I thought of my bird-mother in her golden cage. I remembered how I had fed her from my palm and whispered my secrets through her bars and hummed to myself while I cleaned her droppings. I remembered how desperately and happily I had administered to her and wondered if I had more than a bit of Papa’s badness in me after all. I had loved my mother most when she was shuttered and safe, when mine was the only hand that tended her.
It was with a rush of rising acid that I said, “I don’t think that’s right. And even if it is, Derkach is too late. Oblya is already in love with you.”
Sevas exhaled a humorless laugh. “And how long will its affection last? Not much longer than it takes to recover from a night of drinking, I’d expect, or to dissolve a bar of lavender soap. By the time I’m thirty, the ballet will be done with me. I’ll be washed up and ugly and there will be a new boy to whet their appetites. I might as well die before then, when my face is still pretty and my smiles are still coy.”
“You could never be ugly,” I said, heat coiling in my belly. “And besides, it isn’t so bad.”
“What isn’t?”
“Being ugly. I used to think it was a curse, that my sisters were beautiful and I wasn’t, but not anymore. Now I think that there are some advantages to being plain of face.”
Sevas frowned so deeply it carved trenches into his cheeks. “And who says you’re plain of face?”
I almost laughed, because where would I even begin with naming them all? “Undine of course, and Papa, and Mama before she was a bird, and sometimes Rose when she’s in her foulest moods, half our clients—even if they don’t say it with their mouths, they say it with their eyes, and Dr. Bakay . . .”
“Oh,” Sevas said. “Dr. Bakay told me that the sixth Organ of my Mind was twice the size of a normal man’s, and that the sixth Organ of the Mind is what measures Destructiveness.” He glanced around at the matting of broken glass on the floor and the mirrors veined with cracks. “What a resounding endorsement of phrenology I’ve just given. I didn’t realize his services also included evaluating the plainness or beauty of women’s faces.”
My chest ached. Part of me wanted to say no more of Dr. Bakay, ever, until his face rinsed from my mind like dirty water down the drain. But there was another part of me that wanted to scream his name through empty hallways so I could hear the way it echoed. I wanted to whisper it into the ear of every person I ever met; I wanted to burn it onto me like a brand. I wanted, most of all, for someone to steal the wretched, awful burden of it away from me, and to explain precisely how wretched and awful it was. I wanted someone to write it down like a story in Papa’s codex so I could know what lesson there was to be learned.
“He told me I was as quiet as a mouse,” I said, at last. “And he liked that about me. He never measured the Organs of my Mind but he evaluated all the things that made me a woman, back when I was only a girl, and said it was because he wanted to understand witches.” And there it was, the neat dissection of my life: girl, woman, witch. Three small things that were easy to swallow. “Dr. Bakay was not a wizard, but he worked good magic all the same. You should have seen the way I became a woman under his hands.”
Sevas tensed. I could see the cord of muscle straining in his throat, the blades of his shoulders pressing high and close. He said, “That’s not right, and that’s not magic. Magic is the first sip of good wine that makes the edges of your vision blur. Magic is the cool breeze of the boardwalk at night and organ music in the air. Magic is landing a grand jeté and nearly going deaf with the crowd’s applause. Magic is the low flicker of tavern lights and the girl you’re courting leaning close so you can kiss.”
As he spoke I felt an unnamable feeling bubble up in me, something even crueler than grief. His words were so lovely but strange; he might as well have been speaking in his Yehuli tongue. I didn’t want to weep again after hearing how much it had distressed him, yet I felt tears gather along the line of my lashes, and Sevas’s face swam before my eyes.
“I’ve never tasted wine,” I said, around the hot thing in my throat. “I’ve only once been to the boardwalk at night and heard the organ music; the one time I’ve ever gone inside a tavern was that night with you. And I’ve never been kissed. I only know the old magic of what this place was before the tsar ever planted his flag here. Before there were electric streetlamps on every road and rotary presses ticking away in basement copy shops. If the tsar had never come, I would be better for it. I could’ve run away to the hut of a forest hag—they give shelter to young girls with cruel families and all they ask for in return is for you to separate grains of rotten corn from the sound, and poppy seeds from soil. I never would have needed to come here and ruin everything for you. Sevas, what am I going to do?”