“Well, then, we don’t have to worry about her, do we? She’d handle everything. No need of help. We shouldn’t have left the house. We can go back home and sit and wait.”
“Pyetr, you know what the truth is: she’s scared to death for you. Yes, she’s got her heart, and she knows anything that want! her or me is going to go straight for you, that’s why she didn’t just ask me to go, she wants us looking out for each other. She can’t work with people. She can’t even work with me. She gets scared. Sometimes I think—” He had never brought it up. He took a breath and took the chance with Pyetr. “I think maybe she’s scared of slipping back again.”
Pyetr looked straight at him this time, with all his attention. “To being a ghost?”
“To wanting things. To wanting things so much she can’t…”
“She could stop. She did stop. She could have killed me, and she did stop.”
“With you she did, because you were the first person in all the world who made her think of somebody else. But if she weren’t alive, if she hadn’t come back all the way to life and she were with you every day—I’m honestly not sure she could have been that good, this long. I’m not sure anybody’s that strong, not to have a selfish thought sometime, even if you know it’s going to hurt someone—and sometimes if you have hurt someone—if you’ve done something really, terribly awful—your wishes won’t work very well.” He was thinking of his own house, seeing the fire in the windows and hearing the voices. “I can put out fires a lot better than I can wish them to start. And if she’s thinking of using her magic—I don’t think she wants anyone she loves near her.”
Pyetr stared grimly into the fire and took another drink. A big one. Then he capped the jug. “Well, I know what I’m going to do, friend, it’s very simple. No magic. Nothing of the sort. I just want within reach of Chernevog. The leshys had the right idea in the first place. Old Misighi was for breaking him in little bits. I should have helped.”
Chernevog’s own wishes might well have prevented that, Sasha thought; but he kept that unsettling thought to himself; he had poured enough into Pyetr’s lap tonight, and he was not at all sure he had made Pyetr understand him, about magic and rusalkas. He could wish that Pyetr did. But that broke promises— and that wish itself might go astray, Pyetr having no way to feel what it was to have wishes work—what it felt like to wish while one’s enemy wished, fester and fester, until there was no time to think and no time to mend things…
Until the power grew so much and the confusion so great—
Sasha shivered, a twitch of his shoulders. Across the fire, Pyetr settled down in his blankets. Sasha lay back on his own mat and pulled his blanket to his chin, staring up at the sky, and listened to Volkhi moving nearby.
Thank the god most of the baggage had survived.
Thank the god they had Babi with them to guard their sleep. Babi had posted himself between them and the water, as good a watchdog as they could have.
He only wished he knew where the vodyanoi was tonight; and recalling the bannik—why it had come here or why it had power here. Maybe, he thought, the bannik’s behavior was like Babi’s: Babi had no reason to leave a dvorovoi’s duty either, faring off with them about the woods, except that being a wizard’s dvorovoi seemed to make Babi different. Certainly being a wizard’s bannik—might account for almost any odd behavior.
Insoluble by any reason. His thoughts were growing random and chaotic. He worried whether Pyetr had understood anything.
He could still change his mind about what he had said, at least he could wish Pyetr to forget specific things he had said—but that was meddling, too; the god only knew what damage it might do—even put Pyetr off his guard and endanger his life. One could not find a path without a trap in it, and he was scared to the bottom of his soul that he had said things that Eveshka would not forgive and Pyetr might never, ever forget.
God, he did not want to hurt them. Either one.
“Watch us, Babi,” he whispered, before he set his own mind to drift, and deliberately breaking a promise, began to wish them both disposed to sleep…
After which the earth seemed to move and pitch under him like the river.
A ring of thorns…
A cold bed, a hard one—he felt the breeze and knew the touch of sun and moon; was aware of the movement of the stars…
It was the motion of the horse he still felt. It was the dizziness one got from gazing into the heavens—
Sky overhead, blaze of sun through branches, stars glittering through a net of thorns, a long succession of days and nights, careering madly across the heavens…
He sat upright, caught himself on his hands as Babi hissed and barreled into his chest, holding him and burying his head under his chin. He hugged Babi back, still trembling, not wanting at all to think how close that had been.
God, he thought, that was Chernevog, the thorns, the stone, the days and the nights. I’m dreaming his dream.
I nearly did it, I nearly waked him myself… God, I’m a fool!
In the same instant he felt a prickling at his nape, looked toward a sudden sense of presence in the dark at his elbow, fearing the slither of something large and snakelike—
There was indeed a shadow, in which eyes-shimmered gold-filmed red, reflecting firelight. But the shape was human, a spiky-haired, ragged urchin.
What do you want? he asked it, while Babi clung to him and hissed like a spilled kettle. The bannik shifted forward, grinned at him, resting bony arms on bony knees. Squatting there in the likeness of a starveling child, it made a rippling move of its fingers.
Sound of hoof beats… pale horse running under ghostly trees.
What are you? he asked it. Bannik, what’s your name? Are you our bannik—or are you something else?
It grinned at him. Its teeth were sharp as a rat’s. It spread its fingers again.
Spatter of blood on a golden leaf—a single drop, shatteringly ominous…
Perhaps he dreamed that he had dreamed. Now he rode through woods, trees rushing past him, a horse’s pale mane flying in his face. Everything was twilight and terror, and falling, golden leaves. He was not sure where the horse was carrying him, or what pursued them, or where hope was, except in getting away from this place before the light finally failed.
The leaves fell, the sun came and went in patterns of dark and light, following a curve across the sky.
Trees stretched their branches, thorns wove like serpents — and slowed to graceful leisure. Leaves unfurled, more slowly, so slowly finally the eye could no longer see them move.
Then one droplet hung still, still, on the thorn, impaled there…
Eventually it fell.
The next drop gathered. One began to think, if one wished, it might stay a little longer, fall just so.
One would know by that small sign, that one was no longer quite asleep.
11
Pyetr put water on to boil—tea, Sasha asked for this morning, late as they had waked, tea, for the god’s sake, in this damnable vicinity, a delay hard to bear, considering the vodyanoi missing from his den, and Eveshka on the river—
In spite of which considerations he himself had slept like a stone last night, suspiciously like someone’s intervention, while Sasha complained of unrestful dreams and wrote furiously. But if one dealt with wizards, patience was a necessity, and if the lad wanted tea while he did some quick scribbling in his book, lea Sasha got: it was at least something for a man to do who had no choice but to wait.