Rusalka

  Suddenly it flowed into the ground like ink.

  “Stop it!” Uulamets cried, Babi vanished on the instant, and there ensued a frightful yowling, a disturbance running a curving line under the mouldering leaves and into the brush, where violence thrashed and spat and hissed.

  Pyetr was bent over, sword and all, holding his right hand against his knees, and Sasha stumbled to reach him, dizzy as he was.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Of course, of course,” Pyetr gasped, looking out into the woods, one arm braced against his knee. “What’s one hand? I’ve two.”

  Sasha tried to help him, but his thoughts kept scattering to Babi, far out from the clearing now, to Eveshka, a distant glimmering among the trees, and Uulamets screaming at her to come back. His head ached; he could not stop the harm to Pyetr, that was what he kept thinking, and he had to want it more than he doubted before he could even begin to make headway against the pain.

  “Thanks,” Pyetr breathed, surely unaware what a terrible botch he had made of his help—or what it had felt like a moment ago, holding the creature while Uulamets tore it in shreds—until Uulamets himself had flinched, or he had, he could not even remember in the chaos of those moments which of them then had been hurting it most… for Eveshka’s pain, for Pyetr’s…

  “Come back,” Uulamets was still shouting at his daughter, or maybe Babi; and Pyetr, collapsing onto the log beside the fire, looked anxiously toward the woods.

  “Chernevog,” Pyetr said between breaths. “It was Chernevog the Thing meant, it had to be. Her lover killed her. ‘He said I could have the bones…’—God, what kind of man is that?”

  “A wizard,” Sasha said from a dry throat, thinking, I couldn’t let it go. It made me sick but I couldn’t let it go. Even Eveshka flinched, even Uulamets, and I didn’t.

  CHAPTER 25

  “EVESHKA!” Uulamets kept yelling into the dark, wizard at wizard-daughter, who still, it seemed, did not want to explain anything to them.

  But at last she came drifting back from the woods, overpowered by her father’s wishes, perhaps: Pyetr had no notion. Stupid to feel sorry for her, he thought: let the vodyanoi have her and save all of us—

  Because he was sore and shaken and short of sleep, and thoroughly out of sorts with shallow, silly girls who got themselves murdered by scoundrels.

  But that was not the way he felt when he looked at her, and when she came trailing back looking as young as Sasha and as ill-suited to contest with scoundrels and murderers: his heart turned in him and he wanted that particular scoundrel in reach.

  Still, figuring they had their hands full tonight, he was glad to see Babi come shambling after her through the brush, at least one hoped that large and shaggy thing she was not paying attention to was Babi, in his larger and less pleasant aspect. Whatever it was, it stopped at the edge of the woods—lay down there, all shoulders and jaws, gazing as watchfully as any hound in the direction the vodyanoi had gone.

  “You’ve some questions to answer, young woman,” Uulamets said, stalking along by Eveshka as she drifted near to the fire. She looked terrified. Pieces of her were coming away, the way they had from the vodyanoi wherr Uulamets attacked it.

  “Stop it!” Pyetr said to Uulamets, not certain Eveshka’s distress was Uulamets’ doing, but not liking it either, damned certainly not liking it. He said that, and got up to make his point, and Eveshka, who had started in that second to flee, hesitated and looked back at him with a light of hope in her eyes.

  He held out his hand: it was like lifting a heavy weight, so he reckoned Sasha did not approve; but they were being too hard on the girl, even Sasha was, trying to protect him, doubtless, but she had not deserved it.

  “Eveshka,” he said, walked over to her and beckoned her—one could hardly take her arm—over to the side of the clearing where he did not have Uulamets and Sasha immediately to contend with. “Your papa’s upset. We want to help you. That’s all. You know I do, don’t you?”

  “You can’t!” Pieces of her began to come away again. “Let me go!”

  “Where? Where can you go? To that Thing? Trust your father—” God, he could not believe he was saying it: “He’s not stupid. If you and he and Sasha could once get together on what you want, maybe—”

  “I can’t!” she cried. “I can’t, you can’t trust me, Pyetr, you especially can’t trust me, and I don’t want to hurt you—”

  “Well, so you do have a heart, don’t you?”

  “Don’t say that! Don’t believe it!”

  “Seems you’ve believed too many things. If you really want to have it back—can’t you just wish?”

  “No, I can’t, I can’t!”

  “Stop that!” he said, and pieces of her that had come away hesitated like drifting gossamer and immediately reassembled themselves around the edges, to his great relief. “That’s better. God, please don’t do that. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m tired, Pyetr. I want to go, please make my father let me go—”

  “Where would you go?”

  She shook her head slowly, distressedly.

  “Back to that cave?” he asked.

  “Just—gone. Just where people don’t want me to be anything! Pyetr, stop them—please stop them.”

  He felt that anguish like a blow—aimed at him, he thought; he remembered the clay cup and might have panicked as his heart began to thump against his ribs, but he looked her steadily in the eyes and said, as calmly as he could, “Oh, come now, ‘Veshka, you don’t really want to go away, you certainly don’t want to do me any harm—”

  “You don’t know me! Shut up! Shut up!”

  “I’m not a bad fellow, you know. I’d certainly put myself up against Kavi Chernevog.”

  “Please!”

  Odd feeling, to try his old beguilements with the lady’s father in view; and to know the lady’s safety was at stake. But he called up all his graces, smiled at her, while he earnestly wished on Kavi Chernevog all the harm he had done to her. “Nothing’s beyond you. You have to really believe, don’t you? Sasha tells me that’s the way it works. That fellow could trick you once, but you know better, now, you’re not as young as you were, you’re not a silly girl any more—and if you don’t want people wishing you things, ‘Veshka, for the god’s sake don’t talk about running off where he can get his hands on you alone.”

  “Let me go!”

  “You’re not stupid, girl, don’t act it.—Eveshka!”

  He had the strongest, most icy feeling there was something else looking out at him until he spoke sharply to her: she flinched and held up insubstantial hands, less than the sudden gust of smoke that stung his eyes. “Pyetr, I’m dangerous, I don’t think when I’m fading—I don’t think about anything—”

  “Your father believes he can bring you back.”

  “He can’t!”

  “No choice, is there? Either your papa brings you back or he can’t—one way we get out of here and the other way we’re all dead, because when you start to fade, you’re right, you certainly won’t let us alone, not here, not back at the house. Seems to me you’d do better not arguing with us, damn sure seems you’d better not go running off on your own—”

  “I’ll kill you!” she wailed. “I won’t want to, but I will—”

  “Certainly you will if you go on like that. You’re a wizard. You’ve got the power to do and not do, don’t you? Certainly more than I do.”

  She shut her eyes, clasped her hands before her lips and nodded, as pieces of her came back, like threads of spider silk, and filled out her edges.

  God, so precarious, and so scared—the way Sasha was scared, of himself as much as anything.

  But being half-crazed himself—every innkeeper in Vojvoda would swear to that—he quirked an eyebrow, smiled at her, which he had long ago learned was his straightest way to a lady’s heart, wherever kept and however perilously guarded. “Trust me, not that scoundrel.” A wink and a grin. “Show them. Give me a little ki
ss—I’ve no doubt of you.”

  Ghostly eyes blinked, wide and apprehensive.

  “Pyetr,” someone else said, as she slipped icy arms around his neck and gave him the kiss he asked for, a chaste touch of cold lips, a little remembered tingling down his spine. It took nothing. But: “Eveshka!” someone said, faraway, and she drew back, staring at him wide-eyed as he might for all he knew be staring at her, a little lost—

  “Eveshka!” Uulamets said harshly; and “God! stop it!” Sasha cried, unlike himself—so worried-sounding that Pyetr thought that just perhaps, if Sasha Misurov was down to swearing at him, he might be in more trouble than he thought.

  “I’m quite all right—”

  “All right, indeed!” Uulamets snarled, and thrust his arm between them, waving Eveshka off. “There’s been quite enough foolishness here—and you, my girl, had best take quick account of your judgment.”

  “I know what’s best for me, papa!”

  “—and bring your wants in line with mine for once, impossible as that may seem! A wizard who can’t keep track of what she wants is absolutely helpless in this business. You’ve gotten better—god, you had no mind when you’d just died, you were only a blind intention. It’s my spells have brought you back as far as you’ve come, it’s my teaching has kept you as sane as you are, and by the god, you’ll make it back the rest of the way—”

  “With what? Papa, I died! I can’t come back except through somebody else, and you had to bring Pyetr into this, dammit, papa!”

  “It wasn’t supposed to work that way.”

  “Wasn’t supposed to work that way!“

  “It wasn’t,” Pyetr said, made himself say—because on both sides wizardry tempers looked to be getting destructively out of hand. “Your father wanted to know what had happened to you, and you couldn’t tell him.—What else he intended, the god only knows, but he did get you back. He certainly wants you alive.”

  “He didn’t get me back, he didn’t want me back, he took that thing—”

  “It wasn’t easy to see through. It fooled all of us.”

  “He wanted his daughter, his own way!”

  Pyetr shook his head, hands tucked in his belt, and said—god, he could not believe he was saying: “He risked his neck for you—a damn lot more than my father would have done for me, I’ll tell you.”

  Eveshka just stood there, losing and collecting little gossamer threads of herself.

  “So,” Pyetr said with a shrug, everyone else leaving matters to him, “so maybe you should wonder why. The god knows your father’s got his faults, but he’s been at his game a long time. It only makes sense to work with him, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what I said!” Uulamets snapped.

  “Not very well, papa!”

  “Shut up,” Pyetr said. “Everybody. You—” he said to Eveshka. “Don’t fight. Just don’t fight. Not everything’s important all the time. First things first. Like getting out of here. Old grievances don’t help.”

  “They certainly don’t,” Uulamets said. “Think, girl! Our enemy’s wanting us to act like fools, he wants us to forget he’s in the game, he’s damned powerful, and we don’t gain anything by sending it one more help—which you’d assuredly be, going off on your own, daughter, don’t you mistake it. When we came up here, I had some naive hope of dealing with him reasonably, but that’s clearly out of the question.”

  “Out of the question! Papa, you can’t talk with him, you can’t—can’t come near—”

  Eveshka seemed to lose her way in mid-word again, staring off into distances, lips still shaping some word, part and parcel of other things that seemed to be going on where it came to Kavi Chernevog, things that collectively sent a chill down Pyetr’s back.

  “Seems to me,” Pyetr said, looking momentarily at the ground to break the spell Eveshka’s own face cast, “seems to me we’ve been doing a lot of odd things since we got here. As if we didn’t have this—” He remembered about names in time, not so much that he believed the warning, but that he wanted no argument with Uulamets. “—As if you’d never had a reason for leaving the boat and trekking off through this woods—”

  “He’s right,” Sasha said thickly. “Pyetr’s harder to magic, isn’t he? Maybe we should listen to him.”

  “Damn right somebody should listen to me! Does anybody remember what we’re doing here? We buried a Thing that won’t stay buried, the vodyanoi’s trying for the rest of me, nobody’s talking about doing anything but sit here while everything in this woods has a go at us, and I’m not sure who’s to blame for the sail, but I don’t think there’s much chance involved with this many wizards.”

  “There’s not likely to be,” Uulamets said, looking narrowly at him. “Pyetr Illitch, you’re certainly someone’s; tonight I really wonder whose.”

  Upon which Uulamets walked off to the fireside alone.

  “What does he mean?” Pyetr asked Eveshka and Sasha, looking from one to the next. “What did he mean by that?”

  “I don’t know,” Sasha said, while beyond the fire:

  “Damn you!” Uulamets cried suddenly, jabbing his staff into the moldy ground.

  Pyetr ran, sword in hand: Babi and he arrived one after the other, Uulamets still stabbing with the heel of his staff at a traveling lump of leaves. His book had fallen from the log where he had earlier been sitting to lie open on the ground, and a separate lump of leaf mold flowed over it on the retreat, escaping Uulamets’ staff—after which with a curse Uulamets fell bodily on the book and covered it. Pyetr whacked one leaf ball in two as it moved, and both halves and the whole rippled off toward the brush with Babi in pursuit.

  Pyetr had no urge to chase it. He grimaced in disgust, looked at his sword, fearing something noisome might have stuck to it—leaf fragments had—then reached down to help the old man up.

  Uulamets gained his feet with his help and struck away his arm once he was up, hitting him twice more for good measure.

  Pyetr did not hit him back, Pyetr fended him off with a lifted elbow and contained his thoughts of knocking him flat, as Eveshka and Sasha arrived to get between them.

  “Is it all right?” Eveshka asked.

  Meaning the book, Pyetr understood, but Uulamets gave her no answer, as courteous with family as with friends, it seemed—only sat down on the log and started turning pages in rapid succession.

  Trying to find that answer, Pyetr supposed. Time was, he would gladly have chucked the book in the fire, and Uulamets after it: but not here and not now, in their precarious situation. “The River-thing was distracting us,” he said, feeling his knees shaky. “We knew it had help, dammit, we were over there arguing and it was over here trying to steal the book—”

  “It couldn’t do that,” Eveshka said, faintly. “It’s protected.” He felt her against his side. After a moment one could not feel the cold she brought. He thought distractedly, That’s dangerous.

  She shouldn’t do that… But in their situation that presence against his side felt reassuring as Sasha’s was, in a night grown altogether too lonely and too dark.

  Sasha said quietly, “Sir, can it read?”

  “The god knows,” Uulamets muttered, still riffling pages, then looked up, and snarled, waving his hand at Pyetr, “Get away from him!”

  Eveshka fled. And he knew Uulamets had absolutely good reason for his behavior, but he felt—

  —lonely, after that. Even with Sasha there. That scared him. So did master Uulamets putting down his book and starting to delve into his bag, with purpose evident.

  Pyetr set his hand on Sasha’s shoulder. “Better get some sleep,” he said, and wished Babi would come back. There was no sound out there in the woods, now, nothing like a struggle.

  While Uulamets arranged little pots on the ground in front of him. “As happens,” Uulamets said, “I can use the boy.”

  He hardly liked the sound of that.

  So while Sasha squatted on his heels and helped the old man, and while Eveshka hovered sile
nt and angry on the other side of the fire, Pyetr sank down and wrapped himself in his blanket with the fire between him and Eveshka, where he could watch what was going on.

  Little pots. Coals from their fire.

  “What’s the matter with this fire?” Pyetr muttered when Sasha came to collect that item.

  Sasha gave him a distressed look, and got his coals between two sticks and came to put them in the lump of moss old Uulamets was arranging, after which a great deal of smoke went up, to gust directly in Pyetr’s face.

  On purpose, he thought uncharitably, and glared at Uulamets, undecided between conceding his spot or stubbornly suffering the smoke.

  He sat, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, he thought—if Eveshka could hear him—that there was no reasonable connection between smoke and ghosts and Uulamets’ bizarre doings, but then he thought that if there was anything to magic, and he was lately helpless to doubt it, his doubts were no help and perhaps a detriment—to Eveshka, and her welfare, which did count with him; and perhaps to their hopes of getting out of this woods, which very much did appeal to him.

  So he wiped his nose, rested his hand on his chin and shut his eyes, patiently waiting and hoping that there was no danger to Sasha in the old man’s magicking.

  What’s he doing? he asked Eveshka in his thoughts; but she sent him—if anything—only a feeling that finished upsetting his stomach.

  There might be danger. Babi had not come back. There were River-things and Forest-things, and he had himself almost died, Sasha swore it was true, until Uulamets had brought him up from the grave…

  The way he proposed to do with Eveshka.

  Encouraging, perhaps. He wondered if Eveshka knew that. He still resisted believing it on the one hand and wanted to believe it for Eveshka’s sake.

  Uulamets started his infernal singsong chanting, tootled a few notes on a pipe, the sort of sound that ought at least to send shivers through dead bones, and chanted and grunted. Pyetr slitted his eyes from time to time to keep watch over the business, wanting to ask precisely what it was supposed to do, and with the burning urge to ask whether there was some chance of it helping Eveshka immediately—