Ilyana led her horse up to the house, and left it to stand while she ran up to the porch and inside—to get her belongings, he supposed, while his heart pounded against his ribs and he waited for disaster. He wished they might have reasoned with her father—not a wicked man, he thought, only someone with just reason now to kill him.
Something fell into place then with the ghost next his heart, an eerie familiarity with Pyetr, and that situation. I’ve been here before, he thought. I’ve fled this house before. God, why? It seems all the same reason. It seems all the same time—but I do it again and again, until somehow I get away— but where to, but worse than this? That seems where we’re bound, and it’s happened before, it happens over and over again, forever—oh, god, where’s an escape for us?
6
The weathered wood of the landing showed pale gray in the evening light as the boat met the buffers, with no Pyetr and no Sasha to help bring it to shore. Eveshka leapt from the deck to the boards and managed to get a line snubbed about the mooring post, while the boat, with a reckless amount of way on it, scraped along the dock. It hit the limit of the rope: the rope held and the post did, and that was all she waited to see. She whirled and flew up the hill, skirts clinging and binding about her boots, catching at the hedge as she forced her way through. She ran across the yard and up to the porch.
“Pyetr!”
The door was unlatched. The house was dark, except the gray light from open shutters. Embers still smoldered in the hearth. The House-thing in the cellar groaned mournfully and the floor creaked with the peculiarly desolate sound of empty houses.
“Pyetr?”
She looked around her, with the most terrible conviction of wizardry still enveloping the house and the yard. She flung wide the door to her daughter’s bedroom, saw bedclothes in disarray, tumbled on the floor—and Pyetr lying beside the bed, not in the way of someone sleeping, but with a pillow under his head and a blanket over him all the same. She knelt and brushed back his hair, saw a trail of blood running back above his ear, from a lump on his forehead.
She refused to be angry. She refused to think of anything in the world but of Pyetr’s well-being. She took his cold hand in hers, saying, “Pyetr, wake up, Pyetr.”
His eyes opened. He blinked at her, confused at the dim light, at her presence, at the memory of their daughter: she eavesdropped without a qualm, demanding precisely what he last remembered, what he had felt—
Such hurt and such self-accusation—
She did not think about Ilyana. She did not want to be angry. She wondered only where Sasha was, wanting him to be all right; and thought how she loved Pyetr more than she could love her own life: that was what had saved him all those years past. Perhaps it still saved him—even while she wished his head not to ache and the lump to go away.
“She’s gone with him, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know where she is.” She framed every word carefully, holding Pyetr’s face at the center of her thoughts, reminding her who was hurt, not who had done the hurting. “North of here, with him, yes, I’m sure she is.”
Pyetr lifted his head off the pillow, reached for the bedstead to get up, and she gave him room. Somewhere nearby— the bathhouse, she thought—Sasha had waked, and she wished him up, on his feet and out the door, never mind his aches and his bruises, which he damned well deserved for his carelessness.
You knew better, she wanted Sasha to know, while Pyetr was staggering from the bedstead to the wall to the door, with every intention of riding after Ilyana, immediately, this instant.
She followed Pyetr into the kitchen, watched him gather supplies in an achingly random, confused way, while the blood traced a thin trail down his cheek. He was not upset with Ilyana, that was the hurtful thing. He believed it was his fault: Ilyana was only an innocent misled by a scoundrel—maybe not even a thorough-going scoundrel, at that, only a most desperate and unhappy ghost. Pyetr’s capacity for forgiveness outraged her sense of justice and was such gentle sanity when she borrowed from him—
But that borrowing was like the other borrowing, the killing one; and it reminded her that she could have the strength to stop her daughter. She could have it at any moment she wanted to take it…
While in the same reckless way Pyetr forgave Ilyana and Kavi, Pyetr forgave her, too, for things that, dammit, were not even true; and never had been. But how could one possibly refuse forgiveness for sins one had not done, when there were so many worse she contemplated?
He said, glancing around at her in shock, “God, where’s Sasha?”
“On his way.” A tear spilled down her cheek, all unexpected. His innocent dread made a complete wreck of her calm constructions. She wished not. She wished the whole business not, but that was mortally dangerous, oh, god, it was—
He flung his arms about her, hugged the breath out of her and said, “ ’Veshka, ’Veshka, they’re just young fools. I scared her. It’s all my fault. She thinks she’s protecting the boy, that’s all. Don’t panic. We’ll get her back.”
“She’s protecting him? Don’t! Don’t argue with me! You don’t know what they’re thinking, and I don’t want to wonder. Please—pleasel”
He caught her face between his hands, wanting her to look at him. “Wife, I was a handful. I know what she’s thinking. We locked her in and we locked her out, and she couldn’t breathe, that’s all. I would have run, in her place—and dumped my father on his head, too, if he was trying to stop me—but she didn’t mean to hurt anybody, ’Veshka. You know she could have done much worse—”
“Pyetr, dammit, she’s not all your daughter! Wishes are her mother and her father, and we even don’t know whose! I never knew why I had her!”
“She wanted to be born, that’s all, the same way she wanted the filly. Two fools like us hadn’t a chance.”
She caught his hands. “Don’t joke, Pyetr! God, don’t joke, you don’t understand what you’re saying, you never have understood me! She shouldn’t have been born… She shouldn’t exist, Pyetr, I don’t know how I ended up carrying her, to this day I don’t know!”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Pyetr, you don’t feel it, you don’t feel the silence out there. She’s pulled a curtain around her, she’s invisible, she’s the whole damned woods. Pyetr! God, I love her, but love’s not enough!—I should never have left you with her!”
He took her wrong. She hurt him. He turned away to his packing, saying, “I’ll get her back.” And, god—she all but wanted to want him to understand her, but he already blamed himself for losing her, and she was too confused to know what was right to want of him—
Meanwhile Sasha was on his way up to the porch, a very sore and repentant Sasha, who opened the door and said, cheerfully, “Well, she certainly did it, didn’t she?”
She restrained what she thought. She bit her lips on what she thought of Sasha’s damnable levity and Sasha’s choices thus far, until she tasted blood.
And thought of thorns.
Sasha said, “They’ve taken the filly, that’s all. We can overtake them.”
She said, “I’ll take the boat. And I’m not a fool, Sasha. Let’s have no arguments. You know my opinions. I’ll allow you yours. But for the god’s sake don’t tell me nothing’s wrong!”