He walked on, and Missy moved with his hand on her neck, at her steady patient pace. She thought, I wouldn’t hurt him. I truly wouldn’t.
“How can a wizard’s house burn? Can’t they stop the fire?”
“Not always,” he said. “I’m dreadful at fires. —God, don’t—bother me. Please! God!”
Her breath seized up in her throat. And he shook his head furiously and laid a hand on her knee, saying, “I wanted you here. I wished you. I wanted—”
“What?”
“A wife. And it’s not fair for us to want somebody. And you shouldn’t think about me and you shouldn’t want to—” He stopped, quite suddenly, then said, “I sound like ’Veshka.”
She felt fluttery inside. She felt guilty for Yvgenie and guilty for being a wicked girl, her mother would call it, and guilty for upsetting Sasha—it was not fair for a boy to risk his life for her and her not to love him, but it was nothing like Sasha.
“It’s a damned wish,” he said. “It’s magical. You can’t help liking me!”
“I do,” she said, feeling very strange inside. “I do, and maybe it is magical. It feels that way. I never felt like this. I never did…”
He stood there staring at her. Missy had stopped quite still.
“What about Yvgenie?” he asked.
She said, hard as it was to say, “We never—” and stopped there, her face gone burning hot despite the evening chill. She said, “I didn’t love him. I said I’d try to. He’s very nice.” The fact was, she had slept in his blanket and he had slept curled against a tree, because—
—because she had been so dreadfully afraid of strangers. Or of lasting mistakes.
“God,” he said, and shook his head and started walking again.
She did not think he was upset with her. She thought quite the opposite. Maybe it was him hearing what she was thinking again.
He stopped Missy again. He looked so dreadfully upset with her. No, not with her. With himself. Because he was not thinking about the things he should be thinking about, he was thinking about himself, being selfish, and a fool—
She shook her head, refusing to believe that, upset because he was upset—
And not, again. Feelings came and went quickly as breezes. It scared her. Except it was magic, and she loved a wizard, and things like that seemed likely to happen in his company.
He said, “I can’t wish you not. I can’t wish you away. It’s not safe. God, what do I do with you?”
She said, “I don’t know.” A nice girl would never think of looking a strange man in the eyes. But she did. She said, shakily, “I’m in the way, aren’t I?” The woods was not where she belonged. Sasha was walking because the horse was tired. He was out of breath, he was sweating, he looked exasperated and worried, and she bit her lip, not going add her tears to his problems. Which went away, the more she felt her eyes sting.
She said, “I’m not scared of you.” It felt as if every fear she had ever had had gone away from her. And anything the woods could hold was nothing to the fears she had lived with expecting murder at any instant, every day of her life, an had found her mysterious wizard and he was the answer, not the danger. She said, feeling very strange, “I think should think about getting my father out of trouble.”
Because that was what he was trying so desperately think about—and if she was an echo, she could at least that to help him.
She said, “I’m scared of meeting Yvgenie, too, but I think you should help the people you need to help, and not worry about me meeting my half-sister, or my father’s wife…”
He was afraid of that idea. She saw it in his face. He gave a small shake of his head and of a sudden the back-and-forth in her thinking stopped, like a sudden silence, as he started Missy moving again.
She said, because she was stubborn, “They don’t scare me.” Which was a lie. But she was trying to make it true She said, on a cold, dreadful thought, “If my father got killed or something because of me—”
He gave her a strange look and she felt colder and colder, thinking about that. Or maybe it was magic again.
He said, “Pyetr’s damned hard to kill.”
And walked ahead of Missy for a while, in a silence she had never heard in her life—not a lonely one. A cessation of his presence, even when he was right in front of the horse. She watched him, as distant from her as he had been close a moment ago, and thought: He’s thinking about my father.
He’s doing something. My father said—he wants things and they happen. Anything he wants—
God, one has to be so careful with him. Careful of him.
Take care of him, her father had charged her. She had thought—until he wakes. But she began to see what her father find trusted to her, and how very much Sasha needed someone he could trust—
Someone as brave as her father, someone not afraid of him—no matter what.
Desolation, ghosts, stones and peeling roots of broken trees, banks of thorns that went to powder in a grasping hand, that was the place Ilyana saw: Owl was still with her—but cast about as she would among the hedges she could not find a way out again, nor, it seemed, could Owl. Ghosts wove pale threads through the hedges and the branches of dead trees, cold to the touch and angry, one could feel it.
“Yvgenie!” she had shouted till she was hoarse, but only the faint wailing of ghosts answered. He was alone with Patches and Bielitsa in a place where life was fading and the result of that she did not want to imagine—Patches had never asked to be taken out into the woods and lost to a ghost. Her father was looking for her, beyond a doubt, and if she had feared her father harming Yvgenie, now it was Kavi harming her father she had to fear. She thought in despair. God, he couldn’t keep up and I wouldn’t listen. I’ve done everything wrong and now I can’t get back again. Papa was right and I wouldn’t listen to him, I thought I knew better—
Something moved in the tail of her eye. A wolf sat there, the one that they had followed into this place. It looked alive, yellow-eyed and with fur mostly white, but touched with gray and buff. Behind it, tongues lolling, sat others, milky-pale as Owl. Those were surely ghosts.
The living wolf got up and trotted away. The others followed it; and Owl glided after.
Dangerous to wish for what doesn’t exist, Kavi had warned her. Now she was on the verge of wanting her uncle to rescue her and most dangerously on the edge of wanting her father, the god forbid she should be so selfishly stupid. Her mother might know what to do, if her mother would even listen to her situation now, of which she despaired entirely: her mother was not inclined to patience; but god, she was in trouble. The leshys were dead. No one had ever told her that such things could happen, let alone that the woods might suddenly change beyond her understanding.
But they had warned her about Kavi. And she had thought it was so simple—as if loyalty and wishes could sustain him She thought, on the edge of tears: Uncle tried to tell me. Hope never seemed dangerous till this. Now I know what it can do to fools that won’t listen.
Ghosts belong here. Yvgenie doesn’t, not yet: he’s not dead and he’s not a wizard. That’s why he could get away and get Kavi out of this place. God, I don’t want to follow these creatures—it’s stupid. But Owl’s going. And if I lose Owl, what other tie have I got to the other side of the hedge?
Mother, I’m listening now. Uncle, I’m dreadfully sorry… Papa, please don’t come after me. Even wizards don’t belong here. You couldn’t—
A ghost poured out into the aisle ahead of her, and shaped itself into a great lumbering bear, white as snow. It looked at her over its shoulder, and its face showed a dreadful scar, as if something had burned it once.