Fodder for wealthy hags whose husbands won’t touch them, and wealthy men who are too shy for the brothels, he often said. I flushed even more deeply now, remembering his words, and thinking of my own hand slipping between my thighs.
“Right,” said Papa coolly. His gaze swept over Derkach, over Sevastyan, and then over me. “Marlinchen, go on.”
How many rubles had they offered him to swallow his revulsion? I was certain that a year ago no price would have bought Papa’s silence, but I would never know. Papa always took money from the clients on my behalf. I wasn’t smart enough to make sure they didn’t stiff me, he said.
Miserably, I looked at Sevastyan. Derkach had lifted his hand from his knee, and I gave my own unconscious twitch of relief.
“I will do my very best to name your affliction,” I said, which was what I told all my clients, usually with a demure smile. I couldn’t manage one now. “Where would you prefer to be touched?”
Sevastyan’s gaze snapped up. “What?”
“Marlinchen is a flesh diviner,” my father said impatiently. He was gripping his grease-marbled knife in his hand, blade turned up. “Her readings require skin-to-skin contact.”
There was that odd fear in Sevastyan’s eyes again, and I couldn’t make sense of it. All my clients were men, and none had ever been anything less than enthusiastic when I told them how my readings worked. If my father was not in the room, they would smile their languid smiles and try to guide my hand over their gleaming belt buckles. I would laugh weakly and rebuff them the best I could without causing offense, without making them rescind their rubles.
They all relented eventually, grinding their teeth, all except Dr. Bakay. And my father had been in the room then.
For years I had prayed every night for the absent gods to grant me a witchcraft like Rose’s or Undine’s, something that I could perform from a careful distance. As much as I envied their beauty, it was mostly because it rendered them impregnable. Untouchable.
“Yes,” I said shakily. “I’ll do it however you find most comfortable.”
Sevastyan stared up at me, shoulders rising and falling with his heavy breaths. I thought of how he had struck down the Dragon-Tsar, the muscles in his arms quivering like the plucked string of a balalaika, and the way he had run his hands so fluidly over the tsarevna’s hips.
Desire tensed inside me, shameful and aching. Whoever desired a Vashchenko girl was doomed, but the opposite was also true. Wanting anything ended only in misery. And even as I waited for him to speak, for this to be over, I dreaded the thought of watching him leave.
Slowly, Sevastyan reached up and began to unbutton his blouse. The collar fell open, exposing the pale column of his throat.
“Here,” he said, tilting his head. “Do it here.”
Derkach clapped his hands together, eyes sparkling. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to watch a real witch do her work.”
I almost told him that I wasn’t a real witch; the Wizards’ Council had disbanded before I could earn my official title. The last true witch in Oblya was Titka Whiskers, whose real name was Marina Bondar. She’d adopted the moniker Titka Whiskers for a bit of calculated flair, the Old World charm that our clients sought. I had realized when I was quite young that most of them did not want to be helped, not really. They came to us for the same reason they came to the ballet theater: spectacle. Distraction.
I was not nearly as enthralling to watch as Sevastyan, done up in his feathers and painted lambent gold, but my clients came to me, rather than my beautiful sisters, because I offered what Undine and Rose could not—or rather, what they did not have to. Proximity. Intimacy. Palms spanning bare chests, fingers pressed against throats. I found jawbones and earlobes particularly fruitful, of all the places I allowed myself to touch.
Face unbearably hot, I considered what sorts of secrets I could leach from the cleft of Sevastyan’s chin.
With a steely breath, I approached him. Last night he had appeared as lovely as an oil painting of an angel, or one of the Patrifaith’s many saints. Now, in the butter-yellow morning, I found he had a bit of a craggy look to him. If he’d been carved from marble, I could see the places where the sculptor’s chisel had slipped. The dip of his nose canted sharply to the right, and his chin thrust out at an angle that made him look always on the verge of smirking. His eyes were deep-set, but in daylight they seemed an even more brilliant hue of blue, jeweled and nearly translucent.
My heart raced at those thoughts even as Sevastyan inched forward in his chair, until he was perched on the very edge of it. His legs opened, leaving room for me to stand between his spread knees.