When I got to Sevas’s side, he was so surprised to see me that he gave a little jump. “Marlinchen,” he said. “Where have you been?”
I frowned at him. “I was sleeping soundly, wasn’t I? Where you left me.”
Sevas opened his mouth to reply, but before he could the flutter of voices called our attention to the gate. Papa was standing on one side, hands steepled over his full belly （we all had feasted well on varenyky since my return）， looking perfectly sedate. In fact he had the look of a feudal lord again, and all the day laborers clustered around him the serfs who broke their backs tilling his land.
On the other side of the gate was Derkach. My heart dropped like a stone.
“You must return him to me,” Derkach was saying. His hands gripped the fence, fingers so pale and thin they looked halfway dead. “Sevas is my charge, and you cannot keep him here.”
“Do you think I hold this man, or any of these men, here against their will?” Papa laughed, and it sounded like someone shaking coins in a jar. “These men came to my house of their own accord, to regale themselves in my generosity, to compete for one of my daughters’ hands. If you’d like to enter the competition yourself, you may pay the fee and come agreeably inside.”
“You’re a crook,” Derkach said, jabbing his finger through the bars. “I ought to bring the Grand Inspector to your door.”
The thought chilled me, and so did a sudden gust of frosty air. I pressed closer to Sevas, but he was staring and staring at Derkach, as if he had forgotten I was there.
Papa’s voice grew quieter, and his shoulders went up around his ears like a piqued alley cat. On the other side of the fence, Derkach reached into his pocket.
I wanted to say something, say anything, to stop Derkach from offering up rubles and Papa from taking them, but when my lips parted with a protest, there was a sudden rustling noise behind us.
Rose crashed through a briar patch, trampling her own herb beds, scattering lavender buds like blown dust. I had never seen my sister run like this, with such frenetic purpose, nor had I ever seen her eyes so wheeling and wild. I put my knuckle in my mouth and tasted an explosion of blood.
“Papa,” she panted. “Marlinchen. You have to come. You . . .”
The absence of her voice as she trailed off was louder than any ringing church bells, than any shattering plates. Papa frowned deeply and I half expected him to protest, but his brows were raised with a bit of his own alarm—certainly he had never seen Rose so undone either.
Wordlessly we followed her, leaving Derkach where he stood, the whole crowd of us, Papa and Sevas and the day laborers and me, through the garden. The eyeless ravens were not singing.
Rose stopped just past a bushel of lamb’s ear, and at first I was too far behind the crowd of men to see. I shoved my way through, all the day laborers and Papa standing as still as dead oaks, and when I made it to the front of the throng I froze, too, all the way down to my marrow.
I saw a spill of golden hair in the dirt, and my beautiful sister’s body mangled and blood-spoiled at the base of the juniper tree.
Chapter Thirteen
A loud and terrible sound rent the air, the way an animal squeals before it dies. I didn’t realize it was coming from me until Papa’s hands closed over my shoulders and he shook me roughly enough to rattle my teeth. I could scarcely see his face, his spittle-flecked beard. My sister’s body was painted on the insides of my eyelids like a fresco on a cathedral ceiling, so lurid and bright.
All I could see was the ruby collar of blood ringing her throat, the mangle of her breast, the sinew that unfolded from her wound like the cut strings of a cotton loom. It felt perverse, profane, as if I were looking right between a woman’s spread legs.
I stopped screaming, and Papa let go of me. Then I doubled over, clutching my stomach, and vomited into a clump of sage grass. The sick splattered my bare feet and the ragged hem of my nightgown and it was the color of spilled ink, of crushed elderberries, viscous and black. Dark juice.
Sevas held back my hair and I couldn’t even thank him for the kindness or warn him that Papa and the others might see. But no one was looking at us. All the day laborers were staring at Undine’s body without blinking, their gazes running across her like sweet-cherry sauce poured over mlyntsi, making her death even more obscene.
Even now they were hungry for her, moved to arousal by the vulgarity of it. Their ravenous eyes ate her up. I felt as if I might retch again, but my stomach was empty now, clean as a porcelain bowl. I couldn’t think whether Papa would be angry at me.