But Babi did not come back. There was nothing but the crackle of their small fire, the occasional spit of a water drop as it dripped off the canvas into the embers.
“Babi probably had a terrible scare,” Sasha said.”He’s probably not far from us, right now. He may not have been, all along.”
Sasha was trying to cheer him. Pyetr sipped from the jug, set his jaw and stared into the fire thinking-No, dammit, he refused even to think about losing Eveshka. He refused to think how they might have been tricked from the beginning, and how, after the small inconvenience of dying, Ilya Uulamets might have something in mind for them after all-some spell he might have put onto the boy, to bring them all here when he was ready—
But there was Eveshka, for one very major point of resistance in any such scheme: Eveshka had fought lifelong for independence from her father, she had made most of her young mistakes dying to get free of Uulamets, and she would never be taken in by him now. Sasha argued that, by what was written in his book, Uulamets had never been a truly bad man—to which he had retorted: He was too smart to be bad. He wanted his way—and as long as he got it he was a perfectly wonderful man.
Uulamets had wanted Sasha, too. The old man had taken Immediately to Sasha, said to himself, Aha, here’s a likely, trusting lad—
So we go find him, Pyetr thought. Which gives Uulamets his daughter, his heir, and his enemy all in one basket… And where does that leave me?
But, he argued with himself, Sasha won’t see the old thief do me in. Neither will Eveshka. He’ll have to take me with whatever deal he wants to make with them—and won’t the old man hate that?
But what deal? What do wizards want, when they’re not scared of causing storms and bringing the tsar down on them?
A man could get a headache thinking about wizards. He asked Sasha, whose firelit, pensive face was hazing more than it should in his vision, “You didn’t give me any of that damn stuff, did you?”
A look of wide brown eyes. “No. Of course not.”
Sometimes Sasha scared him. Sometimes he thought, I haven’t got a chance. The boy can do any damn thing he wants. Someday he will.
God help us all.
Pyetr lay down on his side, tucked up like a child, forgetting his blanket. Sasha got up and spread it over him, threw their other canvas over Chernevog, then sat down and pulled his own blanket about his shoulders.
He did wish Babi would come back. But Babi was not answering him any more than Eveshka was, and he was becoming increasingly anxious about trying. What Chernevog had said echoed disquietingly off his recollections of what Chernevog had written, with no ulterior motive—that hearts were dangerous to have when one dealt with magic, because magical creatures could understand hearts: it was wizards’ intentions they could not fathom: and wizards could no more fathom them. Babi was one thing. Something like the vodyanoi was quite another, and leshys did things for reasons that made no sense. What such creatures wanted was very, very different from what people would want—or at least from what good people would want.
He would not write that in his book. He wanted no more writing about magic in his book. He wanted not even to think about it, except—
Except there was something in common about their difficulties lately, and that, magically considered, argued for a common source of their troubles, a single kind of wish.
Whatever it was, it scared Babi, and absented Eveshka, and now that they were out of the silence where they might perhaps speak to her—kept her silent, absolutely cut off from them in a way he did not want to admit to Pyetr, not until there was no choice. He still hoped—but he grew more afraid with every assault he made on that silence, afraid that something unwanted might suddenly track him down the thread of that wish. He had no idea why he felt that way, or what it meant beyond a childish fear of bogles and bumps in the night, but that was the case.
The fear of an answer might prevent one, as effectively as the leshys could—that might be the reason; or it might be his own wishes saving a young and naive wizard from disaster. His thoughts kept going in circles like that—but he equally suspected that what Pyetr called his damnable worrying, laid on thick over the years, might be the protection that had saved Pyetr’s life in the early stages of this trouble, a web of wishes that had not let a shapeshifter lead Pyetr to disaster in the woods, and that had gotten them to the leshys before Chernevog got loose altogether. Pyetr might ironically be the hardest of them for someone else’s magic to get at, after all, seeing he had had two wizards anxious as hens over him for years.
Perhaps the wizards involved had worried too little, after all, about themselves.
One assumed, most particularly, that Eveshka had been taking care of herself; one assumed…
But Eveshka had grown increasingly fey and difficult as the years passed, had worried Pyetr and worried over Pyetr so very passionately that Sasha could see now, increasingly since Pyetr had been alone with him, that Pyetr was—
Was—finally—the man he had left Vojvoda with, a Pyetr, however distressed, all of a sudden thinking again about what would do and how he would deal with things instead of, inevitably, always, what ’Veshka would think.
That idea scared him. It scared him terribly. He thought: What did she do to him?
He thought: ’Veshka’s been scared all along. She wanted so much to make Pyetr happy… but her running off into the woods, her tempers—
She was so terribly scared about using what she knows.
Magic, rusalka magic, not wizardry.
God…
Both of us have kept our hearts.
17
There was a terrible crash, the boat hit something, the tiller bar jolted. Eveshka caught at it, looked up in a fright—in dark, in woods, with branches sweeping over the bow and breaking against the hull and the sail. She wanted the boat free, wanted some way left to extricate it from its predicament before it lodged itself where even wizardry could not back it out.
But her father was there, whispering, “It’s all right, it’s all right, daughter, This is as far as the boat will go.”
“Where?” She saw nothing but shadowy trees, willows weeping into the water, a black tangle that ensnared the boat so completely she had no hope of freeing it. She wanted Pyetr with her—and desperately wanted Sasha—for the merest selfish instant, with the most terrible feeling that she might not see them again. She was going deeper and deeper into something that, in the night and on a strange shore, seemed to have no shape and no end, and if she had gone willingly at first, for Pyetr’s sake— now she was no longer sure she had a chance at all. “Where are we going?” she asked. “Papa?”
Like a small child again, angry and betrayed.
“Don’t doubt,” her father’s ghost whispered. “Haven’t I taught you better than that?”
He was very real in the night, a shadow, a substance, against a curtain of black willow boughs. The boat moved slowly, its bow entrapped. That was real, too.
Her father’s shadow-shape changed then, seemed to sink and flow away from her.
“Pupa?” she said, and found herself alone, standing on the deck of a boat shrouded in willows.
“I never could advise you,” the ghost whispered from some distance. “That’s a dangerous way to grow up, girclass="underline" you always assumed the right course was opposite my advice. You called it freedom—but you were still taking your direction from someone else without understanding it. Haven’t you an idea of your own, daughter?”
“You never gave me a chance to know what I wanted!”
“You never could tell my wishes from yours. So you fought everything, even your own good sense. Do you understand now? You’d better.”