So he said, when he was riding alongside Sasha’s mare, with Pyetr leading his horse, “I suppose you’ve both been thinking how to be rid of me.”
Sasha gave him a suspicious look.
“I don’t know what you want,” Chernevog said. “But I’ll agree to anything.” He added, not without a certain queasiness in his stomach: “There’s no trick in it, not at all.”
“And a pig has wings,” Pyetr said shortly. Chernevog ignored him, asking Sasha quietly:
“What will you do? Everything Uulamets wants? Forever? You could free yourselves from him. You could have anything you want.”
“Like you?” Pyetr jibed. But he was patient and prepared (his time, to deal with Pyetr: he said, directing himself to Sasha,
“You probably realize you have me to trade—but that’s the worst thing you can do. You’ve won: you’ve put me in a terrible position, and you’ve won everything you could possibly want, if you’ll only listen.”
“Are we down to serious bribes now?” Sasha asked.
“Listen to me! Magic doesn’t know anything, it isn’t alive, it Isn’t dead, it just is, and the things that can give you magic don’t know what they want in this world without us to show them. If you’ve any sense at all you won’t give me up to them—”
“I’d trade you,” Pyetr said darkly, “for a mouldy turnip.”
“You’re not understanding me! They can use us the way we use them. I’m telling you the leshys couldn’t hold out any longer and you’re being fools if you think you can. Things like that go straight for weakness—mine; and ignorance—yours; and the god knows who else.”
“I don’t use your kind of magic,” Sasha said. “I don’t want it. It can’t touch me.”
“It can touch Uulamets. It can touch Eveshka. A rusalka’s whole existence is magical. It was sorcery brought her back. And it’s one magic. It’s all the same. Will you say you’ve nothing to lose?”
“We don’t need you,” Pyetr said.
“You’ll lose her. You’ll lose her first—Pyetr next; and yourself, inevitably…”
Pyetr turned and stopped the horse.”You murdered my wife, you damned dog, you’re responsible for this desolation, you tried to kill me—and you want us to listen?”
“Pyetr,” Sasha cautioned him.
“He’s right,” Chernevog said. “Indeed, he’s right. All those things I did—and some you don’t know. But now I need you. That makes a difference.”
Pyetr’s jaw dropped. Then he said, backing up a step: “I don’t think I ever heard anyone put it quite that plainly before. —God, Sasha, we’re dealing with an honest man!”
“Sasha,” Chernevog said, “Alexander Vasilyevitch… you know what I’m saying. Nothing’s an accident. The leshys’ fading wasn’t an accident. I know what we’re dealing with. It cheats, and it lies, and it doesn’t give a damn for your wishes. But it does regard force. You have that. All you have to do is use it.”
Sasha said nothing for a moment. The horses shifted restlessly.
Pyetr said, “It’s a snake, Sasha. It always was, it always will be.”
But Sasha was listening, Sasha was thinking. Chernevog said, so, so carefully, shivering between self-restraint and fear of denial, “Ask anything you want of me, Pyetr Ilyitch. There’s nothing I’ll refuse you.”
“Get off my horse!”
He slid down, stood eye to eye with Pyetr, felt Sasha’s fear wish him not—
Maybe Pyetr realized a danger, too. Pyetr’s jaw set and he ducked past him, flung the reins over and swung up with an enviable skill.
From that vantage Pyetr looked angrily down at him.
Chernevog said, with all sincerity, “You could save your own life, Pyetr Ilyitch—you could stop all of this; you could stop it in a moment—but he won’t trust you.”
Chernevog of course wanted him to ask Sasha how, and why he could rescue them, which was, Pyetr decided, good enough reason not to do it—for one thing because Chernevog was wishing at him and he thought it was time to worry about those wishes If he did one single thing Chernevog wanted; and for another because Chernevog plainly wanted to cause trouble between them, and he was not going to give Chernevog the satisfaction of seeing him worry.
So he ordered Chernevog to walk, he and Sasha followed on horseback keeping an eye on him, and he thought again that, whatever ties wizards might have on each other, a good bit of rope would make sense.
He said as much to Sasha. But Sasha said no, Chernevog did not want to escape them.
All of which sat in the back of his mind and rattled from time to time. It was the hardest thing in the world for him to have a question and not ask it, and it did occur to him to wonder why If there was no truth at all to what Chernevog had said to him, Sasha had not bothered right then to dismiss it as a lie. He knew Sasha’s bad habits very well, one of which was taking all the blame for troubles, and another of which was a tendency—he had surely caught it from Uulamets—to keep his worry to himself, whether to save his friends anxiety or whether because he simply forgot he had not spoken out loud.
So he rode beside Sasha with never a word, but, damn, it bothered him.
“You can’t hear anything,” Pyetr asked Sasha, in the brief privacy they had as they stopped for water. Sasha splashed water into his face and down his neck, put his hands over his face and made one brief, futile try.
It was worse, that cold feeling, the further they rode into this young forest, and worst of all when he listened for some answer from Eveshka. He was a fool not to tell Pyetr outright what he was feeling: he knew he was; but the look on Pyetr’s face, that both hoped and forgave him his failure—how could one say to that, I’m sorry, I’m scared, Pyetr, she’s lost, she’s gone and I don’t want to go on rattling that door, Pyetr?
Pyetr would take that risk. He had no doubt of it.
—Head over heart, young fool…
What if it is Uulamets, god, what if it is Uulamets that’s after us? Eveshka said I think his thoughts, I do the things he’d choose—
What if, the way Pyetr thinks, he wants us all—back? Is that what we’re following?
“I can’t hear anything,” he said, and saw Pyetr sigh and shake his head. “Possibly,” he started to say, and Pyetr looked up and he had to go on, fool that he was, temporizing. “Possibly it’s her choice. She could have decided—” The idea struck him as he was talking, and he blundered into it without time to think it through: “—She could just have decided the leshys had a reason for not talking, so she isn’t going to, either. She might not trust what she hears from us. I’m not honestly sure—” He started to say—That I’d trust what I hear from her. It was true. But he swallowed it unsaid. And, oh, god, but Pyetr listened to what he surmised; he fervently wished he had kept his mouth shut.
Meanwhile Chernevog was washing his face a little upstream from them, dipping up water with torn and surely painful hands. Perhaps he was listening, one way or another, to everything they said and half they thought. One could think very easily of pouring another cup of tea down him, the way Pyetr said, just sling him over a horse and silence him and his offers and his arguments—at least until they found Uulamets.
“Time we got moving,” Pyetr said, dusted off his hands on his knees and got up, looking at Chernevog.
But Pyetr stopped then, gave a deep breath, still staring ahead of him, and put his hands in his belt. “The snake wants me to ask you,” he said, “what he was talking about. I don’t want to, if you don’t want to say. But if it’s ’Veshka’s safety—and there is something I can do, you understand, Sasha, it’s something I’d really like to know, myself.”