He said, “ ‘Veshka—”
But she was not listening. She refused to hear him, and speech damned up in his throat. So he thought, instead, about the heart he had held for her, about its terrible selfishness, that weighed a lost boy’s life so little against its wants and its opinions, and thought, I’m safer from him than from you, ‘Veshka. He could only threaten what I love. You are what I love. What can I do against that?
He saw Sasha take a breath. He found one of his own.
“God,” Sasha breathed then. And: “Mouse!”
The door banged open. His daughter was standing there in the sunlight. She looked at the boy on the floor, she looked at them, and said, faintly.
“Mother’s coming home.”
Pyetr crossed the floor to reach her, but she fled the doorway, out into the blinding sun, and ran across the yard before she so much as stopped to look back at him, not wanting them to touch her, no.
“Mouse, we need your help!”
“I don’t want to help you!” she cried, and turned and bolted along the side of the house, braids flying, running like someone in pain.
“Oh, god,” he said, and took out after her, fearing she might head for the river, or loose some foolish wish. He heard Volkhi protest something, a loud and clear challenge, he heard Ilyana running up to the porch before he rounded the corner of the house, and she looked down at him from that vantage. She was crying.
“Mouse, I’ve got quite enough with your mother right now. Are you going to wish me in the river? Or are you going to listen to me first?”
“No one ever listens! I told you he wasn’t any harm!”
“But he is, mouse! He may be your friend, but he’s killed that boy, mouse, he’s wished your uncle’s house burned, he nearly killed your uncle—do you call that no harm?”
She set her hands on the rail and bit her lip. Maybe she was listening. Or maybe his daughter was wishing him in the river, he had no idea. He heard the horses snorting and stamping about behind him, but he kept his eyes on his daughter and his jaw set as he advanced as far as the walk-up.
“Your mother is on her way back here,” he said, setting his hand on the rail. “She’s not in a good mood, mouse, and I’m trying to reason with her. But it’s not easy.”
“She’d better look out, then. She’s not going to kill him, papa! Nobody’s going to kill him!”
“I’ve talked to your friend. He’s here to see you, mouse-mouse, dammit—”
But his daughter had gone inside, and the door slammed.
He started up to the porch. He lost his conviction halfway up, that he truly wanted to go into the house, or talk to his daughter. He looked aside in frustration and saw—god, a strange white horse with its nose across the hedge, a horse bridled and saddled, holding discussion with their three horses in the stableyard.
Damn! he thought. He did not like this. It took no wizardry for a lost horse to smell out the only other horses in these woods, and Yvgenie had lost one in the flood. It was the sudden accumulation of coincidences that set his nape hairs on end—that and the storm feeling hanging over the house.
That was from his daughter—who might or might not be responsible for the horse, which, dammit, was at least an indication that wizardry was lending them more trouble, and might have something to say about someone needing to get somewhere; or might mean only that Ilyana thought the boy should have his horse back. He set his jaw and doggedly did what he did not want at all to do, walked up to the porch, banged the door open and said, before he had realized it, in his own father’s most angry voice:
“Mouse?”
She was in her room: the door was shut.
He knocked. He softened his voice. “Mouse, this is no time for tantrums. I need you, your uncle needs you and there’s a visitor at the fence. Dry your eyes and come out here.”
She said, through the door, “I don’t know why anybody asks me when they never believe what I say. I’m sure the horse is my fault. Everything else is!”
“No one’s saying anything’s your fault, mouse, don’t put words in my mouth. Come out here and be reasonable.”
A long silence.
“Mouse?”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” a small voice came back. “Papa, mother’s going to do something awful to him. She’s coming back and she’s going to kill him.”
“She’s not going to kill him, mouse. She may even think she will, but she hasn’t seen him. He seems a nice lad, other visitors aside—I’m sure he owns the horse out there, and it’s not at all remarkable it came calling. Horses’ noses work very well without magic. But Chernevog is involved in his being here, and you won’t get your way slamming doors, mouse. Certainly not with your mother. We didn’t hurt the boy, I swear to you we didn’t. We need to talk about this.”
Another long silence.
“Mouse, we’re all very tired. Your uncle’s at his wits’ end and so am I, please don’t cry.”
“I won’t let mother kill anybody and I won’t let her make you do it!”
“Neither will I, mouse. That’s a promise. But I want you to listen to me. Please. I want you to be ever so good and reasonable, and please don’t scare your mother, for the god’s sake, mouse.”
“She wants you to kill that boy!”
“It’s not her fault. It was a mistake and she knew it. And I’m not easy to wish. Do you mind if I open the door?”
“No! Don’t!”
He dropped his hand from the latch without thinking about it. He said, patiently, reasonably, “Ilyana, we’re going to help him.”
“How? By wishing him dead? Why not? All my friends are dead. I don’t have any living ones.”
His own vinegar was in that remark.
“All right,” he said to the door, “mouse, I suppose I’ll have to do without your help. And I could truly use it right now.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He pushed the door open. She was sitting in the middle of the bed. Babi was in her arms. Babi growled at him. Babi was not wont to do that. But he was not wont to fight with his daughter either.
He said, quietly, “There’s a strange horse out there. That’s one thing. And there’s the house and the mud. I don’t want your mother to have anything to complain about when she gets here.”
“I did that, papa, you haven’t even looked. I even scrubbed the floors.”
He had not noticed. Not a bit. He looked at the floor, looked up at his daughter’s reddened eyes.
“I’m terribly sorry, mouse. I really am.”
“You’re being awful to that boy, papa. You’re scaring him, I can hear it!”
“Chernevog deserves it. The boy doesn’t, not by anything I see. But in all truth, mouse, I’m afraid there’s very little of the boy left. Rusalki do that kind of thing. Between Chernevog and your mother, I don’t know where we stand—but the boy hasn’t a chance in hell if certain people don’t use their heads right now. If you and Sasha can agree about the boy, the two of you might have a chance of convincing your mother. I don’t know about Chernevog—but if you do have any influence, reasoning with him wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.”
Ilyana looked terribly pale, terribly frightened. Babi went on growling, and the domovoi in the cellar caught the fit, so that all the house timbers creaked. “Uncle would side with mother,” she said. “He thinks the boy is already dead, or good as, and there’s no hope. He’s no hope. He can’t help me, he won’t, he’ll say he’s being fair, but he wants him away from me, too. He’s upset and he’s not being very quiet about it.”
“Try.”
“No, papa!”
He started toward her, but he found the room spinning around him, and the floor and the edge of the bed came up at him.
He said, or thought he said, Mouse, stop! and thought that his daughter had tried to catch him, far beyond her strength to do, before he hit the bedstead and his head hit the floor.
Her shadow fell over him. He felt a somewhat
damp kiss on the forehead, and the brush of her hand, and heard her say, Let her blame me for it, papa, not you. Please, please, papa, be all right…
Sasha had fallen with no warning, and no reason so far as Yvgenie could see, and he was sure any moment now Pyetr would come back and conclude it was his fault his friend was lying unconscious on the floor, and not ask further questions. Yvgenie sat frozen in dread of the next insane event, hoping Sasha would move or give him some clue that he was even alive; but when Sasha did not wake up in the next moment, or the next, or still the next, Yvgenie bit his lip and cast an anxious glance toward the door, beginning to think he might make a break for it, now, this instant, never mind that his hands were tied, and only hope not to meet Pyetr coming in. He was a fool to have waited this long—if he had not waited too long already. And with a deep breath and a great effort he wobbled to his feet and looked to see if he might by some stretch of luck find a knife among Sasha’s pots and herbs.
There was no such luck; and Sasha was most surely still breathing, though he was lying at a most uncomfortable angle, close to the hot stones. Yvgenie edged away, banged his knee on a bench in his retreat and stumbled into the door, sure that at the last moment Pyetr was going to arrive and cut his head off.
The door gave without resistance. Sun hit his eyes and fears welled up as he followed the side of the bathhouse toward the stable. That was where he reasoned he might find a knife, or some edge to free his hands; and a horse to carry him out of here before the wizard awoke and caught him.
He blinked his eyes clear, saw something white outside (he hedge, and it was Bielitsa, it was his horse out there—
He staggered along the fence to the stable itself, up under the shadow of the woods. He bent and ducked through the rails—
And heard a door open somewhere up at the house. He caught his balance in the corner of the fence and the stable wall and saw Ilyana looking at him from the side of the porch. He wished her, Please don’t tell your father. Please just go inside and don’t tell anyone—that’s all you have to do—god, please, miss.
She left the porch railing: he thought she was going back inside. But she came down the walk-up instead, casting anxious glances his way. She ran across the yard toward him as lie leaned helplessly against the wall, thinking-Thinking how the sun shone on her hair as she ducked through the fence, and how beautiful she was as she crossed the stableyard, and how if her father would kill him for looking at her, he would flay him alive for involving her in his escape—but seeing the distress on her face he wondered next if Sasha’s malady might not have befallen her father; she looked as if she wanted help, and, oh, god, he could hardly stand on his feet, let alone rescue fathers who wanted to kill him, for beautiful wizard-daughters who equally threatened his life.
She said breathlessly, “You’ve got to get out of here.” He agreed with that. He turned his back so she could get at the knots—to no avail, he felt after a moment of painful effort. She said, “Wait, I’ll get a knife.”
They were going to be caught, they were surely going to be caught and her father was going to cut him in pieces. He leaned his shoulders against the stable shed while she ducked into the shed—his head kept spinning and he could hardly hold his feet as it was, and somehow he had to get out of the yard, get on his horse and go fast enough and far enough— and he doubted he was going to get ten steps before the spell that had allowed his escape unraveled and he found himself with an indignant wizard and an irate father. More, he had no idea where he should go to escape: wizards he knew about sold curses and told fortunes. They did not crawl about inside one’s heart and talk from other people’s mouths and compel them to do whatever they wanted.
The girl came out again and cut him free, sawing his thumb in the process—her hands were shaking, he realized, which said that she was scared too. “I’m sorry,” she said, about his thumb, but he swore that he was all right, and turned about to thank her and take his leave.
She said, “There’s a horse. It’s his. I’ve my book and everything packed. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Where? he wanted to know. What ‘his’? A girl looked him in the eyes the way she looked at him and told him they were running away together—and the ghost inside him reached out his arm without his thinking about it and touched her arm with numbed, clumsy fingers, saying, “Ilyana, where are you going? What do you hope to do?”
“My mother wants you dead, she’s already wished that, do you understand? It’s too dangerous to talk to my father, he can’t help what he might do—”
His hand fell, painful and half-dead from the rope, and he believed her: he remembered Pyetr and Sasha talking, remembered them saying something ominous about Pyetr’s wife—
Who was not reasonable, not at all reasonable.
Eveshka was her name…
“Come on,“ she said, pulling at him. “My father’s asleep, but she isn’t, she’s coming here right now on the boat. She’ll be here before dark.”
He found himself crossing the stableyard before he realized where he was heading, but it was where he would go. He ducked through the fence, breathless and staggering, clung to it to hold him up as far to the hedge and the gate.
It was Bielitsa. He stumbled his way toward her and held onto the hedge, longing to touch her again, to touch anything that was his, any shred of his life that he could get back again—
Bielitsa did come to him, by tentative steps, let him catch her reins and hug her about the neck. He hung there, dizzy and catching his breath; and slowly felt stronger, as if her warm, solid presence brought sanity back to the world, and breath back into his body.
He knew one thing for true. He loved this mare more than anything in his life and if he had left her behind his father would have killed her for spite—because no one got away from his father, no one defied his orders, not his servants and not his son—
His father dead? God, his father was incapable of dying. Other people did. His mother had. Her sister had, and her sister’s son. He heard the thump of axes—heard the voices shouting into the winter air-He fumbled after the reins, patted Bielitsa’s chest and neck to steady her and managed to get his foot in the stirrup and himself into the saddle, courting dizziness to drive the memory out.
A face, and gilt, and paintings. He had seen the tsar-many times; and knew that if the tsar knew what he knew he would cut off his father’s head. He could do that to his father with a handful of words. He had had that power for years, and he did not know what had held his tongue, whether it was fear or the remote hope of being loved—because the tsar would never love him, the tsar would have no reason to trust a traitor’s son, and no one would trust him, then, no one in all the Russias would have him—
Ilyana led her horse up to the house, and left it to stand while she ran up to the porch and inside—to get her belongings, he supposed, while his heart pounded against his ribs and he waited for disaster. He wished they might have reasoned with her father—not a wicked man, he thought, only someone with just reason now to kill him.
Something fell into place then with the ghost next his heart, an eerie familiarity with Pyetr, and that situation. I’ve been here before, he thought. I’ve fled this house before. God, why? It seems all the same reason. It seems all the same time—but I do it again and again, until somehow I get away— but where to, but worse than this? That seems where we’re bound, and it’s happened before, it happens over and over again, forever—oh, god, where’s an escape for us?
6
The weathered wood of the landing showed pale gray in the evening light as the boat met the buffers, with no Pyetr and no Sasha to help bring it to shore. Eveshka leapt from the deck to the boards and managed to get a line snubbed about the mooring post, while the boat, with a reckless amount of way on it, scraped along the dock. It hit the limit of the rope: the rope held and the post did, and that was all she waited to see. She whirled and flew up the hill, skirts clinging and binding about her boots, catching at the hedge as s
he forced her way through. She ran across the yard and up to the porch.
“Pyetr!”
The door was unlatched. The house was dark, except the gray light from open shutters. Embers still smoldered in the hearth. The House-thing in the cellar groaned mournfully and the floor creaked with the peculiarly desolate sound of empty houses.
“Pyetr?”
She looked around her, with the most terrible conviction of wizardry still enveloping the house and the yard. She flung wide the door to her daughter’s bedroom, saw bedclothes in disarray, tumbled on the floor—and Pyetr lying beside the bed, not in the way of someone sleeping, but with a pillow under his head and a blanket over him all the same. She knelt and brushed back his hair, saw a trail of blood running back above his ear, from a lump on his forehead.
She refused to be angry. She refused to think of anything in the world but of Pyetr’s well-being. She took his cold hand in hers, saying, “Pyetr, wake up, Pyetr.”
His eyes opened. He blinked at her, confused at the dim light, at her presence, at the memory of their daughter: she eavesdropped without a qualm, demanding precisely what he last remembered, what he had felt—
Such hurt and such self-accusation—
She did not think about Ilyana. She did not want to be angry. She wondered only where Sasha was, wanting him to be all right; and thought how she loved Pyetr more than she could love her own life: that was what had saved him all those years past. Perhaps it still saved him—even while she wished his head not to ache and the lump to go away.
“She’s gone with him, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know where she is.” She framed every word carefully, holding Pyetr’s face at the center of her thoughts, reminding her who was hurt, not who had done the hurting. “North of here, with him, yes, I’m sure she is.”
Pyetr lifted his head off the pillow, reached for the bedstead to get up, and she gave him room. Somewhere nearby— the bathhouse, she thought—Sasha had waked, and she wished him up, on his feet and out the door, never mind his aches and his bruises, which he damned well deserved for his carelessness.