C. Cherryh - Yvgenie

“I don’t want to ride.”

“No? What do you want to do today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, why don’t we ride until you do?”

“I think I’d better write some things down.”

“That might be a good idea,” Sasha said.

“I don’t think so,” Pyetr said. “God, she’s had enough of magic. She’s a child, for the god’s sake. That’s whal wrong: too much taking care of. She should skin a knee or something a little less damned dire, can’t she?”

“Don’t fight,” Ilyana said; a wish; even he heard it. Ilyana had her lips clamped as if something else was going to escape.

“We’re not fighting. Your uncle and I used to discuss this before—” He almost said, Before I married your mother. Which was true. He said instead, “We’re friends. It doesn’t mean you don’t like somebody if you yell.”

“I know,” she said, with exactly her mother’s frown.

It was not fair to Eveshka, either. He remembered pain. He remembered—

She said, sullenly, “I’ll go riding if you want.”

“I’m not going to make you do anything, mouse. That’s the point, isn’t it? Your mother’s just very fragile. Maybe she always will be. But she doesn’t want you to grow up like her. She wants you—”

“Wants” was not a good word. He knew that after all these years, dammit, he knew better.

The mouse bit her lip. “I don’t know what she wants. It changes. All the time.”

“What would you like to do? That’s the point. Go do it.”

“You wouldn’t like what I’d do…”

He saw that expression in the mirror when he was shaving. On a bad day. He tilted his head and gave her one that matched it.

“Mouse, if you’re a fool, I’m going to be very upset. There’s a vodyanoi to consider now, in your slipping about the woods with secrets—he doesn’t stay to the water, let me tell you something about Chernevog.”

“I don’t want to hear!”

That stung. And he forgot what he was going to say.

Sasha said, “She’s distressed, she didn’t intend that.”

“What about him?” the mouse asked, very quietly. And it came back to him what he had been going to say—that a man Chernevog’s age had no business with a fifteen-year-old girl.

But he did not think, on second thought, that she would understand that.

Instead he said, “If you should see him—tell him I’ll talk to him. Alone.”

She looked upset with that idea, and not only, perhaps, for fear of what he might say to Chernevog in that exchange. Maybe she was thinking about the danger he could be in—knowing what Chernevog was. That was what he hoped she would see, at least.

She said, cautiously, “What would you say to him?”

“I’d ask him what he wants. I owe him my life, mouse. But I don’t owe him yours. And I’d pay mine to keep you safe.”

Something wizardous went on—so strong he felt his skin crawl.

She said, “Don’t talk like that!”

“It’s every bit true, mouse.”

She jumped up from the bench and ran for her room. In a moment, through the open door, he saw her sit down on her bed with her book in her lap.

Not sun. Books.

He shook his head.

Sasha said quietly, “You scared her. That’s good. She’s thinking—very noisily right now. I can’t avoid hearing.”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to deal with her that way.”

“She’s making wishes to protect the house, she’s making wishes for all of us to be wise—even her mother. Winding them around like yarn. That’s the way she’s thinking of it. Don’t push her—to do anything, even to enjoy herself. That’s the real point, isn’t it? Let her think.”

The mouse came out with ink stains on her fingers and reddened eyes. Tears as well as ink on that page, Sasha thought, and put his own pen away and folded his book. She had done all that crying without disturbing the house—in any sense. No small feat.

“A very good mouse,” he said. “I didn’t even hear you.”

“Where’s my father?”

“Trimming horses’ feet. Or weeding the garden. One or the other.”

The mouse came very quietly and sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. “Uncle, what made me so mad was—nobody even asked if he’d done anything wrong. Nobody ever asks my opinion.”

“You mean no one asked you this time. “Ever” is quite large word.”

“It feels like “ever.” “

“I’m distracting you. Yes. We were upset. I’ll tell you, Chernevog was a very strong wizard. And one could suppose he’s old enough to know better than what he’s doing: we didn’t have to explain to him why we were upset—he knew that when he came here. But I do agree with you: you weren’t consulted. It had to scare you; it certainly scared me—I knew Chernevog. If he’d wanted a fight, it could have been bad down there—very bad.”

She had not tried to say anything. He left a silence for ho to think about that. Finally she said:

“I think I’ll go help my father. Is Babi with him?”

“Last I saw.”

She started for the door, turned around again with a lift of her chin. “Have you been talking to my mother?”

He shook his head. “No. But she’s all right, I’m sure.”

“There’s a vodyanoi out there. She should be careful.”

“She can handle the old Snake. No question.”

A very good sign, he thought, watching her go out the door. And the inevitable afterthought, considering the blond braids and that outline against the sun: God, she looks like her mother.

Old Snake had not a chance if he crossed Eveshka right now, no more than Kavi Chernevog had had when, clinging to a scrap of life, he had drifted toward the only friends he had had in the world. And found Ilyana.

No. Not Chernevog as he had died. The boy who loved Owl had found Ilyana; and Ilyana had found someone to play with. And to love.

God help both of them, he thought, sick at heart.

But that was not the worst thing about the affair. The worst thing, the thing that haunted Eveshka and that haunted him and Pyetr, too, so far as Pyetr’s understanding went—was that fifteen years ago they had patched something very wrong in the world; things once associated were always associated—and if there was a way for it to get back into the world it was through Kavi Chernevog or it was through Eveshka—

Or, likeliest of all, Ilyana.

It proved one thing, that they had not been safe all these years: things had begun going wrong very naturally, very quietly, from the very time they had left that place upriver, where Chernevog had died.

Baby mouse, Misighi had called her, lichenous, patch-hided old Misighi, no little crazed from the death of the previous forest. They had been so relieved when Misighi had found no harm in Ilyana as an infant, when he had cradled her in his gnarled arms, smelled her over and said, in that rumbling voice of his—new growth.

But after that, Misighi had not come to the house. A few leshys had. A very few. And he had asked why, in his wanderings in the woods—asked Wiun, for one, who was a little mad himself.

Wiun had said—A new wind, young wizard. A new wind will come.

And more and more rarely they would be there, leaving their backward, tracks on the riverside. Sometimes the orphans of some storm would turn up near his porch, or on it, sometimes a nest of birds—a young squirrel.

But none lately. None last winter. The woods had a lonelier, cruder feeling this spring.

He had written it in his book, and worried about it, and worried that perhaps Pyetr’s going to Kiev had been a mistake, coming home again with, perhaps, too much of the outside clinging about him—too much of tsars and tsarevitches and the noise of marketplaces and the smell of smoke. Pyetr declared he would not go to Kiev again: and suddenly that statement seemed ominous—as if all along their suppositions had been wrong, their fears misplaced: Pyetr could never have been in danger from Ilyana among the leshys. They would have kept him safe from harm—by means a man might not like; but he would have been safe.