Sevas cast his gaze out toward the sea, and then turned back to me. “There were two men found dead here not long ago, and of course the penny presses were astir, printing stories about a monster. They only thought so because the bodies were so thoroughly butchered it couldn’t have been a man who did it. I did read that their hearts and livers were gone. The city police scoured the whole coastline and found a pack of stray dogs living under the boardwalk with blood on their muzzles. They were all put down, but the penny presses will never print a story about that. It’s funny, isn’t it, how much the city is salivating to imagine a monster in its midst? I suppose with all but one of its wizards extinct, and with its only witches sweet and gentle, they need something else to sate their desire for violence.”
I felt my heart stutter crookedly. “Sometimes I do think my clients wished I were more wicked.”
“Perhaps you ought to consider it—as a business opportunity, of course. Feed them draughts of newt’s eye and cackle over your cauldron. Turn your spurned lovers into pigs.”
The notion that I had any lovers, spurned or otherwise, was so absurd that I choked out a laugh, even as Sevas raised his brow. “Papa is the one who does transformations, not me. And there would not be any pigs.”
Sevas gave a quick nod, and I thought I could see his ear tips pinking again, though perhaps I had wishfully imagined it. We stopped at one of the stalls and bought two glasses of kumys, cold and sweet. It occurred to me that I had never had anything to eat or drink outside my father’s house. Inside, when I did eat, I was usually wracked with panic, wondering when and where I would throw it up afterward. The kumys went down as easily as water. Organ music swooped like a gull through the air.
In the distance, the carousel scythed with blades of orange light, casting them out over the water, as bold as lighthouse beacons. I wondered how deep it was, and how many strange things were adrift in its waves. I wondered what was on the other side.
Sevas had stopped walking and placed one hand on the iron railing, staring out over the sea as though he were a weather-eyed captain at his ship’s helm. In that moment I could imagine him a sailor as easily as I could a bogatyr, both dashing and brave.
“Is it how you remember it?” he asked me, very softly.
Was it? I could remember the wind in my hair and the salt smell in my nose. I could even remember the sand under my bare feet, the way that it yielded beneath me. But such a thing would have been impossible—even before my mother was gone, I never would have been allowed to play barefooted on the sand.
A strange memory inhabited me; it possessed me like a ghost. I was standing on the shore beneath a blade of silver moonlight. Even the gas lamps had been extinguished. There was a copper taste on my tongue. There was someone else’s labored breathing, loud and close enough that it drowned out even the ceaseless roll of the tide.
“Marlinchen?” Sevas’s voice prodded me from my stupor. The memory drifted away, a balloon with a cut string.
“I—I don’t know,” I confessed. I wiped my hands on my skirt. They had felt stained and damp, though with something heavier than sweat. “As a child I was afraid of everything. Last time I was here, I think I hid in my mother’s skirts or wept into her shoulder. At least, that’s the way my sister tells it.”
“Which sister?”
“The eldest,” I said. “Undine. She’s very mean. All eldest sisters are.”
His mouth quirked up at the corner. “Who says so?”
I blinked at him. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No,” he said. “I’m my mother’s only son. But in my absence she’s started feeding seven stray cats and every bird that lands on her balcony.”
I smiled a little, imagining it. He asked me about Undine, and why she was so mean. I told him how she took my ribbons and my pearls and then pretended they had always been hers. I told him how she smacked me for being stupid, for being scared, for being canny, for being rude, for not talking, for talking too much. He asked me about my other sister and I told him that she was kind, and even better to have than a mother, because mothers were either wicked or they were dead. He frowned and told me that his mother was neither. I said that I had never read about the mothers of Yehuli boys, and he laughed and told me that most were quite willful, but they always loved their sons very much. Ships floated in the harbor like horses at their hitching posts, sails lashing gently.
“Tell me that story from your father’s codex,” Sevas said. “About the swan-woman and the bogatyr. Maybe there’s something I can incorporate into my performance.”