“You haven’t ruined anything that’s worth replacing,” he said sharply. “I could have stayed up onstage and finished my performance like a good boy, like Derkach’s docile little puppet, like Kovalchyk’s perfect Ivan. But I’m so tired, Marlinchen. I’ve been playing Ivan since I was twelve years old. How many more times can I kill the Dragon-Tsar? Maybe one night I will let him kill me instead. Just for the thrill of something new.”
And then the most astonishing thing happened: Sevas put his hands over his eyes and began to cry. His shoulders trembled with his sobs and all I could do was stare and stare as he dropped to the ground, pulling his knees to his chest.
I had never seen a man cry before. I felt as if I might die myself, just from watching it. I didn’t think I could stand to live in a world that could make him weep like this, as plaintively as a child. Even with my mind spasming around the thought, I found myself kneeling beside him.
“Please, Sevas,” I whispered. “I don’t want to see you die.”
He gave a muffled whimper and his arms lifted to circle my waist. I scarcely even thought of what I was doing as I lifted my own arms and gathered up his head to my chest. His cheek was flush against the bare skin of my breast, right above where the tattered line of my corset ended. I held him there with the ferocious tightness of a bear-mother cradling her cub, of a merchant clutching his most precious ware.
In several moments his sobs ebbed, shoulders stilling. My heart was beating so rapidly and crookedly I wondered if it might wear itself to the bone like an old racing hound. Sevas turned his head and, very briefly, pressed his lips to the cleft of my breasts.
I nearly fell over. My hands dropped to Sevas’s shoulders and he lifted his gaze, staring up at me from beneath dark lashes. The whites of his eyes were shot through with red, but still he was so beautiful that I could hardly bear to look back at him.
“You told me you’ve never been kissed,” he said. “It’s good magic, you know. Maybe the best.”
“I couldn’t say one way or the other.” My skin was so warm and I could see a flush of bright pink spreading from my forehead past my collarbone in mirror after mirror.
Sevas smirked, with the reckless charm of the man I had strolled with along the boardwalk that one impossible night. “Let me show you,” he said.
And then he wrapped one arm around my waist and brought the other hand to the back of my head, snarling a fistful of my wild hair. He pulled me down toward him and kissed me so thoroughly, so relentlessly, that I thought I would faint before he was through. His tongue parted my lips with gentle insistence.
My own hands went to his face, his throat, his chest, touching all the places that had featured in my feverish nighttime fantasies, and still I felt almost surprised that there was no noose to jerk me back into the gray-washed waking world. Behind my eyelids, everything was blooming hot and red.
When at last he pulled away, I said breathlessly, “If that were true magic, I would have turned into something else by now.”
“Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough,” he said, and then bore me down beneath him. My hair spilled across the floor, mingling with bits of broken glass. He kissed me resolutely on the mouth, and then trailed his lips doggedly down my chin, along the line of my jaw, over my throat. All the while I could do nothing but gasp and pant, my arms locking around his neck to pull him closer and closer and closer.
“I do feel different now,” I said faintly, the next time he gave me leave to speak. “Maybe it’s good magic after all.”
Sevas smiled, and it was so lovely that my heart broke a little bit, the way a hundred other girls’ hearts had certainly broken when he looked at them like this. “What are you now, do you think?”
It occurred to me then that perhaps this was my magic: that the secret I’d held in my belly without spitting it back up and the lie I’d told over and over again to keep the secret safe were now made manifest.
“A just-kissed girl,” I said. “A woman, maybe.”
I could feel the press of something hard and stiff against my thigh, and my dress had gotten rucked up over my knee. I ran my hand along Sevas’s chest, along all the coils of muscle and the planes of bone, his skin pulled tautly over them. Everything was twined and hard and strong.
When I reached the slope of his abdomen and the knob of his hipbone, Sevas shivered, and through his parted lips there came a soft moan.
“Do you mean to torment me?” he asked.
I was as light as dust motes drifting through a tract of sunlight, as light as air. I took Sevas’s hand in mine and guided it to the small of my back, where the laces of my corset began.