“Your secrets are mild compared to those that could be shared.” Slava held out her doll, and Matrona took it and held it tightly between her hands. “Open it,” he ordered.
Matrona licked her lips. “You could not have offered so much as a warning, Tradesman? Do you know what it nearly cost me for that knowledge to be made public? What it still costs me?”
Slava shrugged, which angered Matrona all the more. “A few cold glances and whispers. They will pass.”
“My betrothal—”
“Is still intact. I spoke with Oleg Popov just this morning. Now open your doll.”
Her hands trembled around the glossed wood. Her heartbeat quickened. “What will happen this time?”
His pale eyes hardened. “It does not matter.”
“You say it so easily! Open your own doll, Tradesman, and let us see what you are hiding.”
She snapped her lips shut the moment the words left her mouth, and she retreated into the shelves. So loose was her tongue before this man. Her mother would have slapped her again for such insolence.
Slava glowered, and in the corner Pamyat hissed his own disapproval. “You think this is the worst the world has to offer you? That I have to offer you? You’re fooling yourself, Matrona Vitsin.” His hand reached for her father’s doll.
“I will open it.” Matrona meant to sound strong, but the statement was a strained whisper. Fingers slick with perspiration, Matrona gritted her teeth and turned the second doll on its seam, then let out a long breath and pulled the two halves apart.
Inside was a third doll, painted like the rest, though the details in its dress were much simpler than they’d been in the first two layers. Matrona stared at it, expecting . . . She wasn’t sure. But nothing changed about her, mentally or physically. Nothing altered within the room. Nothing happened at all, save for the slight steadying of her breaths.
Slava nodded, once. “Good, good. I’m glad it is you, Matrona.”
She didn’t understand the sentiment.
“Return in three days,” he continued as he reached out a hand. When Matrona didn’t give him the doll, he pried the pieces from her fingers—both the inner doll and the two pieces of the second layer—saying nothing as he carefully reassembled them and placed them back on the table.
“Tradesman.”
He glanced at her from beneath an arched eyebrow.
Matrona took a steadying breath before speaking. “You say, ‘Return in three days.’ Why? If you insist on my pursuit of . . . this”—she gestured to the dolls—“against my will, why not open the doll yourself? Why have me come here?”
He turned toward her, lip quirking. “Because I will never open the dolls. Not again. I will see this done right. To replace me, you must be wholly independent. You must learn it on your own.”
Not again? “Learn what? Sorcery?”
“Three days,” Slava repeated, and turned back to his dolls.
Willing her unsteady heart and bubbling frustration to calm, Matrona fled the room while Slava’s back still faced her, relief bolstering her when she reached the front door.
She stepped outside and stumbled when a sudden heaviness struck her body, as though a cartload of leathers had been draped over her.
She took another step and gasped, pulse quickening. Tumbled beyond the portico and landed on her knees as voices assaulted her mind.
So many years of practice, yet you still milk so slowly. What good are ugly, chapped hands if they can’t be useful?
No one will ask for your hand. You’re too ugly, too boring.
Your jaw looks like your father’s.
What kind of a woman fancies a potter boy, and one she used to tend as a child? What a horrible person you are, a vagrant!
You’ve ruined a day’s work with your clumsiness!
You deserve that beating and another one, too.
You’re useless.
You’re vile.
You stupid, stupid girl.
Images of all her failures flashed before her eyes, memories she had forgotten. Broken ceramics, spilled milk, crooked stitches, misused words. Tears pooled in her eyes, pushed out by cold fingers in her mind. All the bitterness and sorrow she’d swallowed in her twenty-six years of life surfaced at once, and the bleak thoughts wrapped around her like an endless serpent, wickedly familiar.
She recognized the loudest voice in her head as her own.
Something in the assaulting darkness registered the grass under her fingers and the sun at the back of her head. She struggled to breathe, blinking wetness from her eyes. More and more of the ugliness bubbled up from deep in her core: You’re a coward. There had been a spider in the barn, and she’d been too scared to go inside. You’re slow. She hadn’t kept up with the others in the glade. You clumsy oaf! She’d spilled dinner over her dress. None of them were her parents’ words. All her own. So many of them. So many.
It sucked her downward toward the cool grass. She folded over herself, shuddering against the consuming odium—
“Matrona?”
A tiny bit of her mind registered the voice. No, Slava, leave me alone.
You don’t deserve to replace Slava.
Get up. You’re pathetic. How can anyone stand you?
“Matrona?”
Not Slava’s voice. A hand settled on her shoulder, the sensation jarring. Matrona blinked, seeing the grass, wishing only to curl over it and disappear into the earth.
If only Esfir had lived, then your parents could have a useful daughter.
The hand shook her. Its mate found her other shoulder. “Matrona, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”
She tried to blink back the tears and shadows blurring her vision. Found strength to lift her head.
Jaska Maysak looked at her.
Tense energy flooded her back and limbs, quickening her heart, making the criticisms in her skull bounce back and forth with painful speed. Pathetic. Unchaste. Childish.
Words caught in her throat, and she merely shook her head like a crazed woman, trying to sort out where she was, what she was doing.
Slava’s house. You look foolish. The dolls. No one wants you here. Three days. Just lie down and die. She needed to get home.
The hands left, and the shadows pushed inward, pulsing against her forehead. But the grip returned, this time under her arms, hauling her upward. Heat flushed her skin. You’re a disgrace!
“Matrona.” Jaska’s voice was soft and level. “Can you walk? Are you hurt?”
“I . . .” She struggled to orient herself, struggled not to lean against the potter. Someone was going to see. Feodor . . . Her head felt full of nails, and a hammer pounded the points deeper with every heaving breath. She winced and pressed a palm between her eyes. “I’m not . . . hurt . . .”
You should be.
The Maysaks’ donkey stood on the dirt path, a narrow wagon tied to it.
A warm breeze—no, Jaska’s sigh—wafted against her hair. “Your parents aren’t going to like this.”
The ground beneath her gave way, and the brief sensation of falling startled Matrona almost to her senses. Jaska’s strong arms around her shoulders and under her knees sent gooseflesh over her skin. The dark voice inside her pounced—You’re sick—shredding Matrona’s gut with its blades. When he set her down in the wagon, Matrona tried to utter an apology, but she wasn’t sure if it passed her lips.
Everyone will see you. Feodor will leave you. You’ll be a burden to your parents all their lives, and only Mad Olia Maysak will tolerate your company.
Foolish, foolish girl.
Matrona lay on a tear-wet pillow and could barely remember how she’d gotten to her own bed. Her body was made of lead, save for the soft spots of her joints and head where nails pounded and pounded, never set. Her stomach squirmed and gurgled, and she slept on and off—she knew because her dreams were filled with monsters and twisting black clouds in a deep and unfamiliar sky.
She started to fight back, but whatever she’d unleashed in Slava’s house was stronger.
A rag rug has more use than you. Look at you. Pathetic.
Matrona pushed against it: Leave me alone.
It didn’t. It turned and came back, showing her even more memories of past mistakes, of embarrassing moments, of failed schoolwork. A trove of them.
I was young, Matrona shot at it.