C. Cherryh - Yvgenie

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

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

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

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

He remembered Owl dying and the precarious bridge above the river; he remembered his heart lodged as a guest with Pyetr’s—and knew Eveshka the way Pyetr did, saw her the way Pyetr did, in the sun and the wind, at the helm of the old ferry; he forgave her the way Pyetr did—with the firelight on her face and thoughts in her eyes he could never, ever speak to—

Thoughts like doubt of one’s own life, one’s own right to walk the earth, doubts that echoed off his own wizard-bred despair.

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

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

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

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

“To make her safe, that’s all they wanted—”

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

While life and magic poured over that rim and threatened to sweep her and him and everything they loved into itself.

“Eveshka,” he said. “Eveshka, don’t help it, don’t—wish against them—”

“Bonesss,” the vodyanoi said.

The whole world tottered for an instant. Breath failed. But she spun about and stalked away from him, and laid her hand on a bare white trunk.

Something whispered, slithering to the other bank: Don’t trust him, pretty bones. He’s not at all nice. But there is a place that wants him, there is a place that would certainly trade for him, trade for something very, very nice—

It was day. The vodyanoi could not abide the sun—except someone enabled him, except Eveshka was listening to the creature. And who was so foolish, god, who but him had ever been so foolish?

Eveshka rolled a glance at sky and woods, looked at him last, desperate, angry for all the long seasons of cold and dark he had damned her to. She hated him, for lying, for pain, for deception and his theft of her peace and her daughter—

She wanted the strength he held. She took it, in one dizzy rush, that left him on his knees; and wanted him from her sight, now, that was the single grace she gave him, because there was a wisp of life left in him and she would not kill— from moment to moment, so long as she could, she would not kill…

“Run, damn you, Kavi! Runl “

He found the strength somewhere. He fled the streamside, blind, raked by thorns—he stumbled and fell and ran again, mindless, until he found himself lying on dead leaves in the sunlight, watching an ant make anxious progress across a sandy, mold-eaten leaf among other leaves, and stop, and quite suddenly— Shrivel and die.

His heart gave a painful thump. A leaf fell. Another followed. He wiped his mouth with a gritty hand and tried to get up.

Green, untimely leaves showered about him. His teeth chattered with winter cold as he gathered his feet under him and kept going, where, he did not know, except he felt powerless against what moved him —he, Kavi, Yvgenie: the distinction was no longer exact in his thoughts.

He wiped tears that ran on his face, revolted by the chill of his own hand, and slid as much as walked down the face of the hill, gathered himself at the bottom and stumbled further, thinking—the god help him—that if he could only find the horses—they could carry his failing body in more then one sense.

But there was no trace of them, and from Yvgenie nothing but terror and grief. Yvgenie loved the white mare. Ilyana loved the filly. So did he, for Ilyana’s sake. And his living always required murder, it had before and did again, even of what trusted him.

The sun sank below the treetops. In a deeply shadowed passage Volkhi blew and shook his head, and Pyetr shivered for no reason that he could think of—a passing wish, perhaps, either good or ill, if any magic at all could reach him. Volkhi had his head up, smelling something of interest, that much was certain. Pyetr asked a little more speed of him and Volkhi picked up his pace, pricking up his ears and flattening them again, listening and worrying. The mouse? One could only hope. No, god, it was Patches, riderless, with Yvgenie’s white horse behind, coming slowly down the wooded hillside. His heart said hurry; but he rode quietly so as not to startle them, and saw bloody scratches and countless welts on their hides, thorns snarled in manes…

Sasha could easily have asked them the questions he most wanted to ask. All an ordinary man could learn of them was the evidence of a panic flight through thorn thickets: dirt from falls, scratches all over them, and everything Ilyana and the boy owned still bound to the saddles—god, Ilyana’s book was there along with the rest of her belongings. She would never have parted from that—willingly.

He slid down, slipped Patches’ bridle, tied it to the saddle, and sent the filly off with a whack on the rump—home, he hoped, where young Patches understood home to be; or to Sasha, or whatever refuge she could find on their own. He held on to the white mare for a change of horses, swung up onto Volkhi’s back, argued Volkhi and the mare into an uphill track, and rode along their backtrail, not breakneck, but slowly, observing an occasional print of a hoof on soft ground, a snag of white horsehair in brush. The horses had both gotten away clear: life had escaped Chernevog’s grasp, and if it was Chernevog’s fault what had happened, the horses could not have gotten away without magic.

Which could most reasonably mean the mouse—who, being the mouse, might have driven them off for their own safety, if things were going wrong; but she would not have chosen to send them away with the book and their food and their blankets, not unless something had gone very wrong, very quickly, or she had some destination in mind for them. Like her uncle. Like—the god knew. The book might have every answer he needed, which he might know now if Sasha were with him, which, dammit, Sasha was not—nor could possibly be, this fast.