Enjoy, Enjoy

Terry Carr is one of the true gentlemen of the science- fiction field. Editors have trouble being beloved; what they do cuts too close to the writers' bones for comfort. I do not believe there is an editor in the world who some writer, somewhere, does not wish dead. On those grounds I feel sure that there must therefore be some people who hate Terry Carr, but I've never met one. Perhaps the reason is that he has never been in charge of a major magazine or boss of a large book publishing company; he has put in his editorial time as editorial consultant, anthologist, assistant to other editors, proprietor of a special line of his own within a larger group, and these are not the exposed mountaintops where the ravaging lightnings strike. However, they are good places for someone to be whose biggest interest is in finding and showcasing bright new talent. That's something Terry does extremely well. Devotees still fondly remember the Carr "Ace Special series of a decade and a half ago, when Terry took his chances on such unknowns as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, R. A. Lafferty, and a lot of others whose subsequent careers show how good an editor he really is. So when Terry Carr asks me for something, I try to deliver; and when he told me he was putting together a new anthology of original stories called Fellowship of the Stars, I was pleased to offer him this one-and delighted when he accepted it.

Booze, broads, big cars, the finest of food, waterbeds filled with vintage champagne. Those were some of the things that went with Tud Cowpersmith's job. The way he got the job was by going to a party in Jackson Heights. The way he happened to be at the party was that he had no choice.

It wasn't a bad party, for a loft in Jackson Heights. It wasn't a bad loft. The windows at one end looked out on the tracks of the IRT el, but they had been painted over with acrylics to look like stained glass. Every twenty minutes you got a noise like some very large person stumbling by with garbage-can lids for shoes, but except for that the el might as well not have been there. Anyway, at that end of the loft the stereo speakers stood four feet high on the floor, so the noise didn't matter all that much. You couldn't possibly talk at that end. Cowpersmith wanted, eventually, to talk, as soon as the person he wanted to talk to showed up, so he drifted to the other end.

There the noise was more or less bearable, and there the windows were still clear. They were even clean. He could see through them down on a sort of communal garden, three or four backyards for three or four different old apartment buildings thrown together: a tiny round plastic swimming pool, now iced over with leaves and boughs frozen into it; bare trees that probably had looked very nice in the summer. To get to the windows at that end you had to thread your way through a sort of indoor jungle, potted plants presumably carried in from the garden for the cold weather. And there, on a chrome-rimmed, chrome-legged kitchen table, the host and hostess were rolling joints. They greeted Cowpersmith- "Want a hit?
"Thanks.
-but the pot did not ease him. He was looking for somebody. That was the reason he was there.

The person he was looking for was named Murray. Murray was an old, old.., friend? Something like that. What he basically was was somebody who owed Cowpersmith fifty dollars, from a time when fifty hadn't seemed like an awful lot. Cowpersmith had heard, the day before, that Murray was in town, and tracked him down to a hotel on Central Park South.

After some deliberation he had telephoned Murray. He really hated doing it. He needed the fifty, but in his view the odds against getting it were so bad that he didn't like the risk of investing a dime in a phone call. The dime was, after all, real money. There was no way to flash a revoked American Express card at the phone booth, as he had done with the last two restaurants and the airline that had brought him back from Chicago, where the last of his bankroll had melted away. But the odds had paid off! Murray was in, and obliging- "What fifty?

"Oh, Christ, sure. Was it only fifty? Must be some interest due by now, Tud. Tell you what-

-and the way it worked out they were to meet at this party, and Cowpersmith would collect not fifty but a hundred dollars.

That required some decision making, too, because there was the investment for a subway token to be considered. But Murray had sounded prosperous enough for a gamble. Only no Murray. Cowpersmith took another hit from a girl wearing batik bellbottoms and a halter top and glared around the room. Through the roar of Alice Cooper he realized she was talking to him.

"Tud Cowpersmith, he yelled over the androgynous rock. "It's a family name, Tudsbury.

She reached up close to his ear-she was not more than five feet tall-and shouted, "If you're a friend of Murray's he's looking for you. He allowed her to lead him around the buttress of the stairwell, for the first time noticing that her armpits were unshaven, the hair on her head stuck out in tiny, tied witch curls, and she was quite pretty.

And there was Murray, knotting his wild red eyebrows hospitably. "Hey, Tud. Looking great, man! Long time.

"You're looking fine too, said Cowpersmith, although it wasn't really true. Murray looked a little bit fine and a lot prosperous; the medallion that hung over his raw-silk shirt was clearly gold, and he wore a very expensive- looking, though ugly, thick wristwatch. The thing was he also looked about fifteen years older than he had eighteen months before. They sat in two facing armchairs, one a broken lounger, the other so overstuffed that the stuffing was curling out of it. The girl sat cross-legged between them on the floor, and Murray idly played with her tied curls.

Cooper had changed to the New York Queens and somebody had turned the volume down, or else the shelter of the stairwell did the same thing for them. Cowpersmith got several words of what Murray was saying.

"The finest fucking job in all the world, said Murray, and laughed and laughed, poking the girl's shoulder. When he had calmed down, he said, "What do you work for, Tud?

Cowpersmith said angrily, "God, you know. I worked for the advertising agency until they took cigarette ads off TV, then I was with the oil company until-

"No, no, damn it! After you do all the lousy stuff like that. What do you do with the extra money? Like when you were still pulling down twenty-five K at the agency and everything was on the expense account anyway?

"Oh, sure. It had been so long ago Cowpersmith had almost forgotten. "Fun. Good food. Plays. Girls. Cars-

"Right on, cried Murray, "and that's what everyone else works for, too. Everybody but me! That's what my job is. I don't have to work for those things, because I work at them. I don't imagine you're going to believe this, Tud, but it's true, he added as an afterthought.

Cowpersmith looked down at the girl and swallowed hard. A dismal vision flashed through his mind, of the five crumpled twenties in his pocket turning out to be joke money that, turned over, might say April Fool or, held for ten minutes, might evaporate their ink, leaving bare paper and ruin. "I don't have any idea of what you're talking about, he said to Murray, but still looking at the girl.

"I don't blame you. Look. Well, let's see. Shirley, he said, half laughing, "how do we explain this? Try it this way, he went on, not waiting for her help, "suppose you had all the money in the world. Suppose you had more money than you even wanted, right?

"And then suppose you had like an accident. Crashbang; you're in a car accident or a piano falls on you. Quadriplegic. Can't have any fun anymore. Got that?

"All right, but even though you can~t do much yourself anymore, there's a way you can have some fun vicariously. Like you're not going to Ibiza yourself, but you're seeing slides of it, or something. You can't get the kicks a normal person can, but you can get something, maybe not much but better than nothing, out of what other people do. Now, in that position, Tud, what would you do?

"No you wouldn't, for Christ's sake. You'd hire other people to have fun for you. And then with this process- he patted the ugly thing that looked like a wristwatch, but Cowpersmith now realized was not- you can play back their fun, and maybe it isn't much, but it's all the jollies you can ever get. Right, Shirley?

"Well, anyway, it's something like that. I guess. It's kind of secret, I think probably because it's someone like Howard Hughes or maybe one of the Roekefellers that's involved. They won't say. But the job's for real, Tud. All I have to do is have all the fun I can. They pick up the tab, it all goes on the credit card, and they get the bill, and they pay it. As long as I wear this thing, that's all I have to do. And every Friday, besides all that, five hundred in cash.

There was a pause while Bette Midler flowed over and around them from the speakers and Cowpersmith looked from the girl to his friend, waiting for the joke part. At last he said, "But nobody gets a job like that.

"Wrong, friend," said Shirley. "You did. Just now. If you want it. I'll take you there tomorrow morning.

Behind the door stenciled E.T.C. Import-Export Co., Ltd. there was nothing more than a suite of offices sparsely occupied and eccentrically furnished. Hardly furnished at all, you might say. There was nobody at the reception desk, which Shirley walked right past, and no papers on the desk of the one man anywhere visible. "I've got a live one for you, Mr. Morris, Shirley sang out. "Friend of Murray's.

Mr. Morris looked like a printing salesman, about fifty, plump, studying Cowpersmith over half glasses. "Good producer, he agreed reluctantly. "All right, you're hired. And he counted out five hundred dollars in bills of various sizes and pushed them across the desk to Cowpersmith.

Cowpersmith picked up the money, feeling instantly stoned. "Is that all there is to it?

"No! Not for me, I've got all the paperwork now, your credit card, keeping records-

"Certainly not. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a wristwatch-shaped thing. Cowpersmith could not see all of the inside of the drawer from his angle, but he was nearly sure there was nothing else in it. He handed it to Cowpersmith and said, "Once you put it on it won't come off by itself, but we'll unlock it any time you want to quit. That's all. Go have fun. By which, he added, "I don't actually mean screwing, because we've got plenty of records of that already.

"Hell, man! Up to you. Water skiing, skin diving, breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. What do you dream about, when things look bad'? You do dream, don't you?

"Well, sure, but- Cowpersmith hesitated, thinking. "I always wanted to eat at La Tour d'Argent. And, uh, there's this crazy poison fish they have in Japan-

"Sounds good, the man said without enthusiasm. "I'll have your card delivered to you at your hotel tomorrow.

"No catch, Tud, said Shirley, annoyed. "Jesus, what does it take to convince you?

"Nothing like this ever happened to me before. There has to be something wrong with it.

Cowpersmith found himself standing up. "No, wait, he said. "How-how long does the job last?

"Then you turn in your recordings. And you take your last week's pay and go look for another job.

"Recordings? Cowpersmith looked down at his wrist, where, without thinking about it, he had clasped on the metal object. is this a tape recorder?

"I'm not into that part of it, Mr. Morris said. "I only know my job, and I've just done it. Good-by.

And that was all she wrote. At Shirley's urging, Cowpersrnith checked into a small but very nice hotel on the Upper East Side, went to a massage parlor, ice-skated at Rockefeller Center, and met Shirley for a late drink in a Greek bar in Chelsea. "Good start, she said. "Now you're on your own. Got any plans?

"Well, he said experimenta~ly, "I think I can still make the Mardi Gras in Rio. And I heard about a safari tour to Kenya-

And yoa're going too, right? Look, she said, "you're going to ask some probably very important questions, to you, but all I know's my own job

"-which is none of your business. Go enjoy. When Mr. Morris wants to he in touch with you he'll be in touch with you. No. Don't ask how he'll find you. He'll find you. And so good night.

And so, for eight dynamite months, Tud Cowpersmith enioyed. He did everything he had ever wanted to do. He made the carnival in Rio and discovered hearts-of-palm soup in a restaurant overlooking the Copacabana beach. He rode a hydrofoil around Leningrad and toured the Hermitage, bloated on fresh caviar. Gypsy violins in Soho, pounded abalone on Fisherman's Wharf, a nude-encounter weekend at Big Sur, high-stakes gambling in Macao. First-class stewardesses on half a dozen airlines began to recognize him, in half a dozen languages. Shirley turned up once, in his suite at the George Cinq, but only to tell him he was doing fine. Another time he thought he saw Murray pushing a scooter at the Copenhagen airport, but he was going one way and Murray another, and there was no way for Cowpersmith to get off the moving person carrier to catch him. He took up motorcycle racing and tried to enjoy listening to the harpsichord and, in spite of what Morris had said, repeatedly and enthusiastically enjoyed a great deal of sex. It was at the time of his second case of gonorrhea that he began to feel enough was very nearly enough, and then one morning his phone rang.

"Cowpersrnith? said Mr. Morris' tinny little voice, very far away. "You don't seem to be having a lot of fun right now. Are you about ready to quit?

Although the pleasure had not been quite as much pleasure lately, the prospect of losing it was very much pain. "No! yelped Cowpersmith. "What are you talking about? Hell, man, you should see the girl I just- He looked around; he was alone in the big bed. "I mean, I've got this date-

"No, whispered the small voice, "that's not good enough. Your EI's been down for three weeks now. Not below the threshold yet. We can still get a little good stuff from you. But the quality's definitely down, Cowpersmith, and something's got to be done about it.

Dismayed, Cowpersmith sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bed. "How do you know about-what is it, my EI'?

"Emotional index? Well, what do you think, man? We continuously monitor the product, and it just isn't what we want.

"Yeah, Cowpersmith conceded. "Look, I just woke up and I'm a little fuzzy, but- He got out of bed, car- rying the phone, and sat in a chair by the window. Outside was Grosvenor Square, with a demonstration going on in front of the American Embassy, so he knew he was in the Europa in London.

By this time the staff of the hotel had learned to value him and understand his likes, so the floor waiter, alerted by the incoming phone call, was bringing in his black coffee, American style, with two large glasses of fresh orange juice. Cowpersrnith swallowed a little of one and a little of the other and said, "Listen, can you give me an idea of what he likes?

"No. I don't know what you've been doing; the monitor doesn't show that. It shows where you are and how you're feeling. That's it. We won't know exactly what you've been up to until the debriefing, when they study the recordings. Me, I'll never know. Not my department.

"Hah! Cowpersmith thought wildly. "Listen, how's this? Has anybody just sort of sat and meditated for you?

"Well, yes. Or just sitting and thinking, like, you know, Thoreau at Walden Pond.

"Or-well, how about skin diving? Again. The doctor told me to lay off for a little while until my ear healed up after Bermuda, but I heard about this neat stuff at the Great Barrier Reef, and-

"Cowpersmith, said the tiny voice, "you know what you're costing? Not counting the half a thousand a week in cash. Your charge has been running over forty-eight hundred a week, on the average. You got to show more than some spearfishing maybe a couple weeks from now. You got to show today. And tomorrow. And every day. So long.

So Cowpersmith kept at it. The meditation didn't seem to be going well after the first hour, so he hired a new travel consultant and for a while things looked bright. Or bright enough. Maybe. He backpacked across the Trinity Mountains and flew to Naples for a swim in the Blue Grotto. He ate couscous and drank akvavit and smoked Acapulco gold, all in their native environment. Then he took a pack mule through the Montana hills, and flew back to Naples for four hours of clambering around the ruins of Pompeii, and hit Paris for nightclubs and Waikiki for surfing...

... But a couple of wipeouts at Diamond Head made his ear feel worse, and one nightclub turned out to be an awful lot like another, except that where the toilet jokes were in French he couldn't understand them. He knew the phone was going to ring again. He didn't need the little machine on his wrist to tell him he was down. He felt down.

So he came to a decision, and just sat in his hotel room, sullenly waiting. He had already put eleven thousand dollars in a numbered bank account in Bern and paid off all his old debts, and if it was over it was over.

It was, after all, the finest fucking job in all the world, and everything Murray had said about it was true. No more headwaiters falling all over themselves? No more pretty women to take to the clubs, to the tracks, to bed? He ordered up a couple of bottles of brandy and worked himself up to a weeping drunk and when, the next morn- ing, it was inevitably followed by a dry-mouthed, burning- bellied hangover, he sat wallowing in the misery of his thousand-franc-a-day suite, shaking and enfeebled, barely moving to order up food, and more booze, and more food. The longer he sat, the worse he felt. And the next day. And the next day. And- And by the fifth day, after most of a week of solid,

sullen misery, he realized that his phone had not rung. Why not? He certainly wasn't enjoying.

He didn't understand why, but when it came through to his mind that it was so, he didn't really care why. Hope was back. The magic money machine had not turned itself off! So he cleaned himself up. He got himself dressed. He waved off the floor waiter and the major-domo and the concierge and went out for a walk, a perfectly dull, uninteresting, unexciting walk, up the Champs Elysees to the Lido Arcade. He ate a quiche and drank a beer and dropped in on a flick. It was an old Barbra Streisand with French subtitles; he had seen it before, and he didn't care. It bored the ears off him. He enjoyed being bored very much.

"For homey pleasures, said Mr. Morris' small, distant voice, "you don't get paid this kind of money. You want a McDonald's hamburger, quit and come back.

"I had this feeling you'd call, Cowpersmith acknowledged. "What can I say? I've had it with joy. It is no fun anymore.

"All right, said Cowpersmith, after a moment of digesting that bit of information. "But tell me one thing. Last week I was really down; how come you didn't fire me then'?

"Last week? Last week you were great. I thought you knew, pleasure isn't the only sensation they like.

You mean you'll pay me for misery? "One of our best units, said the little voice in his ear, "was terminal stomach cancer. They paid him five grand a week plus full medical every week he didn't take painkillers.

That took a moment to digest too, and it went down hard, but Cowpersmith began to see hope. "Well, I don't want to go that far-

Ensued some of the most depressing weeks of Cowpersmith's life. Not miserable. At least not reliably miserable; he could not even be sure, from day to day, that he was quite bugged enough to register a decent misery on his wristband, and that in itself was discouraging. He tried everything he could think of. Inspiration struck, and he made a quick list of all the things he had been putting off because they were awful: went to the dentist, had a barium enema, got tattooed. That took care of three days, and, looking back at them honestly, he had to admit they were not memorably bad, merely lousy. He flew back to Washington and spent two afternoons in the Senate gallery-merely tedious; after the first half hour he stopped hearing what was being said and caught himself drowsing off. He flanged together two stereo systems and poured thirty watts of acid rock into one earpiece and Mahler into the other and came out with only a headache. He invented excuses to go in and out of Kennedy airport, with special emphasis on the Customs line and the hack- stands, but after a while even that anger diminished. Food. Remembering all the enjoyment he had had from good food, he looked for dyspepsia and displeasure from bad. He ate a haggis in Glasgow, flew to Heathrow and had brawn for dinner, caught a commuter flight to Paris and had an American breakfast at Orly. None of it worked very well. It proved to be harder to make oneself unhappy than to find joy, which had, after all, lasted for the best part of a year. The other thing was that deliberately making oneself unhappy made one, well, unhappy. It was not a way he liked to live. He discovered that twenty cups of coffee a day, sixty cigarettes, and a maximum of three hours of sleep gave him a perpetual headachy feeling that made everything an annoyance, but the other side of the coin was that nothing was much more than an annoyance; he was simply too beat to care. In desperation he returned to the States and delved into copies of the underground press, answering all the ads he could find for "instruction, "discipline, and so on, but that mostly got him a large number of FBI men and postal inspectors, and the S-M experiences were basically, he thought, pretty God- awful anyway. So he was not all that surprised when, less than five weeks from the second warning, his phone rang again. He was in Waikiki, where he had been nerving himself up to trying to get his ear hurting again in the surf, and he was frankly grateful to be spared it.

"Third time's the charm, said the little voice. "Come home, come home for debriefing.

"Well, said distant Mr. Morris judiciously, "you stop working for us as soon as you're debriefed. But you get a year's severance pay, which comes to, let's see, twenty- six K.

"Wow! cried Cowpersmith. And then, "Uh. Say. Was that, you know, just to give me a high?

"No, although you did register a beaut. No, it's real. You just have to turn over the recording, and you're on your own.

"Well, said Cowpersmith, picking up the phone and walking out onto the lanai. "Well, he said, surrendering a dream, "I guess that's about it, then. Isn't it? I'll catch the first plane tomorrow-

"No, said Mr. Morris, "you won't do that, you'll catch the next plane right now. We've arranged for your tickets; they'll be at the desk when you check out. Which should be in fifteen minutes.

And five minutes after he hung up, the Uikai bellman was at the door, eager for Cowpersmith's one beaten bag. Mr. Morris had been very thorough. They not only had Cowpersmith's ticket at the desk, they had an envelope with two twenty-dollar bills and ten singles, for tips and miscellaneous. And they also had their instructions about his credit card. "I'm very sorry, said the clerk politely, "but as of the time you settle your account with us your card is canceled. And we have to pick it up. It's part of our contract with the company- "Well, fine, said Cowpersmith. "Tell you what. I forgot to pick up a couple little things in the shops, so let me have the card for a minute before I finish settling up.

And now, when it was all over, Cowpersmith spent his time in the taxi to the airport thinking of things he could have done but had not. He got onto the plane in a daze of missed menus and untried wines, and had to be prodded sharply by the stewardess before he realized he was in the wrong part of the airplane. "Sorry, he mumbled, allowing himself to be led aft. He glanced around with some wonder. He had almost forgotten that there were parts of a 707 where people sat three abreast.

He stared at her through gummed eyelids. By the sun it was late afternoon, but by the clock of his body it was eight in the morning after a night with no more sleep than a man can get sitting in a coach seat between a fat plumber on a group tour and a small boy who alternated snoring and leaping about. "Had fun? she asked, steering him toward a chauffeur-driven Bentley.

"You know better than I, he said bitterly, trying to take the wristband off and slap it in her palm. The gesture failed, because it still would not come open.

"You'll feel better when we get going, she said. "I've got a Thermos of coffee. It's about an hour's drive.

"I know, I know, grumped Cowpersmith, who had, after all, been in and out on the Kennedy-Manhattan run more times than he could count. But when the chauffeur took a right-hand turn where there had always been a left, he realized he did not know. It did not seem important, and he drowsed until the car stopped, doors opened- "Here's your boy, Morrie.

"Em all right, he said with dignity, and halfway up the pebbled walk looked around and said. "Where is this place, anyway? Porticoed porch, ivied walls, he had not seen it before.

Sensory impressions smote him: An entrance hall, with a staircase winding up under a huge canvas-shrouded painting in a gilt frame. A library of glassed-in shelves, mostly empty, with drop-clothed chairs around a cold and swept fireplace. A dining hall, and beyond it a closed door.

Mr. Morris sighed. "There is no he, ' he said patiently. "There are they.' They are here, some of them ... This is the part I hate, he added morosely.

"Well, you're going to ask a lot of questions again. You all do. And you're going to figure you've done your bit, now you have a right to know. Right? And maybe in a sense you do, although it's pretty pointless. . . Anyway. What we do now, we take the recordings from you, and when we've got enough to make a shipment, we send them off. I don't know where, exactly. I don't know what they do with them, exactly. But it's a big business with them.

"Big business? Misconceptions and erroneous as- sumptions were splintering in Cowpersmith's brain.

"Well, like a TV network. I mean, I think they kind of broadcast them, sort of like a National Geographic television special: sensory impressions from all over, strange pleasures of the aborigines-

"I never, said Cowpersrnith positively, apprehensions dissolving the sleep from his mind, "heard any broadcast like that.

Cowpersmith swallowed, choking on apprehensions and the splinters of former certainties.

"The mistake you made, said Mr. Morris sympathetically, "is that you assumed the people who hired you were human beings. They're not. No. You wouldn't think so if you'd seen one. They, uh. . . Well, they look a little bit like fish and a little bit like the devil. All red, you see. And not very big-

"Oh, Christ, said Mr. Morris, "how could Murray know? If it's any consolation to you, when he was debriefed he was as surprised as you are. It gets everybody the same way.

"Bloody charming, said Cowpersmith bitterly. "Now I'm an agent of a foreign power. I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI picks me up about this.

"What do we do in there? Cowpersmith demanded, truculent because the only alternative was being terrified.

Cowperstnith swallowed again, choking this time on plain panic. He wished that the car hadn't gone away. Still, he thought, they had to be somewhere on Long Island. Maybe Sands Point'? Maybe Patchogue. And he still had most of the fifty dollars, plus whatever had been left in his coat, plus, of course, that Swiss bank account. There would be a taxi...

"Okay, he said, tugging at the wristband. "Let's get it over with and I'll get out of here.
"Oh, said Mr. Morris, annoyed, "what are you doing? That's not the recording. That's only the monitor, so we could tell how you were doing and where you were. You turn over the recording in there.
And he opened the door behind the dining hall.
Two men in white stepped through. They were not smiling. They were without expression, like saloon bouncers or dog catchers.
The room behind them looked like an operating chamber: bright lights over a flat white table. Rows of transparent jars lined the shelves around the room. They came in two sizes:
In the large (there were two of them) red and hideous things stirred uneasily, looking out toward Cowpersmith with great pale eyes.
In the smaller jars, of which there were more than a dozen- Were the floating objects in them really human heads?
And that one there, next to the brighter of the two red creatures, the one with the wild red eyebrows-wasn't it very familiar?
It was too late to turn; the men were reaching out for him as Mr. Morris said from behind him, sadly, disclaimingly, "What better recording could they have than the one in your own brain?
" he said. "Look, whatever we decide later, let's get everyone back to the boat, go back to the house, try this all again—"

Sasha shook his head, and did meet his eyes this time, with a bleak, exhausted look. "It won't get us out of this. We can't get there."

"Do you know that?" Pyetr asked carefully. He felt cold himself, and sick and scared. "Sasha—can you tell, are you free of her?"

Sasha gave him a strange look then—blinked and looked at him, laid a chilled hand on his and clenched his fingers. "I'm all right," he said, and Pyetr's confusion went away from him, Eveshka's presence suddenly so quiet he felt drawn to look and see if she was there.

Something stopped him from turning his head. Something held him looking into Sasha's face. Something told him not to be afraid.

But Sasha said to him, quietly, "Whatever else—whatever else, it's got to get me first, Pyetr. And that's not easy any more."

He felt his arm begin to shake in its awkward position. He felt the cold of the ground under his knee. "Listen," he said, fighting it out word by word, "I'm grateful, understand. But don't do that. Don't wish me not to worry about you, boy! That's damned foolish, isn't it?"

Sasha blinked and his mouth made a desperate, thin grimace of a smile. His grip tightened. "Yes.—But she's not fighting me. She knows it's not good for her. It's all right a while. I can keep her away. Don't worry about it."

The grimace broadened into something like a grin. Sasha patted Pyetr's hand, drew a deep breath and sat back on his heels.

As if it was Sasha, a wise, bone-weary boy carrying far too much on his shoulders. Pyetr rubbed the back of his neck and looked at him a second time, refusing to ask himself what they had just buried, or whether Uulamets ' daughter had ever had a heart in her life—until she borrowed Sasha's.

Or maybe because Sasha's own unselfish kindness would not let her hold on to it… and that was the inevitable trap she had fallen into.

"So what are we going to do?" he asked Sasha. "Do we even know grandfather's sane?"

"I think he's sane," Sasha said, and added, with a tremor in his voice: "If any wi/ard is. I think after a while—after a while—"

"You're not crazy," Pyetr said. "I'm not sure about him, but I do know you, boy, and you're not going his way. If you want my ignorant advice—wish us out of here. Fast. Grandfather with us."

"When you wish, things happen that can happen, and not always the way you want."

"What was this thing we just buried, then? What was with Uulamets , fixing us breakfast and sleeping in his daughter's bed? Was that something that can happen? Not in Vojvoda, it can't!"

"I don't know," Sasha said in a subdued voice, and with an uncomfortable glance at the pile of dirt between them. "We know what it was—but I don't know for sure what raised it."

"At least two," Sasha said, and looked aside as Pyetr did, where Uulamets sat beyond a screen of branches, beside the ashes of last night's fire. "Maybe wanting something so much—"

"He didn't want herl He wanted a daughter who'd agree with him, say, 'Yes, papa,' and keep his house clean."

CHAPTER 23

Eveshka was silent, withdrawn: she had surely spent a great deal of her borrowed strength to dispel the Fetch or whatever had been, as Pyetr put it, making their meals and sleeping in their company. Now she drifted as a ghost, pale, apparently aimless, among the trees that curtained the grave and Uulamets ' fireside.

So it fell to him, Sasha supposed, since Pyetr and master Uulamets were not on the best of terms, to broach urgent matters with the old man.

He had washed his hands in the little spring that ran from this place, he had washed the leaves out of his hair and used Pyetr's razor to scrape the little mustache off his lip, which made him, aunt Denka would have said, look as if his face was dirty. It seemed respectful, at least, not to approach master Uulamets looking like a vagabond—even if master Uulamets ' clothes were mud-stained and his hair and beard were stuck through with twigs and bits of leaves.

Master Uulamets had his book with him. But he was not reading it or writing in it, only holding it in his arms and staring off into the woods, as if the forest held all the answers he wanted.

Sasha bowed and cleared his throat when master Uulamets seemed not to notice him. "We've taken care of everything. Pyetr thinks we might go back to the boat and think things over. I don't think we really can, but maybe you know—"

Uulamets did not so much as look at him.

"We had no idea where you'd gone," Sasha said. "Eveshka led us. We ran into a leshy. He helped us."

Not a flicker of interest.

"He lent her enough strength to get here," Sasha said. "But he said she mustn't take any more from his woods. He doesn't like us being here."

Going on and on without master Uulamets ' acknowledgement seemed impertinent as well as futile. He was sure that a wizard of Uulamets ' skill had to know most of what had happened without a boy telling him more than the details; and he found himself more afraid of the old man than he had ever been—a fear from what origin he suddenly suspected.

She left me things, he had said to Pyetr, when Pyetr had tried ever so delicately to ask him if there was lasting harm in what Eveshka had done.

She taught me things, Sasha thought now.—I know why she did it. I still remember how clearly I could think on some things, and where I was blind… and I think I know why.

I knew how to be scared. That must be different than other feelings—at least when it's for yourself.

I could worry about Pyetr… I knew he was my friend: I wouldn't even want to be myself again without him, but only knowing he was important to me was enough to keep me doing right things—because they were the smart things.

Pyetr would say, Boy, don't be stupid. But he'd mean, Don't get hurt and don't hurt people—because he never was üke those friends of his: he wouldn't have broken aunt Ilenka's churn on purpose, and certainly not if he knew it was her grandmother's.

He'd say he was sorry if he knew that, and he'd really mean it, because he doesn't always think through what he does: he can't wish somebody dead. But he's real smart about people, and what's right and wrong—

And if a wizard doesn't have somebody like him—and if he's put his heart away someplace and he can't feel what's right, who's going to tell him not to be a fool about what he wants?

Master Uulamets had stopped listening a long time ago, it seemed to him—even to Eveshka.

So he stood there and stood there, and finally cleared his throat again.

"Excuse me, sir. If you're thinking, I apologize and you don't have to listen, but we're going to fix lunch and if you don't have any idea what we ought to do after that, we're going to pack up and start back to the boat and see if we can get it backed out i again." I Uulamets said, "Not likely."

"What is likely, sir?"

"Go away," Uulamets said.

Sasha drew a deep breath, clenched his fists and told himself master Uulamets was probably listening and taking what he said into account even if he gave no sign of it.

Eveshka hardly seemed to think so. Eveshka was angry. He felt it. He wished her not to wish anything for a while… "Please," he said aloud as he walked away and left Uulamets in peace. "Pyetr and I are tired. Please. Not now."

He felt a shiver in the air—impatience, fear, anger. Always the anger. She was weaker, and that could only go so far—

I can't die, she insisted he know, terrified; and other thoughts that kept bobbing up in his mind—

Murder. Anger and hurt—half-crazed and hungry and half-killed by her father's wanting her to be different than she was… that was what had killed her. All her life she had fought just to be Eveshka, while her father was trying to wish Eveshka to be something else… and she wanted him to stop it, stop it, stop it—she wanted him dead—

"Shut up!" he yelled at her, and the whole woods seemed hushed, Uulamets and Pyetr both looking at him in startlement, while he stood in the middle of the clearing with his fists clenched. "Shut up, I did what you want, I killed my father and I killed my mother, and you don't know what you're talking about! I do, so shut up!"

And while Uulamets was looking his way in shock, while he had the old man's attention and Pyetr's, he plunged ahead with the rest of what she had set boiling in him, which he had no certainty he could ever remember in cold blood—

"You," he said, pointing at Uulamets , and wanting his attention as Eveshka wanted Uulamets to know what he had to say, "you drove your daughter away, every day you wished she was exactly what you wanted—"

"That's not so," Uulamets said. "That's not so. I gave her every opportunity…"

"As long as you thought she was right. What if she just wanted—"

"Was Kavi Chernevog right?" Uulamets stood up, wild-haired, wild-eyed, and turned on Eveshka. "Was it your wishes got you here, girl? Was what you wanted so wise?"

Eveshka dimmed and retreated.

"Young folk," Uulamets said, "have such potent wishes, and so damned little brains to make them doubt what they're doing—"

"Old ones," Pyetr said, from his seat on an old log, "get so damned self-centered." Uulamets rounded on him and Pyetr said, "Turn me into a toad, why don't you?" with Uulamets so furious Sasha wished with everything he had that Uulamets would not take that suggestion, but Pyetr kept right on going: "—because you haven't done so well either, grandfather, or our boat wouldn't be stuck in sand in the river, and we wouldn't have had to track you days through the rain and the muck in this woods to rescue you from your own damned foolishness!—And you—" he said, with a look at Eveshka—

The raven screamed from its perch on a limb and made a sudden dive at Pyetr's face. Pyetr flung up his arms and Sasha flung out an angry wish to drive it away, but quick as he could think it was already kiting skyward, and blood was welling up in a scratch on Pyetr's wrist.

While Babi, a suddenly very much larger and more ominous Babi, was growling and hissing and bristling about the shoulders, not at Pyetr, as seemed, but looking up after the raven.

So was Uulamets looking skyward, frowning as the raven came back to sit in the top of a tree.

Sasha said, "Remember what I told you, master Uulamets? I'll remember everything you do. And I don't need you so much as I did."

Uulamets turned, wild of eye, finger trembling as he pointed at him. "Now there's a fool! Don't need me, do you? You're going to walk out of here, hike down to Kiev, you and your friend and my daughter, and make your fortune in the streets. Of course you are!—Fool! You can't get him free of her, you can't get him free of yourself', there's his difficulty! There's no family for a wizard, there's no friend, there's no daughter either. Take a lesson from me! I brought up a wizard-child, I let her grow the way a weed grows, without wishing more than her safety and her good sense, and that, it seems, was unfatherly neglect. When she got to a reasonable age and took to selfish wishes she didn't want me to know about, we had discussions, oh, indeed we had discussions, boy, about wisdom and self-restraint and consequences—lessons you apparently learned by native wit and my own offspring abjectly failed to learn from my teaching, because my daughter was far more concerned with being a weed—and, like a weed, going her own way and getting what she wanted, having everything I forbade her to touch! My daughter grew up a fool, boy, against every principle I tried to teach her—because of course I was wishing her to learn, and wishing her to use good sense—"

"Your good sense!" Eveshka cried, drifting into the way of things. "What about mine?"

"Oh, indeed! Is there a mine and thine to good sense? There's one good sense, daughter, and if I have it and you don't, then you'd do well to listen and do what you're told!"

"And what if you're the one who's wrong? Pyetr's right! You're not doing so well, papa! You wouldn't listen to me, you didn't want me back, you took that thing in my place and let it sleep in my bed and you treated it the way you never did treat me, because I wouldn't put up with your nonsense—"

"One hopes his daughter grows! One hopes his daughter learns something after all these years!"

"Everybody shut up!" Pyetr shouted, and quietly then, from his log, elbows on knees: "Does it occur to anyone that maybe something's wanting us to act like fools, the way something wanted that sail to rip, and maybe it's not having a real hard go of it, considering what it's got to work with."

It certainly made sense. "Pyetr's got a point," Sasha said before Uulamets could say anything. "We felt the River-thing out there. It's somewhere around here. And if that's what's happening, maybe we ought to trust Pyetr's sense about it—being as he's not magical, and it's harder for it to confuse him, isn't that what you told me?"

Uulamets gnawed his lip and cast a narrow glance at Pyetr.

"I'd advise," Pyetr said, "we get back to the boat, but Sasha says we'll never make it that far, so what are we going to do? Go on believing the River-thing who told us this was a good idea? Or just salt it down once for all and see if that doesn't improve our luck."

"You can't kill a magical creature," Uulamets said in a preoccupied way, and walked off to the log where he had been sitting.

"What—?" Pyetr started to say, but: "Shut up!" Uulamets hissed, and went and picked up his book from the log, sat down and started leafing through it.

"More magic," Pyetr said, and looked at Sasha. "I hope he's got a way to wish us out of this. Maybe if you and he and Eveshka got together on what you wanted—"

"You can wish a rock to fall," Uulamets snarled, turning pages. "You can wish a man to rise. But you won't wish either to fly, and you won't wish a force of nature not to exist, not if you have any sense."

"So what would happen?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On strength and intent. Shut up! You'd try a stone's patience."

"I want to know," Pyetr said in a low voice, looking back at Sasha, "how if you can't wish what can't happen—what we just buried back there could be walking around and calling him papa."

Eveshka vanished, just shredded like smoke and whipped away across the clearing to take shape again with her back to them.

"I don't know the answer," Sasha said under his breath.

"I didn't mean to upset her. But that thing's damned scary. How do we even know the old man's what he seems to be?"

Pyetr always had had a knack for scary questions. Sasha cast a look over at Uulamets and wished hard, that being all he could think of, to see the truth about him. All he saw was a bony, frightened old man with a book that preserved the things he had done or thought of doing, but which would tell him very little about the things he had never thought of at all.

Unless one could think like Pyetr—just throw down the walls of what was scary and what was dangerous and ask questions like that.

Why? Why not? And, Why won't it?

Actually, Sasha thought, trying to answer Pyetr's questions for himself—I don't know why we can't wish ourselves out of this.

Why not?

Why not all try it?

Master Uulamets thinks it's dangerous. Why? Because he's never tried it? Because none of us really can agree what we want? Why did he answer that by talking about nature?

If you wish a fire not to burn, some other force of nature has to move in a rainstorm. If you wish a stone to fly, some force of nature has to move in and lift it.

If you want a bone to live and move—nature doesn't want to do that. At least in Vojvoda it wouldn't, Pyetr's absolutely right.

But there are things that don't come to Vojvoda.

Why not?

Because ordinary people are hard to magic?

Because working with all those people that can't be magicked is like lifting a lot of rocks, all the time?

He wished Eveshka would not be angry at Pyetr, and that she would tell him what she knew about magic.

Maybe, he thought, his thinking was Eveshka answering him.

What did we bury? he wondered suddenly, and went, ignoring Pyetr's startled, "Where are you going?" to see the place where they had buried the skull.

Pyetr caught up to him as he reached the spot. And there was no mound, just a hole.

"God," Pyetr said, and hastily looked around them.

"I don't know what it was," Sasha said, "but it wasn't dead. Size doesn't mean a thing to a vodyanoi. Shape doesn't either. We've seen that."

"Why didn't it kill us?" Pyetr asked. "It had a hundred chances."

"Something wants us here," Sasha said uncomfortably. "I think you're absolutely right about that."

"Eveshka knew what this thing was," Pyetr said angrily. "She killed it—"

"Not killed."

"Whatever she did to it—she's a wizard, isn't she? She has to know more than we do, doesn't she? She could have said, 'Pyetr and Sasha, don't touch that thing, it's not dead!' She might have said, I'm just not sure about that,' she might have said, 'Don't waste your time burying it, it'll just leave when you're not looking.'"

A cold thought came to him. "Why didn't Babi growl at it? Babi's your friend."

"Babi's her dog," Pyetr said in a subdued voice. "Or whatever. Babi didn't go close to it. And grandfather, for that matter—didn't open his mouth. He's the chief wizard around here, isn't he? So why didn't he tell us?"

"Master Uulamets isn't doing very well," Sasha said, feeling his stomach increasingly upset. "And I don't know why she didn't tell us. I don't know why she disappeared for a moment on the trail, or why the vodyanoi kept coming and going. I don't know why she's acting the way she is, but she's upset at her father and she's not—"

He lost whatever he had been going to say. It just dropped out of his mind.

And again something dropped out.

That scared him, and he wished he could remember what it was.

"I'm being absent-minded," he said, and lost touch with the forest around him for a moment. He wished not to, and made himself look around. "We're in trouble."

"God," Pyetr muttered, and shook at his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

"I don't know. I don't like what's going on." He looked up at the ridge, and into the trees around them, and he took Pyetr's arm and drew him back into the clearing where Uulamets and Eveshka were.

"Eveshka," he said, quietly, so as not to disturb her father. "We want to talk to you."

She slipped away into the woods, pale and silent, not quite out of sight, but not talking to them about what was not in that small grave either.

CHAPTER 24

Nobody talked about doing anything. "Are we going back to the boat?" Pyetr asked Sasha, who at least was talking to him; and: "I don't think so," Sasha said.

The next reasonable question: "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know," Sasha said, managing not to look him quite in the eye.

The third: "Is everybody waiting on grandfather to make up his mind? Or is it perchance the vodyanoi we're waiting for?"

"Grandfather's thinking," Sasha said.

Pyetr muttered his succinct opinion, got into their supplies and had himself a drink, had himself two, for good measure, after which he came at least to the temporary philosophical conclusion that he was doomed, everyone was bent on a course that was assuredly going to kill them all, and if no one else wanted to take the trouble to hike back to the boat, damned if he wanted to make a pointless, exhausting trek.

At least, in a more practical vein, they could rest, eat, bandage blisters and mend rips and such against such time as it might please grandfather to think about going back to the boat and back to the house to reconsider this whole mad venture.

So Eveshka drifted in and out amongst the trees, grandfather read his book and the god knew what stalked them in the brush while the sun passed noon, afternoon, and it got on toward dark.

By then he had patched the knee of his breeches, cut a binding for a split in the side of his left boot, and had another sullen dispute with Sasha over nothing more substantial than how much water ought to be in the stew; after which he felt disgusted with himself, so he had another drink after supper. Then he sat down with his sword braced between his shoulder and his boot, using a whetstone to renew the much-abused edge, a small, steely sound—at least the hope occurred to him—to remind any Thing out there in the brushy dark beyond their fire that here was both steel and salt, and a man in no good temper.

Grandfather read even while he ate; Eveshka stayed to the edges of the firelight, evading questions; Sasha let the supper dishes lie and took to making notches in a stick he had peeled, which Pyetr took at first to be some sort of rustic pothook, if they had had a pot: certainly Sasha seemed quite purposeful about where he bored little holes and cut little lines.

"Bear?" Pyetr asked, after a while, thinking he saw a face developing. "No," Sasha said without looking at him.

A man could feel unwelcome at this rate.

He looked glumly out at Eveshka, wondering was it only him or whether the whole world was out of joint this evening—not that he wanted Eveshka's attention, the god knew, although…

Eveshka did at least seem to care about him.

The whetstone slipped. He nicked his finger and quickly carried it to his mouth, wincing, while he watched that shimmer of mist, and saw her watching him.

"Deep?" Sasha asked him, meaning his cut finger. He looked at it. It was in a painful spot, on the inside of his thumb—on the hand the vodyanoi had gotten, the same one the damned raven had scratched.

"No," he said, sullenly, shaking it. "What's one more?"

"Here, let me see it."

"No." He put the wound to his mouth, shook it again after, and applied a little vodka to the cut, applied a swallow to his stomach, and then a second one, casting a foul look at Uulamets .

"Old man," he began at last.

"Hush," Uulamets snapped.

"Grandfather—" Pyetr persisted, doggedly, grimly polite, but Sasha signaled him no, not to bother Uulamets .

One supposed by that, that Uulamets was making some progress. It certainly did not look that way to him.

"So what are we going to do?" Pyetr said. "The vodyanoi

lied, grandfather, it's lied from the start. It says you have to find this Kavi-"

"Shut up, fool!"

He gave Uulamets ' turned shoulder a long, cold stare, thinking of things he had done in Vojvoda he was ashamed of, considering how much more this old man deserved them. Poor old Yurishev, for one, had spitted him mostly by accident—he had no grudge for that: indeed he had never even drawn his sword against the old man, nor thought of it at the time, not being the sort who would readily think of violence against a man three and more times his age—

Until lately.

"Pyetr," Sasha said quietly, at his elbow, "don't, please don't quarrel with him. He didn't mean it. He's trying to think."

"Good," Pyetr said. "About time." He stopped the jug and set it down. "Trust the vodyanoi, why don't we? It swears on its name, doesn't it? We trek into this woods after one of his old-"

"Shut up!" Uulamets said, and as Pyetr looked around at him: "It couldn't lie. Not on its own."

There must be something magical going on, Pyetr thought: he could see the old man talking, see the sweat glistening on Uulamets ' forehead, but his voice sounded distant, like listening through water.

"We're in serious difficulty," Uulamets said. "Are you listening to me? I've been trying to draw our shadow in. It's not reliable, nothing it says is reliable, but it does have very much to do with my daughter's life. We have no choice, you least of all, Pyetr Illitch. I suppose I owe you some small debt—"

"Small!" Pyetr cried.

"—which I will pay," Uulamets snapped, "with your life so far as I can save it! But my daughter's life is ultimately all that will save any of us. You know names. Don't speak them again. Don't ask me my intentions. Do as I tell you and don't follow impulses that seem strange and dangerous to you: I cannot personally conceive how you see magical things and I don't know how else to warn you. You're both more difficult and more vulnerable a target. You must do what we tell you, because your own opinions are not reliable, do you understand me? Do you understand me, Pyetr Illitch?"

Pyetr worked on that thought, unpalatable as it was, and looked into the old man's eyes with the suspicion, no, the sure knowledge—that the old man insisted he. say yes, and that that was the feeling thick in the air. "Sasha," he said, desperately trying to resist it. "Sasha—"

Sasha said, laying a hand on his shoulder, "He's telling the truth, Pyetr."

A man had no chance. He truly had no chance. He had thought he was standing by what Sasha would want.

So he gave Sasha a reproachful look, another to Uulamets , and went back to sit at the fire, unstopped the jug and had another sip, disconsolately watching the patterns in the embers and thinking quite fondly at the moment of The Doe's hearthside and 'Mitri and the rest of his double-crossing friends. They at least were willing to applaud when he risked his neck.

"Pyetr," Sasha said, at his shoulder—sounding concerned.

Good, he thought.

"Pyetr, he's right. We haven't any choice."

He folded his arms on his knees, clamped his jaw and wished he could come up with a viable choice—damn it all, how could a body think with two and three wizards nattering at him?

And one of them with his feelings hurt and probably wishing hard for him not to be mad—even if he was an honest boy and knew how absolutely furious that would make him.

"God! I'm going crazy!" He thrust himself to his feet and gave a disgusted wave of his arm. "What chance have I got, with the lot of you?"

"I'm sorry. I'm not doing anything!"

"Good! I'm glad! Thank you!" He shoved both hands into his belt and faced back to the safe formlessness of the fire-patterns. "Grandfather's not that polite. Neither's his daughter. So we've got to go find this Chernevog—"

"Please. Don't throw names around."

"What's the matter? What's the matter with a name? I'm not magical! My wishes don't work. What is this nonsense?"

"I don't know," Sasha confessed. "I truly don't know, just—"

"It's because," Uulamets said from behind them, "when you name a name we hear it; and having weaknesses we want that person or we don't want: the one's a call, the other's an attack, and it's damned foolish to do either in our situation, since we don't particularly want notice, does that answer your question?"

"Well, then, why don't we call something friendly," Pyetr retorted, "like the leshy? It seems to me we could use the help."

Uulamets to his surprise actually seemed to think about that.

"It was friendly," Sasha said in Uulamets' silence. "It didn't like Eveshka being here, it didn't like my borrowing from the forest, but—"

"Did you?" Uulamets asked sharply.

"Yes, sir," Sasha said.

Uulamets fingered his beard and plucked a twig from it, and sat there looking at them, one eye cast in a band of light between their two shadows, his face a maze of old secrets.

"Clever lad," Uulamets said. "Clever boy. And a leshy helped you. A leshy fed a rusalka. That's quite remarkable."

One never knew with Uulamets what was sarcasm and what was not. Pyetr had a surly answer ready, but Uulamets went on looking at them as though they were something on his dinner plate.

"It gave us its name," Sasha said after a moment.

"Truly remarkable," Uulamets said.

"So what does it mean?" Pyetr asked.

"It means this woods wants us here."

"Oh, god! One more in the game!"

"Quite," Uulamets said. "I wouldn't swear to which side." He picked up his book, made a little shooing gesture past that burden. "Out of my light."

"So are we going to do anything?" Pyetr asked.

"Just stay out of trouble, damn you. Why don't you go keep my daughter company?"

Pyetr opened his mouth to answer, but Sasha pulled him around by the sleeve and gave him at least that excuse to take the wiser course.

"He has no feeling," he said to Sasha, and waved an angry gesture in Uulamets ' direction. "Is that the way you want to end up?" It was unfair, perhaps, since Sasha was born what Uulamets was, at least Sasha had had precious little choice in it. "To hell with it. He's driving me crazy. Just let me alone a while and stop wanting things, can't you?"

"I can't stop caring what happens—" Sasha said, and cut himself off and looked desperate.

Maybe thinking about Uulamets and his daughter, who knew?

Pyetr sighed, and folded his arms and shook his head, looking at the ground, feeling better—damn the boy!

He picked up the jug and stalked off with it, wanting and not wanting a drink, wanting it, damn it all, precisely because he suspected Sasha wanted him not to have it, and the whole thing was driving him mad.

So he stood at the edge of the firelight, staring off into the dark of the forest in another quarter to that where Eveshka was, just wanting nothing for a while, except to rest his battered brain and not to have any demands on him, not from Sasha, not from Uulamets , not from Eveshka, that damned bird, or anyone else.

He was quite out of his depth, he decided. Eveshka surely cherished no illusions about his competency; he was reasonably sure Sasha had none left; and the old man's opinion of him was never in doubt from the beginning.

Babi popped out of thin air, right at his feet, a fur-ball with solemn black eyes and a glistening wet nose.

His heart hardly even jumped, that was how numb he was becoming to things like this. He stared back at the fur-ball, which was presently about cat-sized, and it squatted, staring up at him expectantly, licking its human lips and panting like a dog.

He reckoned what it wanted. He tipped the jug, it opened its mouth and caught the dollop neatly, standing with little black hands on his leg.

That, he looked at askance. But he took another sip for himself. The hand hurt, from which wound he was not even certain any longer. He made a fist and looked at it to try to tell, trying to hope it was the latest wound; but there was a coldness about the pain, like a cut on ice: it was the back of the hand that was hurting—and he did not like that.

He liked less the feeling he got, looking off into the woods.

So it was out there. That was no news to anyone, least of all to him, and he was in a fey and surly mood. He stood there obstinately, reminding himself he had beaten it before, thinking that maybe if he could get it in range he might be worth something after all; and then with a numb sort of chagrin, remembered his sword was lying against a log on the other side of the fire, which he really, immediately, imminently should do something about—He drew back a step—it was like walking in thick mud. The next was harder: he had great difficulty thinking why he was going at all, except, last and most desperate thought—something was wrong and he needed Sasha's attention.

But Eveshka was insisting to tell him something, which only confused the issue. He stopped, forgetting where he was going or what he had been about to say, except Eveshka was muddling him up—

Something snarled and grabbed his leg. He yelled, spun half about to save his balance and staggered free as Babi snarled and knocked his legs out from under him, become as large as a wolf, as large as a bear as it stood over him. He yelled and tried to get out from under it, and something had his ankle, worrying it and growling as Babi trampled him and lunged that direction.

"That will be enough!" Uulamets said, and Pyetr scrambled for clear ground and looked back at the edge of the woods. The raven was shrieking, Babi had vanished into the undergrowth. "Come here!" Uulamets ordered, and something whipped away through the woods, stirring the firelit brush.

Babi popped up again at Pyetr's feet, panting, dog-sized and showing a fearful lot of teeth, just the other side of Pyetr's boots, one of which showed a single set of scrapes in the leather.

"Are you all right?" Sasha asked, shakily, behind him, and Sasha took his arm, but Pyetr was still staring Babi in the face and discovering, quite to his embarrassment, that he had saved the vodka jug and all but broken his elbow hitting the ground.

He flung it. It landed unbroken in a bush, which seemed to him the final insult. He resisted Sasha trying to pick him up, got his own feet under him and dusted himself off.

"So much for your snaky neighbor's promises," Pyetr snarled at Uulamets, who had come to stare at him, and glared at Sasha, who brought him the jug, ignoring him for a second, surlier look at Uulamets . "Won't hurt your friends, will it?"

Eveshka drifted near, her face grave and worried.

"I'm fine," he snapped, and flung out an arm to clear his path back to the fire. "I'm fine. I don't need the damn jug!" He stalked back to where his sword lay, at the fireside, thought of taking it in hand and going off after the vodyanoi; but he had already embarrassed himself beyond bearing, and stupidity piled onto fecklessness was no help. He sank down in disgust on the log beside his sword and picked it up, scowling as Babi came up and put his little hands on his knee.

"Thanks," he said.

Sasha came and put the jug down. "I think my wish on it must have stuck," Sasha said very quietly. "It just won't break."

"You mean I couldn't turn loose of the damn thing! Thanks! Thanks ever so much! I could have gotten killed!"

"I'm sorry. I've patched it. It's what can happen if you wish things. They can come back on you—"

Sasha looked white as Eveshka. And blaming Sasha was the last thing in his mind. He shook his head and massaged his bruised elbow. "We've got to get out of here," he said. "First thing in the morning, we've got to get back to the boat—"

"That solves nothing," Uulamets said from behind him.

"What do you advise?" Pyetr asked, with the sudden, uncharitable recollection exactly how Uulamets had had the vodyanoi swear. "Damn you, you said it shouldn't harm you or yours. So what am I? Not inside those bounds? You're trying to kill me, is that the game?"

"Your own attitudes gave it its exception," Uulamets said, leaning on his staff. "Think on that."

Wherewith Uulamets stamped his staff on the ground and went back to gather up his precious book.

"I'll kill him," Pyetr muttered.

"You don't learn," Uulamets said, with a sidelong look. "Go where you please. Walk to Kiev. Reason your way past the creature."

Babi patted his leg, and went over and picked up the jug, waddling back with it like a great pale gut.

Pyetr shut his eyes and rested his forehead against his hands—which hurt his elbow, but he was beyond caring.

"My daughter," Uulamets muttered at their backs, "is very much its creature. And you are hers. Remember that, too."

Pyetr said nothing to that disturbing assertion. He only looked daggers at the old man, who was back at his book.

"He means be careful," Sasha said.

"He has a damned nasty way of saying so." He took the jug from Babi, who was waiting anxiously, unstopped it and poured a big helping into Babi's waiting mouth: Babi had earned it.

On which thought he poured him a little more.

The jug, about half empty, seemed not particularly lighter by that. It had not, he suddenly began reckoning, gotten emptier all day.

Maybe, he thought, that was Babi's wish. Who knew?

Pyetr took to his blanket and slept, finally—Sasha saw to that, a very little wish, a very cautious little wish, for Pyetr's own good: Pyetr might catch him at it, but Pyetr was in so much misery, much of which Sasha held for his fault—as Pyetr said, what was one more at this point?

Sasha added the jug to the tally of wishes on his stick, like all the others, some not even lightly made or unconsidered—but all unsummed, until for the same reasons as Uulamets he had begun that long-postponed ciphering, spiderwise trying to patch a web that should have been orderly from the start, but which he discovered frighteningly random. Writing was beyond him, but he made marks he wished to remember—

While Eveshka brushed near him, angry at him, as if his attempt to understand things terrified her in some way too obscure for him.

Then he remembered that she had died at near his age.

He made a mark for that, in the line that was Eveshka.

Young for all her years since, because it seemed to him she could learn about things, without learning things, sometimes acting exactly sixteen, in his reckoning, especially about Pyetr—

No, she insisted, from across the fire.

And maybe about her father, too, he thought, making another mark. Grown folk maybe puzzled Eveshka more than they did him: working at The Cockerel had shown him a lot more about people—and she had only met a few living souls in her whole life, all of them wizards.

Until she died, Sasha thought, and maybe met others, to their regret-She drifted closer to him, more and more upset—of which Uulamets was quite aware. He realized that without looking around. Uulamets was suddenly upset with his line of thought, and he recollected the jug he had so casually bespelled: his most effective spell, Father Sky! The thing had resisted accident and almost cost Pyetr's life—precisely as master Uulamets had warned him: Magic is easy for the young…

Nothing had stood in that spell's way—no one had ever wished that the jug break, no one had ever had a contradictory motive toward it, and the god knew he had not had a hesitation in his head when the jar had flown across the deck and he had wished it stay whole.

Magic was so damnably easy—the jug showed that: he had gotten nonchalant about such little spells, being constantly in the midst of great and dangerous magic had dispersed his lifelong cautions and made him believe he could let fly a harmless wish—

But his spell on the jug was not harmless. It had evidently been more powerful than the protections he had set on Pyetr himself, for reasons he could not entirely understand—unless—

Unless his spells on Pyetr had flaws—like doubts—

But that was not the thread he had started to follow. He found himself disturbed to the heart, feeling a wish happening around him, like a brush against his skin—or that insubstantial periphery he sometimes described to himself that way.

Uulamets said, from behind him, "A rusalka is a wish. A

wish not to die. A wish for revenge. That describes my daughter."

"The leshy helped her," Sasha s