I inhaled sharply. “Maybe you ought to have considered what an awful mess it would make, to couple with a plain-faced witch.”
It was the only time I had ever seen Sevas flush. He let go of my arms and said, “I don’t choose my conquests like a woman shopping for hats, imagining how each will make me look when I preen in front of my friends. Is it so preposterous to think that I was only a foolish man, like so many others, who desired a woman that perhaps he shouldn’t? It’s the oldest story there is, men wanting things that will kill them.”
“I wouldn’t kill you,” I said, but the words felt both heavy and empty. “It’s only Papa that would try.”
“I’d sooner let him try than play Ivan one more time,” said Sevas, and even as he attempted a smile I could see the muddled misery in his eyes. “A Dragon-Tsar or a wizard in his manor: what’s the difference, really?”
The difference was that Papa didn’t breathe paper flames. His magic was as real as my bird-mother’s white feathers or the black snakes in the garden, as real as the terror coiling in the bottom of my belly. I rested my palm flat against the wooden floor to steady myself, then began to put on my dress.
Sevas watched me in silence, eyes tracing the slope of my breasts, the curves of my calves and thighs, looking enraptured. I had seen the proof of his desire; I had felt it stiff inside me, and yet it was still almost impossible for me to believe that he had wanted me just as desperately as I had wanted him. Sevas put on his tights again and swept up his feathered mantle, shaking out the bits of broken glass.
Mama’s compact was lying on the ground, in a bed of glittering shards. I closed my fingers around it and drew it to my breast, the metal cool against my feverish skin. Last night when Sevas had torn off my corset, the compact had clattered to the floor, spilling out some of its black sand. I had waited for him to ask me about it, and his gaze had gone to it briefly, curiously, but then he’d only turned back and kissed me again, with the desperation of a man near to dying. I held that memory in the black space of my mind and licked my lips, tasting the saltiness of him.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. Tears were gathering again at the corners of my eyes. “Papa will have my liver and I cannot stop him. There are fifteen strange men at my house, and that’s not counting Dr. Bakay. He is laughing with Papa on the chaise. Both of my sisters hate me for keeping my secret, for telling my lie. And I’ve ruined myself from ever being in a good story again.”
My heart was thrashing like an open window in the rain. Sevas came to me and cupped my face in his hands, very firmly, and said, “I know about the men. Your father’s posters were everywhere and then the penny presses printed them on the front page. You said he wants to protect your virtues, but now he wants you married to any one of Oblya’s desperate bachelors who can solve his wizard’s riddle.”
“My sisters,” I said softly, looking at him through wet lashes. “The man who figures out the truth can have his pick, and no man of sound mind would choose me when he could wed Rose or Undine.”
Sevas pursed his lips. “Of all the things Dr. Bakay said about me, he never suggested that I was not of sound mind.”
“Speak frankly.” My stomach swooped like a gull. “What need do you have of a plain-faced witch-wife? You must know that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. I could grow a second set of teeth. I could eat my husband.”
“You must stop calling yourself plain-faced,” Sevas said sternly. “I do not think of plain-faced women the way I think of you. And you are sharp-toothed already.” He showed me his fingers, nicked all over with my bite marks. “If I took you to wife, I would not mind being nipped in our marriage bed.”
My face was torridly hot. “You can’t really mean to say that you want to be in Papa’s competition.”
“And you don’t think I could survive it?” He lifted a brow. “What is his wizard’s riddle, anyway? Dr. Bakay said that my Organ for Cleverness was exceptionally large.”
“It’s not a riddle that cleverness can solve.” But something was turning in my mind. “He wants to know how I managed to escape from under his spell. To come to the theater.”
“Your secret,” Sevas said. “You never told me how.”
I opened the compact, my fingers shaking. The black sand was still there, smelling faintly of brine and sea air, as impossible as it had always been but now imbued with the strange new magic I hadn’t known I’d possessed. “This came off me in the bath. Papa’s spell was that none of us could leave the house without black sand from Oblya’s beaches.”