Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

My sisters were beautiful without ruse or artifice, which was my curse, really, not my father’s. My father’s curse was never to be satisfied with anything, so to him my sisters were beautiful, but not beautiful enough.

But even we were warned never to touch the juniper tree, which bore berries of the most dangerous variety: both poisonous and sweet. Whatever sick thing was in them, we could not be inured to it.

Men’s stares swept past me as well, landing on the cleft of Undine’s breasts or Rose’s bare shoulders. I could see the hunger, but also the guilt running under their gazes, the quiet fettering of desire. They knew anyone who desired a Vashchenko girl was doomed.

“what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”

All other thoughts had been momentarily evicted. It was as though I had forgotten how to even feel afraid. Was this the magic that kept pulling my sisters out of the house? In that moment it seemed almost as strong as Papa’s spellwork.

The only monsters left in Oblya lived here, under my bed or in our garden, and none of them had any lust for human flesh. All those sorts of monsters had died out long ago.

Let her eat black plums and never taste the poison. Let her bathe naked in a stream without ever drawing a hunter’s wanton eye. Let all the bears she meets be friendly and pliant, and never men in disguise. Let her never fall prey to the banality of the world. Let her never fall in love.

You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead.

Magic was always like that: it had ugly undersides. Wanting anything was a trap.

Most days I could not even stand to sate my own hunger. The fullness of my belly was unbearable, but with two fingers jabbed down my throat I could make it all vanish, turning back my indulgence like a scratched record, undoing it and making myself clean and empty and new again.

It was an awful feeling, to draw secrets like blood, without the person even knowing that the needle was in them.

But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry.

“My father wouldn’t let us. He says that liquor is the refuge of weak-minded men with something they want to forget.” Sevas put a hand to his chest. “I’ve never been so thoroughly eviscerated by a man I’ve only once met.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how much the city is salivating to imagine a monster in its midst? I suppose with all but one of its wizards extinct, and with its only witches sweet and gentle, they need something else to sate their desire for violence.”

A strange memory inhabited me; it possessed me like a ghost. I was standing on the shore beneath a blade of silver moonlight. Even the gas lamps had been extinguished. There was a copper taste on my tongue. There was someone else’s labored breathing, loud and close enough that it drowned out even the ceaseless roll of the tide.

Undine had already chosen cruelty, and Rose had chosen cleverness. What else was left for me but kindness?

My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.

I wanted someone to write it down like a story in Papa’s codex so I could know what lesson there was to be learned.

Is it so preposterous to think that I was only a foolish man, like so many others, who desired a woman that perhaps he shouldn’t? It’s the oldest story there is, men wanting things that will kill them.”

Any predator can choose to smile without teeth.

It reminded me of how I had flayed the monster, carving out its entrails. It had come to me so easily, as if such butchery were as natural as breathing.

If this is what I am in truth, a man made up of nothing but wounds, why should I fear such a thing now? There is no more perfect mate for me than the one who wears my own mortality around her throat like a jewel.”

If you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”

And perhaps my magic was only for showing, not for doing or changing or making, but I had shown everyone the truth.

I had become a very powerful witch indeed.

Here, gazing baldly at the truth of it all, I was my father’s daughter.

And so, in the end, here is what happened to us all.

The sailors onboard clambered to their posts, and I imagined that they were all as thrilled and terrified as I was, to be going somewhere new.