trousers so quickly that I nearly tore them. He lifted my hips and held me up against the mirror, the serpent slithering from my throat to his, and then he thrust into me without hesitation, without contrition.
Over my shoulder I could see my monster’s head falling back, mouth open with distraught pleasure, scaled breasts swaying. My wings were crumpled against the glass. The corners of Sevas’s eyes were pulled down by snaking lines of scar tissue, but the rest of his face was buried in my hair. At last he spent inside of me with a groan, and my legs slid back onto the floor, both of us panting and heaving.
Sevas stepped away, breathing hard. The serpent had wound itself around his throat instead, gleaming like a black jeweled collar. The mirror was fogged with the heat of our bodies, both of our reflections obscured. I could only see him standing there in the limpid moonlight, inches from my mother’s flung-open cage.
Something broke apart inside of me, like a glass sliding off the table and shattering. I reached out for Sevas again as my hair tumbled down over my bitten breast.
“Don’t you see?” he asked, his voice ragged and low. “You can take my heart and liver; slit open my belly and eat what’s inside. I would sooner bear it than lose you to those who call you plain-faced, who make you kneel and kiss their feet. Do not leave me alone. Do not leave me to lick my wounds like a dog before it’s put down. Do not look at the truth of me and then look away. Please, Marlinchen.”
I almost laughed. “You would rather me eat your heart than look away in disgust?”
“Of course,” he breathed. “Every time.”
So I stepped toward him and took his face into my hands, drawing my thumb across his lips. He shivered under my touch, lashes painting a feathered shadow on his high, slim cheekbone. I tried for as long as I could not to blink, to stare him down to his marrow, to the truth of him. The serpent wound its way up his throat, tightening its body around him like a vise. When I saw his pulse throbbing between the coils of muscle, I pried the serpent off him and let it wind around my wrist instead.
“Perhaps,” I said, “this story can have a happy end.”
The corner of his lip pulled up into a beautiful, crooked smile. “Who says so?”
“I do.”
In the dead of night, I plucked up a candlestick and went to Rose’s storeroom. I had half expected to see the men back in the sitting room, lolling on our couches like tired hounds, but they were still outside in the garden, dozing under the flowering pear or prodding at the snake fence. Papa was still in his room with the door shut, and it seemed so funny to me now, that he could sleep peacefully as I prowled the house. His daughter was a monster, but he did not fear her. She only became deadly through his orchestration. A dog that bites its master is not long for this world.
I slowly pushed open the storeroom door, letting in a little knife of light. There were just the cobwebbed shelves and vials of chopped motherwort, the dusty chopping block where the dried-out lavender stalks decayed in the darkness. The herbalist’s compendium was laid flat on the desk, open to a page on “Diseases of the Mouth.” I set down my candlestick and began to try to decipher my sister’s handwriting in the puddled yellow glow.
I had scarcely managed a single word when I heard the patter of footsteps behind me, and I snatched up the candlestick and whirled around. Rose stood silhouetted in the doorway in her nightgown, still smelling of soil and of Undine’s blood, the tang of it cutting through all the musty herb scent in the air. Beneath the curtain of her tousled hair, her face was pinched and small.