Flame-men were leaping and twirling. Snow-maidens were simpering and cowering. And in the center of it all was Ivan, bare-chested and wearing his feathered mantle, wooden sword arced over the laughing Dragon-Tsar.
Every time seeing him was like the first time, when I could scarcely breathe for how beautiful he was. But now my gaze searched for pits of dried blood on his lips, for a red mark on the back of his throat. I searched for Sevas’s face lurking somewhere behind Ivan’s heroic grimace, like a blurry shape under ice.
I hardly realized I was creeping closer and closer to the stage until I felt my eyes water beneath the glare of lights. Sevas plunged his sword into the belly of the Dragon-Tsar （really between his chest and arm; from this angle I could see the perfect falsity of his death）， and the cellos warbled and the flame-men wilted and the snow-women rose up like puffs of whipped cream on a pastry, all soft and white. The tsarevna went leaping across the stage, toward Sevas, and I knew it was the moment for their mimed kiss.
But before she reached him, Sevas turned, and somehow his eyes found me. His lips parted, and all of Ivan’s false, preening victory drained out of him.
Just as the tsarevna readied herself to vault into his arms, Sevas dropped his dancer’s pose and strode forward, to the center of the stage, and then leapt off it, still holding his wooden sword. His face was luminous with awe, jaw taut with determination.
The violins stopped so suddenly it was as if their strings had snapped and the snare drum trailed off like a dwindling heartbeat. Murmurs rose from the crowd, and then shouts of jilted fury, but I scarcely heard them. Sevas paced down the aisle toward me and I moved toward him, as if in a haze, as if in a waking dream.
When we finally met he threw his arms around me, and the audience members lurched to their feet, howling at us like wolves.
Chapter Ten
As soon as Sevas let go, the crowd rose and nearly swept him away from me. It took almost a quarter hour for the ushers to press everyone back into their seats, and even then some had already stormed up to the ticket booth, demanding refunds. The curtains drew quickly shut over the stage, erasing the befuddled snow-maidens and the gaping, blank-faced Dragon-Tsar. I locked eyes briefly with the tsarevna before she vanished, and my breath caught with how balefully she stared at me.
As the chandeliers winked back on, I could better see all of the outraged expressions from the audience members, the hard, sharp gazes that cut me down like scythes. I shrunk back against Sevas’s chest, still naked and gold-daubed and heaving. A man in a velvet suit dashed out onto the stage and began to make wheedling reassurances, summoning invented excuses with the showmanship of a street-corner magician.
It was Aleksei, not Derkach, who finally shouldered his way through the throng and grabbed Sevas, yanking him backstage, and me along with them.
He dragged Sevas and me into a room with mirrors on all four walls, our reflections doubled and then doubled again, as if we were standing inside a kaleidoscope. I looked wild-haired and ugly; Sevas looked pale-faced and beautiful; Aleksei looked furious. He began to strip off his red jacket, embroidered with its pretending flames, and said, “What were you thinking? Have both of you gone mad?”
I could not summon a reply. Sevas ran a hand through his hair and simply said, “Maybe so.”
Aleksei let out a long breath. “Why do you always make things worse for yourself, Sevas? You can never manage to just keep your head down and your mouth shut. Derkach was already livid; I can’t imagine what he’s going to do now.”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” Sevas said, but his eyes were darting to the mirror, following his own reflection. The line of his own bent elbow. “Derkach is always angry.”
“Well, that’s quite a juvenile attitude, isn’t it? And it reflects poorly on the rest of us too. The rest of the company . . . they’re going to cut our salaries to pay for the ticket refunds, you know.”
“I know,” Sevas said miserably. He looked at me and bit his lip. “Marlinchen, you have to go.”
I thought of Derkach’s fingers curled around the back of his neck and Dr. Bakay in the foyer, speaking cheerfully with my father. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Silence fell over the mirrored room, irregular and unpleasant, like a music box suddenly halting its song.
Sevas gave a brief nod, as if he had expected little else, and Aleksei sighed with the weariness of a harried mother. “I’m sorry,” he said, though it wasn’t clear if he was speaking to me or to Sevas. “I can’t protect you from your own foolishness.”