Now I saw only this: a boy who was terrified of being alone.
I went to speak but he caught up my face in his hands again, bitten fingers brushing over my lips. Still I went weak-kneed at the way he looked at me, like he wanted never to look at anything else.
“If I kiss you again,” he said, mouth so close to mine, “will you turn into a girl who believes me?”
“You aren’t being fair,” I protested. “Do you plan to kiss your way out of any predicament?”
“Only the ones with women involved.” He paused. “I am not afraid of your father’s anger. I am afraid of his gentleness.”
“What?”
Sevas looked down. “Even Derkach was capable of kindness. You heard him say that he loves me. Any predator can choose to smile without teeth. I’m afraid your father will choose to treat you tenderly if you return and then I will never be able to get his teeth out of you.”
My heart plummeted. He was right. Papa could be tender. For all the fear his magic laid on me, my bed at home was still the softest place I had ever known. Although Papa’s moments of kindness were so rare, so meager, they ballooned so hugely in my mind that sometimes they obliterated everything else.
“I wish,” Sevas said quietly, as though he could see inside my mind, “that I could give you a softer place to fall. But you’re right; I only have a wooden sword and handful of rubles and a face that gets older and uglier and less useful with each passing moment.”
As much as he wished for a soft place for me, I wished the same for him. I remembered the vision that he’d spilled into me and now I wanted again to kiss it out of him, to make the space between him and Derkach vast and long. I wanted to give him the gift of hours, to gather them up in my apron like fresh apples and empty them into his lap. I wanted to feed him hours that were free of Derkach’s black, curdling rot.
I did not know if kisses could do such a thing, but Sevas was right—they were very good magic indeed. So with a quiver of boldness I pressed my lips squarely to his, fingers circling his wrists. Sevas held my face and sucked my tongue into his mouth and didn’t let go until both of us needed desperately to breathe.
“I’ll harden myself against Papa’s gentleness,” I whispered, “if you can solve the riddle that’s not a riddle and steal the mirror from under his nose.”
“I promise,” he said, “I will be the canniest glass-thief you’ve ever seen. Besides,” he added, “I’m good with mirrors.”
I gave a small smile, even as his promise tugged me along like a wooden toy on a string, to Sevas’s dressing room where he put on his clothes and I looked at myself in the mirror of his boudoir, trying to track my own metamorphosis. There was a bruise on my throat in the shape of Sevas’s mouth, and my hair was mussed with the movement of his hands. Would Papa notice it all when he looked at me, proof of the blood spilled between my thighs? The old fear surfaced like a shipwreck dredged up out of the sea. If he suspected my misdeed and forced the potion down my throat, there was nothing Sevas or I could do about it. And if Sevas’s very presence stirred him to a vengeful fury, what power did I have to keep Papa from turning him to a spewing of black snakes at my feet?
I watched Sevas put on his coat and could only feel myself fill with dread. He had worried over Papa’s kindness, but Papa’s anger was a churning, roiling thing, always changing its shape. It could coil around me like a serpent or snap me up in its jaws like a wolf.
I would have to be clever enough to evade his anger, and cruel enough to turn away from his kindness. My problem was that I had spent my whole life being told I was neither, only a plain-faced third daughter whose magic was just for seeing, not doing or changing or making.
Was I being clever now, with my plan, or was it just Papa’s magic working on me from afar, slowly pulling me back to the garden, to the house, to the sitting room where he and Dr. Bakay were chatting like old friends?
Sevas took my hand. He led me through the labyrinth of dressing rooms, looking determinedly ahead. I was glad that his grip did not give me a choice in the matter, because otherwise I would have stayed there, frozen, the mirror holding me in place.
Voices rippled the velvet curtain, only whispers at first, too low to make out, and then rising to a chorus of shouts. Sevas halted abruptly. “It’s Kovalchyk.”
“Is there another way out?”
“No. We’ll have to go past.”
There was more shouting, and then a sound like a great number of boulders tumbling down the side of a mountain. Metal screeched against metal, and Sevas drew a breath. In another moment he parted the curtain with the flat of his hand and pulled me through it after him.