Rusalka

CHAPTER 11

SASHA CAME AWAKE with an uneasy feeling, heard the house timbers creak, and heard a small sound from Pyetr—dreaming, he saw by ember light, and in distress.

He wanted to know what had waked him, and his heart all but stopped as he saw a black thing skitter along under the table across the room. It might be a trick of the dim light: that was all that kept him from waking Pyetr on the instant. Then it was the glitter of small dark eyes from under that table, eyes which locked with his so fixedly he was afraid to breathe.

Pyetr stirred, not awake, he thought. And something rattled a shutter. The wind, perhaps.

But the black thing skittered aside and back into the shadows, so that Sasha was left wondering if he had seen it at all. He was still afraid to move.

Then he heard the rattle of the second shutter, that at the end of the house.

Pyetr drew a deep breath and Sasha laid a hand on his shoulder and shook at him, but Pyetr did not wake, and he was yea and nay about wishing it in any concentrated way—totally confused, he thought in some distress, afraid that Pyetr might do something foolish, afraid that noise might bring attack from the Thing under the table or the Thing outside the window, though by what law of the unnatural he had no knowledge. He simply could not reach a decision what to do, even when he heard a board creak on the porch. He sat there like a fool, with Pyetr on one side and Uulamets in his bed both stirring restlessly.

Suddenly Uulamets woke and sat up in bed, which in some measure he was very glad to see, and in another way, made his heart turn over for fear the things were real. Uulamets put his feet over the side and a warning stuck in Sasha’s throat—but the Thing under the bed did Uulamets no harm: instead, it came out and clambered with human hands up onto the bed. Uulamets got to his feet and walked barefoot across the floor, to stand and look about him at a house in utter silence.

“Something’s out there,” Sasha whispered, and Uulamets looked sharply toward him. “On the porch.”

Uulamets walked over to the table and seemed to listen a moment. “This isn’t good,” Uulamets said. “This isn’t at all good.” He gathered up a bag and began to stuff it with something dry and brown. Moss, Sasha thought: he recalled a ball of it between the uprights by the table. “Twice in one night. She’s getting much too insistent. Or something is.”

The Thing skittered across the floor suddenly. “That—” Sasha said, and took in his breath as it reached master Uulamets’ feet and climbed up the table-leg.

It reached the table-top and perched there, dark little eyes glittering in the ember light as it watched. It had a flat face, a cat’s black nose, its jaw and mouth were very like a man’s, and it looked overall, tucked down, like a black ball of dust and tangled hair, the sort of thing a broom might dislodge from under furniture.

Uulamets gave it hardly a look. He was tucking little pots into the bag, and adding more stuffing, while shutters rattled and the Thing turned about on scarcely seen limbs to hiss at it.

Uulamets looked at that window, too. The ember light showed anguish on his face. Or fear. Sasha could not be certain. He got to his feet while Pyetr slept like the dead.

And Uulamets went on with his packing.

“What are we going to do?” Sasha asked.

“We,” said Uulamets, “are going to find her.”

“Find her…—She’s outside.”

Uulamets threw him a scowling glance. “She won’t face me.”

Sasha had the most uncomfortable feeling then, the same that he had had any number of times, that there were secrets more than the ones Uulamets wrote in his book, and troubles in this place more than a drowning. Uulamets’ using them for—as Pyetr called it—ghost bait, he suspected was not entirely the desperation of a grieving father—unfair, perhaps: he had no idea personally how desperate a man could become, but in his own way of thinking, a man who would callously trick his guests into favors of the kind he asked… was a man very much like his uncle.

“Wake him,” Uulamets bade him.

“Go out there in the dark?” Sasha objected.

“I’ve told you. Dark or light makes no difference. The danger is the same.”

“Then maybe we should wait till daylight,” Sasha said, “if nothing else, so we won’t fall in the river.”

“But there is danger in meeting her on our own ground,” Uulamets said harshly. “Never let her in. Never let her into this house. Do what I tell you. Wake him. We have no choice. Are you numb to the danger we’re in? Or are you a fool?”

“What about Pyetr’s danger?”

Uulamets picked up a metal pan and banged it on the table. The black thing hissed and jumped for the rafters, leaping from one to the other, and Pyetr started awake, his sword in his hands, before he fell back hard against the stone fireside and rested there, the sword half-drawn.

“Pardon,” Uulamets said. “Time you should wake, Pyetr Ilitch. We’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” Pyetr asked, between breaths.

“She’s here,” Uulamets said. Sasha thought that he should do something, say something—but he had no idea whether he was under Uulamets’ spell himself or whether the prickling feeling that said Uulamets was right was from his own senses.”We have to move quickly,” Uulamets said, and crossed the room and took his breeches off the bedpost, while in the rafters something thumped, and a mouldering basket fell and bounced.

Pyetr looked up at that, with the sword no further sheathed than it had been. Afraid, Sasha thought, but whether Pyetr sensed anything such as he did or whether it was only the startlement of the movement in the rafters he could not guess.

Uulamets pulled his trousers on under his robe and pulled on his boots. Sasha stood still, dressed in everything he owned except his coat, and Pyetr moved only to rake his hair out of his eyes.

“Up,” Uulamets said fiercely. “Get up.”

“And go where?” Pyetr said. The sword clicked home in the sheath. He gathered himself to his feet. His hair was standing up at angles. He looked to Sasha, and ember light and shadow made his face desperate and strange, asking questions Sasha had no idea how to answer.

“He says,” Sasha said, “she shouldn’t get in here. That we have to go to where she is, or we’re in worse trouble. That the worst thing is for her to get into the house.”

Pyetr ran his hand through his hair a second time. It achieved no better result. He seemed harried and bewildered, as a man might, roused out of a sound sleep, or out of bad dreams. “Find her tree,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. “God. Of course. Fine. In the middle of the night, looking for a ghost and a tree.”

He looked toward the door suddenly, with that same harried look, with the sword clutched in his hand.

“Pyetr?” Sasha asked, alarmed, and came and stood by him.

“She’s here. Outside.—She’s saying—” Pyetr shook his head suddenly and looked at Uulamets.

“What does she say?” Uulamets asked.

“Not to trust you,” Pyetr retorted sharply, and Sasha tensed, expecting Uulamets’ anger. But Uulamets said only,

“Trust her instead? I wouldn’t.” Uulamets took his cloak from the peg and slung it about his shoulders. “That would be fatal, for her, ultimately, as well as for us.” He began to thread the latchstring through the hole in the door, muttering something singsong as he did so. Then: “Bring my bag, lad. And be extremely careful with it.”

Sasha had a last wild thought of refusing, of siding with Pyetr against the old man, but courage or foolishness failed him, even yet he had no notion which. He gathered up the bag Uulamets had packed, while Uulamets took his staff from against the wall and lifted the latch.

There was no wind. There was nothing threatening outside. “Come along,” Uulamets said, and they took their coats from the pegs and followed him.

No ghost, no wind, no breath of trouble—until the Thing from the yard scuttled out the door between Pyetr’s feet and he stifled an outcry.

“What was that?” Pyetr exclaimed, hand on his sword hilt as the Thing disappeared into the hedge.

“Nothing,” Uulamets said, motioned Pyetr to pull the door to, and led the way down the walk-up. He stopped at the bottom and asked, “Do you see anything? Do you feel anything?”

Pyetr slung his sword belt over his coat and pointed ahead into the woods. “I’d say that way,” he said. His teeth were chattering, but he started off foremost through the yard, kicked the gate open, muttering something about the cold and the dark and fools. He led them toward the riverside.

Sasha turned his head to bring the side of his eye to bear, and saw nothing of the ghost in any direction. He overtook Pyetr with a sudden downhill rush as they reached the river and the dockside, caught Pyetr’s arm and whispered, “Did she really say that? About Uulamets? Pyetr? Do you see her?”

“The old man wants a walk,” Pyetr said in a half-voice, “that’s what he’ll get.” He seemed still to be shivering, although of nights they had had, this was one of the warmest. “This is a stupid thing to do, boy.”

“Did she say that? About not trusting him?”

Uulamets was almost down the hill, chiding them for breakneck speed. There was no time for any long answer.

“What do you think?” Pyetr said. “Do you trust him?” His teeth were chattering still. “Damn, the wind’s cold.”

“There’s no wind here,” Sasha said. He felt Pyetr’s hand and it was cold and clammy. He clenched it tighter as Uulamets came up by them. He had the strongest feeling that he ought to have doubted Uulamets more, and that he ought not to have encouraged Pyetr to have come out here—that Pyetr had been on the side of common sense all along and that all his caution had done was to bring Pyetr out here tonight.

But Pyetr pulled away and started up the river, the same direction they had gone to find the ghost that first night.

“Does he know where she is?” Uulamets asked, catching Sasha’s arm.

“He says so,” Sasha said on a breath, not quite a lie, and broke away after Pyetr, quickly, because Pyetr was going faster than was safe in the thicket, along the river edge, through reeds and through a low place that they had to wade. Sasha struggled to overtake him, and Uulamets came close behind him, warning him mind his step, wait, listen to someone who knew the ground.

Pyetr climbed to dry ground and suddenly vanished into the trees and the dark over the ridge.

“Pyetr!” Sasha cried, shoved the sack at master Uulamets and ran after Pyetr in acute fear that with every moment wasted, they risked losing him. He heard master Uulamets far behind him shouting at him to wait, come back, and he paid no attention. He could see the pale gray of Pyetr’s coat at the bottom of the wooded hill, and he simply locked his arms in front of his face and charged downhill through the thicket heedless of the thorn branches. “Pyetr, wait, I’m coming!”

Pyetr seemed not to hear him. Pyetr appeared to move with woodcraft he had never had, evading thickets, never choosing a false way. By that alone Sasha guessed Pyetr had a guide who did know the ground all too well, and he tried only to stay close enough to see which way Pyetr chose. Wherever that failed, he simply took the short way, breaking through brush, scoring his hands and face, snagging his coat and tearing through by sheer force.

He wished Pyetr to slow down and use good sense. He wished the rusalka to leave Pyetr in peace. He wished himself to keep Pyetr in sight and he wished that Uulamets would find his track and so find Pyetr’s. Common sense said that was too many wishes at once, and that half of them might wish away the others, or do something terrible, but he was too frightened to think things through with any clarity. In a doubtful case, master Uulamets had counseled him, wish only good, and he did that with all the force he could muster, while he was tearing his way through the thickets. He saw Pyetr at the top of a ridge, and dived breakneck down a ravine, clawing his way up the other side in the dark, climbing with the help of roots and branches and coming muddy-handed to the crest in time to gain a little.

“Pyetr!” he cried. “I’m with you! For the god’s sake, wait for me!”

Pyetr was already going down the other side, toward the river again—in the gray dim light that Sasha realized was the breaking of the day. Sasha held his aching side and kept going, down the hill of mouldering leaves and down again, by a rill-cut path which ran down to the river.

Something was amiss here. Sasha felt it before he was aware what was so strange in that place to which Pyetr was going: the trees gave way to open ground, a knoll grown over with grass and living moss—or it seemed that way, in what little light they had, in the way the grass gave underfoot: it was some sort of demarcation Pyetr approached, following what sort of illusion Sasha did not know. He only reasoned that if this was the boundary between life and death in this woods things were surely backwards, and that whatever threat there was, was strong here. He ran, vaulted over an upthrust rock and with Pyetr in reach made no attempt at reason: he flung himself at Pyetr’s back and knocked him sprawling, caught Pyetr’s arm across his forehead as Pyetr rolled and was, the next he knew, flat on his back with Pyetr’s hands on his shoulders, both of them gasping for air.

“She’ll kill you!” Sasha gasped.

Pyetr leaned on him, catching his breath, looking about him as if he had no least idea where he had gotten to; and said then, between gasps, “Where’s the old man?”

“I don’t know! You ran off. I followed you.”

Pyetr looked the more bewildered. “You were the one who ran off,” he said, as if there was no sense in anything. He rolled aside and sat down, leaning on one hand, looking about, while Sasha sat up holding his side, feeling the discomfort of damp ground soaking cold through his breeches. He dared not move. The whole forest seemed too still, no whisper of leaves: those all were dead; no dawn sounds: those were dead, too. There was only the river rushing by the bank.

Then the slow, heavy movement of something dragged by stages over the leafy ground.

“Father Sky, what’s that?” Sasha breathed, edging closer to Pyetr, scanning all the wooded ridges that encircled this smooth-sided knoll.

Pyetr got up to one knee and began to draw his sword as quietly as possible, but at the first whisper of steel the sound stopped, and Pyetr stopped, in a hush so still not even the wind seemed to breathe.

Sasha clenched his hands and shut his eyes a moment, wishing their safety so hard it made him dizzy; and opened his eyes to a woods that looked no different. Pyetr was getting to his feet, sword still a quarter drawn. He pulled it rasping from its sheath and walked a few investigatory steps up to the summit of the knoll

—and vanished with a yell, straight into the earth.

“Pyetr!” Sasha scrambled forward and flung himself flat as he would on pond ice, crawled to the edge and looked over into the deep, shadowed pit with what might be Pyetr’s sprawled body half-buried at the bottom. He could in no wise be certain in the dim light. “Pyetr!” he called.

The gray shape moved, developed an arm and a leg as Pyetr shook himself free of the dirt and the rock, and a flickering length of metal appeared, the sword in Pyetr’s other hand, as Pyetr attempted to gain his feet.

“Can you climb up?” Sasha asked.

Pyetr sheathed his sword and tried, climbing up the rocks and the dirt of the slide, only to have more of the pit cave in.

“Look out!” Sasha cried as the ground underneath him dissolved. He yelled and scrambled backward as his hands went out from under him and he slid into a choking flood of dirt and rock.

The next he knew it had stopped, he was head downward, spitting dirt and fighting to get clear, and Pyetr was hauling him to his knees in the spongy earth.

“Sorry,” Pyetr said. “Are you all right?”

He blinked dirt from his eyes, stood up and looked despairingly at the circle of sky above the pit, with the irrepressible thought that if he had used half his wit he would not have stood on the edge. He might have found a dead limb or something to put over the rim for a ladder. He might have let down his belt for a rope. He thought of a dozen ways to have done better with the situation, now it was too late.

“Uulamets is following us,” he said, the best hope he could think of under the circumstances, and he earnestly wished for Uulamets to find them.

“Small hope in him,” Pyetr said glumly, dusted himself off and looked around the pit they were in. Something seemed then to take his interest. Sasha looked, where a darkness marked one face of the pit.

And seeing that darkness he had a very bad feeling, the more so as Pyetr walked over to it, into the shadow of the rim.

“Smells odd,” Pyetr said.

“It might cave in,” Sasha said. “Master Uulamets will find us. Just be patient.—Please don’t go in there! What if it caved in again?”

“It looks solid,” Pyetr said, and ducked down. His voice echoed out of closed spaces, like a well. “It might go all the way to the river. Probably floods here in the rains.”

“Don’t go in!” Sasha cried, with an oppressive feeling like smothering or like drowning. “The whole hill might cave in. Pyetr! Don’t!”

“I’m not going in. Just trying to see. Maybe when the sun gets higher—”

There was that sound of movement again, the sound of a weight moving slowly over the earth. A few clods rolled to the bottom of the pit beside them, but the sound came from somewhere behind the earthen wall of the slide.

“Pyetr,” Sasha whispered. “Pyetr, please, get back here. Don’t touch anything.”

More clods fell. Pyetr backed away from that wall and carefully drew his sword.

“I really don’t like this place,” Sasha said.

Neither of them moved for a moment. The dragging sound started up again and dislodged an earthfall directly over the cave.

“Is it her?” Sasha whispered, taking a grip on Pyetr’s sleeve, for fear of him starting forward, into a trap the rusalka had deliberately lured them to—and he fervently wished for the old man to hurry and find them.

Something hissed within the dark.

Something hissed atop the rim, too, and something small and black rolled down the slope, scattering clods as it came. It darted between them and into the dark hole, snarling and spitting, and darted out again, like a small dog away from a larger.

“God!” Pyetr cried, as an undulating black mass came out chasing it.

“Look out!” Sasha yelled and jumped for the sloping dirt as the black mass came after his legs. Pyetr was climbing too, beating it about the head with his sword as he climbed. It tried to follow them, while the small black ball that looked for all the world like the Yard-thing hissed and circled and nipped at its coils below.

“Fools!” Uulamets suddenly called from above them. “Get it, get it, go, you have it!”

“Have if?” Pyetr cried, beating at its head. “Get us out of here!”

But it was wilting under the blows, trying to hide its nose with small black forelimbs, writhing aside and dislodging more and more dirt on the slide. Sasha yelled in alarm as a slippage carried him down within reach of the thing. Immediately Pyetr was there, trampling him in the slide, but driving the monstrous thing aside and up and up the bank, where it had no apparent wish to go.

It collapsed on the slope as it reached the light, a black serpent, part scaled, part furred, with helpless naked limbs and a flat head which it attempted to cover. It seemed to shrink, then, sliding down into shadow, into wrinkled skin and fur, into a shape inexplicably like a little old man, while the Yard-thing kept hissing and growling in the shadow of the hole from which the creature had come, keeping it from refuge.

“Ask its name!” Uulamets shouted from above. Sasha looked up and saw Uulamets standing on the rim, then looked toward the cowering creature Pyetr held at sword’s point and said, “He wants to know its name.”

Pyetr jabbed it. Hwiuur, it said. Hwiuur, like some strange kind of bird. It edged closer to the hole, but the Thing was there and would not let it in.

“Ask it where my daughter is,” Uulamets called down. “Tell it answer or you’ll keep it here till the sun rises.”

“It’s a damned snake!” Pyetr cried. “How is it to know where your daughter is?”

But it was not a snake. It seemed more to be a hairy old man, who crouched in the shadow of the earth and shivered, saying, “The sun, the sun!”

“You’ll see the sun,” Uulamets shouted, “if you don’t answer. I want my daughter back.”

The creature covered its face, snuffling softly. “I’d do it,” Pyetr advised it. “He’s a terrible old man.”

“Is that all he wants?” the creature whispered between long-nailed fingers. “One thin-boned girl? I can. I can do that. Take the iron away.” It peered between the fingers, one pale snake’s eye, so it seemed to be. Or at least it was not human. “I know where she sleeps. I can bring her. Bone and all, I can bring her. Tell the wizard let me go.”

“Tell me where she is!” Uulamets shouted.

But of a sudden it was a snake again, whipping about at ankle height, bound straight for the cave, as the Yard-thing attempted to head it off.

Dirt poured down. The Yard-thing came backing out spitting and snarling, as the whole bank came down and the hole closed.

“Fools!” Uulamets cried. “You let it get away!”

“Fool, yourself!” Pyetr shouted, turning about, but Sasha quickly caught his arm and perhaps Pyetr thought again, that here were the two of them in this crumbling pit, three, if one counted the ill-tempered Yard-thing, four, if one counted the snake that had just disappeared into the bank, and one had rather not.

“It promised,” Sasha said to Uulamets. “It did promise. Master Uulamets, get us out of here.”

For a long few moments Uulamets stood there staring down at them, in what had become the first pale light of day. Then he flung down his staff.

“Climb that,” he said.

It took Pyetr bracing the staff up the unstable slope with his body length, and Sasha climbing up over him and up the length of the staff, while he showered a great deal of dirt down on Pyetr, who spat and swore and held on.

Sasha reached the top, hauled himself over the rim on his elbows and on his knees to find master Uulamets sitting on the grass arranging his pots in a half circle in front of him.

Sasha turned about and lay flat on his stomach on the rim of the pit, reaching down after the staff Pyetr reached up to him. He grasped it and tried to hold on while Pyetr climbed, but he failed to hold it and flung the staff aside on the grass.

“I’d use a limb,” Uulamets said disinterestedly.

“Master Uulamets says get a branch or something,” Sasha called down. Pyetr looked up at him distressedly. The Yard-thing was still in the pit with him. Pyetr was resolutely not looking at it. “Then do it,” Pyetr said.

Sasha got up and ran down the slope and up again to the edge of the dead woods, where there were rotten limbs in plenty. He picked a likely big one that was already lying on the ground and dragged it back as quickly as he could, past master Uulamets, who was sitting there with several of his little pots in hand, shaking out powders and muttering to himself and singing.

Sasha heaved the dead limb over the edge and Pyetr pulled it to the bottom, breaking off twigs and lesser branches which were in his way. Sasha lay down to hold the topmost branches steady while Pyetr flung himself at the dead limb and climbed, stepping from branch stub to branch. Finally he reached Sasha’s arms and hauled himself up and over, while Sasha clenched his teeth and held himself as steady as he could.

“Babi!” the old man called.

The Yard-thing came scrambling up the branches, face on. Sasha yelled and flung himself aside and sat down beside Pyetr as it scuttled over to Uulamets.

But Uulamets simply muttered to himself and scattered powders on the ground, ignoring it crouching there.

“What’s he doing?” Pyetr asked. “What does he think he’s doing?—What is that thing?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said. He thought that he ought to feel something if it was true magic master Uulamets was doing. Or if what he was doing was working at all. He felt nothing but a shiver in his bones and a queasiness at the pit of his stomach.

“We ought to get out of here,” Pyetr said, Sasha thought quite calmly and reasonably under the circumstances. “We don’t know where that thing went. We don’t know what it’s up to.”

“We’ll go,” Sasha said, wishing that they would, wishing that he understood what Uulamets was up to. “Soon now.”

But Uulamets kept scattering pinches of powder and singing, and finally piled up a few handfuls of grass and asked for wood.

“For what?” Pyetr asked. “A fire? Here?”

“I’ll get it,” Sasha said under his breath, seeing nothing else to do. He got up and ran back to the woods and gathered up twigs and larger pieces, ran panting back to Uulamets and dumped it down, falling to his knees. “Master Uulamets—”

The Thing growled at him. Master Uulamets ignored him and went on with his chanting, which reminded Sasha very unpleasantly of the night Pyetr had almost died. It was the same kind of singsong, under the breath, it was the same oif-key tuneless wandering. He saw Uulamets pick up the twigs and break them and put dry grass into the midst. He saw Uulamets take a pungent bit of wool from one little pot and tuck it into the grass. Then he took a cinder from a small fire pot, and Sasha jumped in spite of himself when the pile burst into flame.

“Fool,” Uulamets said under his breath, interrupting his singing. And handed him another pot, an empty one. “Water.—And be careful. The vodyanoi’s not to trifle with in his element.”

“Was that what it was?” The question jumped out before Sasha remembered the master was incanting. He ducked his head, murmured a quick Excuse me, and hurried up the ridge and down again where he recollected a stream—terrified at the mere thought of going to the river if that was lurking there.

But something came behind him, and he looked back through the dead woods to see Pyetr coming down the slope.

“You don’t have to go!” Sasha said, and held up the pot. “I’m just going after water!”

“What are you, his servant?” Pyetr skidded down the slope. “Let him fetch his own.”

“Please. Don’t fight with him.” He reached the little stream, hardly ankle-deep, and dipped up the water, then hurried back again. “He says that thing was a vodyanoi.”

“It can be whatever it wants,” Pyetr said. “I’ve nothing more to do with it.” Pyetr had, overall, the look of a man who wanted very much to say what he had seen was only a log or a large snake or whatever, but who had gone very much beyond that safe limit. Pyetr stayed with him as he hiked back up the slope and down again to bring the pot to master Uulamets.

This master Uulamets took, and set in a forked stick he held above the fire.

“Listen, grandfather,” Pyetr said, taking a step nearer on the slope, and Sasha winced. “I’ve a notion to be on to Kiev. Whatever we owe you, we’ve just paid it. So we’re leaving. Hear?”

“Onto the river?” Uulamets asked. “Or through the woods? The vodyanoi or my daughter?”

Pyetr scowled, and beckoned Sasha.

“He’s telling the truth,” Sasha said. “Pyetr, we won’t make it.”

“We did well enough. And small help grandfather was, there. ‘Bring me wood. Fetch me water.’ So he can have his morning tea, I suppose—while we fend off his damn pet and whatever-it-was—”

“A vodyanoi,” Uulamets interjected pleasantly, without looking at either of them.

“Vodyanoi. River-thing. Whatever it is, it ran. It didn’t like having its nose hit. Your daughter runs cold fingers down a body’s neck, but the most she’s done is fling a few pots and rattle the shutters. A pretty weak ghost, I’d say.”

“Quite,” Uulamets said. “I’ve kept her that way, deliberately. Go on, go running off alone. One of you will feed her. The other will be extremely sorry. You won’t go, Pyetr Illitch. You’re not a fool. Don’t act like one.”

For a moment everything Pyetr said seemed reasonable; then everything Uulamets said overpowered it, with such a feeling of danger in the woods around them that Sasha felt impelled to look behind him—but he resisted that impulse, jammed his hands into his belt and thought very hard about Pyetr being right.

A chill ran down his neck. A second one. He was sure that something was behind him, even if Pyetr was facing him and showing no sign of anything amiss. For a moment he was not even sure he could rely on Pyetr, or if Uulamets might not have cast some spell on him to keep him blind to danger.

“Stop it!” he said. It was the hardest thing in the world to speak out against the old man. “Master Uulamets, you’re doing that, I know you are.”

“So I am,” Uulamets said, but the feeling did not go away. Uulamets turned his head and looked at Pyetr. “The boy trusts you. He’ll fight me for you, and for a lad of his sensitivities, that’s considerable courage. But he’s quite young. He can be persuaded against his better judgment—by a plausible scoundrel. Very much like my daughter. That’s why I’m patient with him. But you—having none of his sensitivities, and a rebellious and an entirely selfish attitude, in which the god forbid there should be anything in the entire world outside your personal understanding!—have no hesitation about taking this boy off to your feckless purposes, for what? For Kiev? A place no better than the last that failed to satisfy you, or the next, or the next. Your lacks, sir, are in yourself; and you most unfortunately carry that baggage to whatsoever place you find yourself. Most significantly, you pass for a man, sir, in this boy’s eyes, and I suggest you examine the responsibilities of that position.”

“And what do you pass for?” Pyetr retorted. “A wizard. A scholar. A man of learning. About what? Sitting alone out here in the woods mixing stinking potions and talking to birds and snakes!”

“If you’d had the wit to talk to that one, we’d be better off. Sit down. Stop talking nonsense. What if you’d not had my advice about the sun, what if you’d blithely assumed it was yourself that drove the vodyanoi back, and you’d been fool enough to chase him into his hole? Then you’d have regretted it. So would the boy.”

“It did run from the sword,” Sasha objected. It upset him that the old man said things so hurtful to Pyetr, even if he knew they verged on true. It upset him the more that Pyetr just stood there, angry, and not doing anything.

“Since the sunlight weakened it,” Uulamets said. “Yes. And it’s doubtless not feeling well. Hope that’s the case. I have a job for you.”

“What?”

“There’ll be a cave on the riverward side of this hill. There’ll be a nest there. I want you to put something in it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pyetr said.

“Or you can do it,” Uulamets said with a particularly unpleasant grin. “Soon, I’d say, since I’m relatively sure the vodyanoi’s out of his lair at the moment, and I wouldn’t give odds he’ll stay away long.” Uulamets held up the pot in the forked stick. “This. Just throw it in. You faced down the creature once. You don’t really have to go inside. And of course your sword’s enough to protect you.”

“No,” Sasha said.

“It’s after all for his own rescue,” Uulamets said. “I’ll do it myself if I have to. Or you can. But our brave fellow so wants to prove he’s right about the sword—”

“I’m not a fool!” Pyetr said.

“Of course not. Nor a coward, are you? Shall I do it? I’m certainly not as agile, or as strong…”

Pyetr walked up and held out his hand for the stick and the pot, scowling.

“No,” Sasha said. “Pyetr, don’t.”

“It’s easy,” Pyetr said nastily. “Your wizard says it is.”

“It should be,” Uulamets said, “if one isn’t a fool.”

“Old man.” Pyetr said on a deep breath, and rocking on his feet, “I’ve a great deal more patience than you and far better breeding. Which, considering I was born in a gutter, I’ve never been able to say before.”

With which Pyetr took the pot in hand, flung the stick down, and walked off while Sasha was still standing there numb.

“Let me go!” he said to Uulamets, and felt the release as sudden as the relaxing of a fist.

He ran, then.