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sit down next to the oven where it was warm and he could never do that again, never go home, never see his own bed again, never see the horses or the stable or any of those things that made up all his days—and he had trouble thinking to move at all, except that Pyetr took him by the elbow and pulled him along to the left, where the road ran along the wall.
     
    Pyetr was breathing too hard to talk; Sasha was too lost to have any opinion: his lip was cut, his jaw ached, the guard had clearly been appalled at the sight of his face, and he did think that Pyetr might have spared him the second and the third blow.
     

     
CHAPTER 4
     
    « ^ »
     
    "W here are we going?" Sasha asked when the north road had left Vojvoda well behind, when there was nothing around them but plowed fields and the night sky.
     
    "South," Pyetr said.
     
    "But we're going north!" Sasha said.
     
    "That's the point. If you want to escape the tsar's justice you have to escape the tsar's territory. And you can't go the way they expect."
     
    "But where are we going?"
     
    "There are other tsars," Pyetr said between breaths. "All we have to do is travel far enough… Everything will be fine."
     
    Pyetr had to sit down shortly after that. They had reached a point where they had a woods or a ridge or some large darkness in sight eastward: Sasha had no idea what that was, but they were out of sight of any lights at all; and Pyetr sat down on a large rock and held his hand to his side, his head hanging. Sasha squatted down to look at him closely in the dark, more afraid than he had been when he was lying to the gate guards, because Pyetr was bleeding again, he had no doubt of it now, Pyetr was growing weaker, and he had no notion what to do, without medicines, without clean bandages, and no hope of a place to get them. The north road only went to Belovatzd, that he knew of, which was only a village, and nowhere to hide, because it was closer to the tsar than Vojvoda was.
     
    "I 'll be all right," Pyetr said, and made an effort to straighten, not entirely successful. "Time we got off this road. They'll be hunting us—if they have the stomach for it. Who knows, maybe a sorcerer helped us get out the town gates."
     
    Sasha felt a chill settle about him when Pyetr said that. Pyetr laughed and said:
     
    "God knows what the guards will tell—or what your fool cousin saw when I came out of that corner! Father Sun, the look on his face! I must have shape-shifted, my sorcerer friend must have turned me into a haystack—"
     
    "Don't joke!" Sasha said. "The Field-thing could be listening."
     
    "It should have a sense of humor."
     
    "It's not funny."
     
    "It ought to be. It's all moonflufF, boy, me 'witching old Yurishev, us shape-shifting our way through the gates. God, I used to play the devil around The Doe's kitchen when I was a kid, used to carry their wood for them, then drop down to the cellar where they hung the sausages…"
     
    "You didn't!"
     
    "I did. They kept saying how they had to have done something to set the house-devil off, because he was eating them out of their profits. So they must've figured it was since they hired me—and I
do
bet their profits came up when they let me go."
     
    "You're a thief!"
     
    "I was hungry, boy. I didn't
have
relatives. And in case you've ever wondered, the Little Old Man around The Cockerel's barn is a black and white cat."
     
    Sasha shuddered to hear that kind of talk. "It's not lucky," he said. "Don't say things like that, Pyetr Illitch."
     
    "Poor Sasha. There
aren't
any House-things. There's nothing in the bathhouse. The bannik won't get you, and it can't tell you any more than the fake wizards on Market Street."
     
    Sasha got up, walked off and squatted down on the other side of the road, where he did not have to be near Pyetr Kochevikov.
     
    The man was wicked. He had no fear. Aunt Ilenka had said it, and he had not believed it; and now he had Pyetr Kochevikov for a guide, if Pyetr was not