“I’ve no damn ch-choice, have I?”
That cut deep. Pyetr’s look did. But he said as coldly and rationally as he could: “I don’t like you taking the blame for things. Give me time to think.”
“That’s fine, Sasha. But d-do something!”
He wanted Pyetr not to have to struggle like that. He had not meant that wish for silence, he simply wanted not to be argued with right now, which meant Pyetr had to fight him to talk at all. “Pyetr, believe me, the mouse doesn’t hate us. She’d have come flying back here if she’d known you were in trouble. She isn’t Draga and she’s not her mother: I don’t believe it, I never believed it, no matter what ’Veshka says—”
“The hell with what ’Veshka says! It isn’t the mouse’s fault what happened. She thinks she’s doing right. I don’t have to be a wizard to know that. She’s not against us.”
“It’s not her fault, and if you want the plain truth, I don’t think it was ’Veshka’s either. She was in Draga’s house before the mouse was born. I honestly believe Draga wanted something that made trouble for us.”
Pyetr stopped with the cup halfway to his mouth. “Draga—” But the thought escaped him and escaped his eavesdropping as well. Something about Eveshka’s mother, about the time Eveshka had spent in her mother’s house under the hill, about Chernevog and Draga’s wishes—
Wishes could make a man think all around a matter. Wishes could defend themselves, the same as the mouse wishing them off her track. They could well be missing something essential.
He said, fighting Pyetr for pieces of that thought, “Eveshka was up there with Draga when neither you nor ’Veshka knew the mouse existed—Draga wanted the baby, no question. That’s how she got her there—she couldn’t wish ’Veshka herself, ’Veshka’s too strong; but she could wish the mouse there: nobody wished anything about the mouse, since none of us knew she existed—”
“Draga didn’t have a damned thing to do with the mouse.” Some illusions one hated to challenge. “In fact Draga or Uulamets either one might have wished Ilyana into existence, Pyetr, forgive me. But we don’t know either of them got what they wanted. Wishes can pull other wishes off the mark, make them turn out differently than planned—certainly a young wizard is a scary handful; and unpredictable; and dangerous—but not, not, in my considered opinion, the creature Draga wanted from the beginning, and not under her grandmother’s posthumous influence.”
“Who said she was? Who ever said she was?”
“ ’Veshka.”
“Hell,” Pyetr said in disgust. “She gets those damn moods.”
“No. Sometimes she admits what’s in her heart. And she’s right to worry.”
“Ilyana’s not a sorcerer! She’s not Chernevog’s kind, Chernevog himself isn’t what he was.”
“Pyetr, ’Veshka died—and in her own thinking, she never won her struggle, no matter that her father brought her back to life. She lost. Nobody wins against sorcery—one either uses it or one ultimately loses to someone who does. That’s what she believes. She didn’t want the mouse badly enough to protect her from Draga—that’s what haunts her: she was surprised to know she had a baby, she was under her mother’s will, beset with her mother’s arguments and she only scarcely wanted the mouse enough for your sake to keep her alive. Something could have gotten to her—yes.”
“That’s not so, Sasha!”
“I agree with you. I don’t think you can make anyone good or bad without his consent. I don’t think it’s being sixteen, or fifteen—I think it’s whatever moment you decide what you need and decide what other people are worth to you. I was five when I made my terrible mistake; but I think we taught the mouse her lesson, and I don’t for a moment believe she has to kill anyone to learn it. More than that, I think there was a time you should have been here and ’Veshka should have taken the trip to Kiev, if you want the truth; and a time last year we should have taken the mouse downriver to Anatoly’s place and let her meet the household, damn the consequences.”
“Why didn’t you say that, for the god’s sake? Why didn’t you insist?”
“I did say it to ’Veshka, I said it to you more than once, if you’ll remember, but no one listened. They were delicate years. It wasn’t a time for quarrels in the house.”
Pyetr ran a hand through his hair. “God.”
“When ’Veshka wished you to Kiev, I knew you’d be back; I knew the mouse would want you back. What’s more, I knew ’Veshka would. She can’t turn anything loose. Not her daughter. Not her husband. Not an idea, once it takes hold of her—and she doesn’t ask where she got all of them. That’s her trouble, friend. She learned to fight from her father. Her young lessons were all that way. And in teaching the mouse what to do with magic—I had to hold Eveshka off.”
Pyetr was quiet a moment, staring into the fire. Sasha bit his lip, hoping he had not gone too far, wanting—
No.
“I won’t tell you what to think, Pyetr, only what I think. There always seemed too many quarrels for me to start another. All I could think was—just get her to the age of reason. Eveshka says she wasn’t working magic—but she was, she was constantly, in every opinion she holds. How do you convince someone not to hold opinions?”
“How do you convince Eveshka not to hold opinions?”
“The god only knows, Pyetr. I’m afraid neither of us was that clever. The things we want do come true: we make them happen, we shape them with what we say and what we do. It’s not the mouse’s fault. Not even his, I think. We made the mouse lonely. She wanted a playmate. She wished one up and he wanted—perhaps to come home. I don’t know.—But you taught her things. How to hold a baby bird. Do you remember?”
Pyetr frowned at him, upset and confused. “Not how to hold lives in her hands.”
“How to hold a fox kit. You said, “If he bites it’s only fear. Be careful.” Do you remember that? That’s a very important lesson.”
“A bite isn’t a betrayal. It isn’t your whole damned far against you. Or your mother wanting someone dead.”
“ I wish her to remember what you taught her, Pyetr. That’s the wish I make for her.”
“God, don’t put it down to me!”
“All those years she should have been with you, all the years we kept you apart—what you did teach her, in spite of that, the mouse sets most store by. You were the forbidden. You were the one out of reach.—What would you wish for her now?”
“To wait for me, dammit, that’s what I’ve been saying—for her to talk to me. That’s what I want.”
Dangerous wish. Dangerous and indefinite and putting Pyetr at risk. But Pyetr was, he had had faith in it for years, wiser and braver about such things than he was. So he said, slowly, with the awareness of everything unhinged, and everything in doubt:
“I wish that, yes. And I wish you well, Pyetr… as well I know how.”
Pyetr looked at him as if he were mad, looked at him in the gray dawn, that time that ghosts began to fade, and said, no faintly he could hardly hear: “Wish yourself well, Sasha.”
Because he had chosen the wish he had—foolish wizard that he was: he had deceived himself for so many years that he wished Pyetr’s welfare completely unselfishly, for Pyetr’s benefit, and not his: Let Pyetr be well, let nothing change—
He thought, not for the first time, All of us brought him from Kiev. Who knows, maybe we wished him into trouble to do that, and he never would have played dice with the tsarevitch or crossed Kurov. As it was, it got him home, and it put him here, where he nearly died last night.