“What do you mean?” Sasha whispered back. So much, he thought, for wizardly sensitivity.
“Nothing,” he said, and pulled the quilt over his head, exhausted and determined to sleep, entertaining himself with thoughts of Eveshka.
But immediately as he shut his eyes his traitorous mind conjured instead the sudden drop into the pit at the knoll; and when he banished that memory, gave him the cave and the vodyanoi’s soft body wrapping around him—none of which promised pleasant dreams or a restful night.
Doggedly he remembered Eveshka by firelight, which chased the dark to the far edges of his mind.
Until his imagination, sly beast that it was, came around to Eveshka’s image on the river, and the touch of her cold fingers—and then, by unpleasant surprise, brought back the feeling of the bones in the cavern mud.
So, well, but even as a ghost, Pyetr told himself, putting his unruly imagination to rout again, Eveshka had hardly done him harm, a little cold water on his face, a scowl and a retreat—which he could now attribute to her desperate frustration rather than to any anger directed at him: she had tried so hard to speak, always without a sound. She had tried, there by the willow that was her tree—
The cave came back, perniciously. He heard the vodyanoi saying, “Best three out of five,” with his father’s voice, which he reckoned was less prophetic than the fact that he had been recollecting his father with unusual clarity this evening.
Back to the fire, then, and Eveshka: his thoughts kept going in circles, and he sincerely wanted to put all of it away and get some sleep—but with darker and darker images beginning to drift through his eyes when they were shut, he decided he had rather stay awake awhile. Unlikely things seemed to have happened to him with such persistence these last few days that nothing seemed quite safe: his mind was all a-boü with sights it refused to reconcile, and he was beginning to have a great difficulty telling the imaginary from the real.
He was not, tonight, with a dead girl dreaming by the hearth and his whole body aching from the battering of the vodyanoi in the cave, entirely certain that he was in control of his life any longer, and he found that a very upsetting idea.
He could go away from here, he and Sasha could just walk away in the morning with no one to stop them (granted they kept an eye to the river), and two or three days after this he would be able to wonder again if he had ever seen a rusalka or a dvorovoi, or wrestled with a River-thing.
But of nights—
For the rest of his life, he feared he was going to dream about things he did not understand, His confidence and his courage were the only assets he had ever had in life, the fact that Pyetr Kochevikov would make a try while everyone else was hesitating. For a man who had a knowledge of the odds for his only inheritance from his father, the existence of unknowables and uncertainties threaded through every situation was a terrible revelation.
One had either blindly to discount them—the action of a fooler wisely to unravel them, which di4 not look to be a study of a handful of days.
Of course he could walk out of this woods. He could quite possibly look at the ladies of Kiev in years to come and not compare them too unfavorably with Eveshka’s ethereal beauty. And between his light-fingered talent and Sasha’s odd ability, he reckoned the two of them could make a tolerably comfortable living in a world of natural men and ordinary risks.
But he would always know there were other rules, and that at some fatal moment they could intervene and tip a balance he thought he had calculated.
It would always be a possibility, even in Kiev, particularly as long as he had Sasha Misurov in his vicinity. There might have been things even in Vojvoda he had been fortunate not to have come afoul of; and one of Vojvoda’s wizards might have-No. Absolutely not. There was no wizardry at all in old Yurishev’s death, and nothing but his own stupidity had brought him to that pass.
Unless—
Unless Sasha, the stableboy at The Cockerel, had, in a momentary slip, wished very, very hard to escape his lot, or to find a friend, or to understand what he felt he was—
Or he might once have wished that a real wizard would someday teach him how to handle that deadly gift of his—
Who knew?
God, maybe Uulamets himself had wished—had wished someone like Sasha to help him.
Who was safe anywhere in the world, if wizards could put a thumb on any balance, years and leagues away?
He wanted, damn it all, to understand what he was involved in before he left the place most likely to have the answers, and to know for a certainty whether he had any free will left, even in the choice to go or stay.
In the morning Eveshka was up before any of them: Sasha heard the rattle of a spoon, lifted his head and saw that Eveshka was mixing something in a large bowl. Beside him Pyetr was quite soundly sleeping, and Eveshka smiled and waggled her fingers at him to bid him lie down and take a little more sleep himself.
Certainly he had no wish to deal with her alone, Uulamets being still abed. It seemed far safer to take advantage of a little more sleep, so he ducked down in the quilts against the morning chill and shut his eyes.
It seemed only a moment later that he woke with the smell of cakes cooking: he could see past the table legs and the bench a three-legged iron griddle standing in the embers; and Eveshka was turning the cakes, talking to her father, who was up and dressing, and saying she had missed the taste of food.
It somewhat gave one a queasy feeling, thinking about rusalkas, and wondering exactly in what fashion they did sustain themselves, or what exactly her appetites had been.
But he decided he could no longer claim to be asleep, so he gathered himself up and waked Pyetr.
“Our lie-abeds,” Uulamets greeted them cheerfully enough, though Pyetr muttered under his breath that he was due a little lying abed after carrying the old man home yesterday.
“We owe our young friends,” Uulamets said, and took his daughter by the hand and introduced them each by their proper names, which attention embarrassed Sasha: no one to his recollection had ever introduced him to anyone, since everybody who ever came to The Cockerel had already known him—or had no interest in whether the stableboy had a name. He hardly knew what to do, except to look up at the girl with his face gone burning hot and, he was sure, quite red; while Pyetr in his turn made a bow and said he had never seen anyone so beautiful, not even the finest ladies in Vojvoda.
At which Eveshka looked pleased, and Eveshka was the one who blushed in that exchange, then exclaimed about her cakes and quickly rescued the griddle from the fire and dumped them onto the waiting plate.
“They’re not burned,” she said with a little sigh. “Go, go, everyone wash up. I’ll make the tea.”
They were wonderful flatcakes, better than aunt Ilenka’s, Sasha thought: there were two apiece, with tart dried berries he had not himself discovered in Uulamets’ jars, and every crumb disappeared. Uulamets said Eveshka’s mother had used to make cakes like that, and Eveshka smiled and laid her hand on her father’s as they sat together at the table.
Altogether Uulamets looked very tired, worn to the bone by the last two days, but he looked changed in a better way, too—as if he had let go all the bitterness and the anger he had, and suddenly remembered, with Eveshka in the house, a kinder way of dealing with people. He set his hand over his daughter’s and said to them, “I have to explain to you. There was so little I could honestly explain, there was so little I really knew, myself, except that Eveshka—” He pressed her fingers gently. “Eveshka might have run away from me. That wasn’t the case. But I feared it might be, and if it had been, it would have been all but impossible to bring her back.”