He only shook his head in dismay, and for a moment, a very small moment, there seemed hazy edges about him, Kavi’s shape and Yvgenie’s.
“He’s afraid,” Yvgenie said. “He—” Yvgenie’s blurred shape got up from the stone and looked into the woods, shaking his head slowly, once and twice. She tried to eavesdrop, and caught only images of Kiev, and Yvgenie’s father, und a hallway at night where men gathered and talked of murders. He recalled a stairway, and towers and walls, and leading Bielitsa out into the dark, out the gates of Kiev—
Yvgenie said, looking around at the sky, the dead leshys. “The falling suns. The moons and the thorns. This is the place. He had to bring you here—to them. They wanted him to. He slept for years here. But he forgot and it was too long, it was much too long. He was only a boy—and leshys don’t understand little boys. —God it’s all full of dark spots—”
“Don’t say that—” Oh, god, a stupid wish, when he was desperately trying to warn her. She wanted out of this place, she felt the life going away from him and Owl as if he was bleeding it into the stone and the ground, the longer he stayed here. “ Come away.”
He shook his head, with the most dreadful memory of fear, and thorns, and a confusion of suns in the sky. OwI dying, struck by her father’s sword.
She came and took his hand, wanting Patches and Bielitsa to stay with them: his fingers were cold as winter. “Don’t argue with me, please, Kavi, it’s not good here. It’s not safe, Kavi, please listen. Something terrible happened in this place, and it’s dead, and you can’t be near it any longer, Kavi please, let’s get out of here, let’s go on!”
He stood still, resisting her pulling, and gazed out amour the trees. “It’s there,” he said faintly, and she looked, and saw nothing but dead leshys and dead brush.
“What’s there!”
“Where I was buried. Where I died. Across the river…”
The cold was spreading from his hand to hers. She held on, she wanted him to leave this place, with all her mind she wanted it, and pulled at him, made him walk, that direction, any direction, if that was all he could want—as long as it was out of this place. Please the god it was out of this deadly grove.
She wished Bielitsa and Patches to follow them. They left the stone behind, they re-entered the maze of thorns. She was colder and colder—her fingers could not even feel his, now.
“Please, a little further, a little further—”
Thorns scratched her arms, caught at her skirts and at him and at the horses. Then something cold brushed against her, Something flitted through the brush ahead, and following it with her eye she saw it take a path she had not realized was there. She fought through the thorns and saw the way through, if only she could reach it. “There,” she said. “There! There’s a path, do you see?”
Babi turned up, at Missy’s feet as they went, and Sasha was only half glad of that. “The dvorovoi,” Nadya said, the instant he appeared, trotting beside them as they rode, and he said:
“I’d rather hoped he was with Pyetr.”
Nadya held sometimes to his belt, sometimes to his waist— at the moment it was the former, but a fox darted from cover and Missy made a little toss of her head, and immediately it was the latter, tightly.
“Only a fox,” he said. “Missy’s never trusted them since—”
Since he had thought shapeshifters or the like might use that form, and most unfortunately told Missy.
Nadya’s arms stayed where they were. She had never ridden a horse, she was thinking, she had never even left the walls of her house and her garden—
Nor seen a fox, nor a bear nor any wild creature. Considering that, she was very brave.
And reconciled to Pyetr, at least she knew certain things that made her understand him—Sasha most earnestly tried not to eavesdrop, and all the same caught embarrassed and embarrassing thoughts about him while they were riding, which, god! were no help at all to a wizard trying to think. One could hardly tell her not to have thoughts like that: the limit was the eavesdropper’s, or his concentration: she was all unaware and innocent. She was thinking—how he felt so strong, although he was hardly taller than she was; how he must ride horses and do things other than magic; how just thinking about him—
—made her feel—so entirely different than poor Yvgenie, who was handsome and kind and brave and everything any reasonable girl could ever want—but no one had ever looked at her and made her shiver all the way to her toes the way he did when she had looked him in the eyes. She had no idea even when she had begun to feel that way, except last night she had finally believed her father was telling the truth, and therefore that her father’s friend must be everything he seemed to be—
It was not her idea, the god help her, he had done it with his stupid, selfish wishes that had nothing to do with this girl—Pyetr’s daughter, for the god’s sake—had wanted for herself. He had done one damnably wrong after the other since they had left home, he had completely lost the train of his thoughts last night, blotted an entire page he could not recall in entirety, spilled all but a few pages worth of ink, and now with Nadya’s arms about him he could not even remember the straight and the whole of what he had been thinking when he wished himself asleep. Something to do with the mouse—something to do with Nadya, that simply would not come clear to him, or that had not even been that urgent, only leading up to some brink he dared not cross.
Dammit, he knew now how to do real magic, he had discovered the truth old Uulamets had hid and he could let fly a wish that would surely make the mouse hear him—or bring rains clear to Kiev.
But he could not believe in his own wisdom any longer, he knew the scope of his mistakes already, and how did one wish belief back, when belief was central to the wish?
The great magics were always easy—to someone in the right moment, at the exact moment of need—and always impossible, to someone who did not expect the result.
Make up your mind, Pyetr would shout at him. God, he wanted to. But what was fair to wish, with Pyetr’s daughter involved? Leave me alone?
Go love Yvgenie Pavlovitch?
He had no idea where that might lead her either—to harm, in this woods; to heartbreak and disaster, if Yvgenie was dead; to disaster for all of them, if she provoked the mouse to jealousy and foolishness. Everything wrong seemed possible, and the only wish that made sense—was not fair, dammit, simply was not fair to her. What in the god’s name could he do with a girl who had no idea of wizards or magic and no idea what she could expect of him?
The ground dipped and rose again. Nadya caught hold of his shirt, and of him, thinking of bears and wolves, of bandit and dreadful walking houses, and thinking over all it was better than the four walls of a garden in Vojvoda, if she was eaten by a bear out here it was better than that—she would never go back, never, never, never live like that. She feared for Pyetr, she wished she had been worth enough to go with him, she was glad enough they were going, and if she was any help she was willing to try—
(”Tell me, what would you have done if your father had decided you shouldn’t be on the streets, and locked you in The Doe’s basement?”)
(”I’d have—”)
Damn, it was like listening to Volkhi.
She had a knife. She had stolen it. Her father had thought it was stupid, but all the same it was better than having nothing. She understood her father going off the way he had. She was glad Pyetr was her father and not some dead old man she had never met—all in one night she had a father who would take his sword and go off into the dark after to rescue a daughter and a young man he hardly knew from rusalki and ghosts, and would her uncles, would her uncles ever dare?
(Her uncles had gathered up the silver—knowing the killers were coming. Her mother had packed her jewels, and told her, when she had come upstairs to announce, with a lump in her throat, that she was going with Yvgenie, “Go where you please.”
Damn them, Sasha thought. And remembered something too painful, nights in the stable when s
omething had gone amiss in the tavern and he had realized his aunt and uncle were talking about being rid of him. He had tried (because he had known then that wanting things was deadly dangerous) not to have an opinion about the matter. Even if he had nowhere to go. Even if he tried to love them. He only worked the harder the next day to please them—
And here he had the most beautiful girl he had ever seen with her arms close about him, thinking, the way Pyetr would jolt him into thinking that it was all right to want things like Pyetr’s staying alive, that it was all right to want to get Pyetr’s daughter back and Yvgenie back— No!
Dangerous, that thought. But she thought it. She want it of him, she expected him to do it, for the sake of a brave young man she owed her life to—no matter he had spent the night lying senseless and no matter he could not find thread of his thoughts—she believed he could do it, wrapped her arms about him and believed the way she believed in the world beyond her walls.
Dangerous for a wizard, dangerous as walking a roofline drunk, dangerous as a rusalka’s kiss—
Don’t be a fool, he told himself while they rode. But for a few drunken instants he had believed in it, too, and thought—Yvgenie. Life and death. Death in life. Yvgenie’s the instability.
Yvgenie’s the stone that moves the hillside. Wish him to our side while his life lasts. Is that wishing against nature?
Thorns stood like walls on either hand, braced by tall dead trees, and Yvgenie walked, following Ilyana, following Owl who glided in bands of sunlight and shadow on gossamer white wings. Owl was back, since the leshy ring, and Yvgenie told himself that should be a hopeful sign, but his heart could not quite believe it: I dreamed this, he thought. Or I’ve been here before. And from time to time he glanced over his shoulder, expecting the wolves of his dream.
“This is wrong,” he said. “Ilyana, this isn’t the way to go. Ilyana, we’re losing the horses—”
“They’ll follow,” she said. “Come on! They’ll follow us once we get through.”
“Through where?” he protested. But his voice came from faint and far away, and the daylight seemed colder and grayer with every step. “Ilyana, look ahead of us. There’s nothing living.”
“It’s further to go back,” she protested. “It can’t be that much further through—I can feel something ahead of us—”
He reached for her hand, to compel her if there was no other way—take the strength she had and carry her back to the horses; but she evaded his touch, wishing no so strongly it stung. “Kavi, I can help you, there’s a way back, I know there is, my mother died and she’s alive again, she had me, didn’t she?”
“At whose cost?” The ghost wrapped itself about him, cold, wary, and protective against her magic. “And what will we be then? Come back, don’t go any further.”
“Kavi, Kavi, come on!”
He flinched as a sudden cold spot swept through his middle. Another grazed his shoulder, and became a wolf and a second wolf, walking tamely ahead of them, creatures of gossamer and pallor, like Owl, wending their way through thorny hedges mat parted, simply moved, to let them through. White wisps streamed and wove through the thorns of the hedge like serpents, and he began to hear a voice saying, Ahead is where you belong. Here’s the rest you’ve deserved. Here are all the answers to all the questions you ever asked…
Another cold wisp swept through him, and another, stealing life and warmth. “Ilyana!” He caught a branch to hold the hedge apart, scarcely feeling the thorns. “Ilyana!”
But more branches closed between them as she turned to look at him.
“Kavi!” she cried, trying with bare hands and wishes to unweave the tangled thorn boughs. Ghosts streamed like snakes about them, thicker and thicker. He shoved his arm through the thorns to draw her back through, leaned against the branches, almost touching the tips of her fingers—but the cold spots shot through him more rapid than his heartbeats, and the weakness he felt now was its own warning that he dared not touch her if he could.
“Kavi!” she cried. But he clenched his hand just short of her fingers and drew his arm back. “Kavi, stay with me, we’ll find a way through—”
“I can’t,” he cried, and tore and fought through the thicket away from her, blind and breathless. He would have killed her just then, the way he would kill the horses if he found them in this desolation: he would draw the last life from the ground, draw it from anything in his path. He drew it instead from the stubborn thorns, fended brittle branches away from his arms and ran, fainting from cold and weakness—heard the voices of wolves amid the wailing of the ghosts, and, glancing over his shoulder, saw them coursing after him, slow and pitiless as nightmare.
Something had shifted. Sasha felt that much: an essential pebble had moved, somewhere. But as to how things were falling now—he was blind and numb with terror, resolved not to let his fear reach beyond him, or do more harm than he might already have wrought with his wishes.
God, Pyetr, hear me. The boy’s in trouble. Chernevog is. I did something I don’t understand—
Nadya whispered, “What’s wrong?” Missy had stopped, abruptly, standing with her ears pricked and a shiver going through her shoulders. Within his awareness, Nadya was trying not to be afraid: she had known the world outside her walls must be dangerous, but she had chosen her course, she was with a wizard she was sure could fight the invisible dangers and on a horse with strength to carry them through the tangible ones. Dear fool, Sasha thought, feeling her arms about him, dear young fool, nothing of the sort-But it made him sure all the same that he had imminently to do something. Pyetr would tell him so exactly that way. Though he did not have Pyetr and his sword and his good sense at his back, he had a lost boyarevna armed with a kitchen knife and a faith only the young could have, a faith he so desperately—
—O god!—wanted for himself.
Thickets gave way to green again, to scantly leaved trees struggling for life, and sunlight that blinded and did not warm. Yvgenie slid on a muddy edge, sat down hard on a bank of a cold spring-fed rill with his heart pounding for fright, as if a mouse could drown in that water that soaked his leg—but it seemed to him he had been on the verge of another fall, and drowning, and that the bank where he lay and the sunlight shining down on him were less real than the other shore.
He looked up the hill, thinking of wolves, not sure now that any had been there, not sure that they might not yet come over the wooded hill.
Get up, keep moving, the ghost insisted. He recalled that Ilyana was in some dreadful danger, that he had let her go and lost her and that he dared not go back, because he was dying, he much feared so, dying finally and forever, when he had died truly that night in the flood, in a woods in which the dead did not rest. He wanted not to steal strength; but he wanted not to die, either, or to wait for the wolves, and he hauled himself up on his arms and his hands to try to get his feet under him—with the sudden feeling—perhaps it was the ghost—that there was help to be had, that it was very close now—
An arrow hit the bank, among the dead leaves, beside his hand. He flung a look over his shoulder at riders coming down the opposite leaf-paved slope, and tried to run and sprawled again on the leaves in the weakness of his legs. He rolled over and looked at them as they came—god, they were the tsar’s men, not his father’s; and that made him hope—
Although why they should be here in this woods, he had no notion at all. He only stared at them as they came. He had no strength to flee them, not even to stand on his feet to face them.
They stopped, their captain’s horse standing half astride the rill, the mustached captain looking down at him grimly from that vantage as two others rode across to dismount on either side of him. Their armor and their manner recalled Kiev, and streets, and sane places where the Great Tsar ruled, not wizards. They would kill. They would do anything they pleased, in the tsar’s name. But they might be here on some other cause, they might even be here hunting his hunters.
“Yvgenie Kurov,” their captain said,
as the horse took a step closer, looming over him. “Where’s the girl? Where did you leave her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and the two men on either side of them came and hauled him up by the arms. Why should the tsar care? he wondered. Why should the tsar take a hand in my father’s troubles, or want to find me or her?
The ghost said, Because your father is dead, poor young fool, with his servants, the second wife, and all his house, and they intend no traitor’s heir survive—nor any question of an heir, born or unborn. The Kurovs are gone, the tsarevitch is scrambling for his life, and heads will roll if some pretender comes out of the woods: that’s what I hear in them. I’d not fall afoul of Eveshka’s ill will. But no one told the tsarevitch that, when he tried to switch dice on Ilyana’s father…
He was dazed. Their grip hurt his arms. He found no sense in what the ghost was saying, and the captain of the tsar’s men leaned close to ask him and seized him by the hair, making him look up. “Where is Nadya Yurisheva?”
The name echoed strangely in his ears, recalling— recalling—
—a talk behind the stairs, vows exchanged besides the witnessed ones, with the bride they had contracted for him: they had conspired to try to love each other, his bride behind her walls, himself within his father’s treacheries and the Medrovs” climb to influence. Until someone had whispered the fatal secret, a taint of wizardry—’Where is she?” the captain asked, shaking him, but he saw only forbidding thorns, and ghosts, and the fire and Ilyana writing in her book. He had no idea how he had become so lost, or where he had lost Nadya and fallen in love with a wizard who wanted him for a ghost’s sake— For Kavi Chernevog, who had sustained his life and who with a confidence beyond courage was not afraid of these men, no. Kavi wanted them, he felt it coming—
“Let me go!” he pleaded with them. But the breath and strength that came flooding through his arms was theirs, all the arrogant violence they had brought to this woods. Two horses bolted, free through the woods. Go! he wished them, heard the captain cry, “Kill him!” and shut his eyes and wished not, wished all the horses free: it was his own mortality, that, and the ghost did not fight him on that point. It was too well satisfied with the life it had in reach, and with every gasp of breath came anger at his victims. He had tried all his life not to hate, had kept his father’s wicked secrets, poured all his love into a man whose only passion was cleverness and strength, and fear in the eyes of his dogs and his servants and his sons…