My cheeks were still prickling with tiny needles of heat. I pulled my housecoat tighter around myself while Undine slipped on her shoes and walked toward the door, turning back to look at me with her hand on the knob.
“You should be angry at me,” she said.
“Why?”
She looked at me with disdain. “Because I just slapped you. You are insufferable sometimes. You’re not doing me, or yourself, any favors by pretending not to mind when you get hurt. I would have slapped you harder if I didn’t know the truth—if I didn’t know that you would just blush and bat your lashes as someone tied a tourniquet around your thigh and prepared to saw your leg off. Do you know why the worst thing Papa has ever done to me is push me to my knees? Because I wail and scream and beat his chest with my fists whenever he tries to do anything more than bark orders at me from the chaise. You think he wants some mute little china doll to cook his meals and wash his sheets? No. He wants daughters with teeth. The hurting is the point. I can’t believe it’s taken you twenty-three years to figure out—if you even understand what I’m saying at all. It’s no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new. And you should hear the way men talk! Some of our clients, even. A woman’s worthless and spoiled once she’s been bred. That’s why Papa can’t stand the idea. He can’t stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him.”
And then she pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind her. I stood in the echo of the sound, run over and over again by the wave of my sister’s words. By the time I managed to follow her, I felt exhausted and drenched, my throat raw with saltwater.
Maybe it wasn’t cruelty Undine had chosen, just the truth, as mean and banal as it was. And maybe I hadn’t picked kindness at all. Maybe I’d just shut my eyes and sat as still and silent as one of the women at the cotton looms, face made sallow by the factory lights, waiting for the machine to teach me what to do with my hands.
There was something sick in me, something wrong. Even baby birds knew how to shriek, even kittens knew how to mewl, even puppies knew how to whine. Papa had told me I hadn’t even cried when he’d pulled me from between my mother’s thighs. I hadn’t protested when he dragged me through the streets of Oblya, hadn’t protested when Rose had chided me or when Undine had slapped me. My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.
I walked down the stairs without hearing my own footsteps.
Papa was in the sitting room, perched on the chaise longue. The front of his shirt was stained with pink juice and I could see the bulge of his stomach under his robe, huge with everything he’d eaten. My own belly growled and I felt terribly embarrassed at the sound, wondering if everyone else could hear it too.
My sisters and I stood in a straight line before him, like saltshakers in dour observance of a feast, waiting for the moment when we would be snatched up and used.
His eyes plucked me up first. “I must thank you, Marlinchen, best and most dutiful of my daughters. If you hadn’t taken me to that stinking slum, I never would have landed on the idea that will keep this family from ruin. It is not just the simple thing of marrying off my daughters, my witch-daughters, nor to whom. It is the choosing of your bridegrooms that will save us.”
Papa was like this sometimes: speaking words that only he understood, but with the grandiloquence that imagined an audience of rapt thousands. When I dared to glance at Rose and Undine, I saw that their faces were as blank as mine. I turned back to watch Papa’s bare feet crush the fibers of the carpet.
“This city is full to bursting with desperate, penniless young men,” he went on, rising now and beginning to pace, certainly killing hundreds of dust mites with every step. “Who among them would not leap at the opportunity to wed one of Zmiy Vashchenko’s daughters, and to someday inherit his estate?” Papa gestured vaguely at the ceiling with its splitting plaster, at the last of his cat-vases. “As soon as I announce this competition, we will scarcely be able to keep the crowds of men from our door.”
“Competition.” Rose dropped the word in front of us like a butcher slapping down a cured liver on the counter. “You want these desperate, penniless men to compete for our hands?”
Papa seemed barely to hear her. “I will do as you suggested, Rosenrot. I will go to the printing shop and buy a thousand flyers that all say the same thing: zmiy vashchenko’s daughters to be wed—come to his house on rybakov street if you would like to one day own it. I will post them all around Oblya and by nightfall, daughters, I guarantee it: half the men of this city will be rattling the gate into the garden.”