Yvgenie Read Online Free PDF Page B

tomorrow might not be the best day for it. Eveshka was clearly not in the best of moods tonight, for her to have sent out the call she had when the girl was late to supper.
    Eveshka feared—feared the good god only knew what, precisely: that Ilyana, who had wizard blood from her and from two grandparents, might turn uncontrollable, might attract magic to her that no child could handle.
    Possibly. Ilyana's ability was considerable and he had no real understanding himself how to govern her, except love and a great deal of listening—reasoning that if anyone had cared or asked him what his thoughts were when he had been her age, if anyone had ever offered seriously to listen to him before Pyetr had, and to advise him before master Uulamets had, then perhaps a great many things might have been different. Listening before advising the child seemed to him to be the best course. And wishing tranquility in these woods: that too—they wished very little change, here on their river shore, far from the demands of ordinary folk or the possibility of visitors. They shared the land, they shared suppers, they shared their lives, when wizards as a rule gave up their hearts and lived with loneliness. Certainly that had been the case with master Uulamets, Eveshka's father, and certainly it would have been the case with them, except for Pyetr—who was at all points the peace in the household, the center of all the friendship and the love they shared, husband, father, and friend —
    Somehow he could never make Pyetr understand that, or make him realize how desolate their lives might have been without him. Thanks to Pyetr he had more than his books and his house, he had a place to go in the evenings where one could sit by the fire and talk. He had friends and a child to watch grow up, as good as one of his own—he had made Ilyana toys when she was small, he had whittled dolls out of wood and painted them with dyes; and carved a quite remarkable horse, with straw for a mane and yarn for a tail. But she had suddenly grown too old for toy horses, too old for toys, that was precisely the trouble he saw coming: there seemed so much difference between this year and last. The toys languished, though loved, in Ilyana's room, the dyes grew faint—the dolls had had the life hugged out of them years ago and the horse's mane was a disgrace he had offered to mend, but Ilyana would have none of that, thank you, Patches was her horse and no one would change him.
    Now Patches was a real horse. Soon enough Ilyana might ride the woods with a freedom a wizard-child could enjoy, with no fear of bandits, with the not inconsiderable blessing of the leshys, whose names she knew, one of whom had held her in his vast, twiggy arms when she was an infant—old Misighi had, on his first visit after she was born, smelled her over, regarded her with a vast, moss-green eye, and declared she looked to him like a baby mouse. So mouseling she had become; and their mouseling would go where she would in the world, ultimately—to whatever woodland fastness the leshys held now, or to the edge of fields where ordinary folk lived, or within sight of Kiev—the god knew. Since they could not be with her every step to guide her actions, it was the quality of her choices they had to assure.
    Certainly a young wizard would make a few mistakes along the way. The vodka jug was one of his. So were the wishes that had brought Volkhi to them, and Missy; and the god only knew what calamity their flight might have caused in Vojvoda. He still did not know, nor wish to know, exactly what had set them free.
    And generally, as tonight as he opened his book and began to write, in a house that had neither domovoi nor dvorovoi, nor any feeling of home—
    Generally he did not think at all about Vojvoda, or his family. He, most of all of them, did not want his life to change—and he had to be careful of that, appended as he was to Pyetr's household.
    Odd uncle Sasha. Sasha the maker of toys, for