I was so breathless by the time I finished that I had to put a hand up against the wall to steady myself. Sevas blinked once, lips parting, and I thought he was preparing to laugh me out of his dressing room. After another moment passed, he said, “Thank you.”
“What for?”
“For warning me,” he said. “For treating me at all. If your father is as powerful and cruel as you say, it was kind of you not to turn me away.” His gaze drew up and down me, and then I saw the tips of his ears go pink as dawn. “He must not know that you’re here now, in the loathsome ballet theater with its most loathsome principal dancer.”
Fear noosed me like a yoke, and not even Rose’s tincture was enough to stop it. “No, he doesn’t. But he’s not cruel; he only cares for his daughters so much that it terrifies him, the thought of anything happening to us.”
I was too afraid to say more, like speaking it aloud might imbue the words with a magic that would make them real. Sometimes I did wonder if my father would kill my sisters and me, rather than lose us to the world. I considered, not infrequently, that we would be safest in ashes and in urns.
“So now I’ve told you,” I went on, my voice wavering, “and now you know not to ever come back. I can give you the right elixir so that Derkach won’t be angry. My sister has draughts to keep men’s lips from liquor—”
“I’m not a completely hopeless sot, you know,” Sevas said, and he nodded toward the glass bottle under the boudoir, still a few fingertips full of clear liquid. “You’ll be pleased to learn I haven’t touched any vodka since I came to see you, and not just because Derkach has been more hawkeyed than usual. I can’t say I have too much experience with sorcery, but I didn’t think breathing the smell of borage would keep half a liter of vodka from coming back up. And I didn’t want to bring Derkach fuming to your door and rile your father even more.”
Several more moments ticked by before I realized he’d done me a kindness. Just as I hadn’t wished to visit Derkach’s anger upon him, he hadn’t wished to visit my father’s anger upon me.
We stared at each other from across the warm and narrow dressing room, him nearly a head taller than me, both of our brows dewy with sweat, my baby hairs curling out of Rose’s careful braids. Everything looked golden and bright, like sunlight through a jar of kvass, and my father’s house felt so tremendously far away. Even the air tasted sweet and my desire curled its long tendrils out of my belly, blooming in the light and the heat.
Sevastyan opened his mouth, and my breath caught as I waited for him to speak. And then there was a scuffling noise followed by the door clattering open.
It was the other dancer, Aleksei, his right cheek smeared with fiery orange paint. When he saw me he gave a low chuckle and said, “Taisia is going to strangle you with her stockings.”
“It isn’t like that,” Sevas said, but his ear tips were still discernibly pink. “Though she did watch me undress.”
“I turned around!” I protested. Sevastyan was grinning now, and Aleksei was laughing, some joke happening in the space around me, and even though it went vaporous between my fingers I didn’t sense any sharp edges to their smiles. No lidded meanness in their eyes. I felt welcomed in the laughter. I could not remember the last time I’d been part of something so warm.
“We should get out of here before Taisia starts shrieking and Derkach starts scolding,” Aleksei said. His gaze drifted vaguely toward my half of the dressing room; if he recognized me as a Vashchenko girl, a witch, he made no mention of it. “Is your, ah, friend coming with us?”
My heart leapt, and yet I found I could not speak. It would be foolish to go, selfish, to tempt the hours that Papa slept, to test Rose’s patience. She had to be pacing the floorboards now, waiting for me to come home. I felt I had to make a perfunctory protest, even if it made my stomach shrivel like a wilting violet.
“I can’t,” I said quietly. “My father . . .”
Aleksei turned to Sevastyan with a look of great dismay. “Please tell me you haven’t chosen another girl whose father can sharpshoot.”
“He was a half-deaf veteran of the Rodinyan Imperial Army and he owned a rusted flintlock. Always the dramatics with you, Lyosha. And no, even better. Her father is a wizard who wishes to turn me into a mass of black snakes.”
“I thought wizards in Oblya went the way of spinning wheels,” Aleksei said, though he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the existence of a wizard, or by the prospect of his friend becoming an abundance of vipers. His accent, I noticed, was Rodinyan too. All the wizards in Rodinya had been gone even longer.