I had never thought much about how my sisters and I would die, and so it had never occurred to me that Undine, the most beautiful of us three, would have such a poorly attended funeral. Even the day laborers who had slavered over her, both alive and in death, now cached themselves in the shed or under the plum tree; some of them tried to bait the snakes and got bitten for it.
Now that the lurid obscenity of her death had receded, now that her blood had dried to the color of rust and her body had begun the slow and humiliatingly mortal process of decomposition, they were not interested in watching. Witches died just like regular women, or at least they could. That was something I learned by watching my sister’s lips drain of their color.
When it was done, Rose stood up. Her hands were caked in dirt. She came to me, without speaking, to embrace of course, but for some reason I anticipated being struck and flinched away from her. Hurt flashed in her violet eyes.
“It’s not my fault,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“What are you talking about?”
My mouth opened, and all the swallowed poison spilled out. I told her and Sevas everything: how I had revealed my secret to Undine in a fit of spite, how she had threatened to turn it over to Papa, how Sevas had only come back because of Derkach, how we had planned to come and steal Mama’s mirror. Sevas took Mama’s compact, still gritty with the black sand, out of his pocket and showed it to her. It seemed like such a stupid trinket now, this thing I had guarded so jealously for so long, the thing I had imbued with wishful, powerful magic.
I wanted to tell her about the rib bone too. About Sobaka. About the man in the theater with his missing heart and liver, but my voice curdled up in my throat like something at risk of rot.
“Marlinchen, you could not have done this,” Rose said when I was finished, when I was trembling and gasping with the strain of all I had confessed. “Your magic doesn’t work like that. You can’t make a spell out of just a mean thought. If you could, don’t you think we would all have been able to turn Papa into a roach or a toad by now? You being angry at Undine didn’t make her die. Your magic is just for showing; it’s not for doing or changing or making.”
But wasn’t it? I had wished for Ivan, one who would not care that I was plain of face, and he had come. I had buried my secret, spilled blood to keep it, and it had hatched like an egg, full of hope and promise. I looked at the dried blood under my nails, at the worried wound on my knuckle. Words rose in me, but I did not want to upset my sister further, so I let them drift back down again.
“What is it that killed her, then?” I asked instead. “A real monster?”
“Of course not,” said Rose. Her voice was sharp and quick and left no room for argument. “It must have been one of the men; perhaps she refused their advances. I will make a truth elixir tonight and sneak it into their soup and the culprit will reveal himself. But Marlinchen, is there any other tonic or elixir you need from me?”
“What sort of tonic do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, eyes darting between Sevas and me, “you do know how it works, that when you couple with a man there’s risk of something taking root in your womb? If you want to tear out the root, I have elixirs for that.”
A furious blush came over my face. I could not bring myself to look up at Sevas. Papa had always said that the seed of mortal men did not grow easily in witches’ wombs, but I did not know if that had been just as much a fraud as his potions were. If witches could die just like mortal women, couldn’t we breed like them too? I didn’t want to offend Sevas by sounding so eager to rid myself of his imagined child, but he spoke first anyway, saving me from replying at all.
“As much as I enjoy inquests into my virility—” he started, but Rose held up a hand.
“I wasn’t asking you,” she said sourly. “Marlinchen, come to my storeroom later and I will make certain that this man’s seed never comes to bloom.”
I was still too mortified to answer, so I only nodded. And then I remembered what Undine had said, about how Rose knew Papa’s potions weren’t real and she had coupled with women in the storeroom or the garden shed. Something turned hard in my belly, like a plum stone. For so long I had wondered what it was my middle sister wanted, what she dreamed of, and now I knew that she’d had it this whole time, and I was the only one bereft. She and Undine had conspired to keep this secret from me, and I could only guess that it was because they thought it might make me too reckless, too willful, that it might imperil their own little rebellions in the process.