He kept his voice low, but even so I felt I was a wave that had come upon a seawall, his words solid and immovable. What did I know of any history besides my own, and even that hazy, half-remembered? There was a whole world spreading its roots outside my father’s house, and oaks just as old as the ones in our garden. I grew up with his words and the stories in the codex, but did I really know anything at all?
And then there was Dr. Bakay’s name in his mouth, which might have made me retch if not for the waft of Rose’s tincture.
“I’m sorry,” I said embarrassedly. “We don’t have any history books in our house. No books at all, aside from my father’s codex.”
Sevas gave a short laugh, and his eyes were bright again, as if it were all forgotten. “Those were the least cruel words I’ve ever heard spoken on the subject; trust me, there’s nothing to be sorry for. But have you really never read a book, an actual book?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, still feeling mortified. “Papa—my father’s codex has lots of stories and spells, and recipes for potions.” It had the smell of damp moss and was as ancient as Indrik claimed to be. “I like the stories where swans turn back into maidens so they can marry princes.”
“Now I see why you love Bogatyr Ivan,” he said with only the barest of smirks. “Heroes triumphant, evil banished, crowns won and wedding vows sung. There are so many books like that you could spend your whole life reading, just like I’ll play Ivan every night until I’m too old and ugly for it—likely around age thirty.”
The idea of him ever turning ugly was as unthinkable as a spell to turn iron into gold, the most impossible of all impossible alchemies. Yet Rose’s prediction lingered. “And what will you do after?”
“I don’t give much thought to it. I may very well be dead before that day comes. I try to live each night like death is riding for me at the very first hour of dawn, so I’ll have very few regrets when it does finally appear in the tavern door.” He glanced toward the threshold, as if he really did think he might see a black-clad figure there. In Papa’s codex, Death was a man with willow fronds for hands and drooping ears so huge you could fold yourself into them and fall soundly asleep. “I think I would regret it deeply, if I died at dawn knowing it’s been so long since you’ve seen the ocean. Won’t you let a rude intruder show you your own sea?”
And selfishly, like a feather-veiled maiden, I did.
Overhead the moon was as pale as a woman’s face on a cameo pin, its reflection so bright and solid it seemed a dredge boat could scoop it right up out of the water. The black shoreline bunched and flattened, like the sash of a dress. Running alongside it, the boardwalk was still busy even this late at night, studded with flat-roofed pavilions piping organ music and stalls that sold tall, frothing glasses of kumys. A little ways down the boardwalk was the white coronet of the carousel, and as far as I could squint my eyes to see, the electric lamps burned like live embers.
Couples ambled past us: women in dresses with huge sleeves and even more enormous bustles, and men in top hats that seemed each to grow taller than the last, as if they were in private competition, trying to outdo one another in height. Even in my dated dress and with my wind-snarled hair, nearly all of it now come loose from Rose’s braids, it filled me with a very pleasant warmth to know that these strangers looked at Sevas and me as if we were another couple, with ordinary lives before us and behind.
I tried not to think of the snow-maiden that had kissed him, of the other perfumed women that he’d spoken of, or of Derkach’s hand on his knee. Deep down I knew, even in the haze of this waking dream, that Sevas would never imagine me the way I imagined him, with such futile desire. But still I grew hot all over when he laughed, blushing down to the hollow of my throat.
The black tide lipped the blacker shore, with a sound like hundreds of riled serpents, and suddenly I remembered something.
“Do you ever read the penny presses?” I asked him, training my eyes on the vanishing tongues of foam.
“Of course,” he said. “They’re always good for a laugh. Just yesterday I read a lascivious story about the gradonalchik’s wife and her unseemly consorting with a postman. Why do you ask?”
“I heard a story,” I said, slowing my pace, “that there were two men found on the boardwalk, dead. I think it was in the penny presses. They said that the men were missing their hearts and livers, and that they had plum stones where their eyes had been.”