C. Cherryh - Chernevog

Babi did not go at once, Babi marched over to the shattered rail and Sasha wanted him to stop. “See to Missy,” he said again, wishing Babi, strongly, and Babi went this time without looking over that edge.

Sasha hugged the salt jar against him and stood up, still weak in the knees, still thinking about the shapeshifter and its tricks, and leaned against the deckhouse. The wind blew pale salt across the starlit deck and the sail flapped and thumped against the willows.

He wanted to know Pyetr’s state of mind, he could not for a moment help himself—it was his heart at work, in the convolute way he had to think of such things. He dragged himself back from that thought and tried to tell himself what he had felt from Pyetr had not been the dark that death was. He had felt that dark silence many times, many times, if he went eavesdropping on people in their sleep—sometimes one overheard dreams and sometimes just a confusion no different than ghosts—

Another shiver came over him, a sudden chill, a breathing at his nape. He looked across the deckhouse roof to the stern, fearing to see Hwiuur’s massive head rising out of the river.

But there was nothing more substantial than a sudden chill, us if the wind had skipped around his shoulders and whipped mound into his face. It spun around and around him, touching him with cold.

Pyetr? he wondered with a heart-deep chill. Surely not.

The cold spot passed through him. Not Pyetr—thank the god, no. It left him weak-kneed and short of breath and shivering so he had trouble hanging on to the salt jar. He asked it, teeth chattering:”Who are you?” and waited for some manifestation, Nome pale wisp in the night.

But there was nothing. He stood there looking into the dark, not entirely sure he wanted to hear from it again—and felt an overwhelming anxiousness.

“Master Uulamets?” he asked whatever-it-was. “That’s you, isn’t it? Misighi said to look for you.”

It had shaken him worse than any ghost yet. He was all but certain now what it was—if it remembered its own name. He sensed its anger with him, and that was something he could not help at all—that he was profoundly glad this ghost was dead and Pyetr was alive.

“I’m sorry,” he said carefully to the dark, aloud, because it was easier to shepherd spoken words down a single, careful path. “It’s not that I’m glad you’re dead, understand, I never was. I’m not now.”

But it was hard to lie to a ghost, and he was terrified, now that he had found it. This one knew what to touch. What to ask. It had lent pieces of itself to him it might want back with a claim he might not resist—and he needed them and Pyetr did, desperately, this ghost having no love of Pyetr at all.

The boat groaned. There was the soft sound of water. He wanted the ghost to show himself, he wanted it to behave itself and forgive him that he did not want it alive and could not trust it. Uulamets had never encouraged trust. Quite the opposite.

He only knew he was supposed to take the baskets out of the deckhouse. All of them. Now. Immediately.

As wishes went it seemed harmless. He was not sure it was at all sane. But he pushed the door open and started dragging baskets out onto the deck.

The third he pulled out— —’Veshka’s book—here. Oh, god-He wanted light. Or something did. He rummaged feverishly in the deckhouse, looking for the lamp they kept there—managed, with many false efforts and desperate wishes, to get the thing lit, while the cold swirled about him and through him. He set the fluttering light down inside the deckhouse door and gathered the open book into his lap, tilting it until he could see the last pages written. He read, first:

I don’t know what to wish about the baby. Papa would say you can undo anything but the past…

Draga threw herbs onto the fire and sparks flew, a cloud of stars whirling up the chimney. Draga said, “Many things pass boundaries: not all are changed. Wood and water and iron go into the same fire. Each behaves differently. Does fire frighten you?”

“No,” Eveshka said.

“You’d put your hand into it? “

“I could,” Eveshka said.

Draga reached into the fire and gathered up an ember. Eveshka thought, It’s the same as reaching into the fire—she’s wishing the heat away as fast as it comes. But she’s very good,

Draga closed her fist about the coal, so there was nowhere for the heat to go. —Where is it going? Eveshka wondered. Can she wish it back into the fire?

“I’m not wishing it anywhere,” Draga said, and opened her hand. The cinder had become black. It still smoldered. There was soot on Draga’s hand. “That’s the very simple difference between your wizardry and mine. Your wish would be very modest and constant, very fussy, and if someone said your name you might burn yourself very badly, mightn’t you? Because you’d lose your spell at the first pain, and you might not be able to restore it. But real magic doesn’t bother to figure out a clever way to hold the fire. It ignores nature.”

The ember began to glow again, and burst into fire in the middle of Draga’s hand.

“That,” Draga said, “is magic.”

“A straw actually does as well,” Eveshka said, with Pyetr’s stubborn pragmatism: her mother was pushing her, undermining her way of doing things, and a straw was better, not least because it did not tempt one to throw wishes about carelessly.

“Wishes just don’t matter. That’s the thing, dear, you don’t have to be that careful. If you make a mistake you can retrieve it.”

“ Don’t eavesdrop, mama!”

“You don’t want me to know certain things?”

“I’m not your echo, mama, and I like my privacy, thank you.”

“And what happens if you do make a mistake? What happens if you don’t understand what else you’re wishing?”

“That part is the same. There are consequences. Only some of them happen here, in the natural world.”

“Can magic find them out beforehand? Reliably?”

“Some of them.”

“Then it’s damned stupid, mama, doing anything of the sort.”

“Shhh. You raise a rainstorm. Do you know every leaf that falls? The law is that leaves will fall. Which leaf is meaningless to know. What you care about is that the rain come—and stop in due course. The difference is scope, dear.”

“My husband is no leaf, mama!”

“Neither is that baby.”

“I don’t know that I want a baby! I don’t know I want one at all”

“The one you don’t want, dear, is the one you and Kavi might have had. Or the one you and Sasha might have had. This one is manageable. But not, considering your enemies, the way your father managed you.” Draga shook ash from her hand. That was all that remained of the ember. “Does it matter in the magical world that a bit of wood burned? No. And yes—if it makes you understand what’s essential, it’s of extreme consequence there and here. There’s no reason by which that bit of wood should have that value. But it may.”

“The value isn’t in the wood,” Eveshka said doggedly, “the answer isn’t in the smoke.”

“That’s Malenkova, did you know that? She used to say that.”

She had thought it was her father. She had thought so many things were only his.

Draga said, “The value of a piece of wood, dear, is wherever a sorcerer assigns it. That’s the important thing. You can vest a value in a thing… put a spell on it, if you like. You command a thing to be of a certain value. Or state.”

The fire was out. There was no light. Suddenly it burned again, as if nothing had happened.

“That wasn’t a trick,” Draga said. “It happened. Do you believe me?”