Sevas took me up to the bar, the wood slick-looking in the amber light. Before I could stop him, he ordered two glasses of vodka. He must have seen my face blanch.
“You don’t have to drink it,” he said. “But it’s rude to let a lady sit empty-handed at a tavern. All the other patrons would think so poorly of me if I didn’t buy you something my reputation would never recover from it.”
I could not tell if it was another jest. I looked around to see if there were any other women without drinks in their hands, but our glasses arrived soon after and Sevas lifted his into the air and told me, “It’s also rude not to cheers,” so I picked mine up, too, and our glasses clinked together with a sound like silvery bells.
He drank, and I held the glass up to my face and took a dubious sniff. It smelled worse than any of Papa’s potions. It smelled like what I used to scrub the rings of soap from our bathtub. Maybe it had the same kind of magic as the apples in our garden, or one of Rose’s bubbling elixirs: maybe it tasted as sweet as peach kompot if you could pinch your nose shut against the awful stench. I tried the smallest of sips, and it scalded my throat so badly that I began to cough and splutter.
Sevas leaned forward with grave concern. “Please tell me I haven’t killed you. There are some stories I’ve heard where witches burn up at the taste of vodka.”
“I’m not that kind of witch,” I said. My tongue felt fuzzy and thick, but my mind remembered the stories he was talking about. Those kinds of witches were long-extinct forest hags who gave shelter to young girls with cruel stepmothers, on the condition that they perform all sorts of tedious, miserable chores. “How can you stand to drink so much of it?”
“It gets easier with every swallow,” he said. “Like anything, really. If you do it for long enough it stops hurting. Then other things stop hurting. I thought I would die the first time I did a grand jeté. That’s the great leap where your legs are stretched out as far to either side as they will go. I thought the insides of my thighs would never cease their aching; I thought I would never manage to get high enough, or stay in the air long enough. But ballet is a sport of attrition. The best instructors are war generals. You have to beat your body until it obeys you. And this,” he said, holding up his glass, “helps.”
I had to keep myself from telling him that I often thought of my body the same way: uncouth, deserving of debasement. “To the audience, you know, you look as graceful and free as a seabird. It looks like the easiest thing in the world.”
“Of course it does. That’s the mark of a good dancer. Just like the mark of a good drinker is one who swallows vodka without wincing, with a smile on his face.” Sevas drained the rest of his glass and grinned at me over the brim. “Have you never tried any before?”
“No,” I said. “My father wouldn’t let us. He says that liquor is the refuge of weak-minded men with something they want to forget.”
Sevas put a hand to his chest. “I’ve never been so thoroughly eviscerated by a man I’ve only once met. Is that his sorcery, to make such cutting assessments of character?”
“He’s wrong about that.” Even so far away from our house, it gave me a little thrill of fright, to say such a thing. “No one with a weak mind could dance the way you do, and drunk besides.”
“Do you mind if I tell Derkach as much?” Sevas’s mouth was smiling, but there was an odd quiver in his eyes, brisk as the wind through dead leaves. “He shares your father’s concerns. He thinks I’m incorrigible, and since arriving in Oblya it’s been even worse. But I can’t help that there are twice as many taverns here as in Askoldir.”
I thought of what Rose said: that he had his whole life ahead of him, and nowhere left to go. “Were you happy to leave Askoldir?”
Sevas shrugged. “I left my family there, my mother. But I hadn’t seen much of them since I was young anyway. When you show some promise as a dancer, the ballet companies pluck you up and place you with a handler and make you spend long hours at the studio and take you on tours across the country. As Derkach said, I’ve been in his care since I was twelve years old.”
His voice dropped off, like something being kicked down a great flight of stairs. Silence stretched between us; Sevas ordered another drink. I remembered the look of Derkach’s hand on his knee and wanted to say something about it, but Sevas was already smiling again, and asking me, “But do you know one of the greatest benefits of vodka?”