“That’s stupid!” Pyetr said, but Pyetr looked worried. “What do you do, eavesdrop all the time?”
“It’s not like hearing. It’s…” Anything he could say sounded stupid. “Knowing they’re there. The way you know (he forest is there with your eyes shut. It sounds like the wind stopping. Quiet. And it’s not like that. Ever. It’s not natural.”
Pyetr gave him a look, Sasha saw it from the tail of his vision; Pyetr said, “So it’s quiet. You couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t make Babi hear me either. Or the leshys. Why? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, with his eyes set on the road ahead of them, the confused track through the regrown woods. “A lot of things that shouldn’t. I don’t know everything I should. Pyetr, I swear to you—’Veshka thinks her father left me a lot of things, but that’s not so. She thinks I remember, but I don’t, not—not as if I ever feel her father being there. He’s gone. It’s not like she thinks it is. I can’t make her understand that.”
“I’ve told her. I’ve told her, myself. It’s not you. She’s just worried, she worries about everything—I get myself lost, I start thinking about Vojvoda, the god knows I could have strayed into some damn trap the old man set, and it’s not the first time you couldn’t hear me…”
“It’s not just you. Something’s wrong, I’ve felt it going ever since Volkhi came—”
“Volkhi, Volkhi, what for the god’s sake does Volkhi matter to anything? A horse strays. So what’s going to happen? For a stray horse, the tsar’s going to come?”
“I’m not talking about the tsar. I’m talking about the bannik.”
“I’m sure all of this is going to make sense.”
“I can’t hear the woods,” Sasha said. “I couldn’t find Babi and I can’t hear a thing except ’Veshka when she’s close, I can’t even hear you when you’re right next to me, and it has to do with the bannik, it all started with the bannik, the same as Volkhi coming here.”
“You’re not getting enough sleep,” Pyetr said. “It’s that damn book, you know, those little crooked marks you stay up all night staring at—”
“Things are going wrong, Pyetr, they’re just going wrong!”
“Because you can’t hear the trees.”
“I don’t mean hearing the trees. It’s not like a sound, Pyetr—”
“God. I don’t care what it is. You say yourself once you start doubting you can do something it won’t happen, so maybe you’re tripping over your own feet, did you ever think about that?”
“I think of it.”
“So wish it right again.”
“I do! But there’s nothing I can reach, Pyetr, and the bannik just showed up and I’m not sure I even wanted it myself, I know Eveshka didn’t, and nothing’s right.”
Pyetr put his hand on Sasha’s shoulder, walked with him that way, Volkhi trailing them of his own volition. “Listen. Maybe ’Veshka’s right. Forget Uulamets. Leave his damned book alone. Leave everything a while. Quit trying so hard to think of trouble before it happens. Aren’t you likely to wish it up that way? Forget it. We’ll take the boat out, maybe even sail down to Kiev, you, me, ’Veshka…”
The very thought touched him with sudden panic—all those people, all those wishes and needs weighing on his heart, unstable as things were. Not now. God, not now, and Eveshka certainly could never bear it. Even dealing with two people she loved was hard.
“There’s girls there,” Pyetr said. “Girls who’d think you’re a damn fine catch.”
“No!”
“Life doesn’t go on in a damn book, boy!”
Sasha caught a breath, stopped thinking for a moment, stopped even trying to listen with his ears or his wizardry, so that everything Pyetr said became only sound to him. He had used to do that when his uncle had upset him—go away until his heart was quiet.
“Boy?” Pyetr said, shaking at his shoulder as they walked. “What’s the matter?”
“I just want the woods back, Pyetr, I just want things to go right.” He tried not even to think about Kiev, or the people and the girls and the idea of escape Pyetr was talking about. They frightened him, they brought him to the edge of wishes, and he could not let himself want the things ordinary folk might—Uulamets had made that mistake. And Pyetr would not understand that. Pyetr only let him go after a moment, unhappy and worried, he needed no eavesdropping to know that much.
He said to Pyetr carefully, reasonably, “I want everything we’ve done to hold.”
“It’s going well enough. You found me, didn’t you? I didn’t break my neck. Whatever that was, it was scared of you. It ran. If the old snake’s at his tricks again, we can deal with that, we always have.”
“We got the bannik, and when Eveshka wondered where you were, all it said was thorns and branches.”
“Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it? But it didn’t take any damn prophecy to know that…”
Blood on thorns…
“Did it?”
He was afraid to answer. An answer meant nothing. An answer might change before he could so much as think of it. “Will-be is always moving,” he said faintly. “Everything we do changes what’s going to happen. That’s why banniks don’t like wizards.”
“’Veshka says. At least the last one didn’t like Uulamets— but I can understand that. So we’ve got a bannik. And the forest is quiet and you’re seeing thorn-bushes and it scares you. —You don’t make sense all the time, you know.”
The quiet was absolute.
Leaves on the current, the current stopped…
Waiting…
“Sasha?”
“I want us home,” Sasha said.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” He faced Pyetr about and pushed him Volkhi’s side. “I’ll just feel better when we get there.”
Pyetr gave him an anxious look, then swung quickly up to Volkhi’s back and offered him his hand.
9
They came in sight of the house at twilight, both of them staggering tired, in muddy, chafing clothes that had dried on their backs, and with Volkhi so weary they were both afoot and leading him again. But at last there was the gray roof in sight, the hedge, the garden, their own porch, all safe and waiting for them, and Pyetr had no inclination to upset Eveshka twice. He opened the gate, shoved Volkhi’s reins at Sasha, calling out dutifully as he came running up onto the porch, “ ’Veshka, I’m home!”
He opened the door into a dark, cold house.
“’Veshka? Where are you?”
Sasha came thumping up onto the porch and walked in behind him.
“She’s not here,” Pyetr said, thinking, Well, damn! Now she’s gone out looking! Then he thought about the horse and the quarrel yesterday morning and had another opinion.
“She just might be out at the bathhouse,” Sasha breathed, and ran back down into the yard. Sasha’s voice drifted up distant and distressed: “Volkhi, get out of there!”
Hell with the garden, Pyetr thought, looking around a shadowy, supperless kitchen. He threw wide the kitchen shutters for light, opened the door into their bedroom and bashed his shin on a bench, opening the bedroom shutters.
Her book was gone from the desk.
He looked in the domes press, found clothes missing, walking boots gone; and slammed the wardrobe door so hard the piece rocked against the wall. “Damn!” he said, hit it with his fist and sulked out into the kitchen to find out what else missing—and by that just how long she intended to be off on her little pique this time.