C. Cherryh - Yvgenie

Something moved in the tail of her eye. A wolf sat there, the one that they had followed into this place. It looked alive, yellow-eyed and with fur mostly white, but touched with gray and buff. Behind it, tongues lolling, sat others, milky-pale as Owl. Those were surely ghosts.

The living wolf got up and trotted away. The others followed it; and Owl glided after.

Dangerous to wish for what doesn’t exist, Kavi had warned her. Now she was on the verge of wanting her uncle to rescue her and most dangerously on the edge of wanting her father, the god forbid she should be so selfishly stupid. Her mother might know what to do, if her mother would even listen to her situation now, of which she despaired entirely: her mother was not inclined to patience; but god, she was in trouble. The leshys were dead. No one had ever told her that such things could happen, let alone that the woods might suddenly change beyond her understanding.

But they had warned her about Kavi. And she had thought it was so simple—as if loyalty and wishes could sustain him She thought, on the edge of tears: Uncle tried to tell me. Hope never seemed dangerous till this. Now I know what it can do to fools that won’t listen.

Ghosts belong here. Yvgenie doesn’t, not yet: he’s not dead and he’s not a wizard. That’s why he could get away and get Kavi out of this place. God, I don’t want to follow these creatures—it’s stupid. But Owl’s going. And if I lose Owl, what other tie have I got to the other side of the hedge?

Mother, I’m listening now. Uncle, I’m dreadfully sorry… Papa, please don’t come after me. Even wizards don’t belong here. You couldn’t—

A ghost poured out into the aisle ahead of her, and shaped itself into a great lumbering bear, white as snow. It looked at her over its shoulder, and its face showed a dreadful scar, as if something had burned it once.

She thought, It’s not just a ghost of a bear, it was a real bear once. Something dreadful happened to it. And what does it have to do with me?

A ghost swept near her, saying, Ilyana, granddaughter, look at me.

She did look. She saw a man’s misty face, fierce and young and very handsome.

It said, You’re my wish, Ilyana. And your grandmother’s. We never agreed, so least one of us has to be right. Your father was no one’s choosing—or he was your mother’s whim. I’ve no idea. I only know he’s made you terribly dangerous.

She was stung by that. She said, There’s nothing wrong with my father!

A raven had joined the ghost, shaped itself out of the mist and drifted with them, on gray wings. The ghost said, Your father is a gambler—but he’s no one’s fool. Your mother is a damned good wizard—and that’s enough to know. —I wish you to make your own choices, granddaughter. Be what you are.

“But you say I’m dangerous!” she protested, seeing the ghost fade away. “Are you my grandfather Uulamets? You must be! Come back! I’m not through talking to you!”

But the ghost shredded apart and streamed away through the hedges. The scar-faced bear and the wolves and Owl went ahead of her, and sometimes the ghostly raven, until through a last screen of thorns she could see what shone so pale and strange, a beautiful palace of curious design, made all of white stones, on a hill girt by thorn hedges laced with ghosts.

The evening light cast strange shadows on the white palace, making odd shadows, making its walls and its towers appear like lace. How beautiful, Ilyana thought, pulling aside a last few thorn boughs. How can anything so beautiful be wicked or dangerous? Kavi was wrong.

Something crunched beneath her foot. She looked down and saw a broken vault of bone—some old skull, buried in the earth. There were more such. Not stones, she thought, gazing up a hill where other such objects lay half-buried all up the hill to the foundation of the palace.

God, no, not stones that made such lacy walls and towers—but bleached and dreadful bones.

Birds took sudden flight from beyond the hill. Pyetr saw it and earnestly wished for Sasha, for the mouse—for his wife, if he could truly rely on her now. They were not the only adventurers in the woods, the dead deer proved that; an ordinary man had no way to learn what had raised the alarm in the direction he had to go except to go and see. Slipping up and over the hill afoot was once choice; but that meant leaving Volkhi tied, and, risking him, chancing being surprised afoot.

So he drew his sword as quietly as he could and kept riding, watching the trees ahead. He rounded the shoulder of the hill at a walk, feeling something eerily familiar and untrustworthy and magical at once.

He thought: ’Veshka? Eveshka’s presence had touched him first like that—years ago; when he thought of it, it felt frighteningly like her, not his wife the way she had been for the last eighteen years, not the way she had felt since she had returned to the living. It stirred old nightmares. And an infatuation with his own destruction that had moved him once, in his bitter youth, when now life was very precious. He thought, ’Veshka, god, is it you?

A patch of red showed on the hill, the red of blood; of flowers that never bloomed in woodland shade; or a silk shirt that was folly in the woods. Yvgenie.

But no sign of the mouse.

Volkhi had stopped unbidden, laid his ears back and swung half about. An ungodly feeling crawled up and down his spine while his own good sense and his experience of a rusalka’s attraction said stay clear, get away, Ilyana was his first obligation. But the boy—

He reined Volkhi around and around again while he hesitated. He was not making clear choices. But, dammit, he had prayed for Chernevog in his reach. He had set himself deliberately in the way of chance and others’ wishes. And the question now was whether he even had the power to ride past, or whether, trying, he would ran head-on into fate.

Then he felt the likeness of an arm reach about him, like ice, and Chernevog whispered ever so faintly, at the very nape of his neck, “Pyetr. Dear Owl.”

He made a wild sweep of his arm, but it met only deathly chill and fell numb at his side. His heart struggled, his head spun, and Chernevog said,

“Your daughter’s in danger.”

“I know she’s in danger, damn you.”

“The harm I could do is only death. Get down. Get down, now, Pyetr Ilitch.”

He wanted not to, he wanted to swing around and lay hands on Chernevog, but that was not a choice; his hands and feet were growing numb and he found himself sliding down from the saddle and staggering his way to Yvgenie’s side, where Chernevog wished him to go.

The boy lay like the dead, scratched and bleeding, the red shirt in snags and ruins. For a moment he pitied the boy, wanted to help him—

Then Yvgenie reached and seized his arm and the tingling crept up toward his heart, beyond his power to tear away, beyond his power even to want to escape, or to look away as Yvgenie’s eyes opened and looked into his, as Yvgenie’s lips said quietly, “Dear Owl. You came in time. And brought us horses. How foresighted of you.”

Damn you, he tried to say. But words and sense were beyond him. There was only the feeling of suffocation, that once had had infatuation and desire and everything he loved wrapped with it, and now had only desperation and fear and the memory of his wife as a killer, no different than the men who had hunted him.

He waked lying helpless on the ground and Chernevog was bending over him, brushing his cheek with a gentle touch and saying, “Catch your breath, dear Owl.”

His head hurt. His whole body was floating. The leaves against a darkening sky made a dizzying sound. “Where’s my wife? Where’s my daughter, damn you?”