Not Sasha’s.
Poor crazed lad, he thought. The boy’s not altogether sane. At least they’ve not encouraged him to be.
“You don’t go at things the right way, boy. You’ve been wishing for things likely to happen. What you do, you wish for the tsar himself to ride along and recognize us both for the honest, upstanding sort we are, and make us rich and happy. Wish for us both to marry tsarevnas and die at a hundred and twenty, rich as lords and surrounded by great-grandchildren—”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“You’re too honest, Sasha Vasilyevitch. You should learn to laugh. That’s your trouble. You’re too serious.” He clapped Sasha on the shoulder as they walked—which was a very good thing, because he turned his ankle on a rock and depended on that hold quite suddenly.
“Pyetr!”
He got his feet under him again, with Sasha’s help. “Joke,” he said.
But it had hurt. He walked a few more steps, Sasha never letting him go.
“I think I’d better sit down for a while,” he said, short of breath. “I’ve come a long way for a man in my condition. Have pity.”
Sasha snatched up standing weeds, gathering dry ones that way, the same way a good stableboy never took hay or straw from the damp ground. He gathered another armload and piled it over Pyetr’s arms, Pyetr lying on a mat of more such weeds, against a thorn-bush with tightly-laced branches, the best shelter Sasha could find in this season before leaves were out.
No blankets, Pyetr in a shirt, himself in only the lightest of coats—Sasha kept reproaching himself for the horse blankets and the extra clothes they might have brought, if he had had his wits about him and not thought only of running—
Or there was the food he might have had in his pockets, if Pyetr had only said, plainly, Let’s run away, once and for all…
Pyetr was chilling now that they had stopped walking. The night cold came on the edge of a wind, and the wild grass was the only blanket he could think of.
“Good boy,” Pyetr said between chattering teeth. “Good lad.—More sense than ’Mitri and that lot ever will have…”
Sasha pulled weeds until he was sweating, until his hands felt raw, and built up a bank beside Pyetr, higher and higher, until he could lie down and rake the weeds over them both.
He was warm, at least. He burrowed under the weeds, opened his coat and put himself up against Pyetr chilled body.
“Wish us a warm day tomorrow,” Pyetr muttered. “Wish us a horse or two while you’re about it. And the tsar’s own carriage.”
“I’m wishing you to live,” Sasha said, and did, as hard as he had ever wished for anything. He was trying not to shiver, up against Pyetr’s chill side as he was, but it was not the cold, it was fear.
“Good,” Pyetr said. The shivers were down to little ones now. “I’m glad you’re minding the details.”
A moment later, Pyetr said, with a small shudder, “But do spare a wish for a horse, two of them—fast ones, if you find the time. I’ve always fancied black, myself.”
CHAPTER 5
“NO HORSE,”Pyetr complained, in the morning—a frosty morning, Sasha found, in which it might be a great deal warmer to stay where they were, but fear of the thieftakers and the sting of Pyetr’s ridicule made it unlikely he would rest.
“No horse, no coat, no carriage,” Pyetr said. “I expected the tsar for breakfast. For supper tonight, do you think?”
Sasha got up, picked weeds out of his hair and felt bits of them go down his collar.
“No sense of humor,” Pyetr said.
One could be very angry at Pyetr, except he tried to move and sit up, and it hurt him, so that he caught after the branches of the bush and stabbed his hand on the thorns. Sasha winced, himself, while Pyetr just drew back the bleeding hand, shook it and sucked the blood with a weary, aggrieved frown—and held it up then, still bleeding, with: “Do you do small cures, perchance?”
“No,” Sasha said sorrowfully, and came to help him up. “I truly wish I did.”
It took a bit to get moving, cold as it was, but it was the only help for a stitch like that, just to work it out by walking, the boy trying to help him the while.
“It’s better,” Pyetr said, finally, when moving and the warmth of the sun on his back had helped what it could. And, his wits being a little clearer, he thought that the boy was very quiet and very unhappy this morning. “Cheer up,” he said. “We’re away, we’re not on the main road, we’ll come across it again, eventually, beyond any distance they’d search for us…”
“But what town are we going to? Where does this road go? Don’t they say—don’t they say east is the way to the Old River, don’t they say—people don’t go that way any more? Only outlaws—”
“What do you suppose we are?”
“But—” Sasha said with a distressed look, and seemed to be thinking about it.
“But?” Pyetr said, and when Sasha said nothing to that: “We’ll follow the river south,” Pyetr said. “There has to be a road. Or the river itself. We can build a boat of sorts. It goes all the way to the sea. It’ll carry us to Kiev. People are rich in Kiev.”
Sasha trudged beside him, arms wrapped around his ribs, hardly looking confident.
“So serious,” Pyetr said.
Sasha said nothing. Pyetr clapped him on the shoulder.
“It’ll be all right, boy.”
Still there was nothing. Pyetr shook at him. “No wishes?”
“No,” Sasha said in a dull voice.
“No horse?”
“No.”
“You let me devil you too much.”
No answer.
“Boy—” Pyetr flexed his grip on Sasha’s shoulder, and held his temper. “You go where you want. If you want to go back, go back. If you want to go ahead, go ahead. Make up your own mind. If you don’t want to hear about horses, say, Shut your mouth, Pyetr Illitch. Try it. It’s good for your stomach.”
Sasha twisted away from him. Pyetr held on.
“Say it, boy!”
“I don’t want to hear about horses!”
Pyetr let him go. “Then I beg your pardon.” With a bow as they walked, the doffing of an imaginary cap—a mistake: it did hurt.
They walked a while more in silence.
“Your uncle is a bully,” Pyetr said. “I am a profligate, a gambler, a liar and occasionally a person of bad character, but I do swear to you, I have never been a bully, and you insist to make me one. Look me in the face, boy!”
Sasha looked up, stopped, startled as a rabbit.
“Good,” Pyetr said. “Say it again, about the horses.”
“I don’t want to talk about the horses, Pyetr Illitch!”
“Then accept my deep apology, young sir.”
Sasha looked as if he feared he had gone mad, and kept looking at him.
“You’ve got it right,” Pyetr said, and slowly, slowly, the boy’s face lost its frown. “Go on. You’ve almost got it. Don’t be so glum.”
“Why shouldn’t I be? We’ve no blankets, no food, the law wants to kill us—and probably the outlaws will.”
“Then what worse can happen to us? Only better. If you could only wish us up a supper—”
“Shut up about the supper, Pyetr Illitch!”
He laughed. The boy glowered, and he laughed until he hurt, holding his side.
“Stop it!” Sasha cried.
So he shrugged and started walking again, shaking his head.
Sasha overtook him. “I’m sorry,” Sasha said.