Rusalka

  It was Sasha who wanted not to remember now, things far worse than uncle Fedya could ever think of, wishes for harm on someone, wishes to convince someone he was a failure and worthless, so he could wish he were dead—

  “Worse than any beating, boy,” Uulamets muttered as they struggled with the undergrowth. “You should have lived with old Malenkova. Crazy as a loon and mean as winter.” Uulamets was thinking by then of Eveshka and how he had failed with her: he had truly meant to teach her in a better, kinder way; but that had been a mistake: she had been willful as Draga.

  Even so he wished, quite dangerously, that he could save her

  Because a damned boy held on to a heart that was going to ruin them both, against all advice.

  “Stop it,” Uulamets said, “fool!” and turned with every intent to teach a boy a lesson—

  Deserved, Sasha thought: but Uulamets flinched from hitting him in the face, grabbed him instead by his collar, still aching to beat him the way his teacher had him, for his own sake, and all the world’s sake, until he gained a different view of things and stopped being a shallow-minded, flittering boy—

  I’m not, Sasha thought; and wondered, having had all those years dealing with Fedya Misurov, who did not think half so deeply, or deserve half so much respect: Why don’t you just take it from me? You could.

  That made Uulamets want to hit him for a different reason, which Uulamets himself did not understand, except it misapprehended him, and made him out a good man: Uulamets did not want people liking him, or expecting things a wizard could not in good conscience owe anybody, not his daughter, not a student, certainly not a light-witted scoundrel like Pyetr Kochevikov—

  “Who’s probably dead, damn you,” Uulamets muttered. “You’d better make up your mind to count him gone, because he’s your weakness, boy. You’re going to flinch when you shouldn’t, because you’re too soft, you’re too weak, and the one favor you can do me for the rest of this hike, boy’t, is to watch the woods around you, look at the leaves, think about the leaves and nothing but the leaves, hear me? Or if your friend is alive you’ll destroy every last chance we have to do anything for anybody.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sasha said meekly, knowing what the old man in his experience was saying: no doubts, no quibbles, no holding back. He tried to think about the trees, the leaves, the sound of the wind: sometimes—Uulamets angrily pulled him back from it—about the ghosts and what their absence meant.

  “Pay attention!” Uulamets said with a painful jerk at his arm. “Scatterbrain, think of nothing.”

  He understood, he apologized, he slipped with Uulamets into nothing and beyond that into nowhere, while the light dimmed, the air grew chill, and rain fell as a light patter among the leaves. “Don’t wish not,” master Uulamets said. “Be patient. Make no noise.”

  So one watched where one was walking, one admired the water drops, one thought of beads on a branch, the rim of beads on a new leaf—anything that touched eyes, touched mind, being totally here and wanting nothing, and thereby totally silent in the woods.

  But there came a change in the woods. They walked through a curtain of brush into a dead region, trees so long dead their limbs were white and naked, their trunks only patched with bark.

  Want nothing, Sasha thought: he had had that knack once, back home among ordinary people, for their protection. Want nothing, wish nothing away, simply watch and see and accept what came.

  Tree after dead tree, a forest not only dead but long dead, their stream flowing between banks of barren earth, utterly lifeless—not so much as moss or leaves out of this tributary of the river, not so much as a lichen on a tree. Barren earth, dust, that the misting rain turned to mud-Master Uulamets believed he knew the way, and Sasha did not question that, only wondered how he knew—and recalled long ago when the ferryboat had traveled further, and Malenkova’s house, Uulamets’ own teacher—

  Her house was here, beside the old road, he thought, and recollected days of trade and travelers—

  He shied away from that thought as Uulamets’ anger warned him, because it was dangerous to think about their enemy.

  Consider only the trees.

  They walked farther and farther into the barren ground, amid what began to be an open, level strip along the stream, where no tree had grown, seemingly, when the forest was green: the vanished road out of the east, the route of traders in times too long ago for a boy to remember. Malenkova’s old house.

  Tenanted again.

  One wanted to wonder-—

  “No,” Uulamets said. “Think about the rain. Think about the sky.”

  “I—” Sasha began, and saw something through the gray haze of trees, distant, moving toward them, ghostly white. He wanted to know what it was.

  Uulamets grabbed his arm and stopped him in his tracks, and all he knew was a muddle, as if wishes conflicted, his, Uulamets’, the god knew: his wits were too scrambled to make sense of it, but his eyes saw a desperate, white-shirted man coming toward them.

  It looked—Father Sky, it looked like Pyetr, was Pyetr—

  “Wait,” Uulamets said, and jerked his arm painfully the instant he saw blood on Pyetr’s shirt and moved to disobey. “Scatterwits! No! Look at it!”

  Uulamets wished, with everything both of them had, and Pyetr—

  —melted, headlong, into a bear-shape shambling toward them.

  “No!” Sasha cried, Uulamets wished, and it melted to a black puddle that flowed into the ground.

  “That’s our shape-shifter,” Uulamets said, still holding Sasha’s arm, wishing the thing back to whatever hole it had come from. “Know what it is and it can’t work its tricks. The power of names, boy.”

  If it had taken Pyetr’s shape, Sasha thought, trembling now it was gone, if it did that, if it was one of their enemy’s creatures and not the vodyanoi’s, then their enemy knew who Pyetr was. Their enemy might have wished him—

  Uulamets gripped his arm, hurting him. “Save it. You’re right, he does know more than we’d like. Don’t think about it. Most of all don’t believe what attracts you, not in this game, do you understand me now, boy? Catch me once, not twice with that trick.”

  I can’t help it, Sasha thought. If he aimed at Pyetr, Pyetr may be with him—

  With Eveshka—

  Uulamets’ fingers pulled at Sasha’s arm as he started walking again: Uulamets was angry, angry at his own anger: smothering it, killing it with long-practiced indifference. “He’s trying to shake us,” Uulamets muttered, and let him go to walk beside him. “He’s not going to. No tempers, boy, no resentments, what seems, isn’t necessarily so, you understand me? Believe things aren’t the worst, they won’t be the worst, quiet your damned self-doubt, boy, you can do anything you want to do, just want it enough and don’t stop till you’ve got it.”

  Pyetr, Sasha thought, and tried to unwish that—as the raven swooped low, winged past them like a shadow and went aloft again, down the road. God, no, he thought, helpless totally to wish no. God, master Uulamets, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—

  “Fine help,” Uulamets said, flinging his arm aloft as they walked. “—Find my daughter, that’s what you’re good for, you feathered thief! Go!”

  “I didn’t mean it,” Sasha said miserably.

  “Wish confusion on our enemies,” Uulamets said under his breath. “And trust the bird. One of those things a magician can only do a few times in his life, don’t ask me why I picked a damned crow—ask me why I didn’t choose a bear, a wolf at the least.”

  The bird had been Uulamets’ pet when he was a boy. That came through, along with a memory of the house where they were going, a ramshackle place of towers, a terrible old woman intending the raven’s death—

  A scared young wizard, desperately protecting the only living thing he loved—

  Uulamets shut that away, like a door slamming, with the thought that their enemy’s attack had already had its effect, Pyetr was their point of division, Pyetr was the unstable point—

 
Sasha thought—

  Things change that can change—

  CHAPTER 32

  PYETR DID NOT remember arriving at Chernevog’s house. He only recollected a screen of dead hedges and gray, dead trees, hiding a towered and rambling structure as decrepit as Uulamets’ cottage; remembered walking toward it, not of his own accord, until his knees gave way under him and spilled him helplessly on his face in the dust. He was sure that that much was real.

  He thought that at one point, in a room of polished wood, Chernevog had spoken to him again, saying with wizardly persuasion, “You might still redeem yourself with me—” He thought he had refused then—refused, though he was less and less sure he was right, or sane, or that he had chosen right in leaving Sasha to Uulamets.

  “Come now,” Chernevog had said again, or at some other time. “Isn’t it foolish to fight me, when all I want is to give you everything you want? Listen to me, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” he had said, “why not?”

  “But you have to believe in me,” Chernevog had said, “and you’re lying, aren’t you? Stop pulling away from me. Do you want to live, fool?”

  “Yes,” he said, eventually, screamed it, because Chernevog insisted, then tucked himself up on the floor where he had fallen and held his stomach—

  Or it was long ago in Vojvoda, on a dark lane with a couple of bad losers—who had robbed him besides—

  One bully’s like another, Pyetr thought now bitterly. Never satisfied, never satisfied, no matter how much you give them.

  “Yes,” he said when Chernevog asked, or “No,” when Chernevog insisted; “I swear!” when Chernevog half-suffocated him; anything that Chernevog wanted, he agreed to, because he had no choice if Chernevog moved his limbs, stopped his breathing, dashed him to the ground—no choice and no effect to his wishes, for good or ill.

  At last he felt cold against his face, and heard Eveshka pleading, “Pyetr, Pyetr, get up, hurry.”

  He did try. Every joint hurt. “Please,” she whispered, “please, quickly, quickly, do what I tell you. He’s asleep. You’ve got to get out of here.”

  He hauled himself up by the edge of a tottering bench that made a sound like thunder, got his knees under him and shoved himself to his feet. Eveshka tried, with little touches that could not touch him, to assist his balance, guiding him through an archway of carved fishes and up a short flight of steps.

  “Where’s my sword?” he asked, catching at the doorframe, at a shelf then, for balance, within a little of knocking a pot off it. His heart thumped as the vessel rocked and settled. “Where’s my sword? Where is he?”

  “It’s too dangerous, no! I can’t get past that door. He’s protected! Just get away—”

  “Where’s the damn sword?” he insisted, but she wanted him out the door, wanted him to get to Sasha and her father—wanted him simply out of her way:

  “Help my father!” she said. “Help where you have a chance: you can’t face him, you can’t do anything against him, you can’t even get in there. Just get out of here! It’s all you can do, Pyetr!”

  He saw his sword by the door, staggered that direction and picked it up, having then to lean against the wall, his knees shaking under him.

  “Please,” Eveshka said, and touched his face, tears shimmering in her eyes. “Please! You’re no help to me, you only hurt me—”

  “It’s a trick,” he said. “Dammit, it’s a trick!” He struck out at her, passed his hand through cold: that was like Eveshka—who recoiled from him, hands clasped in front of her mouth.

  “Get out of here! Please.”

  The door beside him blasted open on a gust of wind and damp straight from the outside. He looked out on gray daylight, the tops of dead trees beyond a porch railing. Misting rain gusted into the room. Wind knocked something rattling, with a sound to wake the dead.

  He turned his head in alarm, saw Eveshka’s eyes widen, her mouth open in that instant as something blocked the wind at his back.

  He whirled around face to monstrous face with the vodyanoi’s head swaying snakelike above the porch rail, sleek and black and glistening with rain.

  “Well, well,” Hwiuur said, “come ahead, come outside. The master certainly doesn’t mind. He truly doesn’t. He said you’d be coming.”

  Pyetr moved to slam the door shut, but a rain-laden gust blew it back at him, and the vodyanoi struck through the doorway like the serpent he was, blocking it from closing as his strong, small hands seized Pyetr’s ankle.

  “Stop!” Eveshka was screaming. “Kavi! Kavi, no, stop it! Make it stop! It’s going to kill him—”

  Pyetr gave up holding on, slung the sheath off his sword and beat at the River-thing’s head and body as it dragged him out into the light. His hand ached and went numb; he all but dropped the sword, sky and boards changing places as wet coils flowed over him. The sword did leave his hand. Pain ran up that arm to his ribs, where Hwiuur’s weight pressed.

  “Got you at last,” Hwiuur said, wrapping around him.

  Then the vodyanoi flinched upward and hissed: “Salt! Treachery!”

  They could see the towers through the woods, a huge house that might have graced some great city, sitting instead in desolation, weathered gray as the barren trees about it.

  “There,” said Uulamets, out of breath.

  And Sasha, with a pounding of his heart, with far too many unwelcome memories of this place and Uulamets’ own boyhood: “Do we just walk up to it?”

  “Until someone objects,” Uulamets said, and struggled up the rise the land took here, up the mist-slick and muddy slope. He faltered, and Sasha without thinking steadied him, not surprised when the old man shoved him off at the top, not offended at the anger and the concentration that refused outside interventions. Quiet, that concentration wished on them both: invisibility, unexpectedness.

  It encouraged Kavi Chernevog, told* him reassuring things about his own power, his own cleverness—it told him Ilya Uulamets was old and failing, and that there was no reason to worry in this encounter Chernevog had long schemed to provoke. Every power hereabouts was afraid of Chernevog, even the leshys.

  It was easy to believe that, it was especially easy because that was what Chernevog sent out to them, and they echoed back to him with small slight changes for his own suspicious, heartless character:

  Beware of Eveshka.

  She doesn’t love you. Could you expect that? She never did: she only wanted power for herself.

  Then a soft, insinuating doubt came from the other direction, the certainty that Pyetr was alive and with Chernevog.

  Sasha faltered, felt a cold, cruel impulse to distrust Uulamets, remembering that Uulamets would spare nothing, not even Eveshka, certainly not him or Pyetr in his purposes, and rescuing Pyetr was out of the question.

  Then Uulamets caught his arm and said, “Watch yourself, watch yourself, boy. That’s him, too. You can’t believe a thing.”

  But he was increasingly certain where Pyetr was, next a tree in a yard he had never, except through Uulamets’ eyes, seen in his life; and he was certain that Eveshka had given way to Chernevog and accepted his gift of strength, Pyetr having no more to spare…

  As for Sasha Misurov, the seductive whisper came, if he would simply stand aside, if he would do that, then Chernevog would make him powerful in his own right, over all the people in the world that had ever despised him, because Chernevog did not discount him, Chernevog recognized his presence with Uulamets and knew that, but for youth, he was far more than Uulamets—

  A boy who would pledge himself to Chernevog would be part of Chernevog’s own household, along with Eveshka, along with Pyetr, ageless, ruling over cities and kingdoms if he desired it—

  Or he could die, seeing Pyetr die before him—

  “If Pyetr’s there,” Uulamets breathed as they walked, “Chernevog won’t kill him, not while he’s got you upset. Trees, boy!”

  He was worth nothing, at the end, except as a hostage, a weapon on Chernevog’s side, a
point of leverage between Uulamets and Sasha, who were going to walk into this place—

  Chernevog perhaps wanted him to know that, or Hwiuur did; or perhaps he had wit enough occasionally to know some things without a wizard to explain it to him: he no longer was sure where his thoughts came from, sitting where Hwiuur had dragged him, in the mud of the yard, at the foot of a dead tree-once Chernevog had gotten from him the little packet of salt that Sasha had given him at the start of their trek.

  God, he had never once thought of it; and maybe that was the kind of luck a wizard made for himself. But to have Chernevog take it from him and throw it contemptuously into the mud-Smiling.—God!

  “Hold him,” Chernevog said then to the vodyanoi; and to Pyetr: “They’re still coming. The old man’s tricked your young friend, quite the way he’d have used me or his own daughter, ultimately—gotten hold of him in a way your friend wouldn’t choose for himself, I assure you. You might pull him away.”

  To you, Pyetr thought, and turned his face against the smooth, cold bole of the tree, expecting pain for that refusal.

  “Don’t you owe him to do that?” Chernevog asked.

  Only stop fighting me, Chernevog kept saying, in countless ways: I have everything. I’ll give you anything you want…

  Eveshka had tried, god, longer than flesh and bone could hold out, while Chernevog who could have killed him with a spare thought kept him alive—

  “Eveshka’s reconsidered,” Chernevog said. “I think you understand that. Shouldn’t you do the same? You could save your young friend, who has so much potential. You could amount to something. You could do so much good with your life. And you da nothing.”

  Pyetr went—finally, while Chernevog walked off to the house, and the exhaustion and the doubts about Chernevog and Uulamets both overwhelmed him. He hung his head and tried to get his wits about him, ignoring the soft slither of Hwiuur’s coils constantly circling the tree, occasionally sliding over his legs, Hwiuur whispering in his cold, sibilant voice: “Not so glib now, are you? Not so clever after all. Such a disappointment you’ve proved to your friends. And to the woman.”