“Papa had a student, Kavi,” Eveshka said. “Long ago. I was very young—very foolish. I believed he was innocent of the things papa said. He was very handsome. Very persuasive. But when I did find it out, I was so—” Eveshka. looked down, then looked at her father. “I was so embarrassed. You were absolutely right. But I was too ashamed to say so. That was why I left that morning. I only wanted to sit down on the dock and think a while. Then the vodyanoi—”
Tears clouded her eyes and she stopped talking. Sasha sat there beside Pyetr wishing he knew what to do or say to an upset girl who had—he began to realize—been a ghost for perhaps more years than he had been alive, and who was at once a girl of sixteen and much, much older. His stomach felt upset. He remembered the vodyanoi and its malice and felt doubly upset, thinking of Eveshka dragged down into that watery cave.
“I was afraid,” Uulamets said quietly, “that she’d killed herself—or that that scoundrel had murdered her. I put nothing past Kavi Chernevog, absolutely nothing.” He patted Eveshka’s hand. “But you’re back. That’s all. To the black god with Kavi Chernevog. Do you know, I tried to keep your garden, but I’m afraid all I have luck with is turnips.”
Eveshka dried her eyes with her knuckle and suddenly laughed.
“It’s all there is to eat around here,” Pyetr said, and Uulamets frowned. “But,” Pyetr went on irrepressibly, “I can say this place has brightened considerably since yesterday.”
The compliment pleased Eveshka. It clearly did not please Uulamets, who immediately stood up and suggested they clear away the dishes and straighten up the house.
Chests in the cellar gave up blankets and clothes—Eveshka’s own, one supposed; and more shirts and trousers, fine ones, all of 3. size. Eveshka ordered a rope strung from the bathhouse to the porch and ordered the laundry tubs rolled out—which activity trampled into submission the weeds around the bathhouse, and meant, Sasha foresaw it, an incredible number of heavy buckets carried up the hill.
But this time—Sasha had not expected it—Pyetr bestirred himself to help, even taking the harder part of the course, carrying the buckets to the top of the muddy, root-laddered path from the river and letting Sasha carry them across the yard to the bathhouse.
Pyetr wore his sword while he was doing this, by which Sasha knew exactly the danger Pyetr was thinking about. Pyetr did not go down to the river with one bucket while he was delivering the other: Pyetr took the harder way, carrying both at a time, then sat on a tree root and waited for him to bring the buckets back, a choice which kept them always in sight of each other, and that, too, said that Pyetr was concerned.
So was he, out under a clear sky, with time enough to get a breath of rain-chilled morning air and to consider that they had had an uncommon amount of good luck in the last couple of days. He was tempted to congratulate himself: perhaps Uulamets’ few pieces of advice had helped him manage his gift; or perhaps, as Uulamets had said, it was at least possible to stifle one’s ability, to keep a tight grip on it in crises—
“Most people have the instinct for magic,” Uulamets had said to him, that morning that Uulamets had begun to teach him. “Some have a minuscule ability—and don’t manage it at all except by smothering it entirely. Or they smother their good sense instead, and make a thorough mess of themselves, wishing this and wishing that to patch what they last wished and never understanding anything: I tell you, good hard work and talent enough to nudge luck a little is a good combination. But everybody wants the one without the other.”
“And mine?” he had asked, full of trepidation.
“Might not be small,” Uulamets had said. “Let me tell you: it’s a law of nature: magicians and magical creatures can be affected by magic more easily than ordinary folk. The very talents which extend them into dimensions impossible for ordinary people likewise mean that wizards can be affected by incantations against which ordinary people would be immune—”
“Can a person—stop these things? Can he—?”
“Turn a spell aside, you mean? Yes. You know how.”
He did. He had thought so.
“Let me tell you,” Uulamets had said then, at the table that morning: Sasha could still see the old man’s cautionary lifting of a finger, feel the danger in the air. “It’s always easiest for the young: remember I told you that. Remember this with it: it’s very easy for a naive talent to get quite deep into the spirit world, rather too little resistance to be safe—”
The other clothes they were washing—
Papa had a student, Eveshka had said, Kan…
“—and the deeper you get, the easier it is to bind and to be bound, do you understand, boy? Be careful. Power is very attractive. Aggression is easier than defense. Using is easier than restraining, doing than undoing. Set things in motion only in one direction at a time, or at least remember the sequence of things you wished and know everything you’re moving, directly or indirectly. That’s very important. Most of all beware of ill-wishing anything.”
To the black god, Uulamets had said, with Kavi Chernevog…
Most particularly…
“Where did the flour come from?” Sasha asked, out of breath, as he handed the two buckets to Pyetr. “Where did the flour come from this morning?”
“Sometimes I have trouble following you,” Pyetr said.
“At breakfast,” He realized he had started in the middle of his thoughts. “This morning.”
Pyetr gave him a very odd look. Or maybe Pyetr was thinking. Pyetr headed down the path to the river and Sasha sat down on the tree root to wait.
He watched Pyetr go down to the riverside and dip the two buckets full. Pyetr came up the trail, hard-breathing, set the two buckets down and said:
“The old man must be trading with somebody. On the river, maybe.”
“It wasn’t there. Or he had it hidden. Why hide a jar of flour?”
Pyetr gave a large sigh. He looked worried. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just left. Maybe she knew where it was.”
“Flour won’t keep forever. The forest’s been dead for ages. Nobody sails the river…”
“So maybe he put a spell on it. Don’t wizards do that kind of thing?”
It was a thought. It was better than the thoughts he was thinking, that whatever they had really had for breakfast might be very odd. There was oil. There was flour enough for six cakes, and more, assuming one would hardly use up one’s entire store on one breakfast. Oil and flour and berries. It was entirely odd.
Sasha trudged back to the bathhouse with the heavy buckets, up in the yard where Eveshka worked amid clouds of steam. “There,” she said; he poured the buckets into the rinse tub and negotiated the boggy ground taking them back to Pyetr at the tree.
“Mostly,” Pyetr said when he got there, “I want to know why the spell worked.”
“Which spell?”
“The one for her.” Pyetr took the buckets. “There were bones in that cave. How do you do anything with bones? How do you bring a body back?”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “That’s what that book is, all the things he’s ever done or heard, written down.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“That’s the kind of things wizards have. He told me. You have to keep track of things. You can’t forget what you’ve done or you don’t dare do anything. He could have worked years on that spell. Pieces of it. Step by step.”
Pyetr looked at him as if he thought he was lying. After a moment he turned and went down the hill.
When he came up again, carrying the buckets full, he said, frowning, “All that book?”
“I don’t know. That’s just what he said.”