All this time I had blamed the rubles and only the rubles. I had let Papa’s greed absolve him. But he’d wanted more than money after all. Papa had let Dr. Bakay saw off my leg so I could only ever hobble around this house, from the kitchen to the sitting room to my bedroom, like a lame dog. He had tied the tourniquet himself.
A whimper fell out of my mouth. I was seventeen again, and I knew how the doctor’s blade felt against my breast.
And then a fantastic transformation began to take place before me. Where Papa’s face had been, there was now only a skull, flesh and muscle stripped away. In the pits of his eyes were two plum stones. His jaw was fitted with some large creature’s rib bone. In his teeth he held the broker’s card and his hair had turned to white tail feathers. I choked back a scream, and abruptly the terrifying metamorphosis reverted. I was once again looking at a man, a wizard, my father.
It’s not true, I told myself. Papa loves you and he loved Mama and he didn’t mean to turn her into a bird or eat her. He only wanted to keep us safe from the world.
Papa regarded me queerly, as if he could see the tumult in my mind. “Are you thirsty, Marlinchen?”
All of a sudden my throat was parched.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m so thirsty, Papa.”
“Here,” he said, holding up the glass to me. The dark liquid bubbled like a cauldron. “Drink.”
For a moment I thought, with a sluice of panic, that it was the potion he would use to test our purity, but I quickly saw it was not. It was the same black juice I had seen before, left out for me in the kitchen, offered to me by Papa as I limped around him in the sitting room. It had not tasted bitter like the potion; it had tasted sweet.
No moonlight spilled through my window. I was not thinking of Sevas, of the mirror, of the card, of the bracelet, of Sobaka or the missing broker or the man who had been found dead at the theater. I was only thinking of how to slake the terrible thirst. I put the juice to my lips and swallowed.
I woke the next morning with a spectacular headache, the sun laying ribbons of light across my eyes. I blinked dust from my lashes and sat up, which made everything in my stomach jostle like an overstuffed jewelry box.
My conversation with Papa seemed as hazy and half-remembered as a dream. Perhaps that was all it had been. I was lying here in bed, the softest place I had ever lain, and my body remembered the comfort and curled into the memory like a crab into its conch.
But then the grandfather clock gonged six, and my wheel fell into its groove. I stood and drew on my housecoat and went downstairs. Everything was still and silent. The men were asleep in the sitting room, draped over furniture, as if someone had strewn out a basket of laundry. Sevas was lying near the chaise longue, head resting on his own bent arms. He looked beautiful and peaceful.
I did not want to risk waking them as I made my way into the kitchen, so instead I opened the front door and stepped into the garden. It was pleasantly cool, autumn just starting to light up the foliage like a brushfire, greens making their transformations into yellow and orange and maroon. The sky was the tender, throbbing blue of a frostbitten finger. My head badly hurt.
Something made me want to pick down the rest of the plums before they rotted. Perhaps I could make kvass out of them. Perhaps it would please Papa. The garden was oddly silent, the eyeless ravens still dozing on their branches, the goblin nowhere to be found.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something black gleam in the wheat grass. At first I thought it was a dropped ribbon, but when the clouds rinsed away and the sun beamed through the trees at a perfect angle, it looked like a tongue of flame. The fiery serpent. I blinked again, and it was gone.
The plum tree was behind the shed, past Rose’s herb plantings, and half-ensconced in a ring of vividly blue sage flowers that grew nearly waist-high. When the sunlight glanced off them they were as bright as live wires. I trampled through them, gathering burrs in my nightgown, but stopped only when I heard a strange panting sound.
Short, sharp breaths that cut the air like thousands of little thrown darts. I thought for a moment that it must be a trick, that it was only the wind trapped in some small space, and with each gust trying to escape. But then I heard a labored grunting noise, and followed it around the back of the shed, as if in a trance.
Undine was on her knees in the dirt, blue dress rucked up over her bottom, her hair spilling over the ground like a slow pour of honey wine. She was gasping and gasping, her cheeks splendidly pink, and one of her breasts loosed from her corset so that it swung with the heaviness of a pendulum. Her nipple brushed the ground. Indrik was crouched behind her, his hands braced on her hips, rutting. His goat’s fur was all mussed and his tail was flapping with every thrust.