“The hell with what ‘Veshka says! It isn’t the mouse’s fault what happened. She thinks she’s doing right. I don’t have to be a wizard to know that. She’s not against us.”
“It’s not her fault, and if you want the plain truth, I don’t think it was ‘Veshka’s either. She was in Draga’s house before the mouse was born. I honestly believe Draga wanted something that made trouble for us.”
Pyetr stopped with the cup halfway to his mouth. “Draga—” But the thought escaped him and escaped his eavesdropping as well. Something about Eveshka’s mother, about the time Eveshka had spent in her mother’s house under the hill, about Chernevog and Draga’s wishes—
Wishes could make a man think all around a matter. Wishes could defend themselves, the same as the mouse wishing them off her track. They could well be missing something essential.
He said, fighting Pyetr for pieces of that thought, “Eveshka was up there with Draga when neither you nor ‘Veshka knew the mouse existed—Draga wanted the baby, no question. That’s how she got her there—she couldn’t wish ‘Veshka herself, ‘Veshka’s too strong; but she could wish the mouse there: nobody wished anything about the mouse, since none of us knew she existed—”
“Draga didn’t have a damned thing to do with the mouse.” Some illusions one hated to challenge. “In fact Draga or Uulamets either one might have wished Ilyana into existence, Pyetr, forgive me. But we don’t know either of them got what they wanted. Wishes can pull other wishes off the mark, make them turn out differently than planned—certainly a young wizard is a scary handful; and unpredictable; and dangerous—but not, not, in my considered opinion, the creature Draga wanted from the beginning, and not under her grandmother’s posthumous influence.”
“Who said she was? Who ever said she was?”
“ ‘Veshka.”
“Hell,” Pyetr said in disgust. “She gets those damn moods.”
“No. Sometimes she admits what’s in her heart. And she’s right to worry.”
“Ilyana’s not a sorcerer! She’s not Chernevog’s kind, Chernevog himself isn’t what he was.”
“Pyetr, ‘Veshka died—and in her own thinking, she never won her struggle, no matter that her father brought her back to life. She lost. Nobody wins against sorcery—one either uses it or one ultimately loses to someone who does. That’s what she believes. She didn’t want the mouse badly enough to protect her from Draga—that’s what haunts her: she was surprised to know she had a baby, she was under her mother’s will, beset with her mother’s arguments and she only scarcely wanted the mouse enough for your sake to keep her alive. Something could have gotten to her—yes.”
“That’s not so, Sasha!”
“I agree with you. I don’t think you can make anyone good or bad without his consent. I don’t think it’s being sixteen, or fifteen—I think it’s whatever moment you decide what you need and decide what other people are worth to you. I was five when I made my terrible mistake; but I think we taught the mouse her lesson, and I don’t for a moment believe she has to kill anyone to learn it. More than that, I think there was a time you should have been here and ‘Veshka should have taken the trip to Kiev, if you want the truth; and a time last year we should have taken the mouse downriver to Anatoly’s place and let her meet the household, damn the consequences.”
“Why didn’t you say that, for the god’s sake? Why didn’t you insist?”
“I did say it to ‘Veshka, I said it to you more than once, if you’ll remember, but no one listened. They were delicate years. It wasn’t a time for quarrels in the house.”
Pyetr ran a hand through his hair. “God.”
“When ‘Veshka wished you to Kiev, I knew you’d be back; I knew the mouse would want you back. What’s more, I knew ‘Veshka would. She can’t turn anything loose. Not her daughter. Not her husband. Not an idea, once it takes hold of her—and she doesn’t ask where she got all of them. That’s her trouble, friend. She learned to fight from her father. Her young lessons were all that way. And in teaching the mouse what to do with magic—I had to hold Eveshka off.”
Pyetr was quiet a moment, staring into the fire. Sasha bit his lip, hoping he had not gone too far, wanting—
No.
“I won’t tell you what to think, Pyetr, only what I think. There always seemed too many quarrels for me to start another. All I could think was—just get her to the age of reason. Eveshka says she wasn’t working magic—but she was, she was constantly, in every opinion she holds. How do you convince someone not to hold opinions?”
“How do you convince Eveshka not to hold opinions?”
“The god only knows, Pyetr. I’m afraid neither of us was that clever. The things we want do come true: we make them happen, we shape them with what we say and what we do. It’s not the mouse’s fault. Not even his, I think. We made the mouse lonely. She wanted a playmate. She wished one up and he wanted—perhaps to come home. I don’t know.—But you taught her things. How to hold a baby bird. Do you remember?”
Pyetr frowned at him, upset and confused. “Not how to hold lives in her hands.”
“How to hold a fox kit. You said, “If he bites it’s only fear. Be careful.” Do you remember that? That’s a very important lesson.”
“A bite isn’t a betrayal. It isn’t your whole damned far against you. Or your mother wanting someone dead.”
“ I wish her to remember what you taught her, Pyetr. That’s the wish I make for her.”
“God, don’t put it down to me!”
“All those years she should have been with you, all the years we kept you apart—what you did teach her, in spite of that, the mouse sets most store by. You were the forbidden. You were the one out of reach.—What would you wish for her now?”
“To wait for me, dammit, that’s what I’ve been saying—for her to talk to me. That’s what I want.”
Dangerous wish. Dangerous and indefinite and putting Pyetr at risk. But Pyetr was, he had had faith in it for years, wiser and braver about such things than he was. So he said, slowly, with the awareness of everything unhinged, and everything in doubt:
“I wish that, yes. And I wish you well, Pyetr... as well I know how.”
Pyetr looked at him as if he were mad, looked at him in the gray dawn, that time that ghosts began to fade, and said, no faintly he could hardly hear: “Wish yourself well, Sasha.”
Because he had chosen the wish he had—foolish wizard that he was: he had deceived himself for so many years that he wished Pyetr’s welfare completely unselfishly, for Pyetr’s benefit, and not his: Let Pyetr be well, let nothing change—
He thought, not for the first time, All of us brought him from Kiev. Who knows, maybe we wished him into trouble to do that, and he never would have played dice with the tsarevitch or crossed Kurov. As it was, it got him home, and it put him here, where he nearly died last night.
Babi turned up in his lap, Babi grabbed for his neck and hung on, fiercely, with his small hands.
—Babi knows something Babi doesn’t like. I wonder where Babi was before he showed up last night. Things aren’t going well, Pyetr’s right.
“Have you done that?” Pyetr persisted. “Do you wish yourself well, Sasha? Or have you done something completely foolish?”
Pyetr could tell he was woolgathering. Pyetr knew his habits, and his expressions.
“I wish myself to keep you alive,” Sasha said slowly. It was all he dared wish this morning. In their fear for the mouse’s abilities, they had wished nothing about a wizard too old for a child’s mistakes, a wizard who had done a child’s naive magic twice now—unwisely in both in stances.
He got to his feet. He picked up the vodka jug and deliberately let it fall.
Babi turned up below it, caught it in his arms and glared at him reproachfully.
But it had not broken. He could not harm it, even trying. In its way it was dangerous. Fall holding it—and the jug would survive.
It was Pyetr’s coat, Eveshka had no doubt of it wh
en she had fished it out of the river. “Pyetr!” she cried aloud to the forested shore, to the winds and the morning; she wanted Sasha to answer her; but no answer came, not from her husband, not from her daughter, not from Sasha, not even from the vodyanoi, who wanted to torment her. She knew its ways; oh, god, she knew them—knew that it lied, but one could never rely on that.
What she wanted now was a breeze—with the sail canted, the tiller set—just a very little breeze, please the god. Ever so slight a breeze—while she trembled with fear and wider wishes beckoned.
The sail flipped and filled halfway. The boat moved, ever so slowly.
And stuck fast again.
She did not wish a storm. She shut her eyes and wished— please, just a little more.
The boat groaned, the sail flapped and thumped.
The wind was there. It took so little for a stray puff of wind to come into this nook, skirl among the trees along the little stream, and come skimming across the water...
Something wanted me toward this shore. Then want me inner, dammit! I’ve no intention to swim for it!
The boat heeled ever so slightly and slid free, bow facing the brushy water edge.
She lashed the tiller and ran forward, past the deckhouse, under the sail and along the low rail to the bow, with the snaggy wooden hook they used for an anchor. She swung it around and around her with all her might and loosed it for the trees.
It landed. She hauled on the rope and felt it hold, threw a loop about the bow post and hauled, not abruptly, but with patience.
Wizardry waited to swallow her up. The river did, while the vodyanoi taunted her with cruel laughter and told her lies. It was a big boat, a very big boat, but on the water the slightest breeze and the slightest of women could move it.
There were terrible holes in the coat she had fished out of the water, and stains, despite its soaking, that were surely blood.
Hwiuur could not be killed, that she knew, not in this world—but there were powers outside this world, in that place where magic lived.
Branches cracked against the hull. The old ferry jolted and scraped along the shore.
The forest that shut out her magic could not shut her out—kill her if it could—but not stop her short of killing her.
Sasha would talk about morality. Sasha would talk about the safety of people she had never met, and children she had never seen, and beg her to have pity on them, remembering that magic sought a way into the world—which wizards must never, give. But Pyetr was her right and wrong. Pyetr was her world outside the woods, and the world inside her heart. Without him, if anything should have happened to him—
Sasha had warned her against killing and against dying— You know what you’d become…
Oh, absolutely she did.
8
The horses had not the strength now for hard going. No more did Pyetr—small wonder that Pyetr seemed thinner and paler than yesterday: he noticed it especially when they had come to a small in and let the horses rest and drink. Pyetr stripped off his bloody shirt and splashed water over him, sending a trail of stained water curling away over the moss-but of the wound there remained nothing but a white scar on his back and another on his chest. Pyetr touched the one he could reach, examined it, awkwardly situated as it was, and looked up with worry in his eyes that Sasha did not want to read—realization how close he had come to dying last night, certainly; and perhaps of the magic it might have cost to call him back.
“I didn’t borrow,” Sasha said. “If that s what you’re wondering. You’re white as a ghost and some bit thinner to prove it —That shirt’s beyond washing. God, don’t put it back on.” He pulled Pyetr’s spare one from Missy’s baggage. Pyetr shook the water out of his hair, dried it with the dirty shirt and put the clean one on.
After which they took the chance to wash and shave, filled their water-flasks and left the brook behind at a pace Missy and Volkhi could keep.
In the white sunlight, without dirt and stubble looked paler still, the fine lines on his face smoothed away. He seemed—
Drawn thin, the way he had been in the days master Uulamets had first snared them, and used Pyetr for bait for his ghostly daughter. The god help them, he had snatched after an image last night, that very moment a young fool had worked his best magic—they had been young, they had been on an adventure that would end well—but time had glossed the fear and the weariness and Pyetr’s sure attraction for what he knew would kill him—the very destruction Pyetr had been, one feared with the clarity of hindsight, courting all his young life—
Because Pyetr had had that inclination in his youth: Pyetr the gambler’s son, who valued his life less than his freedom and his own way. Old Uulamets had wanted a wizard lad, had wished for one for a hundred years, till a certain stable boy had been shaken out of Vojvoda—to rescue Pyetr from an unpleasantness occasioned by a lady’s window and an irate husband who had dropped dead in the street.
They rode a narrow space between the hills, with noon sun slanting through the leaves. Babi was off somewhere, but Babi would do that—sometimes there and sometimes not, as Babi pleased.
Sasha murmured, out of his own thoughts: “When we first came to this woods, Pyetr, do you remember, master Uulamets wanted me to meet ‘Veshka. You were an accident. He wanted me out of Vojvoda.”
“I wanted the hell out of town. There was a rope involved. I call that a reason.—What are you talking about?”
“He wanted me. He wanted a wizard to attract Eveshka back to him. And after a hundred years of his wanting someone like me—and after my being born and growing up, and all, just to satisfy his wish—what did Eveshka do but fall in love with you instead?”
“Love, hell! The old goat meant you to die, friend. You weren’t supposed to survive the honor.”
“But he didn’t need a wizard for that. He certainly didn’t need one fifteen years old—”
“She was sixteen a hundred years. She was still sixteen then. It wasn’t that unreasonable.”
“But—” The train of thought was getting more and more uncomfortable, now it had started. “She’d have been sixteen another year or so. I’d have been older. It might have worked then.”
“Thank the god not. By then, I’d have been hanged.”
Chilling thought. “But his wish worked too soon, didn’t it? Or didn’t get me born soon enough. Maybe something pulled his wish off a year or so. Maybe it was mine for my own welfare. Or ‘Veshka’s for help. —Or maybe it wasn’t even me that was going to work: you were his answer, and he wouldn’t see it. He had his mind made up how everything was going to be, just like ‘Veshka: it was me he still wanted, after you were right under his nose; and why, with you at hand, did he still want a wizard, when we all know the doubly-born are so dangerous? Did he want Ilyana?”
Pyetr frowned at him, thinking thoughts he most definitely did not want to overhear. Then Pyetr said: “Does a rusalka want anything but its own way? Maybe ‘Veshka did it. Maybe her father wanted you and she wished me up to spite him.”
A ridge loomed in front of them. The horses took it at a brisker pace, and after that it was a climb down again, through thin new growth, past a fallen tree. Since the forest’s re-growth, young trees had grown old and massive; and some had died.
He said, had been waiting to say, when they came side by side again, “But all along we’ve said wizards shouldn’t marry wizards. You were ever so much—” Pyetr arched an eyebrow.
—safer? Hardly flattering, to the rascal Pyetr had so studiously been. His face went hot and he mumbled instead, “I just don’t know why he was furious that she went for you.”
“What in hell are we really talking about?”
Impossible to explain. They were coming to another rough spot. “I don’t know.”
Their course took them apart again, around a tree, along a hillside, Missy dropping behind. He overtook Pyetr at the end of a stand of trees and a thorn thicket and Pyetr said, “By everything you say, ‘Veshka herself being bo
rn was no accident. The old scoundrel must have loved Draga once, I’ll suppose he did—why else marry her? Or maybe—”
Missy had to drop back again, and Sasha started to eaves drop for the rest of it, but it felt too private, something about Eveshka; and when they were side by side again, Pyetr asked:
“What are you trying to say?”
“That Draga couldn’t have carried ‘Veshka without wanting her—or stayed near Uulamets if Uulamets hadn’t been willing for her to—a baby’s just too fragile. He knew his wife was trying to kill him. He knew his wife wanted that baby, but he wanted Eveshka, too—not just after she was born. He had to—if a wizard-wife can wish not to have a child—so can her husband, granted he’s thinking in those terms.”
“Not a sure thing,” Pyetr muttered, “granted wizards are like the rest of us.”
“Eveshka’s told me she wasn’t even thinking about having a child, herself, before she conceived Ilyana, which—” He was sure his face was red. “—considering you both, was incredibly forgetful on her part.”
“She didn’t exactly have a mother’s kindly advice.”
A hill intervened. He rode it, trying not to overhear Pyetr’s thoughts, and Missy picked her way down at Volkhi’s tail. Babi turned up again and left by the time he overtook Pyetr on flat ground.
Pyetr said: “She’s getting more and more like her father, if you want my opinion: scared to death of magic and using as little as she can.”
“But why did Uulamets want a wizard to marry his daughter?”
“Forget marry. He wanted to kill us!”
“You were the one he specifically didn’t want and it happened anyway.”