Pyetr was damnably hard to move when he wanted otherwise. “What’s your name?” Pyetr demanded, a question so absolute his own curiosity slipped, and the girl said, in a hard voice.
“Nadya Yurisheva.”
Pyetr sank slowly to his heels, stared his firstborn daughter in the face while she stared back at him, then stood up and without a word took the pan back to the spring—
In a silence thick as the leaves.
Sasha whispered—one could only whisper, “Excuse me, please,” and went after Pyetr. Anything might happen. Leshys were involved. One was still watching them, he was sure of it.
Pyetr leaned against the rock, put the pan against it to let clean water trickle in, while Volkhi and Missy blithely destroyed the little green that grew in that spot of sun.
Pyetr said, “She’s about eighteen, nineteen, do you think?”
Vojvoda, a stable, Pyetr run through and bleeding, Pyetr having left the Yurishev’s second story window very precipitately not an hour before—
“—Did you and Irina—?”
“Sufficiently, I assure you. Not that night—but certainly others.”
“God.”
“The leshys have a damned dark sense of humor, friend.”
“I—don’t think they’re altogether to blame—”
“I know who’s to blame! It’s quite clear who’s to blame! Nothing’s an accident, isn’t that it? Nothing’s ever an accident: her being here is no accident, her looking for that boy is no accident—She’s no damn substitute for the mouse, Sasha! I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s not what I’m taking home, I don’t care what the leshys intend!”
“Hush! She’ll hear you!”
Pyetr sank down on his heels and dumped the water from the pan. “God, Sasha.”
What did one say? What did one do? Or wish?
Pyetr said faintly, “I don’t know this girl. The daughter I know’s off in trouble somewhere, not being reasonable, and I honestly don’t think this is going to help, Sasha!”
“We don’t know that. We—”
“Magic strikes at the weakest point, doesn’t it? Things go wrong at the weakest point, and our weakest point’s my own damned— “
“ You said yourself the mouse is no hazard.”
“Yes, and you’ve been making wishes all these years to protect my daughter, haven’t you, and something certainly has, clear from Vojvoda! You wanted the leshys to bring my daughter to us, and they certainly did! Something’s satisfied all your wishes, if it had to start eighteen damned years ago to do it!“
Pyetr was uncannily good at magic for a man who had never believed in vodyaniye until one all but took his hand off. Sasha sank down on his heels by the water’s edge, trying now Pyetr said it, to think exactly how he had framed his wishes for the mouse or how he had thought of her all these years—whether he had left a way for disaster. He could not pull order out of his ideas about the mouse, could not determine how he thought of her, and that was frightening.
He said to Pyetr. “I was getting too damned cocky. We’re not giving up on the mouse. We’re not letting her go. The world’s protecting itself, that’s all.” He recollected last night, recollected how easy—how dreadfully easy magic could be—
“You’re not making sense, the world protecting itself—”
“The world does. Nature’s far harder to wish than you are. What you see makes you doubt what you know. For the god’s sake don’t make this girl hate you.”
“ Make her hate me? God, what’s she got to thank me for? The same my father left to me? Gossip behind my back and doors slammed in my face? Why don’t you wish her to be grateful, Sasha? It’s a damned sight easier than waiting it.”
That bitterness went deep; but he knew Pyetr’s heart, at moments too delicate to eavesdrop. “You don’t mean that any more than you really want me to send her away into the woods.”
Pyetr shook his head, looking at the water, the rock, the god only knew. Not at him. Not at anything present.
Sasha said, “I think you’d better talk to her.”
Pyetr whispered, furiously: “I think we’d better get moving. We’re not stopping for any damn cup of tea, Sasha. Magic’s switched the dice on us. I’m not sitting here. Not now.”
“Pyetr, magic’s brought her. Deal with her. Be fair with her. Always at the weakest point, you just said it. You can’t make her your enemy!”
“What am I going to say, for the god’s sake? All of Vojvoda thinks I killed Yurishev—and you and I both know who gained from it!”
Irina’s relatives. No question. With Irina very likely in on the deed. He said to Pyetr, “I think you’d better find out what she does think.”
“You.”
He blinked, looked Pyetr straight in the eyes.
Pyetr whispered, “Dammit, are you wishing me?”
“I’m honestly trying not to. It’s yourself pushing you. Or it’s someone else’s wish. One can never be absolutely certain, at such moments. —When in doubt, do right. Harm has far too many consequences.”
“Damn,” Pyetr said, shook the remaining water from the pan and left him with the horses.
The woods might be thicker here, or the sky had faded. But when Yvgenie looked up he could see the sun through the branches, white and dim as a sun hazed with unseen cloud. He saw the lacy shadows of branches ripple over Ilyana and Patches, he knew by the sharpness of the edges that there were no clouds, and yet it seemed all the colors in the forest Kid sky were fading.
A cold touch swept past his shoulder: Owl. He put out his hand without thinking: Owl settled briefly on his arm, a feint icy prickle of claws. Then Owl took off again, as a gray-brown shape crossed the hillside ahead of them.
“A wolf,” Yvgenie said.
“Where?” Ilyana asked, and it was gone. He could not swear now that it had been there, but his hands had grown so cold he could scarcely feel the reins. “Yvgenie?”
“My eyes are playing tricks,” he murmured; but he feared he had been dreaming again, and he feared what those dreams might mean. He thought, I’m slipping. And saw his own hands reaching after branches in the dark, remembered the water pressing his body against the brush, the roar of the blood in his ears, and knowing he was going under—
—even while he was riding in the sunlight. He was dying, finally, he knew he was, and soon he would grasp after anything to save him, even those things he loved.
She was so like the mouse. So like her. Pyetr sank down on his heels, tucked the empty pan away in the pack.
Easier to look at the ground instead. He gave Babi’s shoulder a scratch, looked up. There was the anger he expected. And hurt; and curiosity: all the mouse’s expressions; Irina’s nose and his mouth—that was the combination that made Nadya different.
He said, quietly, “No one told me either. I didn’t keep any ties to Vojvoda. How did you find out?”
She opened her mouth to answer, angrily, he was sure; then seemed not to have the breath for it. She made a furious gesture with a trembling hand and looked away from him, at the ground, at the sky, at the fire—at him, finally, with her jaw set and fire in her eyes. But no answer.
He said, “Is your mother still alive?”
“What do you care?”
Himself—of a drunken father, in a dark street outside The Doe: What do you care?
She said, “I grew up as Nadya Yurisheva. My mother’s family kept me safe. I never heard. I never did, not in all my life until the month I was going to be married, and I didn’t believe it even then, until I laid eyes on you. It turns out I’m the daughter of a gambler and a murderer who had to ask me who my mother was! How many sisters do I have across the Russias?”