As I watched out the window again, the door of the garden shed flapped open and Indrik came staggering out, the goblin at his heels. He looked almost as despondent as the morning he’d first come to us; for days afterward the sky rumbled with artificial thunder. I felt sorry for him as he picked burrs from his coat, and sorrier for the goblin as it wiped its big eye on a loose rhubarb leaf.
I heard Papa lurching from his bed, so I put on my housecoat and hurried downstairs.
It had been a long time since I had seen the icebox so full, stuffed nearly to bursting with paper packages of hard, white fatback; jars of sour cream that tumbled over each other when I opened the lid; whole carp with their heads and eyes still intact. There was the chicken he’d promised, though it was already plucked and pimpled, and red, round apples with no bruises. I dug through the packets of butcher paper and the loose fruit until I found, strangely, a glass container with filling for varenyky I could not remember making.
I was pleased, though, that I could make Papa a proper breakfast at last. Surely he could not be angry at me or my sisters when there was a heaping plate in front of him and he was sitting on a whole heavy bag of rubles. I made the dough and rolled it thin, then fried up that filling with onions and oil. I put his varenyky on the plate with great care, dropping a spoonful of that fresh sour cream beside them, and another spoonful of pickled purple cabbage with it. I would serve it to him and he would smile and thank me and kiss my cheeks, and then we would print up the flyers and more clients would come and nothing else of Mama’s would need to be sold.
I could not find the blackberry kvass Papa and I had drunk last night, so I poured him a glass of water instead. While I was arranging everything on the tray I saw a mangle of fur and skin and dried blood on the butcher block, what was left of the monster I’d killed.
A sick feeling jostled my belly, like someone prodding an overripe fruit on a sagging branch.
In the safe aftermath of the storm and in the quiet, gutted carcass of our house, I allowed myself to think of Sevas again. He would play Ivan tonight, feather-clad and gold-daubed, following the same steps over and over, trying to make every smile look new and every stumble seem dire.
An idea was pricking at my mind with the relentless rhythm of needlework: I could go out again.
The black sand was safely buried under the juniper tree, and I had already proven that there would be no gruesome midnight transformation, no furtive spellwork in the garden or any insurmountable dangers in Oblya’s streets. I had lied to Papa and he had not tasted it in his liver or kvass; would it be so terrible to test my luck a second time?
The stories tended to give you three chances for these sorts of things. Three nights of revelry before your carriage turned into a gourd. Three questions to ask the wolf before he showed his teeth. Three bites of an apple before you ate the poison in it. I could mete out my three chances carefully, savoring them like caramels; I could suck on them and spit them out again into my hand. Even the imagining of it felt thrilling and tasted sweet.
I brought Papa’s tray into the sitting room and placed it on the cloven-footed table in front of him.
“Thank you, Marlinchen,” he said. The bags under his eyes looked smaller than they had in some time, and they were a washed shade of lavender. He must have slept well knowing that the icebox was full at last.
His praise and easy acquiescence made me soften. “Thank you for going to the market. There was so much food in the kitchen.”
“Yes, but we will have to be careful. You and your sisters can’t eat too much. Women need less to sate themselves than men, and none of you are cursed. If you’re hungry between lunch and supper, eat some fruit from the garden.” He glanced out the window but did not seem to notice the swath of damage that the storm had drawn across his property, vine tendrils still lashing limply in the scant breeze like the tail of a very old dog.
I was not very hungry, which came as a surprise. Ordinarily I watched Papa eat with miserable, guilt-ridden envy, wishing I could allow myself such rich foods, and then chastising myself for my own ugly, indecent desires. Now I felt very little as I listened to the sounds of Papa eating, and when I looked out at the garden, my mind filled like a tavern’s coffers with thoughts of Sevas and vodka and the boardwalk at night.
I had the compact. I had the feather. I had, perhaps most important of all, the memory that assured me that it was possible to escape and return without consequence. Three secrets, three lies. Threes and threes and threes, like the stories said. Surely I could not be doing anything so terribly wrong if I was following the edicts of the tales in the codex so closely.