I remembered how Derkach’s hand had closed over Sevastyan’s knee. Perhaps the other outcome was worse—that Derkach visited his anger upon Sevas instead of me.
Either way I needed to warn him, and now I had the means to do it. But the thought of leaving alone made me grow dizzy and weak. Legs quaking, I stood. The heels of my slippers were still clumped with dirt. I shut the wardrobe door, my mother’s compact clutched in my fist. The taste of Papa’s draught on my lips was like bad mussels, like burnt rubber.
Downstairs there was a half-gutted chicken in the icebox. When evening came on and the sky turned a bruised violet I would cook its liver with onions and parsley. Papa would lick all the grease from the plate, and his magic would swell over our garden like varenyky stuffed to bursting, and I would not sleep for wondering if the next black snake I saw was Sevastyan.
I did not doubt Papa’s spellwork. I had fed our mother from my hand for years.
I was halfway to Rose’s room before I had even made up my mind. My hair was damp against the back of my neck and my heart was rioting in my rib cage. I knocked once and, hearing her voice on the other side of the door, pushed my way inside. My sister lay belly-flat on the bed, paging through her tattered herbalist’s compendium.
“You look like you’ve seen Mama’s ghost,” Rose said with an arched brow, propping herself up on her elbows. “What’s wrong, Marlinchen?”
Suddenly all my words abandoned me. How could I explain the knot of fear and wanting that had coiled in my belly and was now curling up my rib cage? I had never bothered to tell either of my sisters Mama’s and my favorite story. I knew they would just scoff and sneer at it, even Rose. Whatever my sisters’ desires, they were not so bald or so childish or so damning.
I could confess neither my stupid hope nor my stupid terror, so in the end, all I managed to do was hold out Mama’s compact. I flipped it open with my thumb and let the black sand trickle out onto Rose’s carpet, and my sister’s eyes grew wide as plums.
Chapter Four
Rose leapt off her bed and knelt on the floor and scooped up as much of the sand as she could. She snatched the compact from my hand and poured it back inside, and all the while I could hear her breathing in quick little gasps, and her panic leached into me and soon I was on the floor beside her, picking grains of black sand from the bristles of the carpet. Behind me the closed door seemed to ripple and shudder, like a tin roof in the rain. There was still a brine scent rising from the rug in a fine mist.
“You must be mad, Marlinchen,” Rose whispered, shoving the compact inside the folds of her dress. “Where did you get this?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. I could not even explain it to myself. Black sand had somehow peeled off me in the bathtub and then the pipes had coughed it back up. So I only told her that, because it was all I knew, and then I told her how afraid I was that Sevastyan would come back and it would be all my fault when he turned into a mass of vipers at our door.
I did not tell her about the way my hand had slipped between my thighs, or the way that I had spread that small bit of hope so thin that it wore out like an old stringy rag.
But my second sister was canny, and her eyes grew narrower and narrower until they were knives that cut right to the core of me.
“Why did you give him that herb mix?” Rose snapped, when I was done, and for a moment she sounded as angry and mean as Undine. “You could have woken me. I have draughts for men who can’t keep their lips from the liquor bottle. Papa was right. You were stirred by that dancer. You wanted him to come back.”
I had never learned how to lie to anyone, I realized, or perhaps I had never had anything worth lying about, any secret worth keeping. But upon opening my mouth to confess it, all that came out was a choked laugh. Of course my wanting would doom its object. Of course anything I desired would become a black snake in my hand.
“I can’t let him end up like Titka Whiskers,” I whispered, and even saying her name made my tongue burn like I’d sipped at scalding tea. That was how good her magic was—the curse hadn’t even been directed at me, and yet it had its roots in me even after she was gone. “I couldn’t bear it, especially knowing it was because of me.”
Rose regarded me, her stare still perfectly cold. “Undine will try and take it from you, if she ever finds out.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head and shutting my eyes, as though I could armor myself against the truth of her words. “No, she wouldn’t risk Papa’s anger like that. She wouldn’t risk breaking his spell . . .”