“And you,” Papa said, wheeling toward me. “I saw the way you went weak in the knees for that dancer. He’s Yehuli, you know. I should have spied it right away, and then I wouldn’t have let him in for anything. He has an unscrupulous set to his jaw, and the brow bone of a man with capitalist schemes in his mind. You are not a stupid girl, Marlinchen. But you are a girl. Wipe away the dewiness in your eyes and scrub the flush from your cheeks. Do you think he desires sallow-faced witches with the stink of the kitchen on them? Do you think I would ever let his serpent’s jaws close around you, even if he did? You are far too dear to me for that.”
Papa did not raise a hand to me now; he never had before. He only let his fury unfold from him like a mist, until it dampened our brows and snuck into our veins and made us freeze there, as still as graveyard statues.
It was good magic. I couldn’t move and scarcely breathed as he paced the foyer, the loose skin of his cheeks flapping under his beard like our eyeless ravens beating their wings.
“Enough now,” he said to himself, then looked up at my sisters and me. “I have two spells to cast. I will tell you what they are. The first is that no one from Oblya’s infernal ballet theater will ever pass through our gate again, or else they will turn into a pile of vipers. And the second is that no one will leave this place without a bowl of black sand.”
Before any of us could react, he slammed through the door and vanished, taking his magic with him. Undine fell to her knees on the stairs, letting out a broken howl.
“This is your fault,” she snarled, looking up at me from between the curtains of her blond hair. “We let you come one time, and this is what happens? I don’t know what you did, but you drove him here—”
“Undine,” Rose said, voice sharp. “Enough.”
But Undine just stared at me, seething, shoulders rising and falling with her labored and furious breaths. Tears made my vision blur like wet glass.
“You ruin everything,” she bit out.
Rose came down the steps and paused before me, reaching up to smooth the curls from my face. I was vaguely aware of Undine letting out another wrenching howl before fleeing to her room, pale hair streaming out behind her.
“Come on now, Marlinchen,” Rose said. “Don’t cry.”
But there was something hard in her voice. She hadn’t seen what had happened, but she blamed me too. It was my fault that there would be no more midnight sojourns, no more orchestras, no more ballet theater. No more Sevas. One night was all it had taken for me to spoil what my sisters had so carefully and furtively built, like a clumsy child knocking over a stack of dishes. No one would leave the house without a bowl of black sand, and the only black sand was far away on Oblya’s beaches, where the smog from the dredging ships dyed the shores the color of ink.
“I’m not crying,” I said, blinking back the tears that had gathered hotly in the corners of my eyes. “I’m just hungry.”
Rose let out a breath through her nose, a breath of wordless anger. I brushed away from her and she let me. I went through the sitting room, snatching up Papa’s empty plate, and into the kitchen. I put his dish in the sink and opened the icebox.
There was the rest of the filling for the varenyky, cool and hard. There was the blackberry kvass, and a round lump of butter. There was the rolled dough that I hadn’t used yet. I took it all into my arms. I cut the dough into diamonds and filled them. I let the varenyky sizzle in the pan.
As I waited, I saw a full glass of dark juice resting on the counter. I couldn’t remember pouring it for myself, but I must have. It had the color but not the consistency of blackberry kvass. I snatched it up and downed it in one long gulp. It tasted of nothing, the way food always did in these moments.
I dropped sour cream onto a plate, and a heap of pickled cabbage beside it. I cut the rest of the bread into five fat slices and buttered them all. I spooned out my twelve varenyky, still steaming hot.
And then I ate everything, the black bread slick with butter, the pickled cabbage that made my eyes water, the sour cream that turned to a white film on my gums. I ate the varenyky even though they burned my tongue. I only tasted it in quick, hot bursts, the way you could still see the bright-orange splotches of lamplight after you closed your eyes. When I was finished, my heart was pounding and my chest heaving, and my stomach felt like a wineskin filled to its cork.
I did not want to risk seeing my father, so I took the back exit into the garden, through the disused maid’s quarters. The doorframe was cobweb-crusted, wood swollen in the late summer heat. I pushed through it with a thrust of my shoulder and stumbled into a bed of dandelion weeds and thistle grass. Nettles seized the hem of my nightgown, and my bare feet sank into the soft dirt.