Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something brown and furry. Indrik was standing up tall on his hind legs, nibbling at one of our apricots. When he noticed me, he paused and trotted over, muscles bulging in his bare chest.
“You look distressed, young maiden,” he said. “Would you like to call upon the might and magic of a god? I can shoot a star out of the sky and whittle it into a sword of immense power, or I can summon a bolt of lightning and strike down the lover who spurned you. Have you been spurned by a lover? Perhaps ravished by a group of drunken men? I have had many centuries to think of all the ways to punish those who wrong me and my devoted worshippers.”
“No,” I mumbled. “No, thank you. Please, Indrik, I’d like to be alone.”
Indrik snorted through his nose, affronted, and then trotted away again. I heard the poor goblin scratching at the shed door, and Papa pacing the line of the fence. He was already muttering the magic that would keep us here. As many times as he had warned us with his words, he had never erected a proper spell before.
Undine was right; I had driven him here, with my pathetic flushing and trembling knees and the baldness of my wanting.
When Indrik’s tail had disappeared behind an exuberantly green rhubarb plant, I leaned over, stuck two fingers down my throat, and vomited.
It didn’t take long for everything to come back up, lubricated by the black juice. My throat was burning and raw. I wiped bile from my chin. As I did, Sevas’s face hovered in my mind, his words caressing the shell of my ear.
I think it would make me very happy to see your face in the crowd, Marlinchen.
There was no use thinking of him. I would never see him again.
I knelt in the grass and buried my puddle of sick, dirt caulking under my nails. My stomach churned emptily now, and my mouth tasted greasy with acid. When I looked down, I noticed that vomit was streaked across my nightgown, the black color of the juice I’d swallowed. I cleaned my hands on a soft gray bushel of lamb’s ear and stood.
Even as the memory drove knives into my heart, my mind turned over the name he had given me. Sevas, he had said, wrapped up like a china dish or an ostrich egg hollowed out and painted blue. A gift, and I had nothing to offer in return. Diminutives were a mystery to me; my sisters and I had names that eschewed diminutives. Rose’s sweet, pretty nickname was one we only whispered to each other in secret, never in Papa’s presence.
Papa had given us our confounding names on purpose. Undine, Rosenrot, and Marlinchen were not names for people in the city of Oblya, in the empire of Rodinya, in the smog-choked mortal world. They were characters in Papa’s codex, monsters, maidens, minor gods. Marlinchens did not lose their fingers in the machinery of cotton mills; Rosenrots did not gag on tobacco smoke in the back rooms of cafés; Undines did not marry lecherous sailors from Ionika. Our names were the best spell that Papa had ever cast, better than rabbit’s feet or burning sage. They were a veil of protection, a caul that never came off. I imagined my father murmuring a prayer for each of his daughters as he pulled us from between our mother’s legs.
Let her eat black plums and never taste the poison. Let her bathe naked in a stream without ever drawing a hunter’s wanton eye. Let all the bears she meets be friendly and pliant, and never men in disguise. Let her never fall prey to the banality of the world.
Let her never fall in love.
Chapter Three
Here is what happened to our mother.
You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead. I told myself so many times I was lucky to have the dead kind. Further, when your mother is a witch, it is almost impossible for her not to be wicked, so our father married a pretty blushing woman who was not a witch at all. Most of the wizards in Oblya took mortal women as their brides, due to the fact that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. Some, I had heard, even grew a second set of sharp teeth and ate their husbands.
I could hardly imagine having a witch as a mother. It would have been so dangerous! I pictured my sisters and myself cradled above boiling cauldrons, or reaching with our fat infant fingers toward capped vials of precious firebird feathers and bottled sirens’ screams.
But our mother wasn’t a witch. Before she was dead, she was pretty and quick to flush, with skin that reminded me of the inside of a conch shell, it was that smooth and pale. She had Undine’s golden hair, bright as an egg yolk, and Rose’s shining violet eyes. I got nothing from my mother except our identical half-moon nail beds, and maybe the little leap of our brows when we were surprised. I also inherited my mother’s love for the fairy tales in Papa’s codex, which was why she had wed him in the first place. She fell in love with the story more than she fell in love with the man. She told me so when she took me on her knee and used her comb to smooth the knotted coils of my hair, whispering her secrets into my ear.