In another hour I had dressed and done what I could to tame my hair and taken a sample of every herb I managed to find in Rose’s storeroom. I also swiped the compendium off her desk. Even though I was not an herbalist myself, I was still a witch and I hoped that maybe I could imbue the tonics and elixirs with a bit of my own magic to make them work.
It was only that—a hope. My magic was just for showing; it wasn’t for doing or changing or making. But I had promised to go to Fedir and I knew I would not be able to bear it if he died without me trying everything I could to save him.
I had not been out into the city with Papa since before my mother had died, when he had taken my sisters and me with him to the market, or to the specialty shops, or to see Titka Whiskers and some of the other witches and wizards in Oblya. Mostly he was judging his competition, but Titka Whiskers always gave us squares of honey cake to eat and let me pull on her huge black lashes, which were as thick as crow’s feathers, forcing her cat-eyes open and shut and open and shut, over and over again until I got tired and fell asleep curled in her lap.
My mother did not like Titka Whiskers. She said she wanted her daughters to be doctors’ wives, not witches. She wanted to train us to host picnics and luncheons, not to make poultices for ringworm or see fortunes in the bottoms of our teacups. But no respectable man in Oblya would wed a witch, even a beautiful one. My sisters and I were only their furtive nighttime fantasy; we lived inside their heads, not beside them in their marriage beds.
The idea of his daughters marrying doctors was palatable enough to my father, and when he discovered that we were witches, initially he despaired of our prospects. Then he realized that he could use our magic and then Mama died and then none of us left the house so there were no men to meet anyway.
Now Niko led us down Kanatchikov Street, in the opposite direction of the ballet theater. The storm had made everything damp and muggy; I felt like I was being squeezed by a fist of air. My hair was already curling out of its tenuous updo. In the daylight the streets were busier even than at night, with trams and carriages skittering over the cobblestones like beetles and kumys sellers pushing their carts and brokers in snug black suits pacing furiously toward the stock exchange.
I had not been down any of these streets in the daytime before, at least not in a very long time, yet there was something immensely familiar about the way that cobblestones rolled beneath my feet. As if my body remembered something that my mind did not.
As we went on, we came across the beggars and the drunkards, propped up against the sides of buildings or clumped along alleyways like growths of mold, faces ashen and sweat-slick. I saw Papa curl his lip as we passed one of them, dark bottle still held limply between the man’s finger and thumb. Magic rose from Papa like hair on a dog’s hackles, and it was only because Niko sped up then that my father didn’t loose his spell. The drunkard rolled over and pressed his cheek against the cobblestones.
In this part of Oblya, where I had never been, the buildings were like card houses half-toppled. Awnings were wind-thrashed and yellow with time. The windows were clotted with dead black flies and smudged with handprints that lingered like grease on a pie pan. Slack clotheslines crisscrossed above our heads, cutting up the gray sky into slivers. Greasy smoke chuffed from second-floor balconies and stray dogs limped down the road, nosing heaps of garbage.
And all around us were young men, the day laborers, though it shocked me more than anything how they seemed not to be doing any labor at all. They were sitting on the stoops and some of them were smoking and some had weathered sets of dominoes or half-empty vodka bottles, but most were only sitting there and staring, their teeth tobacco-black. I quickened my pace and caught up to Niko, even as Papa scowled and scowled, and asked in a whisper, “Why are they just sitting here?”
“There’s no work for them today,” Niko said. “Most of us don’t have regular jobs, you see. We can go around to the factories and the shops and ask the foremen and owners if they need anything, but a lot of the time they don’t, or someone else has gotten there first. And no jobs means no money and of course nothing to eat.”
One man’s eyes latched onto me, sharp and bright as the ends of kitchen knives. He leaned over and whispered something to another man beside him, and they both smirked like sated cats. A bit of sweat chilled on the back of my neck, and then Papa grasped me by the wrist and ushered me along.
Niko led us to a small grocery with Ionik lettering in gold along its glass windows and a green awning that drooped and sagged like one of Papa’s cheeks. Inside, hunched behind the counter, was an acorn of a man with three precise tufts of black hair: one over each of his ears and one feathering across the top of his round head. He craned his neck slowly toward Niko, like a very fat dog rolling over, and the moment he saw him he began a muffled tirade, words inaudible behind the grease-smeared glass.