by CJ Cherryh
And to lose a book.
‘I don't like this,’ he said, and met Nadya's worried eyes. ‘God, there's nothing in it to like, the book stops on a thought and she'd never leave it—Babi. Babi, there's a good fellow—’ He unstopped the vodka jug and poured, and Babi swallowed.
‘Find her, Babi. Can you find her?’
He was thinking of rusalki, and lovers, wolves—and Draga. And Babi—Babi turned up on Missy's rump again, eyes glowing balefully gold in the firelight.
Sasha said, ‘He can't. I wish to the god—’
No. Fool. One did not think about safe places or putting Nadya in them. Magic was too fickle and too much was loose. One scarcely dared breathe.
His old master would say, Then do. Use your hands, not your wishes.
He picked up the fire-pot and lidded it, leaving them in deep dusk, thinking: Wolves. And rusalki.
If the leshys are dying—it's not their silence. It's stopped feeling like the mouse at all. And it's not Eveshka. It's nothing, that's the dreadful thing. It's—
—nothing. Wishes just go nowhere against it.
* * *
The day was shadowing out of the east, hastening toward that time when ghosts could most easily get one's attention—no more real at night, Ilyana reminded herself, only that there were fewer distractions for the eye in the dark, and being alone was worst of all.
But she had no desire to go up to that awful doorway. She walked the whole circuit of the hill, hoping another path through the thorns might lead out.
God, but it only came back again, back to the hill and the palace of bone, and all the while the ghostly wolves lay about the door, the bear lazed near them, and Owl, faithless Owl, who should have guided her out of this, kept a watch from a white and dreadful ledge above the porch.
She did not have to see them. She could wish not to see any ghosts at all and they would be gone until her resolve weakened. But she believed in Owl too much to think he was not there, and she was too afraid of the wolves and the bear to ignore them for long. Besides, they tended to move about especially when one was not looking, and she did not trust them. It was not true that ghosts were harmless. Kavi was not, by day or night. If Kavi was here, Kavi would—
—Kavi would be a greater danger than any of them.
A cold lump rose in her throat. She thought, I should try again. I should wish something far cleverer than I have and get out of this place before dark. Uncle would. Mother would. Kavi would think of something if he were here, and uncle was telling the truth, he's ever so much older—
Owl can see over the maze. Couldn't Owl have shown him the way—couldn't he listen to Owl, if Owl is his?
I might. I could wish that. But Owl scares me. He always was a standoffish bird.
If other birds came here I might listen to them. If they did. But all I’ve seen are ghosts…
Darker and darker. She was scratched and chilled by ghosts, and came to the end of the path again, back at the hill, with no more daylight left and countless aisles of the maze untried—but her legs ached, she was hungry and thirsty, and she sank down in a knot to warm herself and to think and to wait.
The dark grew. The doors and the windows of the palace began to glow with the slow movement of ghosts. She did not want even to look at it. But it kept drawing her eyes, the way the bear and the wolves did, and Owl at last left his perch and swept a turn about her, winging his way uphill.
Come back, she wished him, and expected no more obedience than she had ever had from Owl, but he glided about again to settle on her hand, a weightless chill, with baleful and too cognizant eyes.
The wolves and the bear appeared suddenly in front of her. Away from me! she wished them, and the wolves showed their throats and the bear ducked his head and looked away as a bear would from a wish.
They did not leap on her. They did not threaten. She took courage from that and wanted them to lead her from the maze.
But Owl left her fist and flew back up the hill, and the wolves and the bear slunk after him.
—Is that the way out? she wondered, hugging herself against the sudden chill of that thought.
Is the way out to go into that place and deal with what lives there?
I'm not uncle Sasha. I'm not as strong as he is.
But he said I was.
If I dared listen to Owl—if I dared—
‘Grandfather?’ she asked the empty air.
A horrid thing burst into her view and gibbered at her and fled.
Grandfather, if that was you, behave! I want you. Right now. No nonsense!
‘Disrespectful whelp,’ a shapeless thing said, a mere wisp in front of her.
If I can't wish someone who likes me, what chance have I with something that doesn't? Show me the way out of this place.
‘Is that all?'' The thing became an upright shape.’Magic brought you here, and you want to run away.''
This isn't a nice place, grandfather!
‘Isn't a nice place. Isn't a nice place. Ha. What a grand-child! Whose daughter are you?''
Papa's. And uncle's…
‘Ha,’ the ghost said. ‘You're my wish, girl. But so far I like your father better.''
He was going again. She did not understand him. She did not understand what she had done to make him say that, or what he meant—
—Except… papa takes chances.
And this isn't a place without wishes—my grandfather's here, and he wished me, but that doesn't matter: there can't be a place there aren't wishes, Kavi was right. When I ran I only took them with me—because I took me where I ran to…
And why would he say he liked my father? He didn't like him. They didn't get along, mother always said that. She didn't get along with him. Nobody could.
Ghosts can't always tell you all the truth. No more than they can lay hands on you. They can get just so close. Because they can't do anything in the world—and their wishes aren't strong enough unless they're rusalki like—
—mother.
If I'm his wish he had to have made it before he died. And he died bringing mother back. Uncle said.
She looked up at the palace on the hill, at the doorways where ghosts moved.
Did he wish me here? He hated Kavi. Didn't he?
Is this whole place—my grandfather's wish? Is he what's waiting inside?
She drew a breath, thinking how nice breathing was, even here, and took a first step up the hill. Nothing told her right or wrong. Nothing would, she decided, and took several breaths.
Uncle would say, It's up to you, mouse.
***
Another handful of herbs. Firelight, fractured in smoke-stung tears. Eveshka drew in a deep breath, deeper still-Papa would say, The magic's not the smoke, the magic's not in the smoke—
She recalled an ember in her mother's hand, fire against unburned flesh—magic, against nature—but not wholly against nature. Easier to wish the air than the ember, and send the heat away as fast as it could come—
Draga tried her with such illusions, but a young wizard's eye had seen the means: not sorcery, but cleverness. Not magic: seeing to the nature of a thing. Draga's only great magic, her truly dangerous magic—was her own daughter's murder: was death, and a naive girl's wish for life.
The magic's in the thinking. The magic's in facing the truth, young fool!
I was the spell you cast, mother, wasn't I? Kavi only thought he betrayed you. But when you wish something as strong as I am dead—who can know how it might defend itself?
It was such a foolish act, mother. Kavi said you were a fool in all the important ways. Or perhaps you aren't through with your own wishes yet, and you wished Ilyana born— though I doubt that, one can never be sure. One can never be safe enough.
Time had been that she had resented her father's meddling, time had been his advice and his teachings had seemed foolish limits. But his daughter wished him back now, if it were possible—wished a ghost out of the earth and longed for even the whisper of his presence.
You never taught me forgiveness, papa, but I try, I do try, the way Pyetr said—and you never trusted him. Why?
Is there foresight? Is it something he would do? Or that I would, for him? Or is it the daughter we would make! Sasha says—the things that will be change with every change we make. Sasha says—that's why no bannik will stay with us.
So there's no predicting. Is there?
Pyetr's hands, fingers so long and agile with the dice-teaching Ilyana—
No, she had said. No. Pyetr, it's not a toy for a wizard. Not for us—
Why? he had asked. And had not understood her distress.
It disturbs me, she had written in her book that day. I don't know why. Prediction—that's what it does. But every time you throw them, every time you hope for an outcome, every time you wish into uncertainty—
Pyetr had said, Try it, 'Veshka. For the god's sake, it's just a game.
It's just a game…
She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her hands against her head, thinking: Is that why you feared him, papa?
You drove our bannik away, you wanted to pin the future down and you kept after it with questions and questions until it ran away.
Even looking at the future changes it. You have to walk blind or you're not walking where you would have—
I could wish things right. I'm stronger than my mother. Or my father.
If I knew beyond a doubt. If there were no uncertainty.
There was a sudden chill in the night, a shift in the wind that carried the smoke aside. And in her heart the old Snake whispered: ‘Well, well, pretty bones. Do you finally need my help?’
She felt the thoughts that went left and right of reason. Change? Hwiuur was on all sides of a question at once. Hwiuur had no sides. And no real shape, nothing, at least, permanent.
Like Pyetr's dice.
‘Well, pretty bones, how does it fare tonight? Missing its young one? Its young one's gone where it daren't.’
One wanted the creature. And so few ever would.
He lunged, he rolled and twisted. She remembered his touch, she remembered the water and the pain of his bite, blindingly sharp.
‘Wouldn't you like to know where your husband is tonight, pretty bones?’
There was cold, there was dark. Time was that she had refused to die. Now there were conditions under which she would not live.
A heart's so fragile, Kavi had used to say.
But a heart's capable of more than breaking, snake.
Hwiuur twisted and slithered aside, blithely, powerfully bent on escape and mischief—on Pyetr, and Chernevog, and the boy. She thought of an aged willow, a muddy grave in a dank, watery den.
And thought of lightnings.
‘It wouldn't!’ Hwiuur hissed, whipping back about. ‘It's bones are there. It daren't!’
She said, as Pyetr would, ‘The hell.''
She folded up her book and wished the fire out.
And it was.
Pyetr felt a sudden chill—maybe present company, maybe just the persistence of fear in this nightbound tangle. His hand ached with a bone-deep pain. The misery went all the way to his wrist now—he must have fallen on it a while ago. His right hand. His sword hand, if it came to that—though there was little a sword could do against foolishness or jealousy and he could find no enemy but those and weariness. Volkhi had been on the trail too long now; the god knew the white mare had little left, and he feared increasingly that they were lost: Chernevog swore he knew the way and that he had seen Eveshka not far from here, north and riverward, near the leshy ring—wherever that was, in the dark, and without landmarks.
They came to a thread of water between two hills. '' Soon, now,'' Chernevog had been promising him for the last while. Now he said: ‘Not far.’
Volkhi dipped his head to drink. Pyetr let him have his sip, and the white mare had hers, against a last effort, he told himself, if only the old lad had it left, not to break both their necks.
And when they found Eveshka, the god only hope Chernevog had not deceived him. If Chernevog had lied, and meant some harm to her through him…
He felt a sharp stab of pain from his hand. He looked down the dark stream course and thought of water—of dark coils, and pain, and the mud about willow-roots, and carried the hand against his mouth.
‘My hand's hurting,'' he murmured. ‘It hasn't done that in years.’
‘My sympathies,’ Chernevog said acidly. ‘Is it a cure you want?’
‘No, dammit, I mean it used to do this. Hwiuur's about.''
‘The creature was keeping company with Eveshka. Not surprising.’
‘What do you mean, Not surprising?’
‘He wanted your daughter. But I wouldn't let him.''
Chernevog was a shadow in the dark. A wizard might have told what that meant, whether fair or foul intentions, but he could not.
‘So you aimed him at my wife?''
‘You have the worst expectations of me. No. I said I wouldn't let him at your daughter. God! Give me once a moment's credence! It's that way—’ A lift of his hand. ‘I could be there now if I wanted to. But I'll rather you deal with your wife, Pyetr flitch, thank you.''
Chernevog started off down the stream, that ran as a sometimes glistening thread through this trough between the dark hills, a reedless, leaf-paved passage. Pyetr rode glumly beside him: Sasha had to appeal to him to deal with Eveshka, Ilyana did, and now Chernevog—there was nothing wrong with Eveshka, dammit, she was Eveshka, that was all—and there was more to her than old resentments and present pain. Even if he seemed himself somewhere to have forgotten that. He had not been able to help her. Or nothing that had happened would have happened.
‘You amaze me,’ Chernevog said.
‘Snake-’
An odd feeling came on him then, as if Eveshka had spoken to him. He stopped Volkhi and listened to the night-sounds and listened to his heart.
He did not like what he was feeling. The pain in his hand was quite acute. And he had the distinct impression that Eveshka's attention had brushed past him and fled him in fear. Eveshka? he thought.
And felt Chernevog's cold touch on his arm. Chernevog's horse pressing hard against his leg, the darkened woods become a dizzied confusion to his eyes. He thought, He's killing me; and tried to free himself, but there was nothing hostile in what he was feeling, rather that the danger was elsewhere close, that Chernevog was holding on to him and finding something of magic about him that Chernevog did not, no more than the last time, understand or wholly trust or have words for—
But he wanted it, and the boy wanted it—
Rusalki both, he thought, and tried to get past that veil of dizziness and confusion to reach Eveshka, thought then of Sasha, and how he had continually been driven to come this way, into Chernevog's reach—
Things once associated are always associated—he could hear Sasha saying that. No coincidences in magic-He could hear the whole woods, hear the passage of a deer, the midnight foraging of hares and the life in the trees around him; and under it, through it, a sense of balances gone amiss, and something—
He did not want to look at that. But he tried. And it made no sense to him. It just was, and Chernevog was there, telling him he did not have to understand, not even a wizard could, but that it was where the silence came from and where it went, and the leshys had kept it in check so long as they could—the stone and their ring and the heart of their magic, that this thing wanted to drink down—
The leshys were dead. The leshys had misjudged young foolishness, and the self-will of two wizards' hearts—he had not brought Ilyana to them in time. He had not wanted to. He had loved her too much. There had always been time—next year and next.
Misighi, holding Ilyana in his huge arms… Misighi, who could break stone with his fingers, returning her so carefully, and striding away from them, never to return to the garden fence, never again that close to them—
God, what did they want? What have they done? If they wanted her, cou
ld we have stopped them?
Eveshka—would have tried. Sasha would have—I would have—
Whatever a man could do, I'd do to get her away from that thing. ... Whatever all of them could do, they would do to get her back.
The world went hushed then, so abruptly it only gradually dawned on him he was hearing the wind in the leaves, and Chernevog's voice saying his name, bidding him not fall off, damn him—that he had no right to be alive, no more than they did, and that they were, him, and the boy and Chernevog together, and that they knew where they had to go—
‘Come on, dammit, Eveshka's going after her.’
He found the reins somehow, he found his seat and turned Volkhi uphill, as Chernevog was headed, not breakneck after the first ten strides. In the moonless dark and on this root-laddered ground, there was no hurrying—like a bad dream, in which haste could manage only a numbingly slow progress over one hill and another and onto a level stretch overgrown with trees and thorn brakes.
Bits of white horsehair hung from thorns here, and Bielitsa made one futile protest against a wizard's direction; but Volkhi went, panting now, into a barren starlit thicket with no trees to shut out the sky, with only peeling wreckage of dreadful aspect—leshys, Pyetr realized, all dead.
‘Eveshka!’ he called into that desolation. But no answer came. They rode among dead leshys as far as the stone that was the center and found smoking ashes beside it, where a fire had been.
That, and everything Eveshka owned, her book, her pack, and her abandoned cloak.
‘God,’ he muttered in despair, but Chernevog wanted his attention toward a gap in the thorns, a broad pathway dark as midnight and more threatening.
Magic had made it. That was where Ilyana was, that was where, Chernevog made him believe, Eveshka had surely gone, and he had no question about following—only about his company.
Magic was slipping loose at every hand. Sasha felt it like pieces tumbling out of his hands and there was no way in the world to go faster. Missy was breathing like a bellows even with Nadya's lesser weight and the absence of the packs; young Patches, saddleless, with his weight and the books, Babi's vodka jug and a handful of herb-pots, was blowing lather. It was all confusion of trees and brush and dark hillsides—rough ground, and the god only knew how Nadya was managing, whether it was his distracted wishes for her safety, or her death-grip on the saddle and Missy's mane. Don't lose her, Sasha pleaded with Missy, and promised apples and carrots and every delicacy in the garden if she would only keep Nadya on her back and keep out of trouble.