His power was crackling in the air like distant gunshots, but I didn’t yet feel the urge to grovel or kneel. We only stood there in perfect silence for several moments until I said, “Papa, we are short one day laborer.”
He raised a brow. “And what makes you so sure of that?”
“I counted the plates at dinner. There were twenty when there should have been twenty-one.”
My father only made a gruff sound. “Oh, I sent one of the boys on his way after he tried to sneak up to the third floor.”
My heart lurched in two directions, like frogs leaping off the same lily pad. I could have accused him of lying. I could have flashed the card and Mama’s bracelet at him; I could have spit up the secret half-bloomed. Or I could take the opportunity to ask, “What spell did you cast over the door to the third floor?”
“That’s nothing for you to worry over,” Papa said. “Sit down, Marlinchen.”
Another leap of my heart, this one jagged and painful. “Are you going to punish me, Papa?”
I had never asked him such a thing so bluntly before. I had only tried quietly to evade the traps he had laid in the floor, not to squirm against the daggers he pressed to my back. Yet this boldness was not Rose’s or Undine’s; it was mine. It was the boldness of the girl who had danced in a tavern and let a dancer rut between her thighs. Her ghost inhabited me for a moment, and I felt my chest swell.
For a long while Papa did not answer. At last, he said, “I knew you would return to me.”
“Well,” I said, still with too much boldness, “you are a wizard.”
“Not because of that. A father knows his daughter the way a tree knows all its branches, the way a serpent has memorized the pattern of scales on its belly. That is its own sort of magic, the hereditary kind, the kind that can’t be learned or taught.”
But you don’t know me, Papa, I thought. You know the girl who cooks you dinner in dutiful silence. You don’t know the girl who bled out her maidenhead in a room full of mirrors and who felt only a dark, bitter pleasure in remembering your prohibitions against it. I did not have quite the boldness to say it.
There was another stretch of silence.
“Do you know what I thought when you were born?” Papa asked, eyes snapping to me in the dark. “I despaired, in truth, because I had divined that you would not be lovely like your sisters. I didn’t know then what use a plain-faced daughter could be to me. Now I understand. This competition has made it more apparent than ever before. If you eat black plums, Marlinchen, I will never let you taste the poison. If you bathe naked in streams, it will be without ever drawing a hunter’s wanton eye. I will make certain that all the bears you meet are friendly and pliant, and never men in disguise. I will never let you fall prey to the banality of the world. I will never let you fall in love.”
You have failed in that, Papa, I thought, but the words were stuck in my throat.
With one hand, he reached up and cupped my skull, drawing his thumb along the back of my neck, as if he were doing a phrenologist’s reading. I realized that there was something in his other hand, a glass filled to the brim with murky liquid. It was not kvass; we were out of kvass.
“What about Dr. Bakay?” I asked, my heart still racing, the brave girl’s ghost still possessing me. I could take out the card at any moment. I could hurl the charm bracelet at him so hard that it hit his face and hurt.
“What about him? He is a wizard in his own way. I know you are a bit simple-minded, Marlinchen, but can’t you see? That was my spell to keep you safe. In the old days of Oblya, before it was Oblya and it was just a steppe that ran into the sea with nothing to stop it, we had a chieftain who made his own laws. He punished criminals harshly, but he never killed them. If they thieved, he took their hands. If they raped, he had them gelded. For smaller offenses you might only have to part with an ear or an eye or a little finger. None of these men ever broke a law again—it was like teaching your dog the sting of the whip. But best of all, no one would hire these men anymore, and their wives wouldn’t touch them, and their children cringed away when they saw them. They could not walk to buy bread without everyone knowing that they had been spoiled, that they were rotted to their core like bad plums. They could not stand the stares and the slurs, so they stayed in their houses, hidden away from the cruelty of the world.”
His words fell into my belly like sleet on snow, washing away the dinner I’d kept down. I grew cold, too cold for the brave girl’s ghost to inhabit me, and she fled, leaving me alone with myself. Now I felt so hungry, so terribly hungry, as if I hadn’t eaten since my cradle days.