“Would my own daughter be so cruel to me?” he rasped. “Must I tell you how I stood over the sink and ate the cold filling of the varenyky in my bare fists? Must I paint such an image in your mind? Must I tell you how I shattered the glasses of cabbage and whitefish and licked them clean down to their shards? It would be another curse, to have to confess such things so baldly in the morning light. Surely you do not wish to curse me so. You are not that sort of witch.”
That’s what he had done, then, as I had danced with Sevas in the tavern, as we had strolled down the boardwalk. As I had laughed and pretended to be an ordinary girl, or a swan-maiden with feathers in her hair, oblivious to the strings that bound me, my father had been here, devouring everything within his reach.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” I whispered. “I didn’t know.”
Yet how could I have known? For years I had cooked him the same three meals, and they had sated him well enough, and he had not needed to raid my stores in a desperate midnight panic. I was lucky that he had not passed by my bedroom in his feverish craving. But I felt somehow that my jaunt had caused this. I had a secret now, and though Papa had not uncovered it himself, it had shifted the stones in his stream bed.
I had always been told my magic did not have that sort of power: the power to do or change or make. And yet in some sneaky, winding way, I had done this to Papa; I had made him hurt.
“The curse has grown with me, Marlinchen,” Papa said, his voice still low. “With every wrinkle that forms on my face or every silver hair I find in my beard, there is another pang of hunger in my belly. Titka Whiskers was truly a serpent of a woman. Her venom is still hot in my veins.”
His hands were still on my face, but my heart gave a horrible wrenching of guilt, of pity. Whatever Papa had done, whatever way he made us live, this was a fate he did not deserve. Such agony, and all I had to do to ease some of it was a bit of labor in the kitchen. It would have been extraordinarily cruel of me to refuse. I would have been the meanest of all the daughters, in all the stories, written and real. Undine had already chosen cruelty, and Rose had chosen cleverness. What else was left for me but kindness? Third daughters always got the last pick of everything.
“I’ll go to the market,” I told Papa. “Just give me some rubles, and I will go. I’ll fetch you the fattiest cuts of meat, the biggest chickens, the ripest fruits—”
But before I could finish Papa was already drawing a breath, air whistling through his nose in a way that my body remembered as danger.
“You aren’t a fool, Marlinchen,” he said, “but sometimes you so persevere in behaving like one. We have no rubles; that’s the problem of it all. You and your sisters don’t work hard enough, and take more than your share. I know what you do, dear daughter, in the garden when you think no one is watching. Eat the food and spit it up again. While your father starves, you bury your wasted food under Rose’s mulberry tree? Is it to insult me? To mock my curse? Do you hate me so much?”
My whole body went slick with a cold sweat. How had he known? What keen-eyed spell had he cast to watch me when his real eyes could not? I started to say something, to apologize, but my lips would not move and my throat was impossibly tight and I could still feel my pulse butterflying under his fingers.
“Never again, Marlinchen, do you hear me?” he breathed against my throat. “Whatever you eat, you keep it down.”
“Yes, Papa,” I whimpered, barely able to talk past his steel grip. “I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again.”
At last he let me go, but I stayed still, afraid to move, afraid that I would fall into a pit I couldn’t see. Papa reached up again and I flinched, though it was only for him to pinch the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. The purple bags under his eyes pulsed.
“Go fetch your sisters,” he said.
And so I did, rousing first Undine, who walloped me hard with her pillow, and then Rose, who woke with such a start it was as if I’d poured frigid water down her back. All three of us came downstairs in our nightgowns and housecoats, hugging our arms around ourselves, trying to breathe as quietly as we could. Papa paced the length of the sitting room. The grandfather clock ticked in time with his footsteps.
“Greedy daughters, selfish daughters, thankless daughters,” he said, staring at the ground. “It’s not enough that I waste away from this infernal curse, not enough that I built this house over your heads and planted the garden that surrounds it and the fence that keeps you safe. Now I cannot even eat. Tell me, daughters, will you rejoice when you find me, dead of starvation, in my bed? Will you make merry over my pile of bones and skin, laugh as you tip my body into its early grave?” He made a derisive sound in the back of his throat. “What would your mother think of the girls that she reared at her breast?”