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.‘Kavi, stay with me, we'll find a way through—’‘I can't,'' he cried, and tore and fought through the thicket away from her, blind and breathless.He would have killed her just then, the way he would kill the horses if he found them in this desolation: he would draw the last life from the ground, draw it from anything in his path.He drew it instead from the stubborn thorns, fended brittle branches away from his arms and ran, fainting from cold and weakness—heard the voices of wolves amid the wailing of the ghosts, and, glancing over his shoulder, saw them coursing after him, slow and pitiless as nightmare.Something had shifted.Sasha felt that much: an essential pebble had moved, somewhere.But as to how things were falling now—he was blind and numb with terror, resolved not to let his fear reach beyond him, or do more harm than he might already have wrought with his wishes.God, Pyetr, hear me.The boy's in trouble.Chernevog is.I did something I don't understand—Nadya whispered, ‘What's wrong?’ Missy had stopped, abruptly, standing with her ears pricked and a shiver going through her shoulders.Within his awareness, Nadya was trying not to be afraid: she had known the world outside her walls must be dangerous, but she had chosen her course, she was with a wizard she was sure could fight the invisible dangers and on a horse with strength to carry them through the tangible ones.Dear fool, Sasha thought, feeling her arms about him, dear young fool, nothing of the sort-But it made him sure all the same that he had imminently to do something.Pyetr would tell him so exactly that way.Though he did not have Pyetr and his sword and his good sense at his back, he had a lost boyarevna armed with a kitchen knife and a faith only the young could have, a faith he so desperately——O god!—wanted for himself.Thickets gave way to green again, to scantly leaved trees struggling for life, and sunlight that blinded and did not warm.Yvgenie slid on a muddy edge, sat down hard on a bank of a cold spring-fed rill with his heart pounding for fright, as if a mouse could drown in that water that soaked his leg—but it seemed to him he had been on the verge of another fall, and drowning, and that the bank where he lay and the sunlight shining down on him were less real than the other shore.He looked up the hill, thinking of wolves, not sure now that any had been there, not sure that they might not yet come over the wooded hill.Get up, keep moving, the ghost insisted.He recalled that Ilyana was in some dreadful danger, that he had let her go and lost her and that he dared not go back, because he was dying, he much feared so, dying finally and forever, when he had died truly that night in the flood, in a woods in which the dead did not rest.He wanted not to steal strength; but he wanted not to die, either, or to wait for the wolves, and he hauled himself up on his arms and his hands to try to get his feet under him—with the sudden feeling—perhaps it was the ghost—that there was help to be had, that it was very close now—An arrow hit the bank, among the dead leaves, beside his hand.He flung a look over his shoulder at riders coming down the opposite leaf-paved slope, and tried to run and sprawled again on the leaves in the weakness of his legs.He rolled over and looked at them as they came—god, they were the tsar's men, not his father's; and that made him hope—Although why they should be here in this woods, he had no notion at all.He only stared at them as they came.He had no strength to flee them, not even to stand on his feet to face them.They stopped, their captain's horse standing half astride the rill, the mustached captain looking down at him grimly from that vantage as two others rode across to dismount on either side of him.Their armor and their manner recalled Kiev, and streets, and sane places where the Great Tsar ruled, not wizards.They would kill.They would do anything they pleased, in the tsar's name.But they might be here on some other cause, they might even be here hunting his hunters.‘Yvgenie Kurov,’ their captain said, as the horse took a step closer, looming over him.‘Where's the girl? Where did you leave her?’‘I don't know,’ he said, and the two men on either side of them came and hauled him up by the arms.Why should the tsar care? he wondered.Why should the tsar take a hand in my father's troubles, or want to find me or her?The ghost said, Because your father is dead, poor young fool, with his servants, the second wife, and all his house, and they intend no traitor's heir survive—nor any question of an heir, born or unborn.The Kurovs are gone, the tsarevitch is scrambling for his life, and heads will roll if some pretender comes out of the woods: that's what I hear in them.I'd not fall afoul of Eveshka's ill will.But no one told the tsarevitch that, when he tried to switch dice on Ilyana's father.He was dazed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]