Babi turned up in his lap, Babi grabbed for his neck and hung on, fiercely, with his small hands.
—Babi knows something Babi doesn’t like. I wonder where Babi was before he showed up last night. Things aren’t going well, Pyetr’s right.
“Have you done that?” Pyetr persisted. “Do you wish yourself well, Sasha? Or have you done something completely foolish?”
Pyetr could tell he was woolgathering. Pyetr knew his habits, and his expressions.
“I wish myself to keep you alive,” Sasha said slowly. It was all he dared wish this morning. In their fear for the mouse’s abilities, they had wished nothing about a wizard too old for a child’s mistakes, a wizard who had done a child’s naive magic twice now—unwisely in both in stances.
He got to his feet. He picked up the vodka jug and deliberately let it fall.
Babi turned up below it, caught it in his arms and glared at him reproachfully.
But it had not broken. He could not harm it, even trying. In its way it was dangerous. Fall holding it—and the jug would survive.
It was Pyetr’s coat, Eveshka had no doubt of it when she had fished it out of the river. “Pyetr!” she cried aloud to the forested shore, to the winds and the morning; she wanted Sasha to answer her; but no answer came, not from her husband, not from her daughter, not from Sasha, not even from the vodyanoi, who wanted to torment her. She knew its ways; oh, god, she knew them—knew that it lied, but one could never rely on that.
What she wanted now was a breeze—with the sail canted, the tiller set—just a very little breeze, please the god. Ever so slight a breeze—while she trembled with fear and wider wishes beckoned.
The sail flipped and filled halfway. The boat moved, ever so slowly.
And stuck fast again.
She did not wish a storm. She shut her eyes and wished— please, just a little more.
The boat groaned, the sail flapped and thumped.
The wind was there. It took so little for a stray puff of wind to come into this nook, skirl among the trees along the little stream, and come skimming across the water…
Something wanted me toward this shore. Then want me inner, dammit! I’ve no intention to swim for it!
The boat heeled ever so slightly and slid free, bow facing the brushy water edge.
She lashed the tiller and ran forward, past the deckhouse, under the sail and along the low rail to the bow, with the snaggy wooden hook they used for an anchor. She swung it around and around her with all her might and loosed it for the trees.
It landed. She hauled on the rope and felt it hold, threw a loop about the bow post and hauled, not abruptly, but with patience.
Wizardry waited to swallow her up. The river did, while the vodyanoi taunted her with cruel laughter and told her lies. It was a big boat, a very big boat, but on the water the slightest breeze and the slightest of women could move it.
There were terrible holes in the coat she had fished out of the water, and stains, despite its soaking, that were surely blood.
Hwiuur could not be killed, that she knew, not in this world—but there were powers outside this world, in that place where magic lived.
Branches cracked against the hull. The old ferry jolted and scraped along the shore.
The forest that shut out her magic could not shut her out—kill her if it could—but not stop her short of killing her.
Sasha would talk about morality. Sasha would talk about the safety of people she had never met, and children she had never seen, and beg her to have pity on them, remembering that magic sought a way into the world—which wizards must never, give. But Pyetr was her right and wrong. Pyetr was her world outside the woods, and the world inside her heart. Without him, if anything should have happened to him—
Sasha had warned her against killing and against dying— You know what you’d become…
Oh, absolutely she did.
8
The horses had not the strength now for hard going. No more did Pyetr—small wonder that Pyetr seemed thinner and paler than yesterday: he noticed it especially when they had come to a small in and let the horses rest and drink. Pyetr stripped off his bloody shirt and splashed water over him, sending a trail of stained water curling away over the moss-but of the wound there remained nothing but a white scar on his back and another on his chest. Pyetr touched the one he could reach, examined it, awkwardly situated as it was, and looked up with worry in his eyes that Sasha did not want to read—realization how close he had come to dying last night, certainly; and perhaps of the magic it might have cost to call him back.
“I didn’t borrow,” Sasha said. “If that s what you’re wondering. You’re white as a ghost and some bit thinner to prove it —That shirt’s beyond washing. God, don’t put it back on.” He pulled Pyetr’s spare one from Missy’s baggage. Pyetr shook the water out of his hair, dried it with the dirty shirt and put the clean one on.
After which they took the chance to wash and shave, filled their water-flasks and left the brook behind at a pace Missy and Volkhi could keep.
In the white sunlight, without dirt and stubble looked paler still, the fine lines on his face smoothed away. He seemed—
Drawn thin, the way he had been in the days master Uulamets had first snared them, and used Pyetr for bait for his ghostly daughter. The god help them, he had snatched after an image last night, that very moment a young fool had worked his best magic—they had been young, they had been on an adventure that would end well—but time had glossed the fear and the weariness and Pyetr’s sure attraction for what he knew would kill him—the very destruction Pyetr had been, one feared with the clarity of hindsight, courting all his young life—
Because Pyetr had had that inclination in his youth: Pyetr the gambler’s son, who valued his life less than his freedom and his own way. Old Uulamets had wanted a wizard lad, had wished for one for a hundred years, till a certain stable boy had been shaken out of Vojvoda—to rescue Pyetr from an unpleasantness occasioned by a lady’s window and an irate husband who had dropped dead in the street.
They rode a narrow space between the hills, with noon sun slanting through the leaves. Babi was off somewhere, but Babi would do that—sometimes there and sometimes not, as Babi pleased.
Sasha murmured, out of his own thoughts: “When we first came to this woods, Pyetr, do you remember, master Uulamets wanted me to meet ’Veshka. You were an accident. He wanted me out of Vojvoda.”
“I wanted the hell out of town. There was a rope involved. I call that a reason.—What are you talking about?”
“He wanted me. He wanted a wizard to attract Eveshka back to him. And after a hundred years of his wanting someone like me—and after my being born and growing up, and all, just to satisfy his wish—what did Eveshka do but fall in love with you instead?”
“Love, hell! The old goat meant you to die, friend. You weren’t supposed to survive the honor.”
“But he didn’t need a wizard for that. He certainly didn’t need one fifteen years old—”
“She was sixteen a hundred years. She was still sixteen then. It wasn’t that unreasonable.”
“But—” The train of thought was getting more and more uncomfortable, now it had started. “She’d have been sixteen another year or so. I’d have been older. It might have worked then.”
“Thank the god not. By then, I’d have been hanged.”
Chilling thought. “But his wish worked too soon, didn’t it? Or didn’t get me born soon enough. Maybe something pulled his wish off a year or so. Maybe it was mine for my own welfare. Or ’Veshka’s for help. —Or maybe it wasn’t even me that was going to work: you were his answer, and he wouldn’t see it. He had his mind made up how everything was going to be, just like ’Veshka: it was me he still wanted, after you were right under his nose; and why, with you at hand, did he still want a wizard, when we all know the doubly-born are so dangerous? Did he want Ilyana?”