“God, of course, you’re our lifelong friend, you want the very best for us!”
“Pyetr,” Sasha said anxiously—but Chernevog said calmly, with a wave of his hand in Pyetr’s direction,
“I can’t blame him. I only hope you aren’t as abysmally stupid as Uulamets was. He didn’t know what he was doing, and if he’s delivered himself to something that can use him—I don’t know what he might be by now. I’m sure you don’t.”
“The leshys trust him.”
“I don’t know what the leshys understand and don’t understand, and I doubt you do. I’m telling you—”
“You’re telling us what you damn well want us to believe!” Pyetr said. “Sasha—”
Sasha pleaded for Pyetr’s patience with a look and maybe a wish, he had no least idea, but he was afraid not to listen to what Chernevog might say, foolish and dangerous as that attention might be.
And Chernevog, bitterly: “You’ve killed Owl, you’ve put me in the same trap you’ve put yourselves in—dabble in wizardry to its limits, but you don’t ever deal in magic with your heart in reach, boy! Magic can’t wish on its own, magic can’t imagine nature—but if you’re fool enough to let my enemies get to me as I am now, then I’ll remember you, damned if I won’t, along with everything else I had to do with.”
A chill went down Sasha’s back; he forgot even to breathe— and Pyetr’s hand was on his sword. But Chernevog said, further,
“Boy, let me free. Something’s hunting us, now that we’re outside the leshys’ keeping—or if it’s not yet, it will be, and if I fell, the first thing I’ll trade them is two fools, hear me? I won’t have any choice.”
He remembered Uulamets saying, Doubt is Chernevog’s weapon…
He said, coldly, from Missy’s height, “I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Arrogant young fool “
“No!” Sasha cried, as Pyetr went for his sword: it occurred to him that dead, Chernevog was no more catchable than mist or water. He gave that thought to Pyetr, and said to Chernevog, leaning on Missy’s white shoulders while she cropped a wildflower or two, “What would the vodyanoi give, I wonder, to know what I could tell him about you? I’ve read your book. I doubt he could read it for himself.”
Chernevog went a shade paler, wiped his lips with the back of a finger. “You’d be an absolute fool to do that.”
“Not if you’re going to work against us anyway. You don’t want me dead, Kavi Chernevog, and let me tell you this: you don’t want any harm to Pyetr or ’Veshka, either, because you don’t want my heart taking over my good sense, now, do you? —Because when you care about something besides yourself, Kavi Chernevog, you take care of your friends, and you don’t want anything happening to them. I don’t need your magic. Wizardry is enough for me—because I believe you, I believe you made one terrible mistake and you’d give everything you have to be where I am.”
“To be a young fool?”
“A young fool still has all his choices left, doesn’t he?”
Chernevog said nothing then, only stepped back from Missy in angry, offended quiet. Sasha thought: God, I shouldn’t have said those things to him, shouldn’t have talked that way to him… whatever he looks to be, he’s a hundred years older than I am and he knows things I don’t even imagine. God, make him mad, Sasha Vasilyevitch, give him a reason if he needed one— he’s nothing if not vain.
He said, with Chernevog scowling and Pyetr looking at him us if he had taken leave of his senses, “None of this is getting us to the river, is it?”
“Right,” Pyetr said on a breath, as if that was all he could find to say, and took up Volkhi’s reins and swung up again.
Pyetr rode closer to him after that, herding Chernevog in front of both of them. Pyetr was worried, that was clear, and Sasha thought in despair that if he had his choice he would stop right now and write everything down and study for days to see if there was a way out of the wishes he was making one after the other.
But things when they were going wrong never waited for slow wits. That was what Pyetr had been trying to tell him in these most important years of his growing up: Get out of the damn books, boy.
He thought, I had three years, I didn’t know that was all the time I was ever going to have. I thought everything would come from the books.
Everything can’t depend on me. God, this is all a mistake…
He felt for the bag at Missy’s shoulder, the precious one with the books, he laid his hand on the oiled canvas.
Woven branches. Branches over sand and water…
They mounted a wooded hill. Gray sky showed between the trees, as if the world ended in nothing but cloud. The sound out of that gulf might have been wind in leaves, but it was the river whispering to them.
Chernevog stopped at the crest, silhouetted against the gray light. Volkhi took the last climb with a sudden effort and Pyetr reined back abruptly, saying, breathlessly, “God.”
Missy made the hill at her own pace and stopped at Volkhi’s side, giving Sasha his own look at gray river, gray sky, a thin, long ribbon of vines and logs that arched out and vanished into the mist above the river.
16
“It’s our way across,” Sasha declared, as if that thin wooden arch were the most wonderful sight in the world. “I thought of logs, myself,” Pyetr said, with a fluttering in his stomach, “maybe floating across—you know, keeping the horses up, rigging something with canvas and rope—the river’s not that fast here…”
“It’s leshy work. They made this for us. They planned for our crossing!”
“Good, it’s leshy work. Tell that to the horses. —They’re not going out on that damn thing, for the god’s sake. Look at it!”
“You can do it. You rode The Cockerel’s porch on the Ice—”
“I was drunk, boy!” He saw Chernevog gazing out at that thread of a bridge, arms folded, with the god only knew what kind of ill wishes already shaping in his head. “It sways in the wind. Look at it! It’s only wishes keep that thing up as it is!”
“The horses will go. It won’t fall, Pyetr. We won’t. I won’t let us.”
“God,” he said, and turned and patted Volkhi’s neck and apologized—for riding him across The Cockerel’s porch, too, while he was at it.
But Sasha was preparing to lead Missy up that muddy slope.
Pyetr took a deep breath, said, “Come on, Volkhi, lad,” and motioned Chernevog to go ahead of them.
Chernevog shrugged and trudged up the soggy earthen mound to the head of the bridge.
The slope was hard enough for man or horse—Pyetr helped where he could, got out of the way where he could not, and reached the top where Chernevog stood in the wind and the mist.
It was split logs, whole trees torn lengthwise by main force, cobbled together with vines and wishes, and supported from beneath—god, one did not even want to think about the security of those braces—with whole trees set in the river-bed, their broken stubs of branches sticking out about the bridge at all angles.
Two logs wide—at most, and sometimes. Beyond Chernevog the arch of splintered wood disappeared outright into mist and distance.
“I’m coming!” Sasha called out from below.
Meaning there was another horse coming up and this one had to move.
“Come on, lad,” Pyetr said, and tugged gently on the reins, coaxing Volkhi up to the logs while Chernevog turned and walked out onto that splintery, uneven surface.
Volkhi came, looking it over, a first few uncertain steps. Pyetr kept the reins slack, let Volkhi see where he was putting his feet, trusting wizardry would keep Volkhi calm—and the bridge steady. Personally he had no wish to look down, but he had to, at least as far as the surface of the logs, to be sure of Volkhi’s footing, to ease him over the joints. Step by slow step, while sweat ran on his face and the wind chilled it.