My palms were growing damp and I wiped them on my nightgown. Rose looked angrier at me than she ever had before.
Papa didn’t berate Undine for her words. Maybe it was true what she’d told me, about him wanting daughters with teeth. He only drew a breath and said, “The very least you all could do is make yourselves look lovely and sweet. Wash your faces and comb your hair, put on your mother’s lilac perfume. Wear your finest dresses and shoes. The more men who fall in love, the fatter our feasts will be.”
And then he pushed past us out of the sitting room, before Undine could protest or Rose could soberly remind him that he had trashed all of our gowns and jewels. Undine tugged at the torn collar of her dress and Rose fingered the end of her braid. I stared and stared at the flattened carpet, my stomach feeling as empty as a blue porcelain bowl.
“I’ll take a bath first,” Undine said finally, curtly, “and then Rose can go after. It makes no difference whether Marlinchen bathes or not. We all know that she will not be chosen for a bride.”
It was as mean as I expected, but still her words made me flinch. I couldn’t precisely blame Undine for her anger now—this was perhaps one occasion where being plain of face advantaged me. Undine stalked up the stairs; in another moment, I heard the bathroom door slam.
In the spell of silence that followed, Rose said, “You would save me, wouldn’t you?”
“What?”
“You can only spend your secret once,” she said, still fingering her braid. “I don’t know how you got that black sand, and I don’t think you would tell me even if I asked. That’s all right. But say one man comes asking after me and another asking after Undine. You would tell Undine’s suitor the truth, and leave mine in the dark, wouldn’t you? Of all of us, Undine would survive best being wed to a strange man. You would be too afraid, and I couldn’t bear it. I just couldn’t. Tell me that you’d spend your secret to save me.”
All I could do was gape at her, struck so dumb by her words. Never before had either of my sisters beseeched my help. Never before had I held something neither of them could touch. Rose knew as much of the truth as I did, but that didn’t matter—she thought I had the secret that could either ruin or deliver her.
It felt like standing at the very top floor of our house and leaning over the railing, dizzy with the possibility of descent. It felt like knowing that you would fall but having to keep on leaning anyway until you did. I didn’t want any part of it.
And, despite everything, Sevas was still my secret, my lie. The black sand had come off in my bath. It belonged to me and me alone. A new realization sank its dark roots into me: even if I had known where the black sand came from, I would not have told her.
“I told you everything I know,” I said slowly. “About the bath and the black sand. You can have that secret and spend it however you wish. I don’t know if it’s enough for Papa, though.”
Rose made a noise in the back of her throat and jerked upright, as if someone had yanked at her braid from above. “I’ve always been kind to you, Marlinchen. Kinder than Undine. I hope that you change your mind.”
And then she was gone too. I stared at the absence of her, the vacant foyer, the grandfather clock’s shadow planked across the floor. I didn’t know what to do with the time that suddenly bloated up in front of me: hours swelling like dough left to rise, empty of all my usual tasks. Even the perfunctory sounds of the garden—the goblin’s wailing and the eyeless ravens beating their wings—had momentarily gone quiet. Dust motes drifted within tracts of sunlight.
Like a trough, the empty space in my mind filled at once with thoughts of Sevas. There was his gray-washed face and the violet bruises under his eyes and his bloody, bitten lip. There was the red mark that Derkach’s hand had left on his back and the shell of his ear as Derkach’s lips brushed against it. I wondered about the words that he was pouring into Sevas’s head, and that wondering held me so tight that suddenly it ached to breathe. It was like someone had twined whalebone around my chest, had made my heart its own strangling ivory corset.
I couldn’t bear it, the not-knowing. I put my knuckle in my mouth and bit down on it hard, but the tears came anyway, crowding my eyes until I couldn’t see anything through the blur of them. I thought of the grinning boy on the boardwalk and he seemed so very far away, nothing like the Sevas who had lowed himself to Derkach and my father. The tremulous smile he’d given me when he stepped between Papa and me kept playing over and over again in my mind like a bad vision. The bad visions were ones that took weeks to exorcise, that hung on the periphery of my gaze when I was awake and unfolded their black tendrils when I slept. Tears drenched my cheeks and dribbled into my mouth, stinging the newly opened cut on my knuckle. I was very hungry.