Chernevog

3

Supper was quiet, everything was calm, not a stray wish or an ungoverned thought flew across the table, just Pass the cakes, please; more tea, Sasha? Only Babi still seemed to be sulking, put out about the horse in the yard, Sasha surmised distressedly, and neither honeycakes nor vodka would bring him.

“He’ll come around,” Pyetr muttered. “At least by breakfast.”

So Pyetr and he made up a bit of grain and honey for Volkhi, (hey curried him down, the two of them, by lamplight, and they built a sort of a pen around him at the back of the house, where afternoon sun let wild grasses grow. It was a hasty sort of work, but Sasha wished the posts to stay put—much easier than wishing the horse, to be sure, which had a mind of its own and which could not be wished out of a taste for new spring vegetables for more than a few moments at a time.

Eveshka came out to help lift the bars into place, and helped wish them to stay. She even brought Volkhi a bit of honey-cake.

“I’m sorry about the cabbages,” Pyetr whispered to her in Sasha’s hearing, across a fence-rail; and Eveshka whispered back, leaning to take Pyetr’s kiss on the lips:

“Hush, it’s all right, I don’t care about that; nothing is your fault.”

Another kiss. After that Pyetr ended up on the other side of the rail and the two of them went walking arm in arm around the corner of the house.

Probably, Sasha thought, they did not need a house guest to turn up in the front room any time soon.

So he shrugged his coat back on, the night being somewhat cold since he had stopped hefting rails about, and lingered to test the posts they had set, figuring that Pyetr and Eveshka would not linger long in the kitchen.

Eveshka had been sixteen when she had died: she had been a sixteen-year-old ghost for better than a hundred years before she had gained her life back and gone on with living it. Sometimes it seemed to him she was still sixteen when someone crossed her—and, god, Sasha thought, resting his arms on the rail, if she caught him thinking that, best he find a bed somewhere in the deep woods tonight, perhaps for several nights.

She had had all those years of Uulamets’ personal teaching and all those years of being both a wizard and a ghost… but she had spent so long as a rusalka and so comparatively few years dealing with the simple pain of burning a finger on a pot handle, or dealing with a husband who sometimes, being Pyetr, did things not even a wizard could predict—

(Say what you want, Pyetr would remind them both cheerfully: just speak it out loud, it’s only fair: tell me what you want me to do and let me decide, is that so hard?)

Sometimes, for Eveshka, it truly was. Sometimes it seemed the hardest thing in the world for her.

And then, just when everything seemed possible and they had everything in the world they ought to want—Pyetr’s best friend had to do a stupid thing like this, and bring this poor horse into the question.

The horse was looking at him quite warily as it might, now that they were alone with only a rail between them. One misgiving equine eye shone under a black thatch of bangs. Its nostrils worked as if it could smell something unnatural about the place and the night and about him.

Poor fellow, Sasha thought: one night in a snug stable, by the well-cared-for look of him, and the next bolting through a woods full of dangers of very terrible sort.

“ Volkhi?” he said gently, ducked under the rail and held out a hand to the horse—not cheating, this time, simply letting the horse make up its mind about his character. A few steps closer. “There’s a lad. Come on. I’m a Mend of Pyetr’s. I’m really not a bad sort. See, not a wish one way or the other.”

Volkhi eyed him a moment more, then stretched out his neck and breathed the air about him.

“Don’t be afraid, there’s a good fellow.”

The horse investigated his fingers, carefully. Sasha felt warm breath on his hand, and the touch of a soft, interested nose, while the lamplight showed their mingled breaths like fog.

A wizard once a stableboy could be a great fool for something like this, could ask himself how he had ever gotten along without such feelings—a warm and friendly creature snuffling his ringers on a nippish night and nosing his face and his coat, looking for possible apples.

For a moment, defending his cap from the search, he was no wizard at all, only his uncle’s stableboy, who had found his only true fellowship in his charges, in the black and white stable cat and old Missy and the various horses that had come and gone with the rich young men of the town. Pyetr had seemed only one of that wild crowd in those days—once upon a time and only, it seemed now, yesterday: The Cockerel’s stable came back so vividly for a moment Sasha wondered just for whom he had really wished up a horse in the first place; or how he could be so warmly drawn back to days he wanted to forget.

But he had been a great deal safer then, he had been so very good in those days about not wanting things of people—not wanting things at all, except where it concerned his four-footed charges. He had never been sure he was doing it, for one thing: they had never accused him for his small sorcery, second; and he had never felt guilty about loving them, nor been reluctant, whenever he had gotten on his uncle’s bad side, to come to the stable to lean on a comfortable warm shoulder and pour out his troubles to a patient friend like old Missy, that he could miss so much of a sudden—

He was that boy again, tonight, the town jinx, that no one wanted around, he had made a mess of things again and Eveshka had every right to be put out with him, on top of which, he had just come recklessly close to wanting Missy here for himself— knowing very well that she was Andrei the carter’s horse, and that Andrei Andreyevitch in no wise deserved to be robbed by some selfish, self-pitying young wizard.

Missy. For rides in the woods, no less—himself and Pyetr out and about together, the way he had dreamed of it being when the three of them had settled here on this riverside.

God, he thought. The cat, too, why not? The house needs a cat. Why not the whole stable, fool?

That was how helplessly unreasonable he was being, longing for ordinary, common things a wizard could never, ever have, and, like a fool, thinking he needed something all his own to love. So things were more complicated in the house than a callow fifteen-year-old had once thought they would be. A man loved his wife. It did not mean he stopped being a friend. A wife took time, especially Eveshka, who had her own difficulties, not least because he was, dammit, too often under Eveshka’s feet, in Eveshka’s house, with Pyetr the one who ended up with a burned supper and an angry wife and Babi not speaking to any of them.

Maybe it was time that he did think what else he could do, such as, perhaps, talk to Pyetr about building another house, over on the hill.

A damned, lonely, solitary little house, without even Babi for company in the evenings.

Maybe he knew he ought to, in all justice. Maybe that was why he was all but shivering of a sudden, despite a good coat and a night none so cold, and why he had a growing lump in his throat, and why he decided he had best get himself inside immediately, away from horses and all such temptations, to read and think a good long while by himself without wishing anything at all.

The front door opened and shut. Pyetr lifted his head from the pillow, and Eveshka whispered, “He’s perfectly all right.”

There were other small, reassuring sounds, the domovoi settling again in the cellar, Sasha walking about in the kitchen, a log going on the fire, which sent up a small flurry of sparks on their side of the hearth.

But Pyetr heard the sound of the bench pulled back in the kitchen and thought distressedly that Sasha was at that damned book again, scribbling and studying.

“That’s no life for a boy,” he said, “reading all day and writing all night.”

Eveshka said nothing. He had only her shoulder.

“He’s eighteen,” Pyetr said. “He’s not going to find everything he needs in that damned book, Eveshka.”

“He made a mistake,” she said. “He’s trying to find out why.”

“A mistake. The boy wants a horse. Why shouldn’t he?”

“A wizard shouldn’t.”

“God.”

“It’s very serious.”

“Can you help him?”

She shook her head, motion against the pillow. “It’s his business. His question. He has to answer it.”

Eveshka’s father had given more than a book to the lad. Eveshka’s father, when he died, the black god take him, had worked some sudden spell or another and magicked everything he knew into the boy’s head, things a boy could have lived quite happily without, things far, far more than reading and writing.

No real memory of things, Sasha insisted. Nothing I can’t deal with, Sasha said.

The double-damned, unprincipled old scoundrel.

“It’s not natural,” Pyetr said. “It’s not natural, ’Veshka.”

But she seemed to be asleep. At least she offered no conversation. So he lay there thinking about his own misspent years in Vojvoda, not regretting many of them, except the quality of the company.

Maybe he would sail down to Kiev after all. Maybe he would finally sail down to Kiev of the golden roofs, with Sasha in tow, just himself and the boy-Shop around a little. Find a tavern. Do something thoroughly reprehensible. Or at least mildly riotous.

If he dared leave Eveshka.

He could not, not that long: Eveshka was far too prone to melancholy. The god knew she slipped too readily toward that state of mind.

So, hell, they would take Eveshka along—show her the golden roofs, the rocs and the crocodiles and the palaces, which everything he had ever heard assured him were abundant in Kiev.

Not forgetting the elephants.

It would do the boy a world of good. Do good for Eveshka too. Show her how ordinary folk lived, show her that people could live together, more of them in one place than she could ever imagine.

Wish the boy up a tsarevna, she could, one of the Great Tsar’s nieces or such.

No. A pretty beggar girl, who would be ever so glad to fly off to the deep woods and live like a tsarevna for the rest of her life—

A girl who would, wise as wizards, keep her wishes modest.

Sasha pulled the lamp a little closer on the kitchen table, going over the page again which, as best he remembered, ought to record his wish for the horse—which he did very well recall, but he had not even written the matter down, nor made any entry at all for that day, that was the puzzling thing. One hardly wrote down every little thing one did: even in the quiet of the woods there were days one got busy and let records slip a day or two, but he did not remember what could have gotten in the way that day, or why he had forgotten it entirely—when he recalled now how it had upset him at the time.

The day they had first fired up the bathhouse—and all of them had been wondering about banniks…

But they had felt nothing banniklike since but the slight spookiness a dark bathhouse might have: a whole (if slightly twisted) roof was not an invariable guarantee of banniks, by all he knew. Uulamets’ book recollected a shy, slightly daft old creature that had sometimes provided visions—but it had hardly been a happy Bath-thing: Uulamets’ bannik had deserted the place after Eveshka had died, Uulamets pursuing it relentlessly for foreknowledge— About his hopes of raising the dead. Not a happy creature, not a happy parting, and, Sasha had thought from long before they had put the roof cap on, certainly nothing he really wanted to provoke to anger. It surely must have been glad, as Pyetr had said, to find some more cheerful establishment to haunt, say, down in Kiev—if (and this was the most substantial of his fears) repairing the bathhouse had not by some law of magic called it back against its will. He recalled he had thought about that possibility, that day.

They had talked about Kiev. He had gotten quite light-headed from the heat—had been quite, quite giddy when he had thought about the horse. They had had to go outside.

God, he thought, what was I thinking then? About banniks? Or was it remembering the bathhouse at uncle Fedya’s that made me think of the horse?

Vojvoda. Pyetr and Volkhi and the butter churn-He rested his eyes against his hands, elbows on the table, thinking himself: Or was I worrying about Pyetr? Was I afraid he’d go off to Kiev and leave us and not come back once he saw the gold and the crocodiles and all? Or was I thinking about him and ’Veshka—because I’m afraid I am messing things up with them? Maybe I really should build that house on the hill over there.

But if I’m not right here with them when they argue, to say, ’Veshka, don’t wish at him—then who’s going to say it? He won’t always know until it gets really plain—and she does it, damn it, she doesn’t mean to, but she does it all the time.

But maybe my not wanting to leave the house is a wish too, and maybe that’s why things are happening that shouldn’t, maybe that’s what’s putting things out of joint.

God, why am I so confused?

Uulamets’ teaching said, uncompromisingly: Write down everything you don’t understand, —fool.

He certainly had enough to write tonight, about Missy and the black and white cat, along with, the god forgive him, shapeless, resentful, thoroughly dangerous thoughts about his aunt and uncle…

He squeezed his eyes shut a moment, got a breath and concentrated deliberately on writing a simple reminder to himself: Unwish nothing. Start from where you stand and trust only to specifics—with a shivery thought toward all the peace they had here, balanced on Eveshka’s resolve to forget all too many grim things, his, to grow up without foolish mistakes; and Pyetr’s, to be patient with two wizards trying their best to keep their wizardry and their hearts out of trouble.

For most of three years he had found one excuse and the other not to rebuild the old bathhouse, for fear of banniks—for fear of one showing them the will-be and might-be in the life they had chosen here, so long as Eveshka was still so fragile and it was still uncertain whether wizards could really live with each other at all. But Pyetr had kept after the matter till it had begun to seem silly and inconvenient not to have it. So one particularly frozen, icy day he had given in.

But what was I afraid of? he asked himself, pen in hand. What specifically was I afraid of learning?

Of seeing myself alone? Or Pyetr changed?

Eveshka wanted Pyetr to herself, of course a new wife would— but ’Veshka was not just any wife, Pyetr had a right to his friends, too, damned if he should build any small, lonely house up on the hill and live in it in exile.

He had a right to have something to love him.

Was that why I wanted the horse?

Everything was perfect, Eveshka said.

At least Eveshka was happy…

Or at least—we got along.

Dammit.

He did not understand his own temper. He did not understand why he had a lump in his throat, but he intended to have no patience with it. He rested his elbow on the table, his chin against his hand, and kept writing, merciless to himself and his notions: Having a heart is no protection against selfishness in that heart-mine or hers.

I don’t know yet what I should do to help the situation. I don’t know how much is my fault, or how much I dare try to help, or even how much I’m imagining because I’m upset. Master Uulamets taught me all he could in the little time he had, but thank the god, Eveshka had more than that, and maybe I ought to listen to her. I understand how to do things, but I don’t always know whether I ought to do them, or why. She does. I need her to tell me where I’m wrong, I need her to keep me from her father’s mistakes, most of all, because master Uulamets did make them, he made terrible mistakes… and I don’t want to be him. Father Sky witness I don’t want to turn into him…

He had taken to the rebuilding of the house with more enthusiasm than Pyetr could possibly understand, clearing out Uulamets’ cobwebby past, changing the very outlines of the house Uulamets would recall, pushing master Uulamets and his wishes and his memories further and further into the past. The old man, dying, had wanted a boy wizard to know all he knew; and have all he had, and a boy who desperately needed that knowledge-fought back as much as he could, knowing his master’s mistakes as well as his virtues.

Old memories still attached to this place… chaotic, fragmentary recollections, the river when the ferry had been running, travelers on the road; the forest before the great trees had died: mere curiosities, those—

Excepting memories of a woman in this house, one on whom Uulamets had sired a daughter he did not, could not trust.

Excepting his student, Chernevog—also in this house, who had wanted that gift he had gotten, and tried to steal it.

I wish for bodily comfort, Chernevog had written in his own book: I wish for gold—why not?

Old Uulamets sitting in his shabby little house, old Uulamets teaching foolishness, mistaking cowardice for virtue —

Uulamets talks about restraint—restraint in a world of cattle, who know nothing, have no power over their own wishes, understand nothing that they want—while we live apart, all for fear of damaging these peasants. Foolishness.

That was Kavi Chernevog, whose reasoning twisted back on itself like a snake—whose reasoning was founded on assumptions totally selfish and shortsighted.

Sasha dipped his quill and wrote, mindfully pushing Chernevog out of his thoughts: The things master Uulamets wanted me to know, like writing, I have to use, and I don’t forget. But what I didn’t use right off just faded, and the things that just come up less and less, I forget. And don’t entirely forget, of course, because there’s his book to remind me, but there are things that used to be very strong; and now they’re just less and less likely to occur to me—I think as much as anything because it’s not the house he knew anymore and we’re not the way he expected us to turn out.

Mostly he’d be surprised, I’m sure he would be. He’d be mad about Eveshka marrying Pyetr, I have no trouble thinking what he’d say about that.

Maybe that’s why I keep worrying about them. Myself, Sasha Misurov, I certainly don’t want to have bad thoughts about my best friends in the whole world. I think I have to watch that, and stop being upset with Eveshka, because Uulamets really didn’t like people much—not since he married his wife, anyway, and after he found out she was after his book: Draga made him distrust people and then Chernevog came along —

Chernevog was his really big mistake.

But what might mine be? Letting myself remember too much? Letting what happened to him make me suspicious?

And selfish. What about the horse? What about me wanting Pyetr to myself again? I’m feeling lonely, and I’ve got to stop that. There’s no good in it. There’s not even any sense in it. Uncle’s house was awful and nobody ever liked me till Pyetr did. So what do I want to change? Eveshka’s mad at me, and she’s right: nothing’s good that upsets us this much, nothing’s, good when a wizard starts wanting love from people, it’s not fair to them.

I knew that once, when I lived in Vojvoda, I was so good about not wishing things, till I came here and master Uulamets took me up.

But he didn’t want my welfare, or even Eveshka’s; he wanted his daughter back before she could join Chernevog: he died with this wish I still can feel —

His heart was beating so he could almost hear it. He could imagine the old man wanting to go on living— wanting his way with them and with his daughter, because Uulamets had held this woods more than a hundred years, and Uulamets was not the kind to give up on anything, least of all his life or his purposes.

Maybe that wish is still going, god, maybe I’m still part of it, and it’s still going, because I can’t not wonder. I wonder what will become of us, and whether we’re right to hold on to our hearts and whether we’ll be good wizards or bad—and what if I didn’t like the answer? There’s so much that could go wrong. Or even what if it was good? How can you enjoy what you’ve got if you can see everything that ever will happen to it?

But Uulamets wanted to know what would come after him. And I’m scared to know even where I’m going. Maybe that’s why a bannik’s never come. He used to say, Don’t-know and afraid-to-know always wins a tug of war—

The pen dried while he was thinking. He dipped it again in the inkpot and made his crabbed, unskillful letters, writing so no wish could make him forget what he had thought tonight, hoping to the god that Eveshka was not awake and eavesdropping.

So in one sense the horse might not have been a mistake. I need something to get my mind off all the might-be’s I’ve been worrying about since we built the bathhouse. When you start worrying about might-be’s, that worry is wishing about things that aren’t even so yet, and then it wishes on what you’ve changed, and the god only knows what kind of damage you could do. I’m afraid master Uulamets did a little of that. So maybe wizards have to be very careful with banniks. But wizards wish on their guesses, too, and their guesses might be a lot less reliable than that.

It does disturb me that I forgot wishing for Volkhi—but then, if I had remembered, I’d certainly have done something to stop it; so maybe after all even forgetting was part of the wish. Maybe I had to forget so it had a chance to come true, and it’s good after all.

Things change that can change and wishes only take the shape they can take. Never wish things against nature or against time…

Wish a stone to fly, master Uulamets had said—then beware of the whirlwind.

Wish a horse from Vojvoda… god, one could imagine dreadful things that could have brought the horse to them: a rider falling and breaking his neck, a stable burning—the whole town of Vojvoda going up in smoke or being put to the sword…

A whole host of might-be’s like that—while a draft twisted the lamp-flung shadows at the end of the kitchen; and he thought with a sudden shudder of the worst thing in the world to disturb, that forbidden, thorn-hedged place where leshys watched, patient as the trees themselves…

Something cracked, the whole shelf above him tipped on one end, books and pottery came crashing down onto the table and off it in a thunderous tumble. He scrambled back, the bench scraping as he caught his balance against the table edge and overset the oil-lamp. He grabbed for something to smother the spreading fire, feverishly wished it out and flung a towel over it, trembling in fright as the last bits of pottery rocked and rattled to a stop.

The threatened House-thing, roused from sleep, shifted among the cellar supports and made the whole house creak. He heard Pyetr and Eveshka getting out of bed, Pyetr calling out, asking him what was the matter; and he felt Eveshka’s frightened wish that the house be safe even before they could cross the room.

He had seen his own house burn. He had been all of five, but he remembered the neighbor saying, The boy’s a witch—

The door opened. “What happened?” Pyetr asked, arriving in the kitchen. “Sasha?”

“The shelf fell.” Still shaking, he found wit enough to pick up Uulamets’ book and Chernevog’s, both of which had fallen’ to the floor

“The peg must have snapped,” Pyetr said, examining the place on the wall where the shelf had been… while Eveshka was mopping up the spillage from the lamp and picking up the pieces of pottery. Pyetr said, then, and it rang in Sasha’s hearing as if it had come from the bottom of a well: “Just split, that’s all. I’ll fix it.”

Sasha remembered the books in his arms and laid them on the table atop his own, with the most terrible apprehension in his heart. It might be—surely it was what Pyetr had said, old wood, a shelf already old when Uulamets had held the house. There was a perfectly natural explanation, the making of the new wall, the opening of the archway, the weighting of the shelf with three books instead of the one which had stood there so many years; even and especially—the several jars he had added some days ago. The shelves and the counters in the kitchen were virtually the only things left the way they had been—

But everything assumed an unnatural importance tonight. A sense of panic came over him. His impulse was to ask Eveshka whether she felt any disquiet—and he shut that thought down quickly—

Because what he feared was so foolish and so deadly dangerous, even doubting in the least the power of the forest to hold the sorcerer who had killed her.

Doubt had always been Chernevog’s weapon.

And Chernevog’s book was here, on his desk, where he himself had never wanted it. It had sat here among spice cannisters and bits of old fishing tackle, sprigs of drying herbs and a curious bird’s-nest… this dreadful, dangerous thing, fraught with memories of its own, a hazard that made his heart jump when old wood broke and an overloaded shelf fell.

“It’s nothing,” he said to Pyetr and Eveshka. “Go back to bed.”

He wished them pleasant dreams. He wished—

But Eveshka stopped abruptly in the doorway and looked merrily back at him, with anger, he thought. Certainly disapproval.

What are you thinking? he asked her in that way that wizards might, wanting that thought to come into her mind. She scowled at him.

He saw himself, then, constantly reading, a boy hunched gracelessly over her father’s book. Uulamets had not meant good at all to Pyetr, no more than he had meant good to Eveshka, nor trusted her—

Nor any woman, nor any daughter, nor any man nor creature that might possibly make alliances against him. It was having his own way that had mattered to Uulamets, it was all that had ever mattered, and he deceived himself if he thought Uulamets meant any of them any good, if it crossed his purposes.

He had that thought, after she had gone through the doorway after Pyetr, and the bedroom door slammed definitely shut. He shivered when she had gone.

She was not all sixteen in her heart. In some things, she was very, very old, and he was not. In some things she had experience and he did not; and he ought to listen to her advice for reasons not least of which was the fact that Eveshka remembered only what Eveshka had seen, and was sure of what she remembered… which was more than he could say.

He was not entirely sure that that was his own thought. But he might have thought that.

What’s happened to me? he asked himself in cold fright. What’s going on in me, if what she sees is Uulamets?