Then he began to strip off his stockings.
“Wait,” I choked out. “I can go—”
He glanced up, brows quirked. “I don’t have much of my modesty left to preserve, Ms. Vashchenko, so don’t leave on my account. But if it’s your propriety you’re worried about, feel free to turn around.”
I did, my face as hot as a stovetop. With my back to him, I whispered, “Marlinchen.”
“Marlinchen,” he said. His voice sounded odd when I couldn’t see his face, quieter somehow, more like a boy’s than a man’s. “I didn’t forget. But since I’d started wondering if you despised me, I thought you might prefer me to address you with some formality.”
“No,” I said, still staring with utmost concentration at the wall. “There are three Ms. Vashchenkos, and only one of them is me. Whenever I hear it I always think someone is asking after my sisters.”
I heard Sevas draw a breath. “You can turn around now, if you’d like.”
Cheeks still burning, I did. Sevas was now wearing black trousers, his flesh-colored tights balled up and abandoned on his boudoir. Looking at him, the beautiful line of his mouth, the bright, clear blue of his eyes—all rational thought flooded out of me.
“I really am glad to see your face again, Marlinchen,” he said. “I wasn’t sure that I would.”
The softness and uncertainty in his voice drew forth a memory: Derkach’s hand closing over his knee. It reminded me that I had come to the theater with a purpose. I drew a breath, tasting the lemon balm from Rose’s tincture and letting the courage leak into my stomach, and said, “I really do have something to tell you.”
Sevas assumed a solemn look. “Go on.”
All at once my words curdled like bad cream. He would think I was a fool, maybe a madwoman, a witch with her Old World ways, a slave to the moth-eaten lunacy of her father. That’s what the other Oblyans thought of us, when they weren’t staring down my sisters’ dresses, and even sometimes when they were. Their debasing curiosity drew them to our doorstep, a magic that seemed sometimes even more powerful than the fear my father tried to instill in them.
To the women we were party stories, yarns spun between close faces. To the men we were imagined conquests, a dreamscape wherein they acted out their wickedest fantasies, the ones they would never inflict upon their sweet, blushing mortal wives. They asked my sisters and me if we fornicated with our father, or with each other, and the thought seemed to make them perversely aroused. I had watched so many mustaches grow sweat-damp as the men picked apart my answer with their teeth, biting down on the lusty bits. If I flushed, it was as good as a confession, and more fodder for their vulgar dreams.
Sometimes I thought of telling them what they wanted to hear, reciting all the tawdry details that I could already see playing behind their eyes. Sometimes I thought of telling them what really happened after I crawled into bed at night: how I imagined clipping off my nipples with Rose’s gardening shears, two neat cuts so that they fell like flower petals, bloodless and pink. I imagined pulling back the band of white flesh around my nail, peeling it in spirals like potato skin, until my whole hand was gloved in red. I visited upon myself one small violence after another, inside the safe bunker of my mind. I concluded that it would probably arouse them too; sometimes I even felt myself go slick under the sheets.
But Sevas was not looking away from me, though it certainly had been too long since he’d said a word, and my face must have looked flushed and miserable. I thought of the way he’d spoken about such horrific things without flinching, and I found within me a courage to speak too.
“My father is a great wizard,” I said at last. “He can fill the air with a mist so cold that it makes you freeze and tremble while your mind goes black with terror. He can pry open your lips and see the lies pooling on your tongue before you’ve even said them aloud. He can build glass walls that you can’t see but that never shatter, and holes in the floor that you don’t notice until you’ve fallen into them. But he likes transformations best of all. When Oblya was older, or newer, his clients would pay him whole sacks of rubles to turn their pocket watches into water clocks or their music boxes into songbirds. He even turned my mother into a bird, by accident. But because the Rodinyans came and started transforming gas lamps to electric and changing fields into factories, my father doesn’t see clients anymore, just my sisters and me. He says that now Oblya has no appetite for his brand of magic, and so he hates all the Rodinyans, and the ballet theater most. He was so angry when you came that he put a spell over the whole house, so that no one from the theater could cross the threshold again or else they’d be turned into a mass of black snakes. Last time a witch turned into vipers at our door my father ate them. And since I’d given you the wrong elixir I was afraid you would come back, not knowing about the curse, and maybe I wouldn’t even realize it until I was sitting in the garden and a black snake slithered over my shoe.”