Then, with the least nagging worry about Sasha’s continued glumness: “—Are you all right?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sasha said.
That was entirely enough to throw a pall on things. He had a sudden apprehension of trouble Sasha was holding back from him; and he felt Eveshka’s growing anxiety at his back.
He asked her, if thinking was asking, and with Eveshka it seemed to be—How far? When? and What can we do, if Uulamets can’t rescue himself?
But he got no answer from her.
He said to Sasha, “I’m for a little to eat, do you want any?”
Sasha agreed and took a bit of dried fish—ate it with a spiritless grimness that left Pyetr increasingly cold at heart.
Babi tugged at Pyetr’s breeches leg. Pyetr passed him a bite, hardly noticing the creature, and put the back of his hand to his mouth, realizing only then that it had started to hurt again—
He ought, he thought, to tell Sasha that fact.
If Sasha were listening. Which Sasha hardly seemed to be. Probably, he thought, Sasha was trying to do something wiz-ardly, and probably it had to do—now that his thinking was straighter—with his sudden well-being this day; and probably with his hand hurting him: he felt bruises he did not remember getting, and it seemed to him that he had been altogether foolishly cheerful all afternoon, almost as if he were drunk.
Whatever Sasha was doing seemed to tire him; and that was decidedly a reason to worry.
He reached out and touched Sasha on the knee. “You’re not propping me up, are you?”
Sasha just stared at him. Sasha said, after seeming to think about it, “I’ve found a way to get it from somewhere else.”
“From where?” Pyetr asked, afraid for that answer.
Sasha lifted a hand toward the sky, toward the trees, all about them.
Eveshka sent him warning: he felt the direction of it as clearly as he would have known the direction of her voice. He said, leaning forward and touching Sasha’s knee a second time, “She’s upset with that.”
“I know she is. But she won’t let you go and I’ll kill her if she kills you, so that’s the way it is. I can do that. The way I am right now I could do it. But that doesn’t get either of us what we want, does it?”
Pyetr felt more and more uneasy. It was not the boy he knew, talking about killing and being killed so calmly as that: it was colder than threat. He drew his hand away, afraid to look too directly into Sasha’s eyes, afraid to ask more questions—
As if Sasha was more danger to him at the moment than Eveshka was.
Then he remembered Uulamets saying:
If the day comes, boy, that you have your way, believe this for a truth—he’ll be far more at risk from you than he is now from me…
CHAPTER 20
THE MIST BEGAN to fall again by afternoon, slow, sifting rain, only enough to moisten the leaves and drip down one’s neck when a tree let fall a drop. Eveshka was a sparkle of such droplets, which fell and hesitated and fell again in continuous motion.
The touch of her hand left a chill moisture on Pyetr’s fingers as she came close to tug at him and make him hurry—as if, he desperately hoped, they might be close now, although he had never ceased to feel anxiety from her. He had never thought in all his life he would want to see Uulamets, but now he did, Uulamets being in his own reckoning the only help for this disaster—Eveshka and Sasha locked in silent battle and himself in the middle of it. His wits were clear enough now to know what a muddled mess they had been most of the day and to know—at least when he worked at knowing it—that they were only clear because Sasha was helping him.
Which they might not be if he shook Sasha back to good sense and rescued Sasha from the wizardry effort that was turning him short-tempered and strange to him. He had Eveshka’s presence constantly flitting through his attention, recollecting to him the feeling he could have, he could still have, if only he would let go and give way to her.
He wanted to. That was the problem. Wanting her came and went like fever and chilclass="underline" sometimes he was able to know quite clearly the trouble he was in (Sasha/s influence, he was sure)
and at others (his own weak will, perhaps: he knew his faults) he wanted what he knew damned well would kill him (but a few moments of that feeling made death seem so absolutely impossible…)
He wished he had managed better than this; he certainly wished he had advised Sasha better than this—but, then, against a good handful of wizards with their minds made up he did not know what choice was even his any longer, or whether his own will weighed anything in the wizardly gale he knew was blowing.
He thought, desperately, that Sasha being the wizard he was might have an edge in figuring out things like that; and if Sasha had, then he hoped Sasha had a good reason for spending so much effort on him. In the god’s name why! he asked himself again and again: in the god’s name what good was he, an un-magical man with a sword, with no sense what he was doing, haunted by rain-sparkle and an apprehension in his heart?
He was more afraid the boy had no purpose in spending so much on him: he was afraid for Sasha’s own generous nature, a boy attempting things he had no understanding of, all to save a fool from his own weaknesses.
“Tell me what to do,” he begged of Sasha when they were passing through dense trees—no hindrance to Eveshka, but he and Sasha had to hand branches off one to the other and eel around the unbending brush, the limbs overhead all the while shaking water drops down on them. He felt Eveshka suddenly pulling at him with unreasoning anxiety, and it seemed to him that things had gone on entirely too long with no sight of an old man who could not have walked faster than they had.
“Move,” Sasha said, and pushed him to make him hurry.
Which was not the advice he hoped for.
God, he thought, what’s the matter with her?—Because she was moving faster and faster, feeding into him a sweating panic that had no object, only that sense of something behind them again.
Maybe it was Sasha himself, or Sasha’s wizardly essence that alarmed her. Maybe to Eveshka’s frightened mind he seemed that cold and dangerous. Or maybe this panic was only a weapon she had begun to use, wearing at him and through him at Sasha…
Move, Sasha said, as if Sasha himself was slipping beneath Eveshka’s spell. If that was true, Pyetr thought, then they were both done, doomed to be bones in some thicket or other.
At some times, within blinks of his eyes, he could not even believe Eveshka existed; at others, even looking elsewhere, even distracted with some precarious slope, he felt her presence as surely as Sasha’s; heard her whispering in his heart that she was not lying, that the danger was there and real as she was.
Run, she whispered in his heart, run, don’t look back, Pyetr—
The rain-sparkle of her shape faded as she passed into thicker shade. The shadow seemed everywhere deeper and they were losing her ahead of them.
“Dammit,” Pyetr said, fighting past a branch, with the black fur-ball darting in and out around his ankles, whining. He tried to hand the branch on to Sasha, but Sasha suddenly stopped and turned to look into the woods behind them.
Don’t look back, Eveshka urged him, don’t look, Pyetr, no, keep running—
He did look—saw something moving on their track, impossibly quick, stirring the brush as it came; and there was no time for argument: he grabbed Sasha by the collar and snatched him through the brush, branches raking them as Sasha flailed out and tried to get his feet under him. Pyetr did not risk letting him go, only tried to haul him upright and keep them both moving. The disturbance was following them through the brush, he heard it snapping behind them, then heard it pass virtually over their heads, sending a hail of broken twigs down on them—