Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

I would have been the only one there to answer to him, to swallow his fury like gulps of seawater and pray I didn’t spit them back up again until he had stormed out of my room and slammed the door shut behind him.

That’s an unusual and interesting sentence. It's more for aesthetic’s sake than it makes narrative sense, though, I think. Like, what does it *mean?* That she tried not to talk back?

The men who came to see me, my clients, were frightening even in the safety of our own sitting room. But all of Undine’s clients were half in love with her and went weak-kneed with her every word. And one day one of them had, in lieu of rubles, offered her tickets to see an orchestra play downtown.

Jesus. Their dad is pimping them out? 🫥

And once the thought of leaving was in her mind, it grew and grew like reaching vines and could not be hacked down. That first night had planted the same flowering seed in Rose’s mind. Their seats, she told me, were in the very back row, so they had to strain to see the stage over a topiary of feathered hats,

Stretchjng that metaphor out too long. 😅

The scents of strangers, sweat and violet perfume, soaked my skin like rainwater. Words poured into my ears.

“Like rainwater”? That’s a lot. Like, eww if so.

Rose seemed to be able to understand things about the world that I could not, even though we were all trapped in the same house, under the same aegis.

Satyrs—which remarkably resembled Indrik—chased

Oh no. “All Satyrs look the same”? 😬

These newcomers arrived waving the tsar’s banners, talking of things like land development and city planning, or else under the emblems of private companies who squeezed every drop from Oblya’s day laborers and then vanished, only to be replaced by other men, under different emblems but with the same goal of bleeding the city dry. They were the reason Oblya’s port bustled with trade from the east, and the reason why our streets were laid out as neatly as wheel spokes.

“Only twenty-one. That’s so sad, isn’t it?” “Why is it sad?” “Because,” she said, “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.”

Headcanon-ing that her capacity for philosophical thought is why she’s so popular with clients.

I knew the vague shape of the story, but the music added something new to it, something that made it almost too big for my eyes to hold.

Something about this figurative language just doesn’t hold up for me.

As soon as he was there under the lights, it was impossible to look anywhere else. It was impossible not to follow his path across the stage. In his presence, the flame-men wilted like cut roses. The snow-women stirred, silver faces brightening with nascent hope. He stumbled past them to the Dragon-Tsar; even his floundering was graceful.

His knee parted the tsarevna’s thighs, and I blushed so profusely I knew Undine would mock me for it, if she had been looking at all. But every face in the theater was turned toward Sevastyan. He was the beacon of a hundred unblinking stares.

I thought she was a sex worker? Seems strange for someone of that background to be so embarrassed seeing a dance simulating sexual intimacy.

Sevastyan was bare-chested again, wearing only thin nude stockings that he looked like he had been poured into, for all the modesty they afforded him. His chest was leafed in gold, whorls of gilded paint that crawled up his throat and spiraled onto his cheeks. Even his lashes were daggered with false pearls.

“Daggered with pearls”? Some of these descriptions are so off. 😅

But the curtains had closed, erasing Sevastyan from view, and I felt as though I had been left unanchored, adrift in the sea of voices. The noise was pressing into me and the heat of all the warm bodies was making my head swim. The air tasted sour with so many tittered words. And once again I could scarcely breathe, like some hot, invisible hand was closing around my throat. Faces pinwheeled past me. I could not tell the wolves from the sheep.

I could hear the rustling of silk as the audience members shuffled from their seats, though a haze had fallen over my eyes, and everything looked as bleary as the grass covered in morning dew.

Pieces of light fell on my face like dead leaves.

Strange similie. How is it like dead leaves?

Dust motes drifted through beams of latticed sunlight, illuminating the fine gray film that covered my mirror and my dressing table, and the bone-white handle of my mother’s comb.

When I was finished, I stuck the spoon in my mouth. I could taste the smooth richness of the cream and the sour bite of cabbage, and underneath the lingering smokiness of onion and browned butter. I licked and licked until all I could taste was rust-tinged metal.

Their utinsels are rusty? 😬

They said my father had been handsome, once, but his curse had whittled away at him like a lubok carving. Now there was something distinctly inhuman about him, a wooden falsity to his rare smiles.

She could see the future by staring into her scrying pool, or into the polished backs of our silver dishes. (Of course, Rose and I liked to joke, Undine’s divination involved gazing endlessly at her own reflection). Her predictions were as muddled as stagnant pond water, but she had more clients than Rose and me put together, even now.

Ok, so they’re not sex workers. Why were only male clients mentioned then? Not giving specifics about their business and only mentioning men made it unclear what they were doing. You'd think witchy business would have mostly female clientele, so it’s weird that none were mentioned. Honestly, I don’t feel it’s very good writing that I’m twenty plus pages in and only now it’s made clear what the protagonist and her sister do, after vague mention after mention.

I hurried to the door, heart beating as soundly as footsteps on a marble floor.

How does she know what that sounds like?

Of all the things Papa loathed about capitalist Oblya, he loathed none more than the ballet theater. He railed against it more than he did the Ionik merchant sailors, who he said brought with them the fish-stink of the east, and more than he did the Yehuli, who he claimed were out to drain the city of its wealth the way an upyr sucked the blood of virgin women. He hated the cotton mills and the day laborers, and the factories that chuffed black smoke into the sealskin sky. But he hated the ballet theater most. Fodder for wealthy hags whose husbands won’t touch them, and wealthy men who are too shy for the brothels, he often said.

“Marlinchen is a flesh diviner,” my father said impatiently. He was gripping his grease-marbled knife in his hand, blade turned up. “Her readings require skin-to-skin contact.”

Interesting ✨

and the truth was, if anyone in this house was something close to a real witch, it was me.

Like, *actually*? Or is this hubris talking?

I breached the threshold of Rose’s storeroom, musty-smelling and cobweb-wreathed, and didn’t pause until I heard Sevastyan say, “That was one of the most practiced lies I’ve ever heard leave a witch’s lips.”

Great first spoken line!

Could he possibly have guessed how I was thinking of him? Could he smell my desire like some scent on the air?

Lol, what? This isn’t a SJM book so my assumption is no he can’t, miss. She is so thirsty, poor isolated thing.

His name leapt off my tongue like a spark vaulting over the grates of a hearth, just before someone snuffed it out. Quick and bright. Sevastyan took the herbs from me, his lovely brow furrowing, and said, “You might as well call me Sevas.”

When Derkach had settled his account and Papa was holding his rubles, when Sevas had tucked his poultice into his pocket, when both of our guests had left through the garden gate, white petals falling over them like rice thrown at a bride and her bridegroom, when I had looped the ribbon around my own wrist and hidden it under the sleeve of my housecoat, when Rose and Undine began traipsing sleepily down the stairs, Papa turned to me.

The first couple “when”s should be “after”. These things aren’t all happening at the same time.

This was one of Papa’s questions that was not a question at all but a trap laid at your feet. You had to speak carefully, considering every syllable, every intonation, to keep yourself from tumbling into it.

“We have lived in Oblya before it was even Oblya,” I said, chewing my lip. “When there was only the long, flat steppe that fell into the sea with nothing to stop it. Since the days of the bogatyrs and their gods, when you couldn’t pass by a stream without a rusalka calling to you sweetly, when you left your third-born sons in the woods for the leshy, and when you prayed in four directions to please the domovoi that lived in the cupboard.”

He has an unscrupulous set to his jaw, and the brow bone of a man with capitalist schemes in his mind. You are not a stupid girl, Marlinchen. But you are a girl. Wipe away the dewiness in your eyes and scrub the flush from your cheeks. Do you think he desires sallow-faced witches with the stink of the kitchen on them? Do you think I would ever let his serpent’s jaws close around you, even if he did?

Well joke’s on you toxic father, because he does and he would ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When Indrik’s tail had disappeared behind an exuberantly green rhubarb plant, I leaned over, stuck two fingers down my throat, and vomited.

Wtf. The disordered eating / binging and purging should have a content warning.

Even as the memory drove knives into my heart, my mind turned over the name he had given me. Sevas, he had said, wrapped up like a china dish or an ostrich egg hollowed out and painted blue. A gift, and I had nothing to offer in return.

Papa had given us our confounding names on purpose. Undine, Rosenrot, and Marlinchen were not names for people in the city of Oblya, in the empire of Rodinya, in the smog-choked mortal world. They were characters in Papa’s codex, monsters, maidens, minor gods. Marlinchens did not lose their fingers in the machinery of cotton mills; Rosenrots did not gag on tobacco smoke in the back rooms of cafés; Undines did not marry lecherous sailors from Ionika. Our names were the best spell that Papa had ever cast, better than rabbit’s feet or burning sage. They were a veil of protection, a caul that never came off.

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. I told myself so many times I was lucky to have the dead kind. Further, when your mother is a witch, it is almost impossible for her not to be wicked, so our father married a pretty blushing woman who was not a witch at all. Most of the wizards in Oblya took mortal women as their brides, due to the fact that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. Some, I had heard, even grew a second set of sharp teeth and ate their husbands.

All around us, Oblya gasped and panted like a woman in a too-small corset. Artisan schools and almshouses burst from between its ivory boning. An eye clinic and an electric station flowered up in two quick exhales. And then, at last, the ballet theater, with a breath that ripped the corset’s seams and exposed Oblya’s pale, heaving chest. Tourists walked from one of her bared nipples to the other, from the Yehuli temple to the onion dome of the oldest church. They gathered at the ballet theater in the valley of her breasts, right above her beating heart.

A dark red drop on the floor caught my eye; at first I thought it was a button that had come loose from Papa’s coat. But I could see my reflection in it, warped and tiny, a minnow trapped in a dirty gather of rainwater. I felt as if my whole childhood was caught in that drop: my long, matted hair like dust gathering on a bald china doll, my father’s hand around my wrist, my sisters’ beautiful faces, my mother’s shed tail feathers and the seed that her stories had planted in my belly, invisible to everyone but me.

Every time I heard someone rattle the gate, my head snapped up to see if Sevas might be standing there, and both despair and relief curled in my belly when he was not. In my mind, I stretched out the short conversation we’d had in Rose’s storeroom into hours, like the last small bit of dough under a rolling pin, until it was so thin that it was translucent when you held it up to the light. I’d committed every single detail to memory: the shadow of his lashes on his cheekbone, his smirk and the arch of his brow, and of course the way he’d said I think it would make me very happy to see your face in the crowd, Marlinchen.

Guilt pricked me all over like thorns. She was right; I had done this, and now none of us would ever see Bogatyr Ivan again. That story would be like all the others that sat heavy in my belly like a handful of seeds, spoiling, unable to bloom. Biting my lip against the sting of tears, I went into the bathroom and locked the door. There was the porcelain tub, like a halved oyster, and the mirror that gleamed as brassily as a wet kopek. Slowly I unbuttoned my gown and let it puddle to the floor. The mirror seemed to look at me narrow-eyed, and my reflection rippled like water near to boiling.

Two many similies. Dear lord 😆

But I’d only found spells that could drain beauty from their targets like blood from a belly-slit animal, and they all promised some sort of gruesome reckoning for their jealous caster, hideous boils or being turned into a toad. Magic was always like that: it had ugly undersides. Wanting anything was a trap.

My thoughts were scattered like leaves.

See this is good. A well-placed, sensible, and sensical simile for effect.

I watched him pour a swallow of the potion into her mouth, feeling my damp hair drip down my neck and onto the carpet. The dark spot of water grew and grew.

She doesn't dry her hair and lets it drip everywhere? Girl. Or did she not just this time because she wanted to get down there asap after her bath?

Papa’s potion was a test to see if we had kept our thighs unbloodied, our maidenheads unspoiled. I was always careful when I touched myself never to let my fingers slip too far inside, never to break what Papa wanted intact. He told us, too, what would happen if we drank the potion when we were ruined: we would vomit it back up along with our livers, and then he would hold up our own naked organs to us as proof of our deception, proof that we were thankless and debauched daughters who would sully the Vashchenko name.

Wtf...

It had never made me spit up my other secrets before, but none had ever bloomed so quick and bright in my mind, like flowering marigolds.

I flipped it open with my thumb and let the black sand trickle out onto Rose’s carpet, and my sister’s eyes grew wide as plums.

She is not the brightest bulb, is she? Pour a little on a table, where it can be fully retained. Don't dump it on the carpet where it's going to sink into the fibers and be harder to get back.

The sky was the color of blood welling under a nail.

I had done it. I had left, and now Oblya’s black roads stretched out in front of me like bolts of silk unfurled.

I visited upon myself one small violence after another, inside the safe bunker of my mind. I concluded that it would probably arouse them too; sometimes I even felt myself go slick under the sheets.

I— 😑

“It gets easier with every swallow,” he said. “Like anything, really. If you do it for long enough it stops hurting. Then other things stop hurting.

I had to keep myself from telling him that I often thought of my body the same way: uncouth, deserving of debasement.

“Have you never tried any before?” “No,” I said. “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. Is that his sorcery, to make such cutting assessments of character?”