I veered carefully away from them, but they didn’t even seem to notice me. Music piped from open doors and cracked second-floor windows. Just on Kanatchikov Street, I counted four languages. If it weren’t for Rose’s tincture, I might have frozen there, foreign words dribbling into my ears, trying to determine which consonants and vowel sounds spelled danger.
But I had her magic, and more, I had a goal set out in front of me, and only one night to taste the sweet thing that my tongue wanted, to fill the aching hunger in my belly. So I kept a brisk pace down the concourse, loosing a juniper berry every third step.
At last there was the theater, which ringed the plaza like a fine bracelet, its white facade as bright as a boiled chicken bone. The fountain was bubbling cheerily for no one; I had come too late and the crowd was gone, the doors closed. Even breathing in the tincture I felt a bit of panic turn loose in me and go skittering up the notches of my spine.
Briskly I paced through the courtyard, past the fountain, right up to the theater, and then turned down the alley to the left. The cobblestones were slick and pooling with oily light, just enough for me to see the door on the side of the building. My memory painted silhouettes on the wall: there was Sevastyan, bent over and retching, and me crouched beside him, both of our faces black and featureless. I blinked and our shadow puppets vanished, and I was staring only at the shut door that Sevas and Aleksei had gone through.
I had made up my mind to wait outside and I was practicing what I would say, even though I knew there was a good chance my words would dissolve in my mouth like a sugar cube. Then, not thinking at all that it would work, I tried the handle.
The door swung open easily. I gave a little gasp of shock and leapt back, and through the crack there leaked a staggering golden light and the swell of orchestral music. Very carefully I stepped through the threshold, bathing just the toe of my shoe and then the rest of me in that amber warmth.
The crimson velvet curtains rippled. I was half-cloaked in the shadow of the state box, where Oblya’s gradonalchik, the city chief, watched over the brim of his profuse mustache. After a beat I ducked farther behind one of the marble pillars. From this vantage point I could see only a sliver of the stage, just the honey-bright wood and the white slippers of the snow-maidens.
Then came the oboes and the snarling drums and there was Ivan, sauntering up to the Dragon-Tsar. Even though I knew how it all would end, that the Dragon-Tsar would die, I held my breath and my heart rattled like kopeks in a can. I peered out from behind the pillar, straining onto the tips of my toes.
Sevastyan’s bare chest was gleaming, his shoulders coiled and ready. Never had I felt so flushed with the lustful violence of it all, not when I was sitting fists clenched between my two sisters or later that evening. Never before had such a heat risen in my cheeks while I watched Ivan’s blade lash out quick as a tongue and the Dragon-Tsar crumple like a black pine lightning-struck.
Biting down on my knuckle, I wished for more gore than just the ruby cloth strewn over the tsar’s false wound. I wanted to see Ivan’s sword thick with real blood, the viscosity and the sheen of boiled cherries. I wanted to smell the wet copper smell of it in the air. That feverish yearning pulled me through time, as if I were a puppet on a string. The rest of the show whorled obliviously past me: Ivan and the tsarevna’s mimed kissing and the Celebration of the Snow-Maidens and the erection of Oblya proper, the painted skyline rolling up behind them and all the flutes trilling happily. Finally I took my chewed knuckle out of my mouth.
When the curtains drew shut, my cheeks were still burning and I could hear nothing but the manic pulse of my own blood. But seeing the audience rise to their feet woke me; I would be trampled if I didn’t move, and suddenly I remembered the heavy metal between my breasts. I turned toward the door, but already the crowd was pressing in.
Panic rattled my teeth. I couldn’t smell Rose’s tincture at all. Oh, I thought as a woman’s sharp elbow caught me in the ribs. I’ve made a bad mistake.
And then the sound of my name arced above the heat and the noise. I turned and saw Sevastyan trotting down the steps that led off the stage, and I thought I had imagined him saying Marlinchen until the crowd parted for him and he was standing right in front of me.
He was still painted in gold and wearing his feathered mantle, and his chest was still heaving but there was no muddle of vodka in his gaze, nothing between his eyes and mine. I felt oddly naked then, even though he was the one bare-breasted. I felt stared to my marrow, looked at in a way people only ever looked at my sisters. It was like someone were fishing for coins in a fountain and had finally closed their fingers around the one that was me.