Yvgenie

by CJ Cherryh

  Unfair, unfair to wait all year for these few days—

  —and have always to come home at dark, when he's most here—

  She reached the safe ground of the ferry landing, beside the boat and cast a look back down the shore. She saw him lift his hand, then, slim figure made of mist, and saw Owl glide to a perch on his fist.

  Then they both were gone.

  She turned and ran up the path to the hedge, and struggled through the gap into the sunset yard where her house stood, rustic and weathered, across from her uncle Sasha's house on the hill. She pounded up the slanted wooden walk-up to the wide porch, opened the door—carefully: she had learned that lesson most distressfully—and slipped inside.

  Her mother had her pale blond braids up under a kerchief, her sleeves rolled up, a stirring-spoon in hand, and a look on her face that said dinner was well toward done and a certain daughter was going to do all the dishes tonight by herself.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ilyana said in a small voice. ‘Shall I bring up the dishwater?’

  ‘Bring your father in while you're about it! God! 'Just out to the horses, dear...' As good invite the horses in for dinner!’ A wave of the spoon. ‘Out, out, nobody cares when dinner's ready, as well throw everything together in a pot and boil it to mush, no one notices.’

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  ‘And ring the bell while you're about it! Your uncle's probably given up on dinner by now.’

  ‘Yes, mother!’ She snatched up the bucket on her way out the door, rang the bell on the porch and ran down the walk-up and around the corner of the house to the rain barrel, within sight of the garden and the bathhouse, and the stable fence. Black Volkhi and spotted Missy and her filly Patches were having their supper, while Babi sat on the gate post, looking like a fat black cat at the moment (though he was not) while her father seemed to be fixing the gate latch.

  ‘Mother wants us,’ she called out, and her father called back, ‘She wants her radishes, too, mouseling. Your filly's figured out the gate.''

  She wished Patches not to think about the gate and her mother's green garden, all too close to the stable. Last week it had been the laundry, drying on the line. And she had had to do it all over again, by herself.

  ‘I've wished her not to,’ she said in her own defense.

  ‘Wishes don't seem to get between horses and gardens,’ her father said, and hammered a peg in. ‘There. That might work a fortnight.’

  She dipped the bucket into the rain barrel and poured for the washbasin on its stand next the barrel. Her father came and washed his face and arms, and, watching him, she thought (her mind was full of thoughts this evening, tumbling one over the other like foxes) how her friend's hands were slender like that.

  ‘I'll carry it,’ he said, when he had thrown out the dirty water onto the ground and she had filled the pail to the top again. ‘Watch out, you'll get mud on your feet. Your mother's floors—’

  It was always mother's floors. Even if it was their house. She swept her skirts out of the way to watch her boots and the puddles, and matched strides with his long legs as far as the front of the house, panting as she went.

  ‘Where have you been running from?’ he asked her, and her heart fairly turned inside out with guilt.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, hating that feeling, ashamed because he could not really tell if she lied—and yet she chose the lies she told him more carefully than any of the truths she told her mother: ‘I was walking. My eyes got used to the dark. I had no idea it was so late.’

  ‘You weren't down by the river, were you?’

  Oh, god, she hated lying to him. ‘No.’

  ''Your mother worries, you know.''

  ‘Mother always worries.''

  ‘It's going to be clear tomorrow, weather's holding—why don't we gather up your uncle and go riding tomorrow?’

  Babi skipped along at her feet, enthusiastic about riding or about supper, difficult to tell. And she had wanted to go, oh, she would have died to go a handful of days ago, but her father had had the garden to do and the stable roof to mend and uncle Sasha had been at his books and then it had rained for three days—so now her father asked.

  She said, miserably, ‘No. I can't.’

  ‘Can't, is it? What appointment have you got that's so pressing?’

  ‘I don't help mother enough.’ It was lame. It was the only thing she could think of on the spur of the moment. She said, all in a rush, face burning. ‘I'd better set the table,’ and rushed ahead of him and around the corner and up to the porch.

  Pyetr Kochevikov considered his daughter's departing flurry of pale blue skirts and flying blond braids with a certain impression of having misheard something, somewhere, several days gone: Father, please may I take Patches out, please may I go riding, nothing will happen to us, please, father—

  Likely nothing would have happened if he had let her go out alone, but the thought of a young rider, even wizardry gifted, on a very scarcely ridden young horse, made him a little anxious about turning her loose on her own, the rider in question being his own flesh and blood—

  Himself, Pyetr Ditch Kochevikov, who had not been reputed for sanity or sense in his youth: he knew the things she might do, he had them listed one and each. Eveshka's heritage had not been at fault when they had found Ilyana standing on the bathhouse roof (‘So I can see the clouds!'') or the time she had ridden Volkhi off into the woods (‘I wasn't lost! He was!’) or the year she had wanted a horse of her own so much that two grown-up wizards' spells had gone awry and old Missy the carter's horse had turned up in foal to high-spirited Volkhi. They had heard nothing else but ‘When can I ride her?'' from the time the filly's feet had hit the ground; and, this being the long-awaited season for that—

  I don't help mother enough?

  Damn!

  Sasha came through the front gate and walked up to him. Sasha peered off in the direction he had been staring, off toward the woods and nowhere, and said, ‘What were you staring at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘With the bucket?’

  He had forgotten he was holding it. He changed hands— the rope was cutting into his fingers—and said, seriously: ‘Sasha, something's going on with my daughter.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don't know.’

  ‘Why do you think that?''

  ‘Well, god, if I knew that, then I'd know, wouldn't I?’

  Sometimes Pyetr made outstanding sense. Sometimes he did not. On this occasion, it surely meant that Eveshka's distress had gotten to him—with an upset daughter who was certainly the finish on matters. Pyetr might have known better what to do with a son, Sasha thought, climbing up to the porch at Pyetr's heels: Pyetr had had experience enough in the streets of Vojvoda to keep himself well ahead of any single fifteen-year-old boy, possibly even two of them; and he might have been very solemn and very strict and persuaded Eveshka to give way to his opinions more often with a son; while a daughter seemed the god's own judgment on Pyetr the gambler's son, who had been familiar with more of Vojvoda's bedrooms than (Sasha was sure) Pyetr had ever, ever confessed to him, let alone his wife; and god forbid Pyetr should explain such escapades to his daughter.

  Pyetr had a wizard wife, Pyetr had a daughter fifteen-going-on-forever, it still seemed so few years; but those years had set their mark on Pyetr: made him content, true; happier, Pyetr swore, than ever in his misspent life. So where had Pyetr gotten those lines along his brow, that in the right angle of the sunlight, one could just this year begin to notice?

  But one did not wish things to be different. A wizard got his wishes, that was exactly the trouble: his wishes came true, many of them not quite in the way the wizard in question intended; and if a young wizard learned nothing else as he grew older, it was that he was lucky to have gotten older—past all those youthful years when wishes seemed safer and more possible than they ever would seem again, when a youngster had no second thoughts nor deeper thoughts than I need and I want and I will.

  They had br
ought the girl safely this far. She had done no harm, nor would want harm to any living creature, so far as they could see: if anyone threatened Pyetr, perhaps—indeed, perhaps. But Pyetr's safety with a wizard child was what had most worried them; and child she was ceasing to be, most clearly so of late.

  ‘About time,’ Eveshka said as they came trailing in to a supper already on the table. ‘There, dear, in the corner.’— This to Pyetr, with the bucket. ‘God, your boots.’

  ‘I'll take them off,’ Pyetr said, leaned on the wall by the door and began to do that.

  ‘No, no, your soup's getting cold, you'll get your hands dirty, god, sit down—’

  Sasha sat. It seemed only prudent. Eveshka was constantly moving in the kitchen, busy about things he did not think quite needed urgent attention with supper at hand, although he would confess that the quality of housekeeping in his small cottage could bear a little of that zeal. He had admittedly grown careless, lost in his books: Eveshka accused him frequently on that account. Pyetr said they should go riding and Eveshka said he should tidy up the shelves—but somehow the shelves never did get dusted and Missy grew fat on apples and too much honeyed grain—which, to be sure, Missy deserved: she had seen things quite terrible for a horse, and Missy should have apples and Volkhi's company and the filly's forever and laze in the sun and get fat, for his opinion of priorities in the world—

  Get out of those damned books, Pyetr would say. Smell the wind, for the god's sake! And Pyetr would take Volkhi over some jump that made his heart stop, and made him wish—

  Wish warmheartedly and with tears in his eyes today for all the world to be right, with Pyetr, with Eveshka, with the daughter who, thank the god, was only half-wizard. He could not tell why such melancholy had afflicted him this afternoon. It came of having a heart, perhaps—which his teacher and late master had said could never be.

  He loved them all: they were family to him, who had had not a single relative worth revisiting. Eveshka absolutely insisted he come down from the hill for supper every evening—swearing he would starve, else. The truth, he was well sure, was that she could not bear looking at his kitchen, or eating his cooking, and truth was, too, he had half-forgotten how to cook in the last near score of years, when once he had been quite good at it. His hearth was always out, he absolutely could not hold a fire—

  And this house was always warm with light and voices.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he said, smelling the soup.

  Eveshka was pleased. ‘Wonderful,’ Pyetr echoed dutifully, and sat down at the table, seeming lost in thinking.

  Daughters did that to a man, too, Sasha decided: it was probably a very good thing for him to live as isolated and as peacefully as he did, devoted to his studies and well away from women's business and household work. He had his work with the leshys, which was important, and which took him sometimes afield—less so, lately, true; but he had his books and his studies, which were extremely important, and he had Pyetr and his family right down the hill for the evenings, which, with Eveshka's preoccupation with tidiness battling the chaos a child made in the household, turned out to be just about the right distance.

  He settled comfortably at the table, he had his supper set in front of him as the vodka jug rose from the corner and walked across the floor—a sight that would have surely created consternation in The Cockerel's taproom back in Vojvoda—where honest citizens would have sworn the jug was bewitched. It happened that it was. But that was not the cause that moved it: the cause lay in two small manlike paws and two bowed legs, and a Yard-thing who believed he had a perfect right to the kitchen and the vodka. Babi waddled over with the jug, expecting his drink and his supper, in that order, and Sasha obligingly took it, unstopped it and poured for the waiting mouth.

  Generously. The evening felt chancy, the day had, the whole month had, come to think of it, and a well-disposed Babi was a potent protection.

  It was the season for rains and storms. Maybe that was the feeling in the air lately. Maybe that was why Eveshka felt so constantly on edge, and why Ilyana had seemed that way to him this evening.

  But no one mentioned problems at the table, thank the god: it was Pass the bowl, have some bread, don't mind if I do, until Pyetr said: ‘I think Sasha and I might go for a ride tomorrow.’

  ‘It might rain,’ Eveshka said.

  ‘Have you asked it to?’

  ‘Rains do happen without us.’

  ‘Well, then, wish it not. The horses need the stretch.’

  ‘People elsewhere might—’

  ‘Want the rain,’ Pyetr sighed. Pyetr knew that well enough. But something happened, someone very close at hand wished, one could feel a sudden small change in Things As They Were. Of wizards at this table there were three— not counting Babi, who was tugging at his trouser-leg, hoping for more vodka.

  Pyetr filled his own cup and spilled some for Babi and some for the domovoi who lived in the cellar. There was immediately a happier feeling in the house.

  Perhaps after all it had been the domovoi putting in his bid for attention, seldom as the bearish old creature woke. Certainly the timbers creaked and snapped in the way of a House-thing settling back to sleep, and there was none of that groaning that betokened a serious disturbance.

  Sasha had another slice of bread—from grain not of their growing: Pyetr traded flour for it downriver, with simples and cures they made and be-wished. From that source they had butter likewise. Honey, the forest bees gave them. Fish they had from the river—Pyetr could not abide hunting, less so the longer they lived here, and he never could; but fish never left their young orphans by one's fireside all winter, to spoil one's appetite for hare or wildfowl—the god knew, they had even had a wounded swan one year, ungrateful creature, which had had a vicious habit of chasing people, even the one who fed it. It had knocked Ilyana down, Ilyana being all of seven, and they had flinched and worried for days about lightning bolts.

  It comforted all of them that the swan had survived its indiscretion to fly free that autumn. They had even forgiven the swan—and praised Ilyana's youthful self-restraint, telling her how marvelously wise she was… god, he had forgotten all of that.

  They had spent so much worry on her, a wizard-child being the handful she could be, and he wondered (but did not, of course, want to know) whether Ilyana truly understood their concern. The little girl who had not killed the swan, the little girl who loved her father, truly loved him, would never do Pyetr harm. Perhaps they might have relied on that more than they had and confused the child less—but that was all hindsight.

  Maybe it was time now to tell Ilyana more than they had— the rest of the story about her grandfather Uulamets and the raven, about—

  But the time for that was not his to choose. He only set it in mind that he should speak to Eveshka and Pyetr about it very soon now. He thought, Pyetr and I understood about living with people, but Eveshka never learned, here in the woods, alone with a demanding, worried father, and a mother—god, best not even think about Draga, not after dark.

  —So how can Eveshka help but make mistakes, never having seen a mother with a child? And how can she help but worry?

  Not mentioning that Pyetr had had no father to speak of, no father worth speaking of, at least, no one to teach him how to bring up a child—and not speaking of his own parents. A wizard-child's parents were very much in jeopardy. He was an orphan; and he had never told Ilyana that plain fact, either.

  Terrible thoughts to share supper with—and surely unwarranted, where Ilyana was concerned. They had seen her refrain from the swan. The danger she posed was not as likely to Pyetr as to anyone who might threaten him—or who she might mistakenly believe threatened him. They were too hard on the girl, he decided that once and for all: the mouseling was coming to that age he remembered well, when all the books and the rules in the world (and he had certainly a good number of them) could not provide all the why-not's to keep wizardry from being a very dangerous thing.

  Time, he thought, while Py
etr and Eveshka discussed radishes and the thinning of birch trees, time perhaps that they give the child an idea of the world outside the woods, perhaps take her downriver and show her how farmer-folk lived. Perhaps that would be the appropriate beginning of explanations—showing her those things she could not at this age understand… how ordinary folk did not discuss weather-making over turnip soup, or whether the thinning of birches on the river shore should be theirs or the leshys' choice.

  He was not sure that he himself could understand ordinary folk, and he had grown up among them and even passed for ordinary in some degree. He knew the ways of the world outside, he knew the thoughts, he had seen most everything a boy could possibly see, working as The Cockerel's stable-boy and as scullion in a tavern kitchen. The god only knew, what with Eveshka's shielding the child from this and from that, how much the girl did understand of men and women and their doings.

  Certainly more about consequences by now than she had when she had circumvented the wishes of two very canny wizards and given Missy and Volkhi a most unplanned-for offspring. I want a horse! had given way to carrying water and grain for three and not two, and a great deal of mucking-out, especially in winters.

  Not mentioning sitting up with Missy one thundery, rainy night, with three grown-ups trying to explain delicately to an anxious twelve-year-old it was not good to wish things to go faster. If a girl had to learn about the world, he supposed that there were worse teachers than old Missy.

  High time, certainly, to trust the girl a bit—perhaps even to take her down as far as Anatoly's, maybe even Zmievka, where there were young folk near her own age. Time to risk, even, the chance of young romance: not likely that any lad in Zmievka could catch Ilyana's eye, or pass her father's scrutiny, let alone Eveshka's. But he had to talk to Pyetr about that, too, tomorrow, if he—

  ‘So what have you been up to all day?’ Pyetr asked him.