C. Cherryh - Yvgenie

“How is she?” Eveshka’s voice asked him; but her heart had already found that answer and the anxiousness smothered, it suffocated him.

“She’s doing a lot better,” he said, struggling for calm. “Eveshka, listen to me, you’ve got to give her more rein. A lot more, not less. Trust her.”

He felt her panic arguing with his—he remembered things a man did not want to remember about his wife: and remembered things about himself, the young fool who had gotten himself skewered by a jealous husband, ensnared by a rusalka and damned near killed by Chernevog—before he had carried Chernevog’s heart a while himself: he knew Chernevog, by that, the way he knew his wife, the way he knew Sasha, and all the pieces of their lives came together in him, or refused to go together at all—

He forced them to meet, dammit, one with the other, in his own opinions of what to do: trust Ilyana, he thought; and he thought unawares of Ilyana and Chernevog; and dying, and killing, and a watery cave that figured in their nightmares. He propped himself against the fireside stones, breaking a bit of kindling in his hands, snap, snap, snap, thicker and thicker pieces, until he could not break them any longer, then did break them once more. There was blood on his hands, then.

“God, you fool,” Eveshka whispered. Her heart struggled to escape his. She wanted her daughter to herself, she gave no credence to his unwizardly opinions that were blind to the dangers reaching out for them, out of magic, out of that unnamable place magic used—

He said, leaning there, sucking a bloody knuckle, “You’ve made a mistake, wife. You understand me. Beat the horse— and she’ll kill you, sooner or later. Don’t do it with my daughter.”

He was not talking to the heart lodged next to his, he was talking to a wizard, doubly and triply born—who found his daughter a cipher, and hurt his daughter because she let her nightmares override her good sense—

“A mistake,” he said, “that’s still able to be fixed. But not by doing the same thing your father did to you. Don’t hedge her about with rules, ’Veshka. Chernevog will be back, I don’t know when, but he’ll be back: I doubt you drove him that far. This isn’t something that’s solved and panic won’t help.”

“The vodyanoi is awake,” Eveshka said quietly, turning her back on him. “Sasha drove him off. More than that may have slipped its peg with what happened out there.”

Glistening black coils, sleek as oil; cold, and mud, and bones. She was making him remember. He was dizzy for a moment, and the wife who feared anything unplanned came face to face with the boy who had walked The Doe’s rooftree drunk, on a dare—that boy and the hard young man who had done it thereafter on bets—for money, because in Vojvoda, you had to have money or you fell further than that…

Eveshka did not understand that place. But she knew fighting for what she wanted, and she knew fighting to stay alive.

“What’s a rusalka,” he asked her, in that one point of understanding, “but a wish so strong it drinks the life out of anything it wants? How close will you hold Ilyana? Or me? If it’s that again, ’Veshka—then, dammit, stay to me. Don’t do it to our daughter!”

There was anger in front of him, then, terrible anger inside him. And fear. Her heart wanted free of obligations. It wanted—

But her heart had no magic to fight with. Neither did he.

The anger in front of him did. The anger could do anything it wanted. It would be a fool to do any of those things to a man who had her heart, and they both knew that—but that heart began to go this way and that in panic at the thought of it.

He said, “ ’Veshka, is the word ‘wrong’ so damned difficult? Take it back, ’Veshka, I know it hurts, dammit—but I don’t like what I’m seeing.”

She looked at him coldly. She walked away and picked up a basket from the stack in the corner, and put it on the table.

Packing, then.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means you can do what you like with her. Maybe you can do better.”

Her heart was saying something else. It was feeling betrayal and terror and wanting fools it loved to do exactly what it thought safe.

She wanted him to do what she said, wanted not to hurt him any further, and wanted out of here before she killed him—because she was drowning in confusion—

And when she could not breathe, she would grab anything and anyone that could give that next breath to her—she would do it again and again, the way she had done, to live, her way—

He held on, he shut his eyes to shut it out, but the panic was not coming from the outside, it was inside him, a panic that must not get to his daughter—he could not let it get to her—

She said, a living voice, “I’m taking the boat. It’s stocked isn’t it?”

He nodded, in the moment’s sanity her cold voice made. He left the fireside, managed to reach the kitchen table and sit down, with the sudden thought that there had been no sound from Ilyana or Sasha. Sasha must be taking care her, Sasha must be trying to get hold of the situation—

He leaned his head on his hands, tasted blood and realized he had bitten his lip. He did it then deliberately, pain to stop him thinking, pain like sunlight to distract a man’s eyes from ghosts.

He heard her steps echo in the bedroom and eventually come back again; he heard her pass behind him to the door, getting her cloak. It was not like the first years of their marriage, when she would bolt and run—heart and all. He did not know now if she meant to take her heart back when she left or whether she might leave him like this, because what she was now was safe, and clearheaded, and cared for nothing more than itself. Perhaps she had no choice. Or she found no reason now to suffer with ordinary folk.

She said, the part of her that had no heart: “I’ll call for it—when I can.”

“Sasha?” he murmured, hoping Sasha could hear him— wondering if Sasha was all right. If Ilyana was. If Eveshka was not about to kill all of them along with her heart, a coldly reasoned self-murder—against the nightmare she had feared all these years—

“No,” she said aloud. He heard the door open, felt a gust of cool night air against his left side.

He thought, he could not help himself: Chernevog wasn’t worse than this. God, what has she become?

“Too strong,” his wife’s voice said from the door. “Too powerful to deal with magic.”

Pain surpassed pain. He slumped onto his folded arms, wanting her to go, put distance between them; but he heard her walk back, while the whole house groaned in pain, felt her shadow against the wind as she bent over him. Her lips brushed his temple and he began to fall then, a long helpless slide into dark.

He thought she said, while he was spinning and falling: “I have to do this, Pyetr. I have to. Or we’ll all of us die.”

“I don’t know what the hell she meant.” His hands were still shaking at breakfast, but the heart next to his was quiet, thank the god. Thank the god Ilyana was still sleeping—or thank Sasha, he thought, who was responsible for the breakfast and maybe for his sanity. “I’m not even sure she said it. It’s what I remember.”

Sasha sank slowly onto the other bench and stared at him.

“Have some tea.” Pyetr picked up the pot. It was the cracked teacup Sasha had this morning; and the magical patch from Uulamets’ time still held. So not everything had fallen apart, though his pouring splashed tea on the tabletop and the pot rattled as he set it down.

“She’s on the river somewhere south of here,” Sasha said, “she’s taken the boat. I think the vodyanoi’s gone after her.”