“Don’t eavesdrop!” Thoughts of her friend went skirling away, like the mist. She could not hold them, could only feel the fear coming from the bathhouse—”Stop it, uncle!”
“Mouse, calm. Be calm. I’m not going to hurt anyone. Or frighten him unnecessarily. But you mustn’t fight me. Go to sleep now.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep! I want to see him. I want you to let him out of the bathhouse! Please!”
“Don’t be frightened, mouse.” Her uncle touched beneath her chin, looking worried, but hard and distant, too. Like a stranger. “And don’t listen to the boy. That’s very dangerous. Do you hear me?—Do you hear me, Ilyana?”
“Yes,” she said. She had to say yes. Her uncle put his hand on her eyes then, and wished her to sleep.
And she was not strong enough to stop him.
The door creaked and gave way abruptly: Yvgenie felt it go, too late, and sprawled in the dust at someone’s feet—someone with a sword in his hand, who gathered him up by the arm while his eyes were confused by the sunlight. There were two of them—he could make that out; one of them was the dark-haired wizard.
“Come on,” Pyetr’s voice said: he was the one with the sword. But he could only take hold of Pyetr’s sleeve and hold on to him, blinded as he was, and with his foot asleep. Pyetr tolerated it, put his other arm around him and helped him walk. Pyetr took him as far as the first bench and let him down. The door was still open, the smoke hole let in light, and he could make out shapes again, through the watering of his eyes from the sun. Pottery clattered. He smelled hot tea, that Sasha was pouring, that Sasha then offered to him, and he held out both hands for the cup, not trusting one alone not to spill it.
It warmed his hands, it warmed his face, and he had not known till then how thirsty he was. It had a little vodka in it, besides the honey, and it soothed his throat of a pain he had not realized he was suffering.
He thought, They’re not so bad, they don’t mean me any harm after all.
Then Pyetr shut the door and latched it, and faced him with the sword crosswise in his hands. Yvgenie’s heart went cold. He sat there with the empty cup in his hands, and Sasha asked him:
“More tea?”
“Please,” he said, trying not to stammer, and looked away from Pyetr to hold out his cup, watching the teapot and the stream of tea and the swirl of bubbles, anything but the wizard’s eyes. He drank the second cup more slowly, not chancing any glance at their faces. Then Pyetr left the door to stand behind him. Sasha poked at last night’s ashes, and put on the last of the wood, provoking a few bright flames. Then he added herbs that sparked up like stars, and made a thick gray smoke.
“Did you sleep well, Yvgenie Pavlovitch?”
He could not make his tongue work right: “Well enough, sir.”
“No dreams?”
He wanted not to recall those dreams: fire and shadow, and something touching him.
Sasha said, “Are you comfortable now, Yvgenie Pavlovitch?”
He still felt warm, felt, in fact, flushed with heat, but his fingers were growing numb again. He was going to lose the cup. He tried to hold on to it, but Sasha took it from his I hands, and he sat stupidly trying to remember Sasha getting up—stared into Sasha’s eyes when Sasha lifted his chin.
So he was caught. His heart pounded with fright, his head I spun with the smoke. Sasha’s whispered something to him, he had no idea of the words, until Sasha said, “Answer me, Chernevog,” and he felt his lips move.
He said, not saying it, “My name is Yvgenie.”
He thought, I’ve gone mad. And Sasha slapped his face, saying, “Kavi—”
It hurt. Not the slap. Something in his chest constricted about his heart, and he remembered that thing in the shadows last night, coming closer and closer to him, waiting for him to sleep or faint.
He had. He had been afraid when he waked this morning that it was too late, and now it answered for him, saying over and over again, in his voice, My name is Yvgenie Pavlovitch, I come from Kiev; while all the while he knew he had no home there, not now. His father had forbidden him to leave the house, and he had taken Bielitsa and run—
But he had forgotten why he had done a thing so desperate, except he had been running down little streets, going to a certain house.
He had been in love. But he was not now. He had found someone kind to him. But there was no one now. His father had ordered differently, and no one defied his father.
Pyetr and Sasha gave him honeyed tea, and spoke together—he could hear them, even when they thought not, saying that he was dead, that he had drowned last night, poor boy.
Sasha came and said to him that he should lie down on the bench, and sleep a while. He shook his head, hazily thinking of the blond girl of his dream warming him, pleading with him not to sleep, not to listen to them. He heard a frantic pounding at the bathhouse door, while his head was spinning and full of echoes. He leaned on his elbow and saw Pyetr go to that door and open it on blinding sun.
His rescuer was there, her hair like a flood of sunlight itself. She said, “I want to see him,” and her father said, sternly, “Mouse, go do what your uncle told you. Not everything’s right down here.”
She leaned a little onto one foot, then, so he was looking right at her, and he took that vision of the girl and the sunlight like something holy, while her father shooed her outside and left, too—after more wood, he said to Sasha.
The door shut, the dark came back and he was alone with Sasha, whose face, lit from below with fire and above with sun filtering through from the smoke hole, became a vision, too, a hellish one. Sasha said, “Lie down, Yvgenie Pavlovitch. I wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself,” and he had no choice: his arm began to shake under him. So he let himself face down on the smooth warm wood of the bench und watched Sasha feed bits of weed into the fire. He felt levered, caught in a dream from which there was no hope of waking.
Sasha said, “How old are you, Yvgenie?”
He said, “Seventeen,” but he knew at once that was not so, he was far older than that.
Sasha asked him, “Why did you come to this woods?”
And he said, or something said, “For—”
There had been a reason, something different than escape. Perhaps that would satisfy them. But he could not think of what. That reason fell away from him. It did not want to be there. And it was not.
The door banged, light flashed on the wall. It was Pyetr with the wood. And Sasha held up a hand, and said, very sternly, “Yvgenie Pavlovitch, what’s his name?”
“Pyetr.”
“And mine?”
“Sasha. Alexander Vas—”
“Tell me my name,” the wizard commanded him, and something twisted next his heart, making him cold through and through.
He thought, Alexander Vasilyevitch. But he did not say so. He only knew that was the truth. He was in the bathhouse of a ferryman’s cottage on a river that ran down to Kiev. The girl in the sunlight was a wizard, too, a young one, dangerous to everyone for that reason.
He knew then that he was going mad, or that something very scary had burrowed into his heart and made itself a nest it was not going to come out of. He let his head down against his hands and tried to remember who Yvgenie Pavlovitch was, or who his father was, or why he had no memory of a mother he thought he had loved, and vaguely knew was dead.
“I don’t think I was mistaken,” Sasha said at the edge of his hearing. “I very much fear not—but I can’t lay hands on our visitor: he doesn’t want to talk to us.”
“I’ll shake it out of him,” Pyetr said, to Yvgenie’s alarm, but Sasha said:
“No, I don’t think you’ll come at him that way. Be patient.” Sasha walked over and put his hand on Yvgenie’s head, wanting something, Yvgenie could not quite hear.
But Pyetr muttered something about rope and Sasha said that they might let him out into the sunlight a bit instead and see how he fared.
He did not understand. But Pyetr hauled
him up by the arm and walked him out the door into the light, and kept him walking despite the wobbling in his knees. The sun hurt his eyes. Tears ran down his face, only from the light, at first, but then they seemed to pour out of the confusion of his heart. He saw the sun on a weathered rail, the light edging grass and flowers, saw a black horse staring at him over the rail of a pen—a horse he had—
—known somewhere. He knew this place. He knew this house, and knew these two men wanted to keep him from Ilyana’s sight. They intended to take him back into that dark place very soon and by wizardry or by plain steel, take his life away—because they could never trust him—he had deserved too much ill of them, and done Pyetr too much hurt for Sasha ever to trust him—
Yvgenie thought, Where have I met them? What did I do to them?
They let him sit in the light a while, on the bottom rail of the fence, where he could look at the house, and the woods beyond the yard, and the horses that might have been a way of escape if he had had the strength or the quickness to escape them—but he did not—and he could not. The girl with the wonderful hair had it in braids when she came to say there was soup ready, and they might bring him into the kitchen. He knew of a sudden what that kitchen would look like; he knew the furniture inside—and the fireplace. He had sat there before—and he was in love with this girl-But her father said, “We’ll have ours out here, mouse. Thank you.”
He listened to her voice, and watched his last hope of help or even understanding walk away from him, head bowed— watched her go, in the same way he looked at the sun or felt the wind—storing every precious detail, against the dark waiting for him inside—
Pyetr went into the house after her, and brought the soup back himself, in no good humor, and he told himself then he had had his last sight of the girl if her father had his way, or if Sasha had his.
“Have your lunch, boy,” Pyetr said. “Or does turnip soup suit your appetites?”
“Be kind,” Sasha said.
“Kind, hell,” Pyetr said sullenly. “He needn’t stare at her like that.”
The soup held flavors too sharp to identify. The heat of it burned his mouth and left tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat.
A tear fell into the bowl, quite helplessly. It embarrassed him. He did not think he had been a coward. He tried not to be. He tried to think how to reason with them, or what he might say, but everything was confusion, everything scattered when he tried to think beyond this yard and the girl and the woods. He found nothing to say he had not said; he only tried to keep from shivering, so that he was hardly able to get up when they were finished, and when they wanted him to go back into the bathhouse. He tried to be braver. But the dark beyond the door seemed suddenly unbearable. He balked, spun about in the doorway to run, but Pyetr seized him and shoved him through.
He was blind, after, except the light from the smoke hole. He met a bench painfully with his shin and grabbed a post to save himself from falling. The door shut. The latch dropped.
God, he did not know why it had so offended Pyetr that he looked at his daughter, even that he had loved her, since he had never offered anything but a look, hardly spoken a word to her. He did not know why Pyetr should have brought him to his house, only for a wizard to lock him away in this place and ask him angry questions. Nothing made sense, not then, nor when Pyetr tied his hands behind him and Sasha made him kneel by the fire and breathe the bitter smoke-only that the thing inside him grew disturbed at that, and moved about his heart, tightening and tightening, like bands about his chest, and Pyetr stood by with the sword blade shining in the firelight, unsheathed, this time, to strike his head off, he supposed, when they had what they wanted—or if they did not, he had no idea.
He thought he heard Ilyana’s voice, far and clear and cold, crying, No, papa, don’t hurt him!
Then Sasha said:
“Eveshka’s coming home, as fast as she can.” And Pyetr said, “God, what can we do? If this Yvgenie lad is still alive—”
“We can get the mouse’s help, perhaps.”
“That’s not damned likely, Sasha!”
Sasha then, with an ominous frown: “Or Chernevog could speak to us on his own. If he wanted to.”
Yvgenie’s heart was beating so it felt about to burst. He said, for no reason he could think of, “Go to hell.”
“That’s Chernevog,” Pyetr said. “Or a boy with very bad manners.”
Yvgenie began to shiver then, and he said, again without thinking, “She’s her mother’s image, Pyetr Ilitch. And her grandmother’s.”
Pyetr grabbed his collar. Yvgenie turned his face away, sure that Pyetr was going to hit him or cut off his head. But Pyetr did not: Pyetr held on to him a moment, then shook him as if to see if anything else would fall out of his mouth. Yvgenie murmured, in his own defense, “I didn’t mean to say that, sir. I swear I didn’t. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
Pyetr said, “Damn.” And hauled him close and held on to him, the way someone had once, he could not remember how long ago. Pyetr held the sword against his back and smoothed his hair gently, saying against his ear, “It’s all right, boy. It’s all right. The Snake’s inside you, but he doesn’t have all of you. We’ll try to get him out.”
“I think I’m d-dead,” Yvgenie said, because something was telling him that. “I think I’m dead and he’s alive, and pretty soon there won’t be anything l-left of me.”
“Damn him,” Pyetr said. “Damn you, Snake, do you hear me? Kill the boy and I’ll have a neck to wring with a clear conscience.”
Something said, quite horridly, out of Yvgenie’s mouth, “This one isn’t to my account. I’d not have beaten him, or driven him to drown himself. But he’s avenged for that, dear Owl, I do swear to you. His father’s dead.”
“Dammit!” Pyetr said, while Yvgenie listened to his own mouth speaking, and heard, inside, a voice like his own, saying, Yvgenie, Yvgenie, the world won’t miss him. Surely you don’t. The men he’d have killed should be grateful. And he won’t be coming here.
He wept against Pyetr’s shoulder. He did not know why. It did not seem to him he had ever loved his father: he remembered the huge stairway and the gilt and the paintings; and his father holding him by the shirt and hitting him in the face—but he surely had loved someone—he had the strongest feeling he had loved the girl who had saved him, but his whole life was sliding away from him, all the things he might have loved, all the things he might have wanted, even his name, and his father’s name.
He had Pyetr. He had the memory of Ilyana and the river. He had a wizard who believed someone inside him was his enemy, and who wanted to drive this thing out of him—or get answers from it—while Pyetr waited to cut his head off— and, god, he wanted to live, if only to find out who he was, or what he might have been, or whether he deserved to be treated like this.
“Poor lad,” Pyetr said—he had hoped if he could once do right he might find kindness somewhere. But he heard his own voice whispering to him in his heart.
We’re old friends, Pyetr and I. And his wife. A most remarkable man—friend of wizards, and magical things, and quite reliable. He wants us both to be ghosts. Be glad he’s not the wizard.
Sasha was setting out herbs. Sasha said, quietly, “Just hold on to him, Pyetr.”
“What are you doing?” Pyetr asked. “What do you hope to do?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Sasha said. “If I knew I’d do it. I just don’t want him wandering about tonight, in whatever form.”
“Salt in a circle won’t work. It never stopped my wife.”
“I’d say keep the rope on him for his own protection.” Sasha’s voice again, quiet, as he tossed pinches of dust into the fire. “His and ours.”
“We can’t just talk about him,” Pyetr said. “He’s not a sack of turnips.”
“Beware your heart,” Sasha said. “If there’s a shred of his own life left in him, we’ll try to find it—” Sasha moved between Yvgenie and the fire, a f
aceless shadow as he rested on Yvgenie’s shoulder. “Go to sleep!” he said suddenly.
“I don’t want to die,” he protested; he had heard the anger, he saw it in Sasha’s face, and said, while he was falling, “Pyetr, help me. Pyetr, dammit, listen to me—” as the shadow wrapped him in.
Not dead, Pyetr thought, with the boy’s weight gone heavy in his arms. “What in hell was that about?” he asked, and held on to the boy as much to still his own shaking as for any good he could do. Something was grievously wrong, he was sure of it, but Sasha gave him no answer. Sasha had leapt to his feet, looking out toward the walls, toward nowhere-crying, “No! Stay out, stay away, you can’t help us—”
Eveshka, Pyetr thought, and heard her like an ache in his heart. Eveshka had wanted the boy dead. She wanted him—
“ ‘Veshka,” he muttered against the boy’s hair, “listen to Sasha. It’s a poor, drowned boy, ‘Veshka, and it’s Kavi’s foolishness, don’t do anything—”
Something happened. Sasha moved between him and that source; or wished a silence, or something of the like. Sasha cried aloud, “Eveshka, you’re a fool. Do you understand me? Your husband won’t forgive you that foolishness. Your daughter won’t. Listen to me, dammit!”
It might have been a long while that passed. Pyetr’s leg began to tremble under him, in its uncomfortable bend, the boy’s weight grew heavier and heavier in his arms; he was sure something was going on, something both magical and desperate between his wife and his friend, and he ducked his head, pressed his brow against the boy’s shoulder and made his own pleas for calm.
Eveshka said to him then, so clear it seemed to ring in winter air, Pyetr, I’m on my way home. I want you to let go of the boy, I want you not to touch him, not to think about him, I want you to go to the house immediately and take care of our daughter, do you hear me? Now!
So many wants. An ordinary man had no choice without a wizard’s help. As it was, he had trouble letting the boy down gently and standing up.