She wished it burned. But that would not undo a single wish in it.
We’d better know what he did wish, hadn’t we? Sasha reasoned against her fears. In her better sense Eveshka knew that he was right.
But tonight she kept thinking about the man in the mist, the young man sleeping on cold stone, ice on branches, and white flakes sifting down through a ring of thorns…
Snow-melt and greening then, the field mouse went free and birch seedlings leafed, saplings of three years rising tall and substantial across the disused road, above banks of bracken fern and moss. The dead trees that once had completely shadowed the forest floor were fewer than the year before… falling to the wind, but never crushing a sapling; to lightning, but never spreading fire; and never lying long, except as a shelter for hares or young foxes.
It was, said the grandmothers in Vojvoda, a magical woods where backwards-footed Forest-things lured the unwary to disasters and untimely death—a terrible woods, grandmothers in Kiev might well say, where wizards lived, and against them not even the Great Tsar and all his army would venture.
A girl—a wizard-daughter—had drowned in the river that ran through that woods, and in the way of such unhappy dead, dwelt in a willow, a heartless rusalka who drank up whatever life came near her. She haunted the shore of that woods, a girl with long, pale hair—Quite likely now the rumor had gotten south (since even near such worldly places as Kiev there were surely grandmothers with their sources) that the old forest had been growing livelier of late, that a new wizard had taken old Uulamets’ place on the riverside and broken the dreadful rusalka’s spell.
But whether this was a good wizard or bad, the rumors failed to say.
In fact Sasha himself sometimes wondered what he was, being now eighteen and inclined, his good friend Pyetr insisted, to think far too much about responsibilities… His friend Pyetr being of course a worldly and married man of all of twenty-and-six—married to the rusalka of the rumors, as happened: there was a great deal truly odd about their household that even the rumors of banniks and House-things and grandmothers surely must fall short of.
That Eveshka Uulametsova was no longer a rusalka, for one thing, nor even dead these days—and that the fey and mysterious boatman who traded with freeholders in the new wizard’s name was that very scoundrel Pyetr the whole town of Vojvoda most gladly would have hanged.
Most of all Vojvoda would be amazed at the changes in The Cockerel’s former stableboy: at least a handspan of height and a good breadth of shoulder— Sasha having done his share of wood-splitting and shingle-making in the remaking of his house, right along with Pyetr—
Whose hands, the god knew, were to this day more adept with the dice than with hammer and saw.
Notwithstanding which, over the last several years the old ferryman’s cottage had quite well doubled its size, was comfortably (if eccentrically) shingled, with a fine (though slightly tilting) shed built onto the back, a bathhouse at the side, (it did perhaps spiral a little out of true) and, in the front and on the left, a garden springing up in green shoots, without a single weed. The last was Eveshka’s doing, the carpentry was Pyetr’s and Sasha’s, and only proved, as Pyetr said, that not even wizardry could make a corner-post stand true.
Still, all they built held strong and snug through the winters and the summers, a house weathered and patched with lichen, added on to with gray, weathered logs, rustic outside— Ah, but in…
Inside were clean wooden floors, rugs from the Indee, cupboards and beds and tables and chairs likewise polished. There were golden cups and pewter plates. There were silk curtains and brass lamps and a wonderful samovar, besides a well-ordered cellar full of apples and nuts and dried mushrooms, bunches of herbs and pots of honey and sacks of good downriver grain—not mentioning, besides, the domovoi who was well-content there, and the shelves at the newly excavated end of the cellar, which held hundreds of well-dusted, well-marked little pots of herbs, simples, powders, and earths that a wizard or even a good householder might find useful.
Not a single mouse. The domovoi got those.
In truth, Sasha found himself so happy in this cozy house it frightened him, because nothing of the gold and the silk and the jewels had ever really seemed to belong to him: it was only a cup to drink from, was only a curtain to keep the draft away; these things had come to him in a night and they could go the same way, for all he cared. It was his welcome with Pyetr and Eveshka that mattered to him, and Pyetr’s happiness with Eveshka, and their willingness to put up with him, who was no longer the fifteen-year-old boy they had started with.
This spring in particular it had begun to seem to him that he was a great deal underfoot for a married couple, though Pyetr and Eveshka had willingly set a room apart for him: Pyetr had in fact built the house twice as large for his sake, so that he could have his bedroom and his own clothes press at one end of what had once been the whole house and now was only the end of the kitchen. Pyetr and Eveshka had the big new room at the back, on the other side of the opened hearth, and Eveshka’s cupboards. It was after all Eveshka’s house: of all else her father had passed on to him, Sasha had never claimed the house Eveshka had grown up in, nor ever doubted it was hers. Yet here he was, always at their breakfast table, always in the middle of their evenings when work was done.
Most of all in those late hours when a not too naive boy was very acutely aware that man and his wife would want a little privacy, they often as not put that off for his sake, so as not, Pyetr had said more than once, to leave him alone by the fireside—all of which said to Sasha that he was a nuisance to them, even if he was company for Pyetr, and even if a wizard had no choice but the solitude of this woods. The house rightfully was Eveshka’s, Pyetr certainly was; and that left Sasha Misurov lately feeling all his own happiness so fragile a misaimed wish could shatter it.
It was so hard, for instance, not to wish them happy together. But a wizard generally got his wishes, in one shape or another: that was exactly the problem. He dared not wish a thing like that for Eveshka, who being a wizard herself could perfectly well feel it happening and angrily bid him mind his own business; and he dared not wish it for Pyetr, either, who would not feel it, but who certainly trusted his best friend not to meddle.
It was hard, too, not to want to be loved and wanted, despite one’s inconvenience: and the knotty question of whether not-wishing could possibly be a wish in itself kept turning over and over in Sasha’s mind, waking him at night and setting him for long hours to writing in his book, to which he added page after page as the months passed; it set him to reading master Uulamets’ battered, rain-stained record, too—which warned him plainly that a wizard who loved anyone was in danger, and a wizard who wanted love from any creature was a thief at best.
That caution applied to Eveshka and him equally, of course; and however they tried, he was sure they were both guilty in their own ways and for their own reasons.
But Pyetr only laughed and said, when once Sasha confided to him his inmost, most terrible misgivings in his case,
“I’m not worried.”
Wherewith Pyetr poured another cup of water over his head— they were sitting in the newly finished bathhouse at the time, sweating in the heat of the stones.
“I worry,” Sasha said, and looked about him in the dim light and the steam—one would be cautious in a bathhouse at any time one was saying something serious, because of banniks. “Pyetr, if you ever think I’m wishing something—”
“What I wish,” Pyetr said, “is a cup of water down my back.”