“I—don’t—don’t remember.”
“Where did you come from?”
The boy thought (Sasha eavesdropped shamelessly): How did I get to this place? Aloud, he said, “Kiev.” But there were black pits everywhere in his remembering.
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Pavel…” The father’s features ran like wax, eluding the boy’s recollection, and the thoughts began jumping again. Dark places multiplied.
“He doesn’t remember,” Sasha said, laying his hand on Yvgenie’s chest, the better to gather up stray thoughts or hostile intentions. He wished the boy’s body well, at least: wished it warmth and ease of the aches and bruises it had suffered.
“Is that better?” he asked.
Wizard, the boy thought in sudden fright, fearing what he felt happening to him, and not daring protest it.
“Yes,” Sasha said, “I am what you’re thinking—which is a good thing for you. Pyetr, put some water on the stones. He’s cold through.”
Pyetr dipped up water and flung it onto the hot stones. The water hissed, fire-shadows jumped, and wind whirled curtains of steam and shadow about the walls. The lad at least could not suffer chill in here—fainting now from the heat, perhaps. Sasha wiped the hair out of the boy’s face and slapped his cheek gently to bring him back, but the boy’s eyes kept going shut, and his breath was rattling.
Not good, not at all good.
“Come on, boy,” he said, and put his hands on either side of the boy’s face, wishing warmth and well-being and easy breath, thinking only about that, and not his doubts of the boy’s nature. “Listen to me, Yvgenie Pavlovitch, you’re not to die, do you hear me?”
“No,” Yvgenie Pavlovitch whispered, with his eyes shut, looking, Pyetr thought, very young, and very handsome, and very rich in his gold collar and his red silk shirt—which meant at least the opportunity to grow up a scoundrel, Pyetr knew it from his own youthful associations.
But a very ill and almost dead young scoundrel, for all that, and for the first time Pyetr found himself seriously wondering whether he might have been too rough with what might after all be an innocent boy. He listened to Sasha’s mumbling over the lad, heard the breath rattling in the boy’s chest in a most disturbing congestion, and truly, he did want the boy lo live—
And be on his way to Kiev or wherever, without having the least to do with his daughter.
But Ilyana had already seen him, and the mouse was inevitably curious and most damnably, reprehensibly stubborn—which first trait was his and the latter one she had gotten fairly from both sides. Present the mouse a mystery, tell her no, and absolutely there was no stopping her.
And might this boy be, he wondered distractedly, the answer they had wished for, to win Ilyana’s heart away from a most dangerous ghost?
Or might he be (as he most acutely feared) Chernevog’s chosen way back from the grave?
Why should Sasha’s house burn, except to keep Sasha busy while wishes came unhinged and this boy found his way to Ilyana’s heart? Lightning had burned Chernevog’s house to its foundations, and one could never say Kavi Chernevog lacked a sense of humor, even in his darker moments.
Their own looming shadows did occasional battle with clouds of steam, jumped as Sasha worked, with a good deal of muttering and an occasional puff of pungent smoke from the fire, firelight glistening gold on his frowning face. Sasha did not look happy, no; and the thought gnawed him the while Sasha did whatever he was doing, that somewhere in the outcome of this night, he might well be losing Ilyana from his life—not, he prayed the god, in the direction of Kavi Chernevog; but at least in her growing up and away from him, now that this boy had come into the question—this Yvgenie Pavlovitch, who, by that silk and gold he wore, might make his daughter very unhappy.
He prayed if there was a rich father and a palace somewhere involved, that neither should ever involve his daughter, who could have no patience for the scoundrels who went thick as flies about such places—and a young man who lived in such places could not help but entertain scoundrels among his associates, even granted his own impeccable good character.
—No, surely this can’t be our answer. This can’t be the boy our mouse will marry. He’s something altogether other— thoroughly dead, by the look of him. Damned if it isn’t Chernevog! Damn, damn, and damn the scoundrel!
He paced. He watched. He asked Sasha quietly, coming to lean over his shoulder, against one of the posts that held the roof: “If he is a boy, do you think you possibly wished him up? Or did the mouse?”
“I truly don’t know,” Sasha said, moping sweat from his face. “I can say he’s stronger now than he was, but whether that’s good or bad for Yvgenie Pavlovitch I honestly don’t know.”
He did not like the sound of that at all. He muttered, “Where’s Chernevog’s heart right now, that’s what I’d like to know.”
And Sasha said: “I can’t answer that. I do think we should take a very quick bath, get the mouse inside, and wish her a sound sleep tonight.”
Yvgenie lay listening, watching sometimes from slitted eyes while water splashed and the wizard and the fair-haired man washed and talked in low voices that rang strangely through his ears. The heat made him dizzy. They spoke names that stirred no memory in him. He thought, What’s my father’s name? Pavel, of course. But what’s the rest of it? What am I doing here and what do they want from me?
He stole glances at Pyetr, whose features recalled so strongly the girl who had rescued him—who had rescued him and held him when the river had tried to drag him away—she had protested, he remembered her voice, clear above the rain and the rush of water, Papa, please, not head down like that, he’ll have a headache—
He had thought so too—but he had been too far gone to protest being slung over a horse’s back like a bale of rags. And he was sure on those grounds he ought not to like or trust this Pyetr, but his heart wanted to—he desperately wanted Pyetr to trust him, and not to frown at him and wish him dead, and most of all, please the god, to stand between him and Sasha the wizard—who might have helped him so far; but whose ultimate intentions he dreaded more than he dreaded Pyetr’s scowls.
What will he want of me? he wondered, recalling (so he did remember some things) an old woman saying that wizards drank from dead men’s skulls and stirred their potions with children’s finger-bones; wizards bargained very sharply, wizards could bind people helplessly to do their bidding, most probably lost young men who came into their debt, souls who became birds at night and flitted about the woods looking for their suppers.
Their shadows and their footsteps came toward him, making a cool space in the heat from the fire. He kept his eyes shut, while his heart pounded, trying not to let them know he felt the hand that rested first on his brow, and lightly then against his cheek and his shoulder.
“Rest easy,” the wizard said, and it would have been very easy to slip right down then—they tried to take even his fear away, and that was the last defense he had. He fought that urge, held on to his doubts, and after a moment their shadows went away and left him in the light and the breathless heat. The door opened and closed with a single gust of chill from that direction, after which he dared open his eyes and look up at the shadows shifting among the rafters. He was at the first breath relieved that they had gone, and then not glad at alclass="underline" he began to have the most terrible conviction that not everyone who had been with them had left the bathhouse, that there was someone standing just out of sight in the shadows behind the fire.
Perhaps Pyetr had stayed—perhaps they had only been trying to trick him into opening his eyes. But it did not feel at all like Pyetr’s shadow—it had no feeling of a man at all. Perhaps he should call out to the wizard and his friend before they got too far to hear and beg their help—but like a child in the dark, he dreaded to cry out, first for fear they might not believe him, and might desert him here with an angrier, more wakeful spirit—and then for fear he had already hesitated too long. They were surely out of hearing now.