Pyetr said, desperately, “Let’s not for the god’s sake quarrel. You pack. I’ll get after her. There’s more than one horse, Sasha. His showed up. ’Veshka, do you have any clear idea where she’s going?”
“North. And you’re not going after her alone. She has no idea what she’s going to do. I have no idea. She’s never fought us like this.”
“Then she’s damned scared, is all! Hell, ’Veshka, maybe we should all just let her alone, let her think! If we all take off after her—”
“With him, let her alone?”
“Hush,” Sasha said. “No. I agree with both of you. We shouldn’t press her, but we shouldn’t let her go off on her own either. There’s too much come loose the last few days— more wishes than hers are involved here, and she doesn’t know what she’s going to do: she doesn’t even realize what she can do—that’s the worst danger. She could have killed you, Pyetr, with a less specific wish.”
“Then she’s smarter than that. She knows what she’s doing, she’s doing exactly what you predicted she’d do—what anybody would do, who’s cornered… For the god’s sake, it’s Ilyana we’re talking about—”
“—in Kavi’s company,” Eveshka cried. “Is that what you want?”
He looked at her in distress and she was sorry she had shouted at him, she was sorry for wanting him to listen to her opinions. She put her arms about him, wanted him well, wanted him to understand her fears, at least. “Love’s no defense,” she whispered. “God, protect yourself.”
He said, his chin against her hair, “Love’s not a defense; that’s the entire point, isn’t it?”
He terrified her. He went at fear the way he went at fences, headlong. And if what he loved had no concern for him—
“Ilyana’s being selfish,” she said, as reasonably as she could. “She’s scared, yes. We’re so easily frightened. Everything’s so unstable to us. When your feet are sliding—it’s very hard to love anyone but yourself.”
“She’s your daughter,” he said. “And you do.”
“Don’t trust me, dammit!” She pushed away from him, and realized Sasha’s embarrassed presence. “God, you reason with him!”
She ran for the door, ran down from the porch and across the yard.
“ ’Veshka!” she heard Pyetr shouting after her, afraid for her, angry at her, she did not want to know. She wished she had kissed him goodbye. She wanted to run back now and do that, which would only make leaving him harder, and lead to arguments. She wished instead to welcome him home, sometime yet to come, which was as close as she dared come to wishing for their lives and this house—
But even that wish might have a darker side. Anything might. Everything might. Don’t trust me, was the safest wish for them: don’t love me, she had tried for years.
“ ’Veshka!” Pyetr shouted furiously, and maybe it was a wish that anchored him to the porch, maybe it was his own knowledge that his effort was foredoomed—but he had a sure notion which when he felt Sasha’s hand fall on his shoulder. Sasha said, “Let’s get packed. She’s had a good start.”
He shook the hand off, and was sorry he had done that. Sasha knew more than he did about what had happened, probably knew more than he did about Eveshka’s intentions at the moment and Sasha had made no attempt to stop her. “What’s she up to? What’s she going to do when she finds them? Reason with them? Not damned likely!”
Sasha said, “Come on. Let’s get what we need in the house.”
“She’s the one we ought to chase down! Why aren’t we stopping her? Is it your idea? Or mine? Or hers?” He slammed his hand onto the rail. “God, I’m going crazy!”
Sasha said, “I think it’s because neither of us can keep her here. And she could be right. We don’t know who wanted Ilyana to be born. It wasn’t ’Veshka’s idea.”
Heat stung his face. Anger welled up. “Babies do happen without magic, Sasha, and once they’re started, they do get born!”
“Not to wizards.”
No damned time or place to argue that point. He muttered,
“To wizards the same as anyone else, unless they wish not,” and started into the house to get his coat, his sword, provisions—
“The point is,” Sasha pursued him at the door, “she’s surrounded herself with protections for her life and her way. It shouldn’t have just happened—”
“Protections against what?” He turned around, stopping Sasha short in the doorway. “Against the fact we love each other? Is that safe, Sasha? Is that even sane? She loves the mouse!”
Sasha said faintly, “She knew the hazards, too.”
“The mouse isn’t a damned hazard! She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us!”
“There were others who could have wanted it. That’s the point, Pyetr. That’s what she’s scared of.”
“All right, all right, let’s say it, shall we? Her mother. Draga. Draga’s influence is what she’s afraid of. But Draga’s dead!”
He saw it coming, knew he had been the fool before Sasha even said the obvious: “So is Chernevog.”
Babi had come with them, trotting along with a slight disturbance of dead leaves, upset and growling all the way.
Which might tell you something, mouse, her uncle would say to her. She had wanted Babi to stay with her father to be sure he was safe until her mother got home (and afterward) but Babi had turned up by Patches’ feet as she led Patches out the gate—and now at the edge of dusk Owl joined them, too, flying ahead of them through the dark, a gliding wisp of white with black barring.
“What’s that?” Yvgenie asked anxiously.
“Only Owl.”
“He’s not a real owl,” Yvgenie objected, meaning, she supposed, that he was not a live owl. She said, distractedly, wishing silence close about them: “He’s real. Ghosts are real.” Yvgenie made her think of her father, so deaf to wishes, and so patient and good-hearted despite his weariness. She wanted to help him, but worrying about him or her father was dangerously distracting to her right now, and she longed for Kavi to speak to her again, but that was not fair. It was even dangerous to Yvgenie—
She thought it and Yvgenie’s head began to nod—perhaps that her wish had done it, perhaps that Yvgenie had grown too weak or too weary to care any longer about overhanging branches. “Stay on,” she wished him, riding Patches close where there was room among the trees. She pushed at his shoulder. “Please don’t fall off.” She had had enough of bumps on undeserving heads for one day, please the god, when she dared not even wish her father well now, dared not reach back into the house where her mother’s wishes hung so thick and so stiflingly strong.
Wishes in that house had been directing their lives from generations before she was even born or her father or Sasha had ever come to live there. Magic in that house was all about her, attached to the china, the doors, stitched into the clothes she wore—magic there must always be more convolute than she knew, different than she could possibly understand. She could feel it tonight reaching even into the woods—and most of it was her mother’s, she knew that now. All her life her mother had told her not to use magic, but her mother had been doing it all along, so subtly no one could catch her. Her mother had expected evil of her; her mother was afraid of anybody who wanted something in the least different than she did, that was the trouble with her mother: her mother wanted every living thing in the world to do what she wanted forever, to live all their lives as she wanted—that was how her mother’s presence felt in the house, now that she had felt its absence.