Yvgenie

1

The white owl flirted a wing past Ilyana’s fingertips, a little breath of cold, a flurry of wing beats above the river and a long, sweeping glide back to the shore.

The boy, mist and shadow, waved his arm and sent Owl another course back toward her. She had met the boy when she was small, when first she had wandered alone in the woods, in the days when leshys still visited them. A fey, sad little boy had turned up sitting on an old log, and scowled at her when she came near—but curious, she had felt that from the first moment she had seen him; and a little girl who had no other child to play with had not minded the scowl. She had been very clever in her approach: she had shown him the smooth stones she had found, had let him see the jay’s feather and the snakeskin she had picked up beside the stream—how could he resist? He had examined her discoveries, he had said not a word, but he had scowled a little less, and then she had shown him how she made leaf boats, like the real boat her father sailed on the river, except her father’s had a great white sail.

The boy had put out his hand to catch her leaf boats. Bui they sailed right through.

He had come every day for a while. Then he had stopped coming, she had feared forever, and she had been desolate. But he had reappeared the next spring, and every year since, daily at the edge of summer, and fading away as the sun grew warmer.

He never spoke. He could not speak, for all she knew. He would only nod or shake his head to her questions, but they understood each other. And every year he grew older, right along with her.

To this day she had never seen another child, and she never expected to see one but him. She had heard about great Kiev, of course, and farms downriver, and she had heard of Vojvoda, the other side of the woods, where there were other children—but somehow there had always been dangers and there were very good reasons, so her parents assured her, that she should live safe in the woods, never visiting towns and cities. This might be so. She had no way to tell.

But her friend was her secret, her secret of secrets, that she had never told anyone, not even when she was small and foolish. Every springtime she looked for him, and every summer brought regret when he went away.

The springtime they both were twelve, he had brought Owl with him. Owl had looked at her with pale, mad eyes, ruffled up, immediately turned his back, and refused for all that visit to face her except over his shoulder.

It had been three years now—they were both, perhaps, fifteen. Owl still held his distance. Her friend mimed things to her with long, quick fingers: notice of the river, a sign to his face and toward her, a smile and a glance that could steal a heart. Owl glided up to perch as a sullen wisp against a tree trunk, and her friend shrugged, smiled shyly and offered his hand to her instead, touching her skin with the cool, faint sensation of his fingers. Ilyana, his lips said soundlessly, and he glanced down and closed his hand, as if he could no more be sure where her fingers were than she could feel his: that was as close as they could come to touching. She could gaze into his eyes, this close, but it was still the edge of daylight, and if she did not imagine very, very hard, she could see the trees and the riverside behind them. His hand about hers felt only faintly chill.

He had grown so much taller. And he looked at her with such solemnity—the way she looked at him perhaps, with all the effort it took to see her, and all the bittersweet anticipation of so short a time he could stay. He had Owl; she had Babi and Patches and all, but he always seemed lonelier than she was—being, as she was almost certain, dead.

Perhaps he had died in late spring: perhaps that was why he haunted the woods in this one short season. He might have lived near here once. Or fallen off a boat, in the days when ordinary boats had used to come this high on the river. She was afraid to ask her parents, who were very quick to guess her secrets. She was equally afraid to ask him, although he could answer her questions with nods or shakes of his head: ghosts were often ghosts, so her uncle’s tales advised her, because they had never realized that they were dead. In that case a careless word might send him away forever.

So she balanced now between the truth her eyes told her and the imagination of a touch beneath her chin, and his face near hers. Easier to feel that touch if she shut her eyes: and when she did so he dropped a shivery cool kiss on her cheek. That was nice.

On her lips, then. She opened her eyes wide and stepped hack, not sure whether that had been a joke or not—to kiss her the way her father kissed her mother.

Not a joke, she thought, by the earnest look on his face. She felt—not shivery—but warm, and shaky in the knees, and short of breath—which might be a spell or a wish. She had no clear thought in her head for a moment, a very dangerous condition, her mother and her uncle would agree.

But her friend had meant no harm, she was sure. She was halfway sure that kiss had been—very sweet, if she had not been so startled.

And now that she thought along that line, perhaps it was only another change with time—like Owl’s arrival. Like flowers blooming. Like the changes that had made her more and more aware of spring, and of the foxes’ games, and the birds’ dances and their seasonal obsession with twigs and straws. She knew what nature was; and she apprehended a very profound change in her thoughts this spring. Like a second birthday, this annual meeting, that she had waited for and waited for and sought by evening shadow, reckoning moon-phases and the rising of summer stars. This year she had plaited blue ribbons in her hair. She had worn—not her best frock for him: she was too secretive and clever for that— but a favorite one, with her own embroidery of lilies, while he appeared this year in much plainer clothing, leaner about the face and broader in the shoulders, as much a young man suddenly as she felt herself becoming a young woman. She apprehended that kiss suddenly as very much what was between her mother and her father—

And she did not think it wrong. She thought, now that she did think of it, that this year was a very reasonable time he do that—unbearable if, after so many years of growing together, he should never have begun to love her, or if in a spring with all the woods gone giddy and wild, she should have had no feeling for him at all.

Danger, her heart said, and, here friendship could end, here it might go on, but forever changed—and what if he liked it and I didn’t? Was it really pleasant, just then?

One wanted to know. One could try again. But where did one go from there?

To where the foxes went? She had no such plans. She had made no wishes one way or the other. She only thought—If I were to love, of course it would be him. There’s no one else. There never could be.

She backed further away—it seemed safest, under the circumstances.

He held out his hands.

“I don’t think we should,” she whispered. She honestly had no idea what the next step could be except the one that she knew her mother would disapprove. “Why don’t we go for a walk? Come up by the stable. Patches has grown so—”

He went on smiling at her and held out one hand, indicating the river shore with the other—no, he did not want to go up near the house; and he might be right: it was a good way to get caught. So she walked with him into the deeper shade, where it was easier to see each other.

Oh, so many details of his face were changed: she stood there only staring at him a breath or two before she felt un-easy and looked away to the water, which was far less an attraction. “Patches has grown, of course,” she said, in a voice higher than she intended, and went on to tick off on her fingers the things that had happened since last year. “The fox kit went wild. We had a nest of mice this spring, and mother said if I let them loose near the house she’d wish me lost in the woods.”

A chill touch came on her shoulder. She let it rest there, because if she turned around now, they would be facing each other much too closely. She said, “Don’t do that. You make me nervous.”

He took his hand away. So she did glance back at him, finding him still closer than she thought safe, holding his hand just a little way from touching her, as if to say he wanted to, but he would not if she forbade it.

His face was so much more grown-up—except the eyes, which regarded her with the familiar anxiousness to be understood: he shook his head at her, meaning, she hoped, that he was sorry he had scared her; and he signed to her that he wanted her to walk with him further along the shore.

That seemed far safer than looking into his eyes at this range. So she walked with him, while Owl glided along ahead of them, sometimes so milky white she could see the barring on his wings, sometimes nothing but gossamer in a shaft of evening sun.

They discovered curious branches the river had washed up, they found shells, they found dens of this and that creature that lived on this shore—all these things had used to occupy their walks. But such diversions seemed trivial now. She picked up a water-smoothed shell to show him, but it was an excuse for distraction, a chance to discover whether her hands were shaking.

She said, “You’re not wishing me, are you?”

He put a hand on his heart, sank down on his heels and reached out to stir the foam at the water edge with his fingers. Froth moved: that was all the strength he had in the living world. Perhaps that was what he was trying to tell her—that he could not really touch her.

He could never really touch her.

And she did want him—not now, but someday, perhaps this year, perhaps the next or the next, at some time her thoughts and her heart agreed.

She caught some faint impression from him then. Listening to his thoughts was like seeing him by sunlight: the eyes saw and the ears heard so many substantial things it was hard to concentrate on one’s imagination. His thoughts were like that: she had heard his as rarely as she had seen him by bright day, and beneath the murmur of the river and the sighing of the reeds and the leaves it seemed she could even hear his voice, saying something about the dark and waiting.

“I can almost hear you,” she whispered.

He stood up, face to face with her. His lips moved—she thrust the river sound to the back of her mind and listened for him. She said, ever so quietly herself, “I’m afraid to ask you questions. I might ask a wrong one. If I asked the wrong one mightn’t I send you away?”

He shook his head.

“No question can hurt you?”

He touched his heart. He gestured toward her, inviting her to go on.

A thousand questions leaped up. She said, breathlessly, “Is it safe to ask what you are?”

That made him laugh. She thought, Foolish question. Of course. He’s a ghost.

She asked, “Is it safe to ask why you come here?”

Another gesture from heart to her, to his eyes.

Flattering, but her father gave answers like that to her mother when he wanted his own way. She made herself coldly sensible like her mother, and asked, “But why here? Why here instead of the woods lately? Do you have anything special to do with this place?”

He reached and touched beneath her chin, said words too faint to hear.

He laid a finger on her lips, then, and a chill came on them and on her heart. She whispered, “So you can’t answer everything.”

The way he gazed into her eyes made her think about the kiss he had given her, and sent a shiver through her knees. She wished please not, not yet, she was hardly sure about the last one. She thought it had been nice. She just wanted to think a while about the next one.

He went on looking at her. She said, “I don’t even know your name.”

His lips moved. She heard “…your friend, Ilyana,”—which was what she wanted to hear, and all she wanted to hear, until she could get her feelings and her thinking straightened out. She was shaky—not scared, just—shaky all over.

While birds courted like crazy things through the branches of the trees.

He gestured upward. “Look at them,” she heard.

She did look, and on the way down from looking up found herself looking straight into his eyes. She thought, But what comes of that is baby birds. And with a ghost?

She thought, or he said—she was not sure—

“—I’d never do you harm, Ilyana. I’d die first.”

She said, aloud, before she thought, “You are dead.”

That might have banished him then and there, if it were mere ignorance holding him to the earth. He had made her that reckless, that inconsiderate of her actions. But he said, ever so faintly to her ears: “You’re why I come here, so long as I have the strength. I swear to you, I’ve never broken the rules.”

“What rules?”

She thought, for no reason, of leshys, tall as trees and very like them. She thought of a ring of thorns, a stone, and golden leaves.

He said, “Don’t betray me, Ilyana. Don’t tell anyone. And never ask for my heart. I’d so quickly give it to you. Owl’s such a hardhearted bird.”

“You’re a wizard!”

“Oh, yes.” His voice came much more strongly now. And she had never been sure of the color of his eyes or his hair, but they seemed dusky now, and a faint flush colored his face against the shadow of the brush. “I was. And you are. Maybe it was your wish all along that brought me. Or mine. I fear I’m no more than a wish—my own, for life; and yours— perhaps for company. And mine again now—for you. Do you understand rusalki? Do you know now?—Please don’t run.”

It had crossed her mind. So did staying for questions, since it was still her friend gazing so closely into her eyes. “Rusalki are drowned girls—”

“And I’m not.” Gentle laughter, a downward glance of still-boyish eyes, a look up again, under her lashes. “Neither drowned nor a girl. Not particularly angry at my fate. So it can’t be sailors that I court, nor travelers in the woods; it’s only you, Ilyana. And forgive me—I’ve borrowed a little of your strength; but only enough to speak to you with my own voice. I won’t take more than that, I swear to you.”

“Oh, god.”

“Please.” He caught at her hand to stay her and from that chill touch a tingling ran through her bones. “I’m the one in danger now. I’m the one your thought can banish. I beg you don’t. I beg you listen to me.”

“God.” Everything was tottering, her one friendship in all her life gone first confusing and threatening, and imminently fatal, if a rusalka was truly what he was.

“Nothing spiteful,” he answered her thoughts, “nothing selfish—well, perhaps a little. I promise you, I’d never harm you. I’ll do anything you want.”

“Then tell me what I ask you.”

“I have no choice.”

“What do you want from me?”

“The things that only you can give.”

“Riddles!” It was a danger with magical things, who might be bound to answer in riddles—on all the places where a trap might lurk.

He said, “There was a vodyanoi once, who lived along this stream.”

“I know about him. His name is Hwiuur. My parents and my uncle warned me.” Worse and worse thoughts: the old snake had never been in his den so long as she had lived. “What’s he to do with you?”

“A threat to you. That’s one thing. He’s come back.” His voice grew fainter. “I daren’t borrow more from you. I can’t stay longer. Believe me, Ilyana—”

“Don’t wish at me! I won’t believe you if you do things like that!”

“You’re growing up, Ilyana. If I’ve any magic left, I wish it to come in this season, while I’m with you. I don’t want you to be alone, Ilyana, and without me, you would be— alone—”

“Alone for what? I’m always alone! I’ve no friend but you!”

His voice was fading. He said, hardly audible, “I can’t explain now. Don’t fail me… tomorrow…”

“Ilyana!” faintly came from beyond the trees. Her mother was calling her. The twilight even out on the river was deeper than she had thought—god, it was nearly dark. And her Mend mimed that she should go, now.

“Back in the morning!” she said, and ran.

“Ilyana!”

Her mother wanted her home, now, immediately, and when one’s mother was a wizard, there could be no question of it—not wise to delay, not now, no thought of why, only obedience: I’m coming, she wanted her mother to know. Yes, mother, quick as I can, mother—

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 brought 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 Pyetr 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.

“Oh, reading.” Perhaps he had dropped a stitch or two. He thought Pyetr might have asked him something before that.

“So do you want to go out tomorrow?”

He most wanted a little more time to his books right now. He had been following a particularly knotty thought the last several days; but he also saw himself getting as stodgy and housebound as master Uulamets had been, and decided that his sudden perception of the mouseling this evening just might be his wizardry forestalling the very problems he had been working on for fifteen years. Perhaps it was really, imminently, absolutely tomorrow, time to say something to Pyetr, and see whether Pyetr could reason with Eveshka about the child.

“Yes,” he said, blinking present company into his thoughts. “Yes, that might be a very good idea.”

Silly thing to say. Pyetr looked at him curiously across the table and said, “All right.”

Eveshka’s hair-brushing sent crackles through the air. It was wonderful hair, pale gold, so long she had to catch it up in handfuls to deal with it. Eveshka wished the tangles out of it, Pyetr was sure: he had never seen anyone go so hard at so much hair with so little breakage; but all the same he took the brush from her, picked up a heavy weight of it and applied gentler strokes to the task, at which Eveshka sighed and shut her eyes. She habitually smelled of violets and lavender and herbs from the kitchen. Tonight rosemary and wood smoke figured in, too, which, with the smell of her hair and the face the bronze mirror cast back to him, could make even a sensible long-wedded man forget that he had begun this evening tired and out of sorts. He bent and kissed her on the top of her head, kissed her on the temple, too.

At which she suddenly leapt up and hugged him fiercely, protesting she was sorry she had been so short today, the bread had gone wrong—

“The bread was fine,” he said.

“I wanted it to be,” she said. He understood how she loathed doing that. She used her magic as little as she could— and seldom on trifles. She was far too magical to throw her wishes around on petty problems, even if those were precisely the safest kind of wishes to make: that kind of solution to failures, they were all agreed, set a bad example for their daughter, teaching her too much wizardry and too little ordinary resourcefulness.

Eveshka said, resting her head against him: “When are you going down to Anatoly’s?”

“Oh, I don’t know, the weather’s holding. Maybe—maybe three, four days, why not? Are we ready?”

In other years, she had been quick with an account of things she wanted, a few special things she would hope (but never wished) he might bargain for. In other springtimes the kitchen had been cluttered with little pots of salve and herbs she had put away during the winter, the trading goods they had to offer. But the season had crept up on her, perhaps: there was no sign of the packing baskets and herb-pots yet, und somehow, perhaps for that reason, he had not gotten around to thinking about going downriver either: everything seemed to be running late this year.

“I’ll sail whenever you want me to,” he said, to please her. “We can hold out on the flour another month, can’t we? There’s grain left—if you’re not ready. Or do you want to come along this year, pack up Ilyana and sail with me? Sasha wouldn’t mind. He’s been suggesting it for years.”

“I’ll think about it,” she murmured against his shoulder.

“You’re not sick or anything?” Wizards never got sick, so far as he knew, never showed their age, never suffered a good many things ordinary folk did; but there were other ailments. There was worry, for one; there was solitude and seriousness and responsibility of a kind ordinary folk seldom thought about—a constant reckoning of consequences which he understood somewhat how to do from the outside of magic, but not—

Not from the inner cautions his wife had constantly to observe, or the fact that she had been dead for a hundred years—and then married a ne’er-do-well scoundrel, who could never quite understand her fears or truly advise her in wizardry crises.

Perhaps he was missing something now. He was not sure. He was not even sure her mood was not something entirely simple, having nothing to do with wizards. He had believed he understood women tolerably well in Vojvoda, at least the sort of women he had had most to do with—bored, rich wives and bored tavern-keepers’ daughters who yearned alike after some risk in their lives, some sense of notice from someone. Neither, of course, could possibly explain his wife—whose temper could raise storms and whose good sense could fill a boat’s sail with wind or turn a tsar’s attention from a very foolish husband.

But whatever else Eveshka was, she was also a wife, and her husband might have been no wiser than certain other foolish husbands whose mistakes had, in his greener days, been all to his advantage.

“No,” she sighed. “Not sick. I’m just worried about the weather.”

“It’s been fine.”

“It might turn.”

Sometimes with Eveshka one had the most distinct feeling one was not talking about the words one was using.

“Is there something in particular?” he asked her.

“You should go,” she said. “You should, yes. Maybe even take that trip you’ve been talking about.”

“Back to Kiev? Are you tired of me, perhaps?”

Silence for a few moments. “Never tired of you, don’t be foolish.”

“Is something the matter with Ilyana?”

“No.”

“You know, none of you are making sense today.”

“What, “none of us?” “

“I asked her to go riding, thought we’d give young Patches a little time on the trail. I’ve heard nothing else for a month. And now she has to help you in the kitchen tomorrow. Are you two having a fight?”

Eveshka stood back and looked at him, hands on hips. “I didn’t say a thing about the kitchen. Did she say that?”

“She didn’t.”

“Did she say anything about my scolding her?”

“Not a thing. Just that she ought to help you more. What’s this about trips to Kiev?”

Eveshka frowned and walked away from him, arms folded. The lamplight hazed her in gold, head bowed, back turned, thinking about things he did not understand and she never explained. Ever.

“Well, I’m not going to Kiev,” he told her. “I’ve been there. The tsarevitch is a greedy lout with no sense of humor. Why should I improve him? As good pay a visit to Vojvoda, where I know they have a rope ready.”

No answer. He waited. He sighed. He went over to the laundry basket in the corner, took off his shirt and tossed it in.

Eveshka turned to him and said, “I don’t know that anything is the matter. It’s just—”

“It’s just that every time there’s a difficulty with my daughter, I’m packed off to the god knows where. She’s fifteen, ’Veshka, she’d never harm a hair of my head, and it’s not as if she throws tantrums these days. If there’s something going on I don’t know about, tell me.”

“I dreamed of an owl last night.”

Silly thing to say. But not so silly, if one remembered. “It’s that time of year,” he said. “I think of him, too. That’s not so—”

She laid her fingers on her lips, made a little wave of her hand, and an ordinary man knew to stop there, with a wizard on the brink of thoughts she did not want to sleep with.

“Come to bed,” he urged her. “There’s no damned owl. If it were a swan you’d dreamed of, then I’d worry.”

He won a laugh from her. “God,” she said. “That dreadful creature.”

“A narrow escape,” he said. “It or me, I swear to you. Thank the god it flew. Ilyana could have attached herself to it.”

“There could be worse places for hearts, all the same.”

“The world’s full of them. Every town’s full of them. But she’s in no danger of them riding in the woods, ’Veshka, and she’s doing very well. Let her be a child this summer. Winter’s time enough for lessons. Don’t scold her. And don’t make her stay in the house tomorrow.”

Eveshka’s brows drew together. “Don’t scold her! Pyetr, I never scolded her.”

“You do ask a lot of her.”

“With reason!”

“She’s a child, ’Veshka. She doesn’t think of things in advance. Children don’t. Even I remember that. She should enjoy herself, not be thinking of work all the time. Encourage her to go.”

“A wizard-child can’t grow up like a weed. She can’t go through life doing whatever pleases her and only what pleases her. There’s discipline, Pyetr. That’s life and death to her and everyone in her reach. If she’s feeling guilty about worrying me today, good! Let her have thoughts like that!”

“The swan lived.”

“Not thanks to her doing the first thing that jumps into her head. Ask Sasha how dangerous she can be. Ask him what became of his parents.”

“Not fair, ’Veshka.”

“You’re never here when—”

“Not by my choice!”

“I don’t enjoy being always the one to tell her no, Pyetr. I know you can’t do it—but what I don’t like is you always being the one to give her the sweets after we’ve had a discussion. You’re always the one with the presents, you’re always the one who’ll give her what she wants, and make me look like a—”

“That’s not true, ’Veshka!”

Eveshka walked away from him, arms folded, collecting her composure. He knew to wait in such instances, dammit, no matter his own temper was touched. He said, unable to hold it: “I’m never here when she needs me, either. I didn’t choose that. You never gave me a choice in it; and maybe it had to be, once, but there’s no longer a reason for my sailing off down the river in crises, ’Veshka. She’s outgrown any girl, wizard or not.”

She looked at him and retorted, “I wish—” And stopped herself, turned away with the back of her hand across her mouth. Restraining herself from what, he had no idea. Nor dared ask right now. And maybe not tomorrow. That was always the problem.

It was a very fine cottage they had built on the hill, snug in snowfalls and springtime melt, safe and solid and at least as straight as the bathhouse roof—none of them were carpenters.

But it could be a very lonely house, at night, Sasha thought, taking the candle to his desk to save lighting another— parsimony his aunt would have approved, but Pyetr would not. Why break your neck in the dark? Pyetr would chide him, Pyetr’s approach to most things being both extravagant and eminently practical.

And for all he could figure, he had no idea now whether the advice he meant to give Pyetr was on the mark or not; or whether tomorrow might not be the best day for it. Eveshka was clearly not in the best of moods tonight, for her to have sent out the call she had when the girl was late to supper.

Eveshka feared—feared the good god only knew what, precisely: that Ilyana, who had wizard blood from her and from two grandparents, might turn uncontrollable, might attract magic to her that no child could handle.

Possibly. Ilyana’s ability was considerable and he had no real understanding himself how to govern her, except love and a great deal of listening—reasoning that if anyone had cared or asked him what his thoughts were when he had been her age, if anyone had ever offered seriously to listen to him before Pyetr had, and to advise him before master Uulamets had, then perhaps a great many things might have been different. Listening before advising the child seemed to him to be the best course. And wishing tranquility in these woods: that too—they wished very little change, here on their river shore, far from the demands of ordinary folk or the possibility of visitors. They shared the land, they shared suppers, they shared their lives, when wizards as a rule gave up their hearts and lived with loneliness. Certainly that had been the case with master Uulamets, Eveshka’s father, and certainly it would have been the case with them, except for Pyetr—who was at all points the peace in the household, the center of all the friendship and the love they shared, husband, father, and friend—

Somehow he could never make Pyetr understand that, or make him realize how desolate their lives might have been without him. Thanks to Pyetr he had more than his books and his house, he had a place to go in the evenings where one could sit by the fire and talk. He had friends and a child to watch grow up, as good as one of his own—he had made Ilyana toys when she was small, he had whittled dolls out of wood and painted them with dyes; and carved a quite remarkable horse, with straw for a mane and yarn for a tail. But she had suddenly grown too old for toy horses, too old for toys, that was precisely the trouble he saw coming: there seemed so much difference between this year and last. The toys languished, though loved, in Ilyana’s room, the dyes grew faint—the dolls had had the life hugged out of them years ago and the horse’s mane was a disgrace he had offered to mend, but Ilyana would have none of that, thank you, Patches was her horse and no one would change him.

Now Patches was a real horse. Soon enough Ilyana might ride the woods with a freedom a wizard-child could enjoy, with no fear of bandits, with the not inconsiderable blessing of the leshys, whose names she knew, one of whom had held her in his vast, twiggy arms when she was an infant—old Misighi had, on his first visit after she was born, smelled her over, regarded her with a vast, moss-green eye, and declared she looked to him like a baby mouse. So mouseling she had become; and their mouseling would go where she would in the world, ultimately—to whatever woodland fastness the leshys held now, or to the edge of fields where ordinary folk lived, or within sight of Kiev—the god knew. Since they could not be with her every step to guide her actions, it was the quality of her choices they had to assure.

Certainly a young wizard would make a few mistakes along the way. The vodka jug was one of his. So were the wishes that had brought Volkhi to them, and Missy; and the god only knew what calamity their flight might have caused in Vojvoda. He still did not know, nor wish to know, exactly what had set them free.

And generally, as tonight as he opened his book and began to write, in a house that had neither domovoi nor dvorovoi, nor any feeling of home—

Generally he did not think at all about Vojvoda, or his family. He, most of all of them, did not want his life to change—and he had to be careful of that, appended as he was to Pyetr’s household.

Odd uncle Sasha. Sasha the maker of toys, for the last child he might ever see. He thought, If I’d stayed in Vojvoda, if I’d married, if it had really ever been a choice to be ordinary—

He wondered what had become of the aunt and uncle who had brought him up. He wondered—

But he sternly forbade himself such thoughts. The god only knew what disasters they could lead to, and as for what had become of his relatives in Vojvoda, who his cousin Mikhail had married, or whether he had a horde of younger cousins by now—it was as good as in the moon, that life, and never that close, any hope of an ordinary family, not for Sasha Misurov. He had the finest any man could dream of, and that should certainly be enough—

Even if the house was dark and lonely at night, and even if it made sounds that had nothing to do with a domovoi, and everything to do with emptiness.

It was so hard not to think—but one dared not, dared not dream or think at all under this roof, with her mother on the other side of the wall. Ilyana lay abed under coverlets her mother had sewn, furiously concentrated on the patterns of the lamplight on the wooden ceiling. God, the nights she had counted the joints, the pegs, the knotholes, and discovered the animal shapes in the wood of this room—while she tried not to listen to the words that strayed out of her parents’ bedroom or to wonder what they were arguing about or why her name figured in it.

Most of all she dared not think of the pattern that reminded her of Owl—nor recall her friend waiting on the moonlit river shore.

But it seemed—it seemed something very like his presence brushed the edges of her mind tonight, so vivid a touch she could imagine him standing at her bedside.

—But that can’t happen. He can’t come into the house. He daren’t come here. It’s only my imagination.

A ghost would have to belong here, to get inside, isn’t that the rule? And surely he doesn’t; and surely the domovoi would never let him in without so much as a sound— Rusalki can kill you just by wanting to. So he doesn’t need to get into my bedroom if he did mean any harm, and it’s stupid to be afraid of him. If he’s a ghost he’s been one since I first knew him, he’s no different than he ever was, and if I don’t stop thinking about him right now, mother’s going to hear me.

Something still seemed to lurk in the shadows by the wardrobe, and of a sudden—

Babi turned up as a weight on her feet, eyes slitted, chin on manlike paws. When her heart settled, then she dared sleep.

When her heart settled, then she dared sleep.