For himself it was sedately out the front gate and sedately down the ghost of a road that ran into the dead woods, with Volkhi all to himself, and nobody calling after him Be careful, Pyetr, don’t take chances, Pyetr,—
He kept it quite tame until he was out of sight of the house.
Eveshka was worried when she shut the door; and wished something quite strongly, Pyetr’s safety, Sasha was sure, against the unknown dangers of horses.
“Babi was with him,” Sasha said.
Eveshka only shook her head.
“Pyetr won’t fall off,” he said. “Saddle or no saddle, I’ve seen him do really crazy things—”
This seemed not to reassure Eveshka at all, so Sasha instantly changed his mind about telling Eveshka the story about Pyetr and aunt Ilenka’s front porch, or how Volkhi had broken the butter churn. He amended it quickly: “But it only looks that way: he really does know what he’s doing.”
“I don’t trust that creature,” Eveshka muttered, and went back into her own room, to her own studies.
Sasha was not up to arguments at the moment, with a dozen things from his book and Uulamets’ all floating about in his head. He went back to the kitchen table, sat down and turned the pages one after the other, looking—
—looking for reconciliations.
He wrote, Eveshka and I like each other as well as two wizards can. We want no harm to each other and certainly we want things for Pyetr’s good: but that’s very tangled, unless we want the same thing in exactly the same way. One never dares be too specific in that kind of wish.
Could Eveshka’s wish for Pyetr’s welfare harm me?
Only if—
He stopped writing, feeling a slight chill in the air, a stray wish, perhaps.
He went on: —I threatened Pyetr, and if that were ever the case I’d certainly want her to —
To do what?
The answer seemed overwhelmingly dangerous. Everything did. Anything he could set down could have consequences.
Rain on stone…
Wind shaking branches…
Eveshka dipped her pen and wrote: The dreams don’t stop. Papa always said I was scatter-witted. But papa didn’t hear the river in his sleep—
If wishing could make me someone else’s daughter, then I would. If it were only me, alone, I’d wish I had no gift and maybe that would stop it: papa always said that was possible. Maybe if I believed that absolutely that we’d always be safe here, that would be the spell papa always said a wizard could cast once in his life, the spell that can’t be broken —
Her heart jumped, her hand moved the pen against the flow: ink flew across the page, a spatter like blood—
He heard Eveshka push a bench back in the other room, heard her running across the floor. She flung the bedroom door open and stood looking at him, in a hush in which the whole woods seemed to participate.
“Sasha?” she said.
He pushed his bench back, rose with the feeling of a terrible presence- standing behind him—no, farther away, beyond the wall, from a very precise spot at the far side of the yard—a bed of stones—
“The bathhouse!” Sasha exclaimed, “the bannik!” as he headed for the door. He banged it wide on his way out onto the wooden walk-up, with Eveshka crying: “Wait! Wait!” and racing behind him to the yard.
But when they had gotten to the ground she rushed past him and ran, braids flying, out the front gate into the road, calling out, “Pyetr!” Terror was swirling about the yard behind them, Eveshka’s wild apprehensions flying out into the woods far and wide, wanting Pyetr back here now, within her protection, immediately—
“Eveshka!” Sasha shouted after her, and ran as far as the hedge himself. “Eveshka! Wait! We don’t know what we’re changing, you could make something happen, don’t call him back!”
She hesitated in the weeds of the lane, still gazing in the direction Pyetr must have gone; and all Sasha could think of was Eveshka’s summons going out, out into uncertainties, agitating everything that was hitherto stable. She clenched her hands and culled again, with a silent, panicked force. “God, I can’t find him! I can’t find anything out there, it’s all gone!”
“’Veshka! If you don’t know, for the god’s sake, don’t wish! We don’t know what we’re calling him into! Come back here!”
She stood with fists clenched, cast an anguished look down the way Pyetr had gone, then came running back through the gate, pale of face and breathless, falling in beside him as he turned and struck out for the bathhouse.
“I can’t find him,” Eveshka muttered as they went. “I want to know where he is, dammit, and I don’t know. I don’t know where Babi is, I don’t know where the leshys are—”
“That’s not unusual,” he said. He could feel the malaise too, silence like a smothering snow settled over the house and yard, In which there was no sense of any presence but that cold feeling from the bathhouse. He was tempted to try a summoning himself, to see if it was his own apprehensions stopping her; but unease was growing in him with every stride he made, and he —- more and more convinced he did not want Pyetr near this kept feeling: danger both in doing and not doing, danger in every word they spoke and every question they asked at this point…
“Sasha, this thing doesn’t feel right, dammit, nothing feels right—”
“Don’t swear! And don’t wish anything. We don’t know there’s any trouble at all where Pyetr is, it could all be here and we could wish him right back into it.”
“It won’t be to us, use your head, Sasha! It doesn’t have to come at us, Pyetr’s out there alone, he’s always the one anything would go for.”
“He’s got Babi. He’s got Misighi if he gets in any real trouble. You know they’re the hardest thing to feel, even if they don’t mind talking to us. Just calm down, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
She was frightening both of them, anxieties flying back and forth between them as they reached the bathhouse. She flinched from his hand on her arm, wanted him to stop interfering with her, in all respects—and she was so strong in her fright, so terribly, dangerously strong—
“Calm down!” he begged her, catching her hand.
Calm won suddenly, a quick clasp of fingers, a meeting of eyes at the bathhouse door. “I know my question,” she said on a breath, thinking determinedly of Pyetr, and pulled the door open.
The presence inside retreated into shadows on a gust of wind, an oppressive dread slipping farther and farther from their hold, circling around the edges of their magic. It whispered, it muttered, it racketed suddenly about the walls and shrieked at them.
“It’s not ours!” Eveshka cried, collided with Sasha in the doorway and caught his arm. “It’s not the one I know—look out!”
Sasha pushed her behind him, demanding of it to know why it retreated from them, wanting to see with his own eyes the shadow that moved around the walls, a crooked shape that might have been a boy and might have been something far less savory, leaping with blinding quickness from bench to bench to firepit.
It hissed at him. It lunged for him with long-nailed fingers and raked his arm: Sasha gasped and jumped back with the impression of wild eyes and spiky hair and a feeling of cold and damp—
And the most terrible premonition about a place of thorns and branches.
6
Very little was left of the old road: it was getting increasingly overgrown, most confused where the fall of old trees had let in the sun, stretches rife with new bracken, saplings as apt to grow in the roadway as in the woods about. There were the occasional deadfalls, there were washes and slips where the death of trees had let streams run unchecked—rough ground and unpredictable, and Pyetr had had every notion of taking it easy on himself and on Volkhi this first outing, simply seeing, sedately and sanely, how Volkhi had fared these last several years.