Chernevog by C.J. Cherryh Page A

to keep thinking he had known such creatures as leshys or had a wife and a friend waiting for him.
    He was the gambler's son, the one the law wanted.
    He had gotten away through the streets.
    Gotten past the guards at the gate.
    Gotten lost on the road, somehow, and ended up alone and freezing in the rain—in a woods he did not understand, looking for an escape that had never existed—or did not yet exist.
    He squeezed his eyes shut until they ached, and until he stopped seeing the woods and the lightnings. Dammit, yes, there was a house, and there was a river, and he remembered someone saying—he had no idea who or when—that if ever he was lost there was always a way home: follow the river, no matter how far off true he had wandered, no matter how some subtle turning of the road and the obscuring trees had confused him, he had to believe the river lay east and the morning sun would show him the way. As long as he could remember that one thing and not lose it—
    “ Something's very wrong, ” he said to Volkhi. “ Something's very wrong with us, lad. ”
    He clung to that direction, held to the mere imagination a house that shifted outlines, friends waiting for him, a wa rm fire ...
    An old man there had threatened him with knives when was sick. The river ran by the house. It might be all his imagining. But it was what he chose to go to, it was the only warm place in the world, and there were people there he could trust, he had no idea why—
     
    The vodyanoi was there, coiled in his cave on the riverside, one knew ... one knew he was. Eveshka paced the floor, knotted her hands together till they ached; and it whispered while she paced, the old snake did, Eveshka, Eveshka, listen to me ... It said, Fool, to trust a heart. They're so breakable. It said, You could do so much, you always could, and you fall so far short of that-Shut up, papa, she said, because that last was not the snake at all, that was her own memory: the room said it to her, the walls said it to her, the cellar echoed with it: Fool, fool, you won't take advice. Trust no one, least of all anyone who says he has your interest at heart ...
    Want nothing. Need nothing. Wishes do come back on you, young fool, don't you understand that? And when the wizard wishes himself, then everyone's in danger.
    She wished for leshys. She wished for Pyetr. She wished to break through the silence. But something else whispered back: Listen, Eveshka.
     
     
    8
    Streams were over their banks: trees were down—reason enough to hope Pyetr had settled in to wait out the storm, Sasha told himself, with the dark coming and the rain still falling. His own coat was soaked, his boots were soaked, probably the fire-pot in his bag was drowned, and he had had to leave the road again, edging out onto a flooded log for a bridge to the other bank, holding to willow-wands overhead.
    He reached a point he had to jump for it—hit the slick far bank, grabbing for handholds among the new bracken and wishing the roots to hold in the sodden earth—no testing whether his magic was working any more, except the fact that the bracken-fronds held and he did not dump himself into the flood. Such small proofs gave him both hope and fear—hope that his gift still might find Pyetr; and fear that Pyetr's vanishing from his awareness might mean something unthinkable.
    But he was fast running from daylight to a starless, stormy dark, in which he had to trust his wizardry absolutely. He was north of the road, he was sure of that; he kept wanting to know where Pyetr was, and what Pyetr was thinking, and something kept convincing him of direction—but whether that was his wizardry working blind, he had no idea. He had no sense of Pyetr's existence.
    I'm here, he wanted Pyetr to know, I'm looking for you: if you're safe, don't leave where you are, just wait for me. He struggled calf-deep through rain-wet fern, brushed thickets that caught at the sword and the pack, in a twilight so deep the fern could