“I can,” I said. “I do.”
Papa scoffed again. “How is it that the ugliest and most simple of my daughters orchestrated my demise? I would loathe this cage less if it had been your clever or beautiful sisters who had put me in it.”
“You made a bad mistake, Papa,” I replied, sighing. “You put too much of yourself in me. Those little bits whispered the truth. My bones hummed with it and my blood sang with it. If we had been less the same, I might never have known. But now we both remember the taste of hearts and livers.”
Those were the worst nights: when I woke from dreams of dying men and frantically checked my belly and breasts for the spreading of black scales. Sevas held me then, and kissed my fingers, reassuring me of their blunted ends.
“They taste better than anything,” Papa whispered, at last rising from his seat. He came up so close to me that our noses nearly touched through the bars and I could smell the acid and bile of nothing eaten for days on his breath. “Better than sour-cherry kvass and pork varenyky, better than a whole raw chicken and its crunching little bones. Better than the meat of your bird-mother. They were the only things that came close to sating the hunger, the hearts and livers of men. Would you deny me this one small relief? Would you let the curse swallow me whole?”
“It has already,” I told him, very gently, and then took my leave. There was no use telling him of my awful dreams, or about how sometimes the rage in my belly reached its boiling point and I could release it only through my mouth, and I pressed my face into my pillow and screamed and screamed, even though it made the goblin weep. Papa’s magic was good, as good as Titka Whiskers’s had been, and it would outlast our proximity. Perhaps it would outlast even his death. As I went toward the door, Papa rattled the bars of his cell, spittle flying.
“They will not keep me here!” he shouted. “I will turn these bars into a spewing of black snakes and they will poison every single one of the guards and barristers, and then I will eat their hearts and livers with sweet wine. I will curse every single one of the day laborers who worked to tear down my house, so that they wake up with chicken feet or yellow bills, like magpies. I will transform you and your sister into hags.”
His words grasped at the strands of my newly trimmed hair, but I was up the stairs and out of the building before my heart could flutter with the urge to turn back. After the thunderstorm, the sun was exceptionally bright. I had to put up my hand to shield my eyes as I walked along Kanatchikov Street; all around me the rainwater dripping off awnings had turned golden, like honey.
I could have hired a carriage, but I decided to go on foot, nodding bracingly at the women as they bemoaned their ruined gowns and ruined hair, stepping aside to let the tardy stockbrokers hustle past. There were day laborers playing cards in an alley, their laughter carrying down to the road. Carriage horses shook out their damp manes and clopped cheerfully on. In the distance, the sea was just a stripe of glistening color, like a knife of light.
Sevas was waiting for me at the boardwalk, leaning against the railing and looking out at the endless spreading water. I could easily imagine him as a ship’s captain then, bold and dashing and weather-eyed, as he smiled his beautiful, crooked smile.
“I hope,” he said, “that the sky has exhausted all its rain for a very, very long time.”
Our trunks were propped up on the ground around him, and the goblin was sitting on the largest one, rubbing miserably at its one big eye. I knelt down beside it and said, “There are still marshes and lovely bogs for you to live in, but they are far away from here.”
The goblin sniffled. I stood up again and Sevas said, “Anyway, the weather will be different in Askoldir.”
“How different?”
He arched a brow. “You will have to learn to love the snow. Even most in Askoldir do not. But they have great fun grousing about it, the way aunts and grandmothers love to commiserate over the same hated relative.”
“What if your mother hates me?”
“She won’t,” Sevas said. “She only hates my third great-aunt, and parsnips, and her landlord, and the woman down the hall who sings to her cat, and . . .”
He trailed off, and I laughed, and the sound warmed me all over, as if I’d dipped into one of the heated baths at the sanatorium.
There was a clock mounted on the wall of the nearby bank and it said that we were nearly at risk of missing our train. So I leaned down and scooped up the goblin, swaddled it in a blanket, and held it to my breast. If one of the ticket attendants saw me, they would think I was only a mother with her child.