Yvgenie Read online

  (‘Tell me, what would you have done if your father had decided you shouldn't be on the streets, and locked you in The Doe's basement?’)

  (‘I'd have—’)

  Damn, it was like listening to Volkhi.

  She had a knife. She had stolen it. Her father had thought it was stupid, but all the same it was better than having nothing. She understood her father going off the way he had. She was glad Pyetr was her father and not some dead old man she had never met—all in one night she had a father who would take his sword and go off into the dark after to rescue a daughter and a young man he hardly knew from rusalki and ghosts, and would her uncles, would her uncles ever dare?

  (Her uncles had gathered up the silver—knowing the killers were coming. Her mother had packed her jewels, and told her, when she had come upstairs to announce, with a lump in her throat, that she was going with Yvgenie, ‘Go where you please.’)

  Damn them, Sasha thought. And remembered something too painful, nights in the stable when something had gone amiss in the tavern and he had realized his aunt and uncle were talking about being rid of him. He had tried (because he had known then that wanting things was deadly dangerous) not to have an opinion about the matter. Even if he had nowhere to go. Even if he tried to love them. He only worked the harder the next day to please them—

  And here he had the most beautiful girl he had ever seen with her arms close about him, thinking, the way Pyetr would jolt him into thinking that it was all right to want things like Pyetr's staying alive, that it was all right to want to get Pyetr's daughter back and Yvgenie back— No!

  Dangerous, that thought. But she thought it. She want it of him, she expected him to do it, for the sake of a brave young man she owed her life to—no matter he had spent the night lying senseless and no matter he could not find thread of his thoughts—she believed he could do it, wrapped her arms about him and believed the way she believed in the world beyond her walls.

  Dangerous for a wizard, dangerous as walking a roofline drunk, dangerous as a rusalka's kiss—

  Don't be a fool, he told himself while they rode. But for a few drunken instants he had believed in it, too, and thought—Yvgenie. Life and death. Death in life. Yvgenie's the instability.

  Yvgenie's the stone that moves the hillside. Wish him to our side while his life lasts. Is that wishing against nature?

  Thorns stood like walls on either hand, braced by tall dead trees, and Yvgenie walked, following Ilyana, following Owl who glided in bands of sunlight and shadow on gossamer white wings. Owl was back, since the leshy ring, and Yvgenie told himself that should be a hopeful sign, but his heart could not quite believe it: I dreamed this, he thought. Or I've been here before. And from time to time he glanced over his shoulder, expecting the wolves of his dream.

  ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘Ilyana, this isn't the way to go. Ilyana, we're losing the horses—’

  ‘They'll follow,’ she said. ‘Come on! They'll follow us once we get through.’

  ‘Through where?'' he protested. But his voice came from faint and far away, and the daylight seemed colder and grayer with every step. ‘Ilyana, look ahead of us. There's nothing living.’

  ‘It's further to go back,’ she protested. ‘It can't be that much further through—I can feel something ahead of us—’

  He reached for her hand, to compel her if there was no other way—take the strength she had and carry her back to the horses; but she evaded his touch, wishing no so strongly it stung. ‘Kavi, I can help you, there's a way back, I know there is, my mother died and she's alive again, she had me, didn't she?’

  ‘At whose cost?’ The ghost wrapped itself about him, cold, wary, and protective against her magic. ‘And what will we be then? Come back, don't go any further.’

  ‘Kavi, Kavi, come on!’

  He flinched as a sudden cold spot swept through his middle. Another grazed his shoulder, and became a wolf and a second wolf, walking tamely ahead of them, creatures of gossamer and pallor, like Owl, wending their way through thorny hedges mat parted, simply moved, to let them through. White wisps streamed and wove through the thorns of the hedge like serpents, and he began to hear a voice saying, Ahead is where you belong. Here's the rest you've deserved. Here are all the answers to all the questions you ever asked…

  Another cold wisp swept through him, and another, stealing life and warmth. ‘Ilyana!’ He caught a branch to hold the hedge apart, scarcely feeling the thorns. ‘Ilyana!’

  But more branches closed between them as she turned to look at him.

  ‘Kavi!’ she cried, trying with bare hands and wishes to unweave the tangled thorn boughs. Ghosts streamed like snakes about them, thicker and thicker. He shoved his arm through the thorns to draw her back through, leaned against the branches, almost touching the tips of her fingers—but the cold spots shot through him more rapid than his heartbeats, and the weakness he felt now was its own warning that he dared not touch her if he could.

  ‘Kavi!’ she cried. But he clenched his hand just short of her fingers and drew his arm back. ‘Kavi, stay with me, we'll find a way through—’

  ‘I can't,'' he cried, and tore and fought through the thicket away from her, blind and breathless. He would have killed her just then, the way he would kill the horses if he found them in this desolation: he would draw the last life from the ground, draw it from anything in his path. He drew it instead from the stubborn thorns, fended brittle branches away from his arms and ran, fainting from cold and weakness—heard the voices of wolves amid the wailing of the ghosts, and, glancing over his shoulder, saw them coursing after him, slow and pitiless as nightmare.

  Something had shifted. Sasha felt that much: an essential pebble had moved, somewhere. But as to how things were falling now—he was blind and numb with terror, resolved not to let his fear reach beyond him, or do more harm than he might already have wrought with his wishes.

  God, Pyetr, hear me. The boy's in trouble. Chernevog is. I did something I don't understand—

  Nadya whispered, ‘What's wrong?’ Missy had stopped, abruptly, standing with her ears pricked and a shiver going through her shoulders. Within his awareness, Nadya was trying not to be afraid: she had known the world outside her walls must be dangerous, but she had chosen her course, she was with a wizard she was sure could fight the invisible dangers and on a horse with strength to carry them through the tangible ones. Dear fool, Sasha thought, feeling her arms about him, dear young fool, nothing of the sort-But it made him sure all the same that he had imminently to do something. Pyetr would tell him so exactly that way. Though he did not have Pyetr and his sword and his good sense at his back, he had a lost boyarevna armed with a kitchen knife and a faith only the young could have, a faith he so desperately—

  —O god!—wanted for himself.

  Thickets gave way to green again, to scantly leaved trees struggling for life, and sunlight that blinded and did not warm. Yvgenie slid on a muddy edge, sat down hard on a bank of a cold spring-fed rill with his heart pounding for fright, as if a mouse could drown in that water that soaked his leg—but it seemed to him he had been on the verge of another fall, and drowning, and that the bank where he lay and the sunlight shining down on him were less real than the other shore.

  He looked up the hill, thinking of wolves, not sure now that any had been there, not sure that they might not yet come over the wooded hill.

  Get up, keep moving, the ghost insisted. He recalled that Ilyana was in some dreadful danger, that he had let her go and lost her and that he dared not go back, because he was dying, he much feared so, dying finally and forever, when he had died truly that night in the flood, in a woods in which the dead did not rest. He wanted not to steal strength; but he wanted not to die, either, or to wait for the wolves, and he hauled himself up on his arms and his hands to try to get his feet under him—with the sudden feeling—perhaps it was the ghost—that there was help to be had, that it was very close now—

  An arrow hit the bank, among the dead le
aves, beside his hand. He flung a look over his shoulder at riders coming down the opposite leaf-paved slope, and tried to run and sprawled again on the leaves in the weakness of his legs. He rolled over and looked at them as they came—god, they were the tsar's men, not his father's; and that made him hope—

  Although why they should be here in this woods, he had no notion at all. He only stared at them as they came. He had no strength to flee them, not even to stand on his feet to face them.

  They stopped, their captain's horse standing half astride the rill, the mustached captain looking down at him grimly from that vantage as two others rode across to dismount on either side of him. Their armor and their manner recalled Kiev, and streets, and sane places where the Great Tsar ruled, not wizards. They would kill. They would do anything they pleased, in the tsar's name. But they might be here on some other cause, they might even be here hunting his hunters.

  ‘Yvgenie Kurov,’ their captain said, as the horse took a step closer, looming over him. ‘Where's the girl? Where did you leave her?’

  ‘I don't know,’ he said, and the two men on either side of them came and hauled him up by the arms. Why should the tsar care? he wondered. Why should the tsar take a hand in my father's troubles, or want to find me or her?

  The ghost said, Because your father is dead, poor young fool, with his servants, the second wife, and all his house, and they intend no traitor's heir survive—nor any question of an heir, born or unborn. The Kurovs are gone, the tsarevitch is scrambling for his life, and heads will roll if some pretender comes out of the woods: that's what I hear in them. I'd not fall afoul of Eveshka's ill will. But no one told the tsarevitch that, when he tried to switch dice on Ilyana's father. ...

  He was dazed. Their grip hurt his arms. He found no sense in what the ghost was saying, and the captain of the tsar's men leaned close to ask him and seized him by the hair, making him look up. ‘Where is Nadya Yurisheva?’

  The name echoed strangely in his ears, recalling— recalling—

  —a talk behind the stairs, vows exchanged besides the witnessed ones, with the bride they had contracted for him: they had conspired to try to love each other, his bride behind her walls, himself within his father's treacheries and the Medrovs' climb to influence. Until someone had whispered the fatal secret, a taint of wizardry—’Where is she?’ the captain asked, shaking him, but he saw only forbidding thorns, and ghosts, and the fire and Ilyana writing in her book. He had no idea how he had become so lost, or where he had lost Nadya and fallen in love with a wizard who wanted him for a ghost's sake— For Kavi Chernevog, who had sustained his life and who with a confidence beyond courage was not afraid of these men, no. Kavi wanted them, he felt it coming—

  ‘Let me go!’ he pleaded with them. But the breath and strength that came flooding through his arms was theirs, all the arrogant violence they had brought to this woods. Two horses bolted, free through the woods. Go! he wished them, heard the captain cry, ‘Kill him!’ and shut his eyes and wished not, wished all the horses free: it was his own mortality, that, and the ghost did not fight him on that point. It was too well satisfied with the life it had in reach, and with every gasp of breath came anger at his victims. He had tried all his life not to hate, had kept his father's wicked secrets, poured all his love into a man whose only passion was cleverness and strength, and fear in the eyes of his dogs and his servants and his sons…

  But that was over. They were gone now, his half-brothers were dead, his stepmother must be dead: everything he knew und understood was gone—he was drowning, and he caught at last at what he could. Branches, lives—it was all the same.

  Finally he was sitting by the water with breath in his body, warmth where cold had been, and three dead men beside him. He had not intended it, god, he had not set out to do murder—it was the ghost. It was all the ghost—

  —Well, well, well, something said, then, that was not harmless, either, that reeked of sunless cold and coils.—A boy. A boy with the smell of my old master all about him. My kind, dear master—is it help you want?

  Fear washed over him—he had no notion of what, or why, only that the ghost knew its serpent shape, and that killing had drawn this creature here as surely as rot would draw ravens.

  You've only to wish me, the creature said. I know what you need. I can supply everything you need.

  It shivered up the streamside like a passing cloud. It brought cold where it passed. And stopped where a woman stood, a woman Ilyana's image.

  A woman he had murdered once. And rescued from magic. And lost again forever through his jealousy.

  He said, in sudden despair, ‘—Eveshka.’

  And the creature who smelled of dark and murder said, suddenly behind him, ‘The years do turn. Don't they turn, old master?’

  Something was ahead of them, not the mouse, Sasha thought, and said, quietly for Nadya, who was holding only to the saddle on this level ground:

  ‘I'm hearing something. Someone. I don't know who.’

  ‘Is it my father?’

  He shook his head, gazed through the sunlit forest, along the hills behind them. ‘It's—’ It was something out of the ordinary, not like the thoughts of deer or the earth-smelling habits of bears. He stood up in the stirrups and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘It's not near us. It's north of here. Too far to hear—it feels like someone. Several someones. Like voices you can't hear. I don't like this.’

  ‘The ones we're looking for? Could it be?’

  He shook his head. ‘I want them to ignore us. I want them not to see us.’

  ‘I'm scared.’

  ‘We've Babi. Wherever he is.’ He reached back a hand without thinking, patted a bare knee with half-felt embarrassment. He did not like the feeling from the woods. ‘It's not safe. But I've nowhere safer to put you.’

  There was a little tremor in her voice. ‘My father said stay with you.'' And she added:’I have a knife in my boot.''

  ‘We don't want them that close.'' He had his own misgivings about putting her afoot and out of his sight—misfortune and magic tending to strike at the most vulnerable point. ‘Don't be afraid. Just think about the wind, think about green leaves, that's the sort of thing Missy thinks about.’

  She thought about walking houses and wolves and dreadful wizards. She tried to see the leaves instead, and admire the sunlight: everything was brighter in the woods, the whole world was more dangerous and sharper-edged than she had ever imagined. She thought, I shouldn't be alive, I shouldn't be thinking thoughts like this—

  Yvgenie rode all the way from Kiev for me—and he's in trouble and we've got to save him; but I can't even think about what to say when I see him. I never felt with him the my I feel now—I never imagined anybody like Sasha and it’s stupid! I can't tell whether I'm shivering because I'm scared to death or only because he touched me…

  Dammit, he thought, we're fools, both of us are fools. I can't afford to think of this girl, god, Pyetr's in deep trouble out there, the mouse is—I need to talk to 'Veshka right now, and I can't, I daren't, because of Nadya.

  God, one clear wish—one clear wish and I could break the silence. Two clear thoughts and we all might have a chance; and the girl has me so upset I don't know my own name.

  I brought her here. It's my fault. Yvgenie is my fault. Or have I been assuming too much all along?

  ‘Where is she?’ Eveshka said, demanded everything, and ran through those memories like a fire through dry leaves. He remembered countless faces, he remembered desperation, going barehanded against Draga's creatures, he remembered dying—and first meeting Eveshka's daughter by the brook where Yvgenie would die.

  He remembered Owl dying and the precarious bridge above the river; he remembered his heart lodged as a guest with Pyetr's—and knew Eveshka the way Pyetr did, saw her the way Pyetr did, in the sun and the wind, at the helm of the old ferry; he forgave her the way Pyetr did—with the firelight on her face and thoughts in her eyes he could never, ever speak to—
/>   Thoughts like doubt of one's own life, one's own right to walk the earth, doubts that echoed off his own wizard-bred despair.

  She still remembered loving him. And she hated that. She remembered him wishing harm on Pyetr with no reckoning of Pyetr himself, only his own pleasure in pain and mischief—that was always at the core of what he did and what he chose. He enjoyed mischief. That was who he was. She believed it.

  He did not dispute her—but the enjoyment of it he could not now remember, could only recall that he had done it, and knew that of men alive or dead, he regarded Pyetr as his friend: ‘I never knew anyone who was good, but him, 'Veshka, allow me that much and don't argue with me now-listen to me!’ A pit was at his back: he could recall all life behind them pouring like a waterfall over an edge that gnawed its way closer and closer to the world and this place. He wanted her to see it, he wanted her to understand he had tried to stay with Ilyana.

  ‘'Veshka, I love her, I was never supposed to fall in love with her. They wanted me to bring her here, to them. But they're dead, and I couldn't stop her—’

  ‘Damn you! You couldn't face me, you couldn't come to me with your 'bring her to them—' What were you going to do, Kavi? What did the leshys intend with my daughter?’

  ‘To make her safe, that's all they wanted—’

  ‘Was it? Was it now?’ The sunlight dimmed before the dark and the anger in front of him. She would kill the boy, he was sure, kill Yvgenie and him and take the magic he had, she was that strong and desperate to be stronger—rusalka no less than himself, a sink of life as deadly as that place beyond the hedge—