PYETR COCKED an eye, lifted his head and winced at the pounding ache in his skull.
Much too much vodka last night.
Some muddle of a dream about woods and a drowned girl, a most vivid dream about running through the woods and seeing a face—
That was the pleasant part. The unpleasant part was waking up with a head like this, with the light coming through shutters the old man had been cruel enough to fling wide to the sun.
Uulamets was back at his book, at the table beneath the window. Moreover—Pyetr lifted his head and winced—Sasha was sitting on the end of the bench, in converse with the old lunatic, their heads together as if they were sharing some direly important secret. Most disturbing of all, they stopped whatever they were saying and looked at him, both of them with one solemn expression, as if he had discovered them in conspiracy.
It was all the same thing as the ghost, too much vodka and, he recalled, god knew what in the stew last night. That had been the start of the trouble, after which nothing had made sense, and they had gone out in the woods—
Or he had dreamed that they had.
He let his head back and stared at the shadowed, dusty rafters where there was no light to afflict his eyes, and tried to keep his stomach from heaving.
He heard a scrape of wood, heard footsteps. Sasha came and leaned over him, a worried young face against the dark of the rafters.
“Are you all right?” Sasha asked.
“I will be,” he murmured. Talking hurt.
“Do you want some tea?”
His stomach turned. “No,” he said, and shut his eyes. “I’ll just lie here.”
Sasha patted his shoulder. Pyetr’s skin ached. He heard Sasha go and say to master Uulamets, “He’s all right.”
He recollected, he thought, Sasha and Uulamets talking about him last night. He saw them this morning, cozy and full of whispers, and his stomach felt upset for a reason that had nothing to do with last night’s vodka.
He suffered the morning long, until Sasha brought him honeyed tea and some potion Uulamets insisted on. He drank the tea, he refused the nasty concoction Uulamets had made for him: Sasha pleaded with him, assured him there was no harm in it, but he pitched the contents of the cup into the coals.
“Pyetr!” Sasha said.
“Let him suffer,” Uulamets said with what Pyetr was sure was satisfaction.
“I’ll keep my headache,” Pyetr muttered to Sasha. “At least I know it’s mine.—Stay away from him!”
“It’s all right,” Sasha said.
“Fool!” Pyetr whispered. His head all but split from the effort. He sank against the stones of the fireplace with his knees tucked up. Sasha went back to his wizard and Pyetr sat there with his head spinning in a disquieting muddle of last night’s dreams and this morning’s discomforts.
His sword was leaning against the wall, behind Uulamets. He marked its whereabouts, and that of the blankets, and the clothes on the pegs and the rope over the rafters, and he laid a plan of escape.
Overpower the boy and carry him down to the boat, he thought. The boy would come back to his senses. There was nothing the old man could do against a young man with a sword and an outright intention to escape: Uulamets’ apparent skill with the staff and his influence with Sasha were the only things to fear—as long as he avoided the stew.
Pyetr set himself carefully upright finally and went outside, down to the river, for necessities and to reconnoiter.
Sasha tracked him, appeared at the top of the bank and came on down the steep path to the dock where the old boat rode creaking against her buffers.
Pyetr frowned and folded his arms as he came.
“Please,” Sasha said, “come on back to the house.”
“Of course,” Pyetr said. He might have been talking to a dangerous lunatic. He was thoroughly patient. And so doing he measured Sasha’s size against his own and decided that indeed, Sasha was tall and strong for his age and possibly more than he could manage in his present condition if Sasha decided to resist being carried.
So he simply turned and walked down the dock toward the boat, and Sasha of course followed him, saying, “Please, Pyetr. We don’t belong here.”
He paid no attention. He reached the end of the dock and took a jump across to the deck of the aged boat, disturbing the dust and accumulated leaves.
“Pyetr!”
Sasha followed him. He had reckoned so. He walked further, with no intention to alarm the boy or to involve himself in a stationary argument—just to lead him farther toward the shelter of the little deckhouse: no sense starting anything near the edge where the boy could fall in, and no need, either, for the extra work of dragging an unconscious body half the length of the boat, especially considering his headache.
“Pyetr, please!”
“There’s no danger,” he said, and kept ahead of the boy. “I’m just curious. Aren’t you?”
“You’re in danger. Please come back.”
He walked around the other side of the deckhouse, back to the stern, and heard Sasha coming. Sasha caught up with him; he had the sudden thought that it might be well to be certain first that the boat was truly sailable, so he shrugged and walked back to the tiller, which swayed and moved in the river current, restrained by a mouldering rope.
“Looks as if it could get us a little way toward Kiev,” he said to Sasha, racking at the bar to test whether the bolts were sound. “Doesn’t it to you?”
“We wouldn’t get that far,” Sasha said. He had almost come close enough. And stopped. “Pyetr, please, she’s dangerous.”
“Looks perfectly sound to me,” Pyetr said.
A sudden cold wind came up the river, or he had a sudden touch of malaise. He looked up and saw a shimmering in the air in front of him, a pale wispy thing. He blinked.
“Pyetr!” Sasha grabbed him and pulled him back from the rail. He gave backward in shock, seeing something like a veil and a face in empty air where nothing should be, and smelling a waft of water and rotting weed as something wet and cold touched his skin.
“Run!” Sasha cried, and he ran, looking backward, colliding with Sasha in a sudden stop at the side of the boat.
It was gone, then. He stood there with his knees weak, his head pounding, and the wind still icy cold on his wet hand and face. He was not accustomed to run from spots of cold air. He was not accustomed to have them touch him with what felt like fingers.
“Something dripped on my face,” he said, looking to the overhanging trees. But no branch overhung the stern. “A fish must have jumped.”
“She’s looking for you,” Sasha said, pulling at his arm. “For the god’s sake, she’s still here, Pyetr, wake up!”
He wished (hat he could. Maybe it was still the vodka. Drunk old men saw things in the streets. Maybe they thought watery wisps ran fingers over their faces, too.
“Pyetr! Get back to the house! Please!”
He stepped up on the rim of the boat and jumped for the dock, only scarcely keeping his feet. Sasha landed beside him, seized his arm and hurried him up the hill, but once and twice again he felt that chill.
It went away then with a last swipe of cold fingers, and Pyetr ran all-out this time, came panting and stumbling up the walk-up to the porch before he stopped, leaning against the wall of the house and holding his side.
It was not real. He was ashamed of running, and he looked around again to see only forest and the riverside, but so also was there water running down his neck.
Sasha pushed the door open, and cried, breathlessly, “Master Uulamets, she was here!”
Pyetr stayed where he was, leaning with his back against the wall, as Uulamets hurried out and into the yard, to stand there as if he expected to see the apparition somewhere about.
“Your daughter has cold hands!” Pyetr said, with as much sarcasm as he could muster, taking his part in Uulamets’ little play, or Uulamets’ madness, or whatever it was. Uulamets came back up the walk in every evidence of anger and disturbance, and said, on his way, “Fool. Stay to the house or there’s nothing we can do for you.”
Pyetr opened his mouth to protest, but Uulamets brushed past him and inside, and there was nothing to do now but follow or carry out his escape, and what with the tremor in his knees, the throbbing of his head, and the condition of his stomach, it did not seem the moment for it.
“Pyetr.” Sasha caught his arm as he started inside. “You saw it this time, in the daylight. You saw it, didn’t you?”
He nodded, since that course offered peace. It was not really a capitulation. He did not intend any such thing. He simply went inside and sat down by the hearth and thought about it while Sasha jabbered with Uulamets about how it had come up the river and he could not see it—”But Pyetr did. It touched him. In broad daylight.”
“Daylight or dark doesn’t truly matter,” Uulamets said. “It’s only that light distracts us with other details. You can’t entirely see her with your eyes.”
“You’re crazy,” Pyetr snapped, from his place by the fire. “How does anybody see without his eyes?”
“Easily,” Uulamets said. “We all do it—don’t we? You see her in your imagination.”
He hated Uulamets turning his arguments back on him and leaving him nowhere to stand.
“That’s precisely where she is,” he said testily. “That’s all she is.”
“You’re wrong. A danger of her kind is most unfortunately not limited to your feeble powers of imagination, Pyetr Kochevikov. Your mischief just now endangered your young friend, which may or may not be a matter of concern to you, and if it weren’t for his good sense, you would have no further concerns. Lives have gotten very scarce in these woods.”
Pyetr looked away across the room, wiped his neck against the persistent sensation of damp and cold, and told himself it had been a branch shedding dew—or some such.
The alternative, of course, was to let go of common, workaday reason once for all, smile at Uulamets and say, I’m sorry, whatever you say has to be true—the way Sasha had; and since Sasha had decided to take Uulamets’ side of things, Pyetr found himself their only anchor to things outside this woods. Once he began to assent to Uulamets’ personal madness escape became very remote for them.
He sat there all day listening to the boy tell Uulamets what precisely had happened on the river, listening to Sasha, damn it all, tell Uulamets about his investigating the dockside, if not the boat; and finally admitting that, too, in Uulamets’ persistent questioning. Pyetr stared at the rafters, ground his teeth, and asked the gods why he was saddled with a fool.
But the answer to that, he told himself, was simply that Sasha had found in Uulamets what he had always wanted, a wizard to tell him his fancies were true and his wishes could change things in ways he wanted.
“What about the horses?” he asked Sasha when Sasha came near the fire.
“What horses?”
“Or the tsar’s own carriage. Either one would do. Maybe our host could wish them up—you being only a novice.”
“Pyetr, listen to him. Please listen to him.”
He gave a flourish of his hand. “Of course. All day. Constantly. Inner eyes and all that. God, boy. I did think you had more sense.”
“Pyetr—”
“He wants to find a damned tree. Fine. Let’s go out in the woods and I’ll find him a nice one. And while we’re stumbling about in the dark, supposing we don’t fall in a bog, he’s going to sing his daughter up out of the grave. That should be a sight. I’ll pass on the stew tonight. I’ll make my own dinner.”
Sasha looked hurt. “I never was careless. Master Uulamets—”
“Master Uulamets, is it?”
“He’s telling us the truth. I swear to you. She’s why there aren’t any animals. It was my luck got us as far through these woods as it did. It got us to him.”
“Bravo. So we can be ghost bait.”
“If we can find her tree or if he can put a spell on her—we’re safe. We won’t be, even here, otherwise. She won’t give up on you.”
“Persistent young lady. Why don’t we just open the door and ask her in?”
“Don’t say that. Be careful what you invite her to do. This isn’t something to joke about.”
He had that cold feeling up his back again.
It was colder, after supper—stew for them and a couple of small turnips for himself, and no drink at all. He had a great deal of trouble falling asleep, with the creaking the house beams made. Unstable ground, he decided.
Until they creaked and the whole floor seemed to shift a little.
But senses could trick a body, especially close to sleep. Sasha was sleeping peacefully beside him on the hearthstones, wrapped in a quilt. Uulamets had finally given up writing in his book and taken to his bed, snoring softly. Pyetr rested his head on his arms in the half-light the dying fire provided and listened to the house creaking and listened to the wind in the dry trees.
Suddenly a single footstep sounded on-the walk, and another on the porch.
He took a breath to call out to Uulamets, who doubtless knew his visitors and their habits. But for some reason without reason he held that breath for a moment and made no movement or sound.
Someone knocked on the door.
Sasha stirred. Uulamets sat up in bed.
No one moved for a few heartbeats. Then Uulamets got up and headed for the door.
“Don’t open it!” Pyetr cried, saw he was going to do it, and scrambled under the table and past the bench, groping in the near-dark for his sword as the door opened, as a wind swept in and blew at the embers.
He grabbed at his sword and unsheathed it, heart pounding—flung an arm over the bench and hurled himself for his feet.
She was there, white and filmy and wavering in the wind. Dripping with river weed.
Then the wind swept inside, wreaking havoc of falling herb bunches and clanging pots and sparks flying from the fire.
“Shut the door!” Pyetr cried. “For god’s sake shut the door!”
For once someone listened to him. Uulamets heaved it shut, Sasha threw his weight at it, and the bar dropped down. The broom thumped down onto the floor. A last cup fell off the shelf and shattered.
“God,” Pyetr breathed.
Uulamets looked at him. Sasha looked like a ghost himself, still bracing himself against the door, although the wind had died away.
Pyetr did not even try to sheathe the sword. He laid it on the table, picked up the vodka jug and a cup and managed to get the liquid in it instead of on the table, that was all his hands could manage.
While the house creaked and whatever-it-was in the cellar growled in displeasure.
He truly wished himself in Kiev—or any place else tonight, for that matter.
“Only the wind?” Uulamets gibed at him.
He took the drink and looked up at the old man with a sinking feeling that hereafter Uulamets knew the territory and he did not.
Hereafter Sasha knew the territory better than he did. And Pyetr was still far from trusting that Uulamets had any good motives toward Sasha or toward him. The steel sword on the table seemed as formidable as it always had been—except when one dealt with ghosts.
Sasha began picking up the herb bunches and the surviving cups and withered objects that had fallen off the rafters, the god alone knew what some of them were.
“Move, move,” Uulamets said, waving Pyetr aside, and Pyetr took his cup, his sword and its sheath and went over to sit on his blankets while Sasha swept up.
He was useless, Pyetr thought glumly, he was absolutely useless to the old man or to Sasha, if the law of the place favored magic and not honest wit. He had no urge whatsoever to get up and help. It was Sasha’s old man. So let him work for him. The old man had wanted Sasha for ghost bait, the old man discovered instead that Sasha had some kind of ability—so the black god take Pyetr Kochevikov, if he was stupid enough to be here, on the peripheries of what Sasha had wished up.
Or what the old man had wished, who knew?
Sasha had no more use for him anyway. Sasha had changed his mind and his loyalties, and who knew? Maybe the old man had ‘witched him into it.
But if magic did it, Pyetr thought, and Uulamets was the master in that, then what could Sasha do or what could he himself have done, except to have gotten them away before they ever fell this deep into Uulamets’ plans?
And what could he look for in Kiev, but more Dmitri Vene-dikovs and more betrayals and more of the same as Vojvoda? Sasha was the only friend he had ever had who would endure any inconvenience for him, the only one who would, god knew, have carried him through the woods or defended him from a ghost.
So why go to Kiev, anyway, if the only friend he had was here, at Uulamets’ beck and call?
He set the cup down and ran the sword back into its sheath, he cast a jaundiced glance at Uulamets sitting over at the table with his gnarled hands clenched in front of his forehead, his lips moving in some god-knew-what-kind-of-incantation, which might or might not work—he still had his doubts on that score, even if there were ghosts. There was no surety spells worked; there was no surety even if some spells worked, that Uulamets’ spells did, against—
—whatever she was.
Pyetr said, without moving from where he sat, “Well, what are we going to do about her?”
Uulamets went on talking to himself. Sasha stopped sweeping and leaned on his broom, looking at him with some indefinable expression: worry, maybe.
“So we find her tree,” Pyetr said, feeling increasingly foolish with every word that left his mouth. “Then what? Ask her to leave me alone?”
His wits kept trying to rearrange things sensibly. There had not been a wind, Sasha was not sweeping up broken pottery—but this time he deliberately set himself to remember that face that kept fading on him, and the wind, and the fear: he could not believe in it now, but he held on to it, reminding himself that he had made up his mind and that, reason aside, he was going to believe it, if that was what it took to exist here and deal with this woods. And Sasha still had the broom in his hands and a pile of broken pottery at his feet.
“Master Uulamets says he can bring her back to life.”
“Isn’t that kind of sorcery supposed to be dangerous?”
Sasha had no answer for that.
“How is he going to do it?” Pyetr asked. “What’s he need? I’ll tell you, I’ve heard recipes for witches—”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “He says he has to find out where she’s staying. He can’t see her or hear her. I can, almost, see her, that is. But you can see her plain as plain. Can’t you?”
Sasha wanted an admission. He stood there waiting for it. Pyetr nodded with ill grace and frowned.
“A rusalka’s very powerful,” Sasha said in a half-whisper, while the old man droned on at the other side of the room. Sasha came and hunkered down at the fireside, and leaned his broom against the stones. “Master Uulamets said she was just sixteen; and he doesn’t know whether it was an accident or not—if she just drowned, that’s one thing, master Uulamets said. That kind of rusalka is bad enough; but if she drowned herself—that’s almost the worst.”
One had to ask. “What’s worst?”
“The ones that were murdered.”
Pyetr gnawed his lip and considered the stones between his feet. “So what does she do? Look for men, I’ve heard that. So what does she do with them?”
Silly question, he thought then, seeing Sasha blush. But Sasha said, “I’m not exactly sure. I’m not sure anybody’s ever been able to say. They’re—”
“—all dead,” he said at the same time as Sasha. “Wonderful.”
“That’s why we have to keep close to you. We don’t know.”
He hated that “we.” He truly did. He scowled and looked at the sword in his lap.
“Rusalkas sleep a lot,” Sasha said, “until they want something. If nothing ever comes along at all, they just fade. But if they wake up, especially the violent ones—they’re terribly powerful. And she’s not the only haunt hereabouts. That’s what master Uulamets says. There’s a Water-thing.”
He stared at Sasha quite unhappily. “Oh, of course. A Water-thing, a Woods-thing, Things everywhere, and every ghostly one of them with a grudge to pay.” He shook his head. “Entirely unreasonable of them, I’d say.”
“Don’t—”
“—joke. They’ve got no sense of humor either.”
“No, they haven’t.”
“I don’t know why you’re so certain. Maybe they’ve been waiting all these years for a good joke.”
“Don’t—”
“—talk like that.” Pyetr made a little flourish of his wrist. “Absolutely. The whole world abhors levity. I’ll apologize to the first leshy I see.”
“Pyetr—”
“Earnestly.” He held up his cup. “Be a good lad. It’s been a hard night.”
“You shouldn’t have any more.”
“No, I shouldn’t.” He still held up the cup. Sasha took it and brought it back half-full, and Pyetr sat and drank and listened to the snap of the embers and old Uulamets chanting and muttering and mixing things in his pots.
Sasha watched a while, standing by with his arms folded. Maybe since Sasha was in some measure magical, Pyetr thought glumly, he had some special sense for what Uulamets was doing. Certainly Sasha looked neither confident nor happy in what he saw.
Pyetr tucked the blanket around himself and his sword, for all the comfort either was in the situation, and shut his eyes and tried to rest without seeing a wisp of white in his memory—
He could see her face when he shut his eyes now. It was a girl’s face, young and very pale, and desperately unhappy. She had long, fair hair, and a little chin and very large eyes, which looked at him so wistfully and so angrily-
It’s not my fault, he thought. I don’t know what I ever did.—Though I have my faults, his conscience added with unwanted honesty. He thought of a dozen escapades in Vojvoda. But his conscious self amended hastily, recollecting her nature: But nothing I ever did to you. It’s hardly fair of you, you know.
She was indeed hardly more than Sasha’s age. He would never introduce Sasha to some of the company he had kept or show Sasha some of the things he had seen—he could not say why, except it would embarrass both of them; and she was so young, she was so like Sasha, he found himself imagining her expression as offended innocence—and her pursuit of him less attraction than vengeful disgust for a scoundrel.
It’s still not my fault, he thought. I really don’t think I’ve done badly, considering my father’s faults. He really didn’t leave me a good example.
She hovered quite close to him—amorously close, he thought, much too close, for a young girl he had no wish to be in bed with.
He tried to wake up, he earnestly tried, in that sense of a dream about to go very wrong indeed…
He felt a grip on his arm and came to himself upright against the fireplace, sputtering and wiping furiously at his face and neck.
But there was no water. He was sitting amid his blankets in a room dark except for the embers, it was Sasha holding his arm, and the cold water running down his neck, real as it felt, was nothing he could touch.
“Are you all right?” Sasha whispered.
He caught his breath, leaned back against the stones of the fireplace and slid a glance toward the old man’s bed. He could still feel the cold water around him.
“Damn the luck,” he whispered to Sasha, and shuddered, pulling the musty, dry blanket up around his neck. “All the ladies I’ve courted and the only faithful one’s a dead girl.”
Sasha’s fingers closed on his arm. “Do you want me to wake master Uulamets?”
“It’s only a dream.” It came out with a shiver. “It’s nothing.”
Sasha did not move. Pyetr slid down further into his blankets and tucked his arms about him. For a long while he was aware of Sasha sitting there.
He was glad. If he had to believe in the rusalka he reckoned he was morally entitled to believe in Sasha Misurov—in Sasha, he thought, much before Uulamets.
Small good his sword might do, he thought, too, but he kept it close, against the few situations he did understand.