So there’s no predicting. Is there?
Pyetr’s hands, fingers so long and agile with the dice-teaching Ilyana—
No, she had said. No. Pyetr, it’s not a toy for a wizard. Not for us—
Why? he had asked. And had not understood her distress.
It disturbs me, she had written in her book that day. I don’t know why. Prediction—that’s what it does. But every time you throw them, every time you hope for an outcome, every time you wish into uncertainty—
Pyetr had said, Try it, ’Veshka. For the god’s sake, it’s just a game.
It’s just a game…
She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her hands against her head, thinking: Is that why you feared him, papa?
You drove our bannik away, you wanted to pin the future down and you kept after it with questions and questions until it ran away.
Even looking at the future changes it. You have to walk blind or you’re not walking where you would have—
I could wish things right. I’m stronger than my mother. Or my father.
If I knew beyond a doubt. If there were no uncertainty.
There was a sudden chill in the night, a shift in the wind that carried the smoke aside. And in her heart the old Snake whispered: “Well, well, pretty bones. Do you finally need my help?”
She felt the thoughts that went left and right of reason. Change? Hwiuur was on all sides of a question at once. Hwiuur had no sides. And no real shape, nothing, at least, permanent.
Like Pyetr’s dice.
“Well, pretty bones, how does it fare tonight? Missing its young one? Its young one’s gone where it daren’t.”
One wanted the creature. And so few ever would.
He lunged, he rolled and twisted. She remembered his touch, she remembered the water and the pain of his bite, blindingly sharp.
“Wouldn’t you like to know where your husband is tonight, pretty bones?”
There was cold, there was dark. Time was that she had refused to die. Now there were conditions under which she would not live.
A heart’s so fragile, Kavi had used to say.
But a heart’s capable of more than breaking, snake.
Hwiuur twisted and slithered aside, blithely, powerfully bent on escape and mischief—on Pyetr, and Chernevog, and the boy. She thought of an aged willow, a muddy grave in a dank, watery den.
And thought of lightnings.
“It wouldn’t!” Hwiuur hissed, whipping back about. “It’s bones are there. It daren’t!”
She said, as Pyetr would, “The hell.”
She folded up her book and wished the fire out.
And it was.
Pyetr felt a sudden chill—maybe present company, maybe just the persistence of fear in this nightbound tangle. His hand ached with a bone-deep pain. The misery went all the way to his wrist now—he must have fallen on it a while ago. His right hand. His sword hand, if it came to that—though there was little a sword could do against foolishness or jealousy and he could find no enemy but those and weariness. Volkhi had been on the trail too long now; the god knew the white mare had little left, and he feared increasingly that they were lost: Chernevog swore he knew the way and that he had seen Eveshka not far from here, north and riverward, near the leshy ring—wherever that was, in the dark, and without landmarks.
They came to a thread of water between two hills. “ Soon, now,” Chernevog had been promising him for the last while. Now he said: “Not far.”
Volkhi dipped his head to drink. Pyetr let him have his sip, and the white mare had hers, against a last effort, he told himself, if only the old lad had it left, not to break both their necks.
And when they found Eveshka, the god only hope Chernevog had not deceived him. If Chernevog had lied, and meant some harm to her through him…
He felt a sharp stab of pain from his hand. He looked down the dark stream course and thought of water—of dark coils, and pain, and the mud about willow-roots, and carried the hand against his mouth.
“My hand’s hurting,” he murmured. “It hasn’t done that in years.”
“My sympathies,” Chernevog said acidly. “Is it a cure you want?”
“No, dammit, I mean it used to do this. Hwiuur’s about.”
“The creature was keeping company with Eveshka. Not surprising.”
“What do you mean, Not surprising?”
“He wanted your daughter. But I wouldn’t let him.”
Chernevog was a shadow in the dark. A wizard might have told what that meant, whether fair or foul intentions, but he could not.
“So you aimed him at my wife?”
“You have the worst expectations of me. No. I said I wouldn’t let him at your daughter. God! Give me once a moment’s credence! It’s that way—” A lift of his hand. “I could be there now if I wanted to. But I’ll rather you deal with your wife, Pyetr flitch, thank you.”
Chernevog started off down the stream, that ran as a sometimes glistening thread through this trough between the dark hills, a reedless, leaf-paved passage. Pyetr rode glumly beside him: Sasha had to appeal to him to deal with Eveshka, Ilyana did, and now Chernevog—there was nothing wrong with Eveshka, dammit, she was Eveshka, that was all—and there was more to her than old resentments and present pain. Even if he seemed himself somewhere to have forgotten that. He had not been able to help her. Or nothing that had happened would have happened.
“You amaze me,” Chernevog said.
“Snake-”
An odd feeling came on him then, as if Eveshka had spoken to him. He stopped Volkhi and listened to the night-sounds and listened to his heart.
He did not like what he was feeling. The pain in his hand was quite acute. And he had the distinct impression that Eveshka’s attention had brushed past him and fled him in fear. Eveshka? he thought.
And felt Chernevog’s cold touch on his arm. Chernevog’s horse pressing hard against his leg, the darkened woods become a dizzied confusion to his eyes. He thought, He’s killing me; and tried to free himself, but there was nothing hostile in what he was feeling, rather that the danger was elsewhere close, that Chernevog was holding on to him and finding something of magic about him that Chernevog did not, no more than the last time, understand or wholly trust or have words for—
But he wanted it, and the boy wanted it—
Rusalki both, he thought, and tried to get past that veil of dizziness and confusion to reach Eveshka, thought then of Sasha, and how he had continually been driven to come this way, into Chernevog’s reach—
Things once associated are always associated—he could hear Sasha saying that. No coincidences in magic-He could hear the whole woods, hear the passage of a deer, the midnight foraging of hares and the life in the trees around him; and under it, through it, a sense of balances gone amiss, and something—
He did not want to look at that. But he tried. And it made no sense to him. It just was, and Chernevog was there, telling him he did not have to understand, not even a wizard could, but that it was where the silence came from and where it went, and the leshys had kept it in check so long as they could—the stone and their ring and the heart of their magic, that this thing wanted to drink down—
The leshys were dead. The leshys had misjudged young foolishness, and the self-will of two wizards’ hearts—he had not brought Ilyana to them in time. He had not wanted to. He had loved her too much. There had always been time—next year and next.
Misighi, holding Ilyana in his huge arms… Misighi, who could break stone with his fingers, returning her so carefully, and striding away from them, never to return to the garden fence, never again that close to them—