Papa raised one brow but did not question me further. In another few moments, Dr. Bakay strode into the sitting room, appearing well rested. Papa remarked cheerfully upon it, and the two lapsed into genial conversation. I could not very well hear their words, as I could focus only on the way their mouths moved as they chewed, teeth gnashing and tongues flicking and lips smacking. A bit of pickled cabbage got caught in Papa’s beard. There was a smear of sour cream across Dr. Bakay’s chin.
Another thrill went up my spine, but this time it was a thrill of fearlessness, adrenaline, and terrific power.
“You stoked the embers of your own funeral pyre, Papa,” I said softly.
His gaze snapped up from the food. “What did you say?”
“When you sent me down to the boardwalk to kill those men,” I went on, my voice perfectly even, “I brought you back their hearts and livers, but I brought back something else too.” I reached down the collar of my nightgown and pulled out Mama’s compact from where I had tucked it between my breasts. I flipped it open and let the black sand pour out onto the carpet. “I saw this slough off me in the bathtub, and I thought you would punish me for it. I couldn’t explain how the sand had gotten there. But I swept it up into Mama’s compact and used it to escape this house—there is the answer to your preposterous wizard’s riddle, incidentally. By rights, I should be able to wed myself now, and inherit this crumbling, hideous house.”
“Zmiy,” Dr. Bakay said, eyes widening in alarm, “what is she talking about?”
Papa held the knife blade-up, and under his beard I saw his face grow pale. “Have I not taught you better to hold your tongue? You are worse than simple-minded; you are insidiously stupid. Your mouth will damn us both.”
My heart was beating very fast. “Maybe. I know your own mouth is damning you,” I said, looking at his empty plate.
“What?”
“When that old chieftain, who ruled Oblya before it was Oblya, had a man arrested for murder, did he also detain the sword that was used to kill? Magic always implicates its caster. You were the one who taught me that.”
“You think you are nothing more than a blade in my hand?” Papa laughed, flinging his mouth open so wide I could see the bits of food stuck between his teeth, and all the way back into the dark abyss of his throat. “I might have clothed you in scales and claws, but I did not order you to kill your sister. That was all your own cruelty and violence. You will sleep with that cold body beside you for the rest of your life.”
“Perhaps,” I replied, fisting the silk of my nightgown. “That will be my own seed to nurture or to kill as I see fit. But you have let a whole tree sprout up inside of you, and its branches are dripping with fat black berries.”
At that moment, Dr. Bakay was seized by a vicious fit of coughing. He bent at the waist, hand clapped over his mouth, hacking and retching. Papa leaned away, lip curling with revulsion, and the coughing went on and on for so long that the small hand of the grandfather clock tipped past eight.
Finally, he spat something out onto the carpet: a juniper berry, fat and black.
Papa stood up and lurched toward me, grasping me by the shoulders before I could stumble through the door. “You foolish, ugly girl,” he snarled, saliva frothing. “What have you done?”
“I did nothing. It was your own hunger that made you eat.”
He shook me hard enough to make my teeth rattle, and my vision blurred at the corners, but I did not go limp in his arms. I wrenched myself away from him instead, even as his fingernails tore long gashes in the silk of my nightgown and left six neat lines of blood behind on my skin. I took a step backward, then another, as Papa breathed hot and loud through his nose like a bull stamping the earth.
Before he could, there was a commotion in the garden. Papa’s head jerked toward the window.
Rose was pacing the line of the fence, flinging the contents of a small vial at the snakes as they spat and hissed. When the potion splattered on them, their black scales began to pale and turn gray, and their long, writhing bodies went limp. As soon as they did, Sevas came, hefting her gardening shears, and cut them down one by one until the whole fence collapsed like a row of dominoes on the gambling table.
Roused from their despondent slumber, the day laborers hurtled out of the garden and fled toward Kanatchikov Street, holding their hats so they wouldn’t fly off as they ran.
Papa turned to me again, and the whites of his eyes were cracked through with red. “You and your sister have both made a bad mistake, Marlinchen,” he said. “And that Yehuli boy has made one even worse. I will turn the three of you into black rabbits and skin you slowly, relishing every squeal and whimper.”