It was not even the mere fact of it that shocked me, but the violence—he ground himself into my sister with determined fervor, but absolutely no warmth. There was none of the aching gentleness I had felt when Sevas moved inside of me. It felt like hours that I stood there, watching, but it could not have been longer than a few moments before Undine saw me and screamed and Indrik pulled out of her and stumbled back, still hard and glistening.
“You idiot!” Undine screeched, rising to her feet. Her skirts tumbled back over her bottom but her breast was still hanging over the top of her corset, and it flopped with her every movement. “What are you doing out here?”
“I wanted to pick the plums.” My voice sounded so obscure and distant, it was as if it belonged to someone else. My sister was staring at me with such venom in her eyes that I went on in a rush, “Undine, I swear, I won’t tell Papa—”
She laughed, a high and keen sound that startled the eyeless ravens from their perch. “Tell Papa if you wish, or don’t. It matters little to me. He’s a fool. It’s been seven years since his daughter has been coupling with a monster in his own garden and he never lifted his head from his plate long enough to notice.”
My mouth was hanging open like a dead carp’s. Her words landed on me, but they left no mark; I couldn’t understand.
Indrik huffed with indignation, but I was surprised that he did not contest Undine’s description of him as a monster. Whatever Indrik liked to boast, the gods in Papa’s codex did not couple like this with mortal women; they did not even couple like this with witches. They turned to swans and left their flushing consorts with three eggs in a wicker basket; they transformed into showers of golden light and spilled themselves onto maidens trapped in towers. It was never anything so brute, so rough, so mundanely human.
The ache in my head sharpened to a blinding white pain behind my eyes, and only when it cleared again was I able to say, “But Papa’s potions . . .”
Undine made a hacking noise in the back of her throat, and then spat in the dirt in front of me. “You are so much more simple-minded than I ever imagined, Marlinchen. Do you really think that Papa’s potions have any real magic at all? He’s not even an herbalist! You must not even know that Rose takes her clients to the garden shed or the storeroom and does the same with them, all those women that come to her with desperation in their eyes. But of course Papa’s stupidest magic worked on you anyway—he convinced you that it was real. Did you fall asleep at night worrying that one of us might cough up our livers?”
She laughed again, loudly and terribly. “Of course, you would never worry such a thing about yourself! Plain-faced, kindhearted Marlinchen would never dream of defying dear Papa, nor would she ever catch a man or woman’s lustful eye.”
It was no crueler than anything I had heard from her before, but now her words smoldered in my belly like the black end of a match. All these years Rose and Undine had both known that Papa’s potions didn’t work, but they had let me go on believing that they were real. They’d enjoyed their furtive rebellions while I was butchering chickens and worse for Papa, while I was folding his laundry and scrubbing the floors and walls until the whole house gleamed as if it were an amulet. They could have told me the truth, but why would they—I cooked all their meals too.
My head was still throbbing and my mouth was dry, but I remembered the way that Undine had shouldered past me to bat her lashes at Sevas, and a bit of my own cruelty flowered up.
“You don’t know everything,” I told her, each word trembling like a plucked string. “You don’t know that when I ran away I went to the ballet theater, and when he saw me there Sevas stopped dancing and leaped off the stage and took me into his arms. Then he coupled with me right there in the theater, in a room full of shattered mirrors, and afterward he said that he would come back to Papa’s house and compete for my hand.”
I said it all in a rush, and hearing it aloud it sounded better than my favorite story in Papa’s codex, better than the swan-tsarevna and Ivan. It sounded better than any dream I might’ve conjured in my own mind, where I was a blushing mortal girl rescued by a valiant bogatyr. Best of all it was my secret that had made it so, the magic of my own little rebellion.
It scarcely even occurred to me that Undine’s face was darkening, turning the shade of a plum near to rot. But then she lurched forward, one breast swaying, and caught me by the throat. Her hands pressed down hard until tears gathered at the corners of my eyes and my breath could only come in short, hot gasps.