A wizard could never want things beyond reason: a wizard could kill someone… He hated his failure. He hated being less than Pyetr. That found a little more strength in his body than he had thought he had. He tried to find advice in Uulamets’ memories—
But he recalled Chernevog’s instead: Nature can’t work against itself. But magic, pure magic, has no such limits.
It took all a wizard’s magic to move so much as a pebble against nature: once or twice in a lifetime, master Uulamets had said, a wizard past his childhood could work a real spell—
If—
If he wished something magical with a child’s simplicity.
Or a rusalka’s ruthless single-mindedness—
God, I do know how. I do know how—
And we can’t, we daren’t, I won’t.
They climbed a bank to dry ground, moved as shadows in a starlit maze of white, peeling trunks, came down again to bog and brush. River-sound grew distant, a faint murmur out of the dark, beneath the dry rattle of limbs in the wind. “You ride,” Sasha urged Pyetr, again, panting for breath, but Pyetr refused— the foot was fine, Pyetr said, he had not hurt himself, he was only glad to get Volkhi to solid ground. “Can’t be that far,” Pyetr said, leaning on his knees a moment. “I don’t ever remember it being this far.”
Sasha thought, We’re not going to find Eveshka tonight. She doesn’t want to be found, she doesn’t want us to catch her.
Not when Pyetr’s with me. If Chernevog breaks free—Pyetr’s the way to her heart. She told me—take care of him. Don’t follow her.
God, I’m a fool! Eveshka, Misighi, hear me!
“We’re being fools,” he called out to Pyetr, but Pyetr said, in a rasping voice, “Is that news? Come on—” and came back and tried to help him, taking his arm, holding to Volkhi’s mane to keep his own balance.
“Damn,” Sasha said, surprised into tears, “dammit, Pyetr!” But he could not say he was right arguing with Pyetr’s judgment: he had no idea any longer what was right or wise. It was Pyetr’s heart drove them both, and it was his own heart muddling up his thinking, he knew that it was: his own heart, his own doubts, his own weakness.
Everything’s going wrong, we’re falling into a trap, my wishes aren’t working. It’s magic we’re fighting—and I’m not Uulamets, I’m not even Eveshka, and I don’t know any more what to do. I can’t even be sure enough to stop Pyetr, Pyetr’s the hardest of us to work on, and maybe he’s the only one of us still in his right mind—
“Damn,” he heard from Pyetr. “Damn! —Volkhi! Stop!” as Volkhi stumbled in water and lurched wildly off and aside, trying to get a forefoot free—
Volkhi made it, on a terrified wish Sasha hardly felt. Sasha stood, gasping after breath while Pyetr got down on his knees in the water, feeling after the leg that well could have snapped.
“Is he all right?”
“He’s all right.”
Sasha clenched chattering teeth, wished the leg sound and wished Volkhi not to be in pain, or tired as the poor creature was—surely Volkhi was worth more than the trees or the bracken, more than foolish hares or any stupid jay. The leshys might not agree: in the leshys’ reckoning they and a nest of sparrows might be equal—but the whole forest might perish, god, the leshys themselves might be lost if a young and ignorant wizard lacked the moral courage or the wisdom to break their rules for their own sake.
He made his wish not wholly rusalkalike, to draw one life till some creature died—but, in the way Eveshka had discovered to do, drew life from everything, all the woods far and wide—
“Forgive me,” he said to the leshys, then, and deliberately widened that theft, wished Volkhi well, wished Pyetr and himself well. Magic flooded strength into them, at least enough to serve.
“What are you doing?” Pyetr asked. “Sasha?”
“Something I can’t go on doing. Something Eveshka would have my hide for.”
Pyetr might not have understood. Maybe Pyetr was too distracted to understand. “God,” was all Pyetr said; and Pyetr did not question the need for it, he only led Volkhi through to better ground and kept walking.
Sasha followed him, aches fading, breath coming, frighteningly easy. The whole forest was there to draw on, all the life they had nursed back into it.
For all their replanting—surely they could steal a little. It was not, after all, for themselves he stole. It was nothing selfish.
The leshys had to understand… please the god they had to understand.
Something glided off through the trees, ghostlike, pale. Eventually an owl called.
A ghost drifted past—one of the shapeless sort, no more than a cold spot.
“Damn!” Pyetr cried, and swatted at it. “Out! Away!”
It made a faint, angry sound. The god only knew what it said. It dogged them for a while.
But ghosts did that sometimes, in the worse places in this woods.
“Papa?” Eveshka said, feeling the change in pitch. The deck tilted sharply and something splashed.
Hush, the whisper said. Everything’s all right.
The old mast creaked against its stays, the rush of water past them grew faster and faster. The ropes hummed, or it was her father singing spells, in his tuneless way.
Remember, the ghost said to her, remember when you were five, and wanted the snow?
She did. She rubbed her nose, tucked up in her cloak and ruefully thought of the storm she had raised, that had piled up drifts high as the east eaves of the house and made the roof creak.
Snow deep and white, snow like a blanket, lying in tall, precarious ridges on the branches, branches that wishes could shake, making small blizzards…
You remember, the ghost said. You do remember. You weren’t afraid of magic then…
Maybe it was a spell on the place, maybe only that their eyes were tired enough to take the ridge in front of them for more dark behind the trees. They had crossed the small ravine and were almost on the slope before the land began to make sense, and Volkhi snorted and Babi hissed at the rotten stench a skirl of wind carried to them.
“It’s the mound,” Sasha said, and Pyetr, slinging his sword around where he could get at it:
“No nicer than it ever was.”
A smell of rot and earth hung about the side of the ridge as they climbed, up and up to a barren top where the south wind blew unchecked. Water-sound whispered to them out of the dark as they walked the crest toward the river, with the hollow, ruined mound on their left, until the ridge ended in a long slope to a flat grassy edge and black water beyond.
“No sign of the boat,” Pyetr said quietly, and after another moment: “I’m honestly not sure whether that’s good or bad. — Is the old snake in his hole down there?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t rely on anything, either. The quiet’s still with us.”
“One way to find out.”
“Don’t even talk about it!” Sasha said. He tried not to draw any more from the trees than kept them going; but when he slacked off his thievery, he felt so cold and weary his knees began to shake. Or the place frightened him that much—the mere thought of the cave down there, and the deep pit on their right, that had been part of the cave once: he wanted to know where the vodyanoi was, and was sure of nothing, as if he had his ears stopped and his eyes shut. “We’d do better to sit up here tonight and wait for daylight. The boat’s not here, that’s all we need to know, it’s all we can find out tonight.”
Pyetr said: “I want to have a word with the snake, myself.”
“Not in the dark!”
“Well, god, he’s not going to come out in the light, is he? You’ve got the salt.”