“It already is working,” Sasha said, in a low voice. “I have this awful feeling—that we need to find ’Veshka. I need her myself, Pyetr, I really need her help—the books don’t tell me everything—”
“God.” He heard the fear shaking Sasha’s voice, grabbed his arm and held it hard. He had loaded too much onto the boy, everything had, for days, he saw that. Sasha was exhausted, white-faced. “Let’s not panic, shall we?”
Sasha got a breath. “I’m not Uulamets, Pyetr.”
“Thank the god.”
“I think,” Sasha said on a second deep breath, “right now, you’d be a lot safer if I were.”
He squeezed Sasha’s arm. “I’ve every confidence in you. You’re doing fine, boy. You’re on your feet, he’s not, you’re doing perfectly fine.”
Several more breaths. “I keep thinking about the boat. I keep thinking that ’Veshka… might look this way right now if she wanted to. But she doesn’t. I don’t know why.”
Now Pyetr’s stomach was truly upset, and he looked narrowly at Chernevog, wondering how far this whole thing went and whether the wiser course was not after all to kill him without warning.
But Chernevog lifted his face just then with a haunted look the match of Sasha’s, and said: “Eveshka’s outside the leshys’ spell. It’s fading. It’s only here, now.”
No more damn sense than any other wizard. “Here,” Pyetr echoed, “what, ‘here’? “ and looking at Sasha: “What in hell’s he saying?”
But at the moment he had two wizards on his hands, both looking off into nowhere and murmuring things like, in Chernevog’s case:
“They haven’t the strength…” And in Sasha’s: “Pyetr, the horses are coming.” An ordinary man just gathered up the baggage and hoped for something very soon to make sense—but he could very well wish the two wizards in question were not unanimous.
15
Volkhi turned up first. Then Missy arrived out of the woods, looking at them across Volkhi’s back as if she were none so sure now about anything she saw—ordinary trees having lately proved unreliable.
But of Babi there was no sign at all, and Sasha found that fact both understandable and worrisome. The leshys’ silence was rapidly drawing in on itself, encompassing less and less, twining through this last small grove with a feeling angrier by the moment, and he kept thinking, while the horses were on their way to them, It may get worse here, it’s only a handful of them will talk to wizards at best.
He said to Pyetr:
“They’re down to protecting themselves now: we’ve got only so long to get to the river. After that, I wouldn’t be near this place.”
He scared Pyetr with his vagueness, he knew that he did, but he was thinking, desperately listening all around him: he had no reassurance to give and words came hard to describe things without substance or sense: there was foreignness, confusion as if whatever maintained the silence about them was also smothering the clear thinking essential to wizardry, the god only grant Chernevog was no less addled at the moment.
He thought not: Chernevog’s wishes tumbled through his awareness, fear-crippled, wanting escape, wanting this, wanting that, going nowhere. Chernevog continually assailed him with promises: Chernevog swore he would defend them and Eveshka with his wizardry, Chernevog railed at him as a young fool who was confusing him and killing all of them—
Uulamets taught you! he could hear Chernevog saying, clear as spoken words. God, boy, he stifled everything in you he couldn’t use, he wanted someone to use, don’t you see it? He failed with me and he failed with Eveshka, and here you are in our place. He wanted his own way, and that damned wish of his is still going, Sasha Misurov!
“Let me alone,” he muttered, taking Missy’s trailing reins. He flung them over her neck, slung the packs up, wishing Missy to stand still. He kept trying to reach Eveshka through the silence, he kept worrying over the leshys’ riddles—and wondering in a certain cold corner of his mind what it was going to feel like if they did find Uulamets: Eveshka already accused him of thinking her father’s thoughts, echoing her father’s advice.
“He set you to do what he wanted done,” Chernevog said aloud, behind his back. “Uulamets was no one’s friend, you surely knew that. Don’t you remember?”
It was not childlike bewilderment he was hearing now. It was a harder, clearer presence. He looked at Kavi Chernevog.
“You’re dealing with magic,” Chernevog said. “He was. And the god only knows what might have taken him.”
Sasha heaved himself up to Missy’s back and looked down at him. “Let me alone!” he said, and Pyetr came leading Volkhi and roughly shoved Chernevog away from Missy, saying: “You walk. You’re not getting your hands on either one of us.”
Chernevog might have resisted that shove if sudden anger had given him clear direction: the thought gave Sasha a sudden chill-but Chernevog did nothing and Pyetr, unscathed, handed him up the sack with the pots and the books.
God, the books…
“Pyetr,” he whispered, hugging that sack close, “be careful of him. Don’t touch him. Don’t do things like that!”
“I’m all right. It’s all right, boy, just take care of us, hear?”
Pyetr turned away. Sasha settled the bag with the books and his little pots carefully in front of him. Chernevog stood waiting as Pyetr took Volkhi’s reins and swung up to Volkhi’s back—and in a moment’s clarity Sasha thought of wishing Volkhi to go to the river, Volkhi’s nose seeming a better guide for them than erratic wizardry in this numbing, angry hush. “Let Volkhi go,” he said to Pyetr, then. “He knows the way.”
“Good,” Pyetr said with an uncomfortable look, and stopped holding Volkhi in.
One did try not to sound like Uulamets, one earnestly tried not to, but thoughts grew difficult and details kept trying to slip past his attention.
He thought, while Chernevog walked in front of Missy, was II me or was it Chernevog who thought of wishing the horse?
He thought of a ball of white fluff, a hungry baby-owl mouth—
He drove that image out of his mind with a deliberate thought of the stone and the ring of thorns. He knew where the thought must have come from. He listened to Missy a moment, smelled after some scent of the river—if he wanted, he could catch such things for a heartbeat or two, more wholesome than listening to mice and foxes, attention so flooded with smells and sounds and Nights that a gust of wind was cataclysm—one dared eavesdrop only by moments, or one risked panic…
But Chernevog slid into his thoughts, wizard-fashion, walking beside Missy with his head meekly bowed:
Draga set Owl to catch me. I was a stupid boy. She wanted me to find that nest, I really think so. I suspect she killed his mother, all with the notion I’d set my heart on him, because she had a spell on Owl, and she had that until I killed her.
That’s horrible, he thought, sorry for Chernevog, it was so ugly a trick: he thought of Vojvoda, and his own upbringing, at best neglected, never at worst, mat cruelly used. He remembered all too vividly what it was to be unwelcome in a place… but never what it was to be trapped.
Chernevog asked: What do you suppose Uulamets wanted you to have, that you had to fear losing?
He wished Chernevog silent then, but with a sudden sinking remembrance of Uulamets threatening Pyetr, making Pyetr’s life the price of his help—
A cup shattering, in Pyetr’s hand, Pyetr doing nothing more than arguing with Uulamets—
Himself saying, terrified: Pyetr, that could as well have been your heart…
Uulamets had been a good wizard, virtuous because, although Uulamets had made his threats against Pyetr as plain as a shattered cup, although Uulamets had most particularly hated the idea of Pyetr being courted by his ghostly daughter—Uulamets had not, after all, killed Pyetr and he certainly had not wrung everything he could have gotten from his student.