Yvgenie

  “She’s hurting my father!”

  “Your father loves her without her wanting him to, and in spite of everything, it’s his decision. Yes, she hurts him. And she knows it. She even tried to send him to Kiev, so he’d forget about her. Foolish thought. He got himself in trouble. He nearly got himself hanged—your father can be a very reckless man when he’s at loose ends, and the plain fact was, he didn’t care about his own safety when he was apart from your mother and you. He was desperately unhappy, he got into a dice game with some people, and he drank too much. And I’ll tell you the rest of it when you’re old enough not to wish the tsarevitch to break out in hives, or worse. Your mother did enough to him.”

  Her parents had dimensions she had had no idea of. They had done things she had no conception of. There had been a whole world going on she had not seen while she was growing up. Of course she remembered the year her father had gone to Kiev. But she had thought that was because she had had a really awful tantrum and her mother had just told him to go further away than usual.

  It was the time she had decided once for all she had better grow up and stop having tantrums, because she had figured out that every time she had one her mother sent her father away.

  And she hated him being gone. Uncle was better company than mother was, but she wanted—

  God, she had never figured out how much she had been wanting her father back—after her mother and uncle wished him out—exactly the kind of wickedness she had been about to accuse her mother of doing. She wanted her uncle to know she had just figured that out, and that she was truly, truly embarrassed.

  “Children do that sort of thing,” her uncle said. “Grownups have to think very carefully what their wants do to other people. You’re very definitely growing up, mouse. Some people never do get that grown-up.”

  —But I’ve got to think what else I’ve been wanting from people—

  —like for my parents to love me and my mother to stop yelling at me. But my mother and my uncle can wish me to mind my own business. Wishing at my father… that’s really unfair.

  Her uncle said, “The test for whether it’s right to want something of someone, mouse, is not whether you think it won’t hurt them, and not even whether you think it’s for their own good—but whether you’d want them wishing it about you. You figured that out very well a moment ago. But don’t worry about wanting your parents to love you or your father to stay—although I do think you ought to watch that, and remember that it’s a lot better to let go and trust someone you love to do the right thing on his own.”

  That was what she had been trying to say. Her uncle found it for her. She said, “My mother doesn’t trust me. She won’t let me out of her light. And I’m not a baby anymore.”

  “Your mother had almost learned to trust herself when you came along. And knowing you were magical, and loving you and your father, both, she’s grown more and more afraid of a little girl she might have wanted—at some time—far too much and at far too great a risk to things as they were. You were a change, a really major change, the sort every wizard’s afraid of. Once she had your father and once she had you, she wasn’t on her own anymore. She couldn’t assure herself you could take care of yourself the way your father can— because of course a child can’t. And that’s precisely where you can help your mother: she’s been looking out for you through some very scary years—and now she has to learn to trust your judgment.”

  “Should I wish her that?”

  “Wish, yes—and do, mouse. Doing is of equal importance. What, besides your friend, upset your mother when she saw you on the river shore?”

  “I don’t know.” A lecture was coming. Her uncle could be so kind talking to her; and then he could frown and scold her. She hated this part.

  “You weren’t supposed to be down by the river. Personally, I don’t think it’s a reasonable prohibition—but she made it; and you’d slipped down there in secret, and you were doing something your mother didn’t know about. Maybe she had told herself she could trust you, and what she saw shook her so badly—”

  “I don’t think I was doing anything wrong!”

  “That’s because you’re making choices for yourself, a lot of which don’t go wrong, and in your own best judgment, you didn’t think this one would. You’re not a baby who’ll fall off the porch anymore and I don’t honestly fault you for making a decision. Nor even for making the decision not to tell us. It may, for one thing, have been his wanting you not to tell—”

  She had not even suspected that. God! “—But really, outside of the danger he is to you, the hurt he’s dealt your mother is very real and very serious. He didn’t tell you all the truth about your mother, and about what he did. Possibly he remembers only up to a point—possibly he has his own interests. She is your mother, and your father loves her, and I think you can figure out from here what you ought to do. Can’t you, mouse?”

  “That’s a dirty trick, uncle. No, I don’t know what to do!”

  “It certainly is. And I don’t either, except that you’ve figured out now that getting your mother to trust your judgment is a very important point, because hers in his case is very complicated—but I’m not going to wish you into it. You don’t become grown-up at midday on your birthday. It’s not a day, it’s a progression of days, and it never quite stops—I’m still growing up. Your mother is. So’s your father. But there is, step by step, a point that your mother should trust your judgment on grown-up matters, the same way she watched you and gradually decided you wouldn’t fall off the porch if she let you play there on your own.”

  “She had to let me try, didn’t she?”

  “And hasn’t she? And can’t she make mistakes? You’re in grown-up things now, mouse. In whatever way you reckon him, Chernevog is an encounter far more dangerous than falling off the porch—and you weren’t where you were supposed to be. You scared your mother out of her good sense— and she slipped. Do you understand that?”

  It made a kind of sense. She was not sure she agreed about being wrong. She was not sure her uncle had even said she was wrong.

  But if she tried to explain that to her mother, her mother would start wishing at her and she would forget all her own good sense and wish at her right back.

  She was not sure whose fault that would be, but it was certainly what would happen; and she decidedly did not want that.

  So it was better to fix her mother’s bean rows, since she could not fix things with her mother. She might go down to the river this evening to see if her friend was back, maybe with her uncle knowing about it and giving her permission—

  But her friend might not come then. He might believe she had turned against him if she did not come back or if she told her uncle. And in spite of everything her uncle said, her friend—Kavi—would be reasonable, if only she could find him and talk to him quietly without people getting upset and without her uncle or her mother wishing at him.

  If her friend was Kavi Chernevog (and he had not, con fronted, denied it) then he was not fifteen years old. And if he was who they thought—and if he had done all these name less dreadful things and killed her mother—still, her mother was alive; and Kavi had not been a thoroughly bad person she did not get that impression, not even from her father who had been as upset with him as she had ever seen her father upset with anyone—her father had called himself the only friend Kavi had ever had… and would her father be a friend to anyone wicked? No. Absolutely not.

  So Kavi was not absolutely wicked. Nor quite a murderer, nor quite hateful to her mother—something had happened, maybe before she was born: and her mother was concerned for him, her uncle had said that, too, what time she was not being scared of him for what he was.

  Her mother had been dead. God! Did uncle truly mean that?

  But Kavi was. She had known that for years—and it had J never seemed entirely unreasonable that he was a ghost.

  So there were grown-up secrets around him, tangled as grown-up secrets could be—but they looke
d not half so formidable or so forbidden as they had yesterday. Her uncle had talked with her as if she were grown-up. And if everybody could just be reasonable, her friend, whoever he was, might even hold some of the answers to what had happened to her mother, that her uncle and her father had no clue to. He might even help her mother, maybe talk to her, and show her he meant no harm, so her mother could stop being afraid and stop being so crazy about things. God, if she could just see him again—if she could just—

  If she could just—

  Her hoe beheaded a bean plant. Her mother would have a fit.

  Uncle had always said that wishes could lie around doing nothing for years and then rise up and get you. Little things going wrong could be a sign of them. Wishes could last and last, even when you were dead, like that patch on the one old teacup, that uncle said her grandfather must have done; and if Kavi had been at their house before, if Kavi had known all of them when he was alive—then there very well could be a lot of old wishes hanging around and causing trouble for him and all of them.

  Uncle said old wishes could make smart people forget things, or do little things that were not smart or stupid in themselves, but that just added up and pushed bigger things in a general direction—

  You could never wish anything against nature, that was the first rule. You could wish a stone to fly, but it would not, as her uncle would say, do that of its own nature; an improbable wish just added to the general list of unlikely wishes always hanging about in the world waiting to happen when the conditions were right. And there must be a lot of them in the world, because other wizards had to be children once, and make stupid wishes—

  So, one day maybe years later, along would come a whirlwind; or somebody to pick up that stone and throw it. Or a passing horse might kick it. And it would fly. But a storm or a person or a horse would have had to go out of the ordinary way to do that, which might cause something else and something else forever, to the end of the kingdoms of all the tsars in the world;

  A lot of wizards had grown up around this house, it turned out, and terrible things had happened here, that could make even a grown wizard wish without thinking. Wishes attached to objects, wishes on the gates, the yard, her own room—

  All the things uncle had told her began to come together of a sudden and assume shapes that made her—on the one hand—feel better, because maybe there was an explanation for her mother acting the way she had: maybe her mother was not after all so awful as she seemed. Being killed could certainly make one anxious about the place where it happened. And maybe she could do something right for once, maybe one single wise wish would satisfy all the old wishes that might exist hereabouts: that was how to untangle a magical mess, as her uncle called it, just like looking through yarn for the master knot that snarled the little knots.

  But—on the other hand—it was not all that simple: her parents certainly had never found that knot; and going down to the river tonight to ask the one other person who might have something important to say was not safe: she trusted her friend, but rusalki killed people, if she was mistaken; or even if she just said the wrong word to her uncle right now and he gave her the wrong answer and she believed it and made a wrong wish—something terrible could happen.

  She was afraid to move when she thought that. She might be the only one in the house in a position to see the answer, the one person everyone ought to trust, and the very people she most wanted to protect could tell her no and wish her not to do things and lie to her, that was the scariest thought.

  Her mother had been running things and wishing things in the house for a hundred years, her mother and Kavi both had, as seemed—not even mentioning her grandfather who had lived here before her uncle and her father had come. And her grandmother, who she supposed must have. And that was a lot of wishes—a dangerous lot of wishes that her uncle as well as her mother might not know about.

  Not to mention her mother was the one her uncle said was fighting that magical thing, whatever it was, that was so easy to use again.

  If her mother had been dead a hundred years she could hardly have kept her book current. So her mother had broken one of the first rules she had ever learned: to write down exactly what she had done, in all its shapes. Kavi, who could not move the foam on the river, certainly had no means to write down his wishes—what was more, he had come back as a little boy: little boys hardly had good sense, rusalki could hardly help themselves; and if a rusalka could still do magic—god, what might a young one have wished?

  “Uncle?”

  Her uncle was squatting with the hoe against his shoulder, patting the earth along the radishes by hand. He looked up at her.

  “If Chernevog’s dead—what happened to his book?”

  Her uncle went a shade of white against the flecks of mud on his face, but she felt nothing but her own careful thought. He was good: he truly was very good. “What put that question into your head, mouse?”

  “I just realized… ghosts don’t write things down. And wizard-ghosts could get in a lot of trouble that way, unless they remember things better than live people do. Couldn’t they?”

  “They don’t. They’re worse. God, mouse. Did you think of that all by yourself?”

  “I think I did.”

  “I think you did, too. You’re a very astute mouse. Yes. I’ve thought of that; and I assure you your mother has. It worries her.”

  “So where is his book?”

  Her uncle got up and brushed his hands off on his trousers. “As happens, mouse, I have it.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes. I’ve read it very carefully. That, and your grandfather’s book; and on one occasion, your mother’s.”

  “Do you think she reads mine?”

  That question seemed to give him pause. “I don’t think so. I think I’d have known. And we agreed between us not to do that.”

  That was different than she had thought. Her mother might lie to her: anybody might lie for good reasons; but her uncle wouldn’t have that particular expression on his face when he did, or be as easy to overhear as he was at the moment.

  He was thinking: ‘Veshka might have. But she’s curiously moral when you least think she will be.

  Her uncle had not meant her to hear that. She felt herself blush; but she was also glad she had heard it: it made more sense of her mother in a handful of words than anything she had ever heard.

  She said, “Would you let me read those books?”

  Her uncle did not like that idea. No. He took a breath, and said, “I think they’d disturb you right now, to be honest. There are some few things left for you to learn before you’re grown—things also more serious than the porch was; and I want to explain them to you the right way, before you read other people’s mistakes.”

  “So explain them now.”

  “I don’t know how to explain them.”

  “God!” She threw up her hands, her father’s expression, she realized it even when she was doing it; and she looked at him the way her father would.

  “I know, mouse, I know. I can say this much: some of Chernevog’s reasons and your grandfather’s… weren’t right ones. You can learn from those books. But you have to realize where their mistakes were—and what they were, because the reasoning that led them to those mistakes looks very sound, if you don’t see certain things a youngster might not know. And you can’t learn them all at once, this afternoon.”

  That was at least the sanest no she had ever gotten. But it was a no. And it was still frustrating.

  Her uncle said, “You’re like your father. “Why” is his word.”

  “To you?”

  “To the whole world, mouse, “Why?” and “Why Not?” He doesn’t believe easily—not until he sees a thing happen. Which could be a very bad habit—except he doesn’t believe a thing can’t happen, either, including the chance that he could be wrong. He’s stayed alive: he’s kept me alive. And I was a very foolish young wizard.” Her uncle took up his hoe again and gave the radish ro
w a thumping down with the flat. “A very small dose of skepticism is a healthy thing in magic. And your father would add—a sense of humor is the most important sense. More precious than your eyes or ears.”

  She looked across the yard to where her father was sitting, planing down a board. She thought: How lonely he must feel, with mother and me both having tantrums.

  She thought, I should have gone riding with him. I really should have.

  She leaned her hoe on the garden fence, and went and hugged her father and told him that she was sorry, could they go riding in the morning?

  “I suppose we can.” He pursed his lips, peeled another curl from the board, and looked at her sideways from under his hair as if he was keeping just a little of his doubt back—in case she was up to something. That was not at all the effect she wanted.

  She said, to cajole him out of that idea without magic: “Will you teach me how to jump Patches this afternoon?”

  Eyebrows went up. “Your mother would—”

  —kill me, he thought. She heard that completely by accident, saw him clamp his lips.

  “I think I’d better teach you to ride by more than wishes, then, mouseling: staying on’s not enough.”

  She’s a great deal calmer, Sasha wanted Eveshka to know, before he opened his book that night. I’ve gone back up to my house, my own bed, you know. God, Pyetr’s a restless sleeper.

  He could feel the loneliness in her asking: How is he? and he answered her with all he knew—which he hoped was some measure of reassurance; about the talk he had had with her daughter, how Ilyana was not rebelling, was not going back to the river—

  Be sure, Eveshka said, and almost—he felt it and wanted that thought quiet, quickly and thoroughly. Please, he said. She’s sleeping. She’s beginning to believe she can talk to you. Don’t undo it all. She does love you. She will want you back—in not so long, I think.