“Yvgenie came to the house. He wasn’t the oldest son. I wasn’t that important. But he was the nicest person I’d ever met.”
“Did you love him?”
A long, difficult pause. “I don’t know. I tried to. I was going to marry him. I didn’t think I was going to like him but I did. We slipped away and talked behind the stairs.” A rapid flutter of the eyes in the firelight, the spill of a tear that ran gold down her cheek. “Before they caught us. —I thought we were going to be happy. I really did. I thought I was going to leave the house and go to Kiev and not have to live shut in and scared of wizards. But somebody—maybe one of the servants, maybe just someone who’d heard rumors—waited all this time and came to Yvgenie’s father and told him I was a—”
She stopped and leaned her mouth on the heel of her hand.
The silence went on painfully long. He said, desperately, “So Yvgenie came to warn you?”
A nod. “His father was furious. He said I had to be one of the wizards who killed the Yurishevs. Most of all he did want any link with my family and he sent soldiers to kill us. But Yvgenie—Yvgenie rode ahead of them all the way from Kiev. He got through the gates at night—the guards knew who he was; they wouldn’t give him any trouble. And he warned my family and he took me on his horse and said he couldn’t go home again. He said he’d take me somewhere safe. My family—I don’t know where they are now.”
One could call the boy a fool. But not a scoundrel. He said, past a knot in his throat, “Where was he taking you”
“To the river. He said he’d rather be a f-fisherman than his father’s son.”
“God.” He looked at the little knife in his hands, turned it and flung it into the ground next the fire. “Damn!”
“So I have to find him.”
“I have to find him.” He thought of the mouse, and Chernevog, and a very desperate and maybe dying boy. “Hell and damnation! Sasha! Wake up!”
But Sasha did not stir.
We had to stop and rest. Bielitsa’s failing, and I know he’s borrowing from her and from Patches, but I can’t say no. He’s so pale now it scares me, and I try to wish him well, I try to wish both of us well, but it’s like pulling a weight uphill. I think I could do what he does and I don’t even want to think about that. I know now what uncle was saying about mother fighting on slanted ground. And Yvgenie’s getting more and more confused. He used to have just dark spots, but now there’s no dark, it’s things that can’t fit together, scary thing, about thorns, that I don’t know why they should be scary, but I feel it when I try to listen, and I don’t think he or Kavi either knows which is which anymore. In the dark, the same way the dark is when you can see ghosts Kavi can talk to me, but only for a moment or two because after that we don’t know what we’re doing. I know I’m being a fool. I think we both know it. I’m scared and I’m so tired I can hardly think right, and the awful thing, I think from time to time this could be what being in love is, but then I keep remembering what uncle said about rusalki. It feels so real, it feels so good, and I know we’re hurting ourselves, it hurts even when it’s so good. We’ve got to do something different soon but I’m scared of every wish that leads away from what we have and I’m scared even of wishing one of us well because if I do it with Yvgenie that’s one wish; and if I do it without, that’s another, and I don’t know what’s safe or what’s right—
He was cold now in a way no fire could warm. He sat in front of it, held out his hands to it, but it had no life to give him. The dark behind him grew far more than the light that danced in front of him. Ilyana dipped her quill in the inkpot beside her and wrote something with a fierce concentration, ignoring Bielitsa’s complaints—the horses, like him, had to stay. Her magic held them. Attraction did.
“Ilyana,” he began.
“Hush,” Ilyana said fiercely, without looking up: his next breath stopped in his throat, while the quill continued its furious course.
He had never thought he would long for Owl or the black Thing that had hissed at him—but no matter it had spat and hissed and bared its teeth every time it got close to him, so long as Babi had been there, they had been safe. And they were not, now. So long as Owl was with them, Chernevog loved—not Owl, precisely: Owl knew nothing about love, but Owl was saner than the wolf, he was sure of that.
Perhaps it was an answer to the wolf Ilyana sought—he saw how frightened she looked, how desperately she clutched the edge of the book and turned pages—looking for some spell, perhaps, some incantation to banish that drifting shadow from the brush, where it circled their fire.
He rested his elbows on his knees, his locked hands before his lips.
He saw it—passing at the very edge of the firelight, not so terrible as the wolf of his imaginings: thin, rather, lank and furtive—
“It’s out there,” he said. And Ilyana said nothing. He could hear the scratch of the quill above the wind in the leaves.
His father’s hounds had killed a servant boy once—torn him in pieces. That night the same dogs had sat at the great fireplace beside his father’s chair, great black beasts that feared his father, no less than the servants did—
Wolves in the woods—hunting him down an aisle of thorns.
Hate, and fear, and never help from anyone—until—
Trees moved like living things. Vines writhed like snakes and crept across gray, weathered stone—
A fair-haired little girl walked precariously along a streamside, a little girl who would look up any instant and say, with a glance to fill up all the empty spots—
“Who are you?”
Threatening question. Important question. He had been hiding in the woods. A terrible lady would find him and take him to her house. She had Ilyana’s face. Or Ilyana would have hers someday. But for now Ilyana was a little girl who walked balancing on the water’s edge—lonely, too, he was sure, though lonely did not always mean harmless.
He was on a porch, at a door of a house he knew, and Ilyana opened it—of course: it was her house the lady had sent him to find and it was Ilyana’s father the lady aimed at— a fierce, unforgiving wizard, who lectured him about honesty, and wanted things of him the way the lady did—
But he would not, could not give himself or his trust to anyone again. The lady held him. The lady made demands on him. He stole the old man’s book and searched it for secrets that might free him or save him—before the old man caught him at it.
Ilyana wanted him back, Ilyana or Eveshka or Draga, the images tumbled over and over in his memory—fair-haired child or girl or woman, all alike. Ilyana wanted him to a meeting, wanted him to face her father, trust her father—
He had drowned Ilyana. Or was it Draga? He could not remember. The wolf was there again, in the brush—he saw it staring at them.