“She had to let me try, didn’t she?”
“And hasn’t she? And can’t she make mistakes? You’re in grown-up things now, mouse. In whatever way you reckon him, Chernevog is an encounter far more dangerous than falling off the porch—and you weren’t where you were supposed to be. You scared your mother out of her good sense— and she slipped. Do you understand that?”
It made a kind of sense. She was not sure she agreed about being wrong. She was not sure her uncle had even said she was wrong.
But if she tried to explain that to her mother, her mother would start wishing at her and she would forget all her own good sense and wish at her right back.
She was not sure whose fault that would be, but it was certainly what would happen; and she decidedly did not want that.
So it was better to fix her mother’s bean rows, since she could not fix things with her mother. She might go down to the river this evening to see if her friend was back, maybe with her uncle knowing about it and giving her permission—
But her friend might not come then. He might believe she had turned against him if she did not come back or if she told her uncle. And in spite of everything her uncle said, her friend—Kavi—would be reasonable, if only she could find him and talk to him quietly without people getting upset and without her uncle or her mother wishing at him.
If her friend was Kavi Chernevog (and he had not, con fronted, denied it) then he was not fifteen years old. And if he was who they thought—and if he had done all these name less dreadful things and killed her mother—still, her mother was alive; and Kavi had not been a thoroughly bad person she did not get that impression, not even from her father who had been as upset with him as she had ever seen her father upset with anyone—her father had called himself the only friend Kavi had ever had… and would her father be a friend to anyone wicked? No. Absolutely not.
So Kavi was not absolutely wicked. Nor quite a murderer, nor quite hateful to her mother—something had happened, maybe before she was born: and her mother was concerned for him, her uncle had said that, too, what time she was not being scared of him for what he was.
Her mother had been dead. God! Did uncle truly mean that?
But Kavi was. She had known that for years—and it had J never seemed entirely unreasonable that he was a ghost.
So there were grown-up secrets around him, tangled as grown-up secrets could be—but they looked not half so formidable or so forbidden as they had yesterday. Her uncle had talked with her as if she were grown-up. And if everybody could just be reasonable, her friend, whoever he was, might even hold some of the answers to what had happened to her mother, that her uncle and her father had no clue to. He might even help her mother, maybe talk to her, and show her he meant no harm, so her mother could stop being afraid and stop being so crazy about things. God, if she could just see him again—if she could just—
If she could just—
Her hoe beheaded a bean plant. Her mother would have a fit.
Uncle had always said that wishes could lie around doing nothing for years and then rise up and get you. Little things going wrong could be a sign of them. Wishes could last and last, even when you were dead, like that patch on the one old teacup, that uncle said her grandfather must have done; and if Kavi had been at their house before, if Kavi had known all of them when he was alive—then there very well could be a lot of old wishes hanging around and causing trouble for him and all of them.
Uncle said old wishes could make smart people forget things, or do little things that were not smart or stupid in themselves, but that just added up and pushed bigger things in a general direction—
You could never wish anything against nature, that was the first rule. You could wish a stone to fly, but it would not, as her uncle would say, do that of its own nature; an improbable wish just added to the general list of unlikely wishes always hanging about in the world waiting to happen when the conditions were right. And there must be a lot of them in the world, because other wizards had to be children once, and make stupid wishes—
So, one day maybe years later, along would come a whirlwind; or somebody to pick up that stone and throw it. Or a passing horse might kick it. And it would fly. But a storm or a person or a horse would have had to go out of the ordinary way to do that, which might cause something else and something else forever, to the end of the kingdoms of all the tsars in the world;
A lot of wizards had grown up around this house, it turned out, and terrible things had happened here, that could make even a grown wizard wish without thinking. Wishes attached to objects, wishes on the gates, the yard, her own room—
All the things uncle had told her began to come together of a sudden and assume shapes that made her—on the one hand—feel better, because maybe there was an explanation for her mother acting the way she had: maybe her mother was not after all so awful as she seemed. Being killed could certainly make one anxious about the place where it happened. And maybe she could do something right for once, maybe one single wise wish would satisfy all the old wishes that might exist hereabouts: that was how to untangle a magical mess, as her uncle called it, just like looking through yarn for the master knot that snarled the little knots.
But—on the other hand—it was not all that simple: her parents certainly had never found that knot; and going down to the river tonight to ask the one other person who might have something important to say was not safe: she trusted her friend, but rusalki killed people, if she was mistaken; or even if she just said the wrong word to her uncle right now and he gave her the wrong answer and she believed it and made a wrong wish—something terrible could happen.
She was afraid to move when she thought that. She might be the only one in the house in a position to see the answer, the one person everyone ought to trust, and the very people she most wanted to protect could tell her no and wish her not to do things and lie to her, that was the scariest thought.
Her mother had been running things and wishing things in the house for a hundred years, her mother and Kavi both had, as seemed—not even mentioning her grandfather who had lived here before her uncle and her father had come. And her grandmother, who she supposed must have. And that was a lot of wishes—a dangerous lot of wishes that her uncle as well as her mother might not know about.
Not to mention her mother was the one her uncle said was fighting that magical thing, whatever it was, that was so easy to use again.
If her mother had been dead a hundred years she could hardly have kept her book current. So her mother had broken one of the first rules she had ever learned: to write down exactly what she had done, in all its shapes. Kavi, who could not move the foam on the river, certainly had no means to write down his wishes—what was more, he had come back as a little boy: little boys hardly had good sense, rusalki could hardly help themselves; and if a rusalka could still do magic—god, what might a young one have wished?
“Uncle?”
Her uncle was squatting with the hoe against his shoulder, patting the earth along the radishes by hand. He looked up at her.
“If Chernevog’s dead—what happened to his book?”
Her uncle went a shade of white against the flecks of mud on his face, but she felt nothing but her own careful thought. He was good: he truly was very good. “What put that question into your head, mouse?”
“I just realized… ghosts don’t write things down. And wizard-ghosts could get in a lot of trouble that way, unless they remember things better than live people do. Couldn’t they?”
“They don’t. They’re worse. God, mouse. Did you think of that all by yourself?”