Rusalka

CHAPTER 12

PYETR HEARD the boy coming behind him as he crossed the ridge, turned around in mid-step and thought with honorable motives the old man had denied he even owned that he ought to order Sasha straight back to Uulamets.

But he thought then, too, that the boy had made a difference against the thing before, that between them, they had been able to handle it, and that if he got himself killed altogether needlessly, Sasha was in a great deal more difficulty being left to Uulamets’ keeping.

So he stood there until Sasha caught up, then walked on down the slope to the river, passing the uncomfortably warm little pot from one hand to the other.

“Why don’t you let me—” Sasha began.

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

“He was trying to make you mad.”

“I am mad.”

“Please be careful.”

Decent advice, he thought. He said, “Know how to use a sword?”

“No,” Sasha said.

“Take it anyway.” He drew the whole sword belt off and passed it to Sasha as they reached the bottom of the hill, on the green, grassy margin of the river. “Point or edge, it doesn’t matter. Aim for the eyes. Nothing likes that. Take it! I don’t want it banging about my ribs. I’ve got one hand full.”

Sasha took it from him and hung it over his shoulder. “Be careful of—”

“I’m being careful, for the god’s sake.” The edge of the river was a clean one here, except where a young willow stood, and that—judging where the knoll was situated on the other side of the ridge and where the hole had been on that other side, in the pit—was the likeliest place for a den unless it was entirely underwater.

It was also the likeliest place for the snaky thing to be hiding, and when he came closer and saw there was indeed a dark space among the willow-roots, he had a very queasy feeling in his stomach.

“Well,” he said, “if I toss grandfather’s potion into the wrong hole, he’s not going to be happy. But I don’t know how I’m to tell.” He set his foot on a willow root and grasped a trailing bunch of willow strands. They were lithe and strong, leafless but budding.

“It’s alive,” Sasha said in the same instant he realized it. “The tree—”

He looked around into a pale face not Sasha’s, and yelled and scrambled back for another foothold as something whipped around his ankle.

He yelled as it jerked: he went down under the water and the yell became bubbles. Muscular flesh wrapped him about. He shoved at it and it threw more coils about him as he suddenly found himself in air again, in the dark, traveling backwards and upwards in the wet soft embrace of a Thing the shape of which seemed to be changing by the instant. He choked, spat, swore at it and kicked it in its soft body with all his might, and when it disliked that enough it spun rapidly about, carrying him upright with it. Breath cold and foul as a swamp’s bottom gusted down on his face.

“Damn you!” he cried, terrified, and struggled and kicked for all he was worth. He lost the pot he had in his hand, he hit the soft muddy floor and he skidded down the slick bank into the water.

Huge coils slipped past him like a river in spate and battered him left and right.

He came up choking and spitting, scrambling as far from touching anything as he could—heaved himself up onto the bank and put his hand on something sharp and hard, among a great number of small, sharp objects that rattled with a bony sound—at which he stopped very still, caught a mouthful of air and listened.

He moved from his awkwardly braced position. A bone rattled softly. He braced again, hearing no sound at all but his own breathing, and began to shiver, a slow quiver of one leg and an arm.

It was making no noise. It might be in the water waiting for him. It might have coiled up on the other bank of the cave. The place was full of dark, cold water, and bones; and the longer he delayed the more terrible it seemed to die there. He could see least lightening of the water in the direction he took for the river, and with a great gulp of air he let go, slipped into the water and ducked under the surface, clawing his way toward the light for all he was worth.

His fingers found something soft and oozing at that threshold—only mud, he told himself; and then something hard and odd—more bones on the bottom. The eyeholes of a skull. He shoved it away with a shudder, fighting to escape the hole and the roots.

Then something grappled with him, and he kicked and fought his way to the surface, blind and struggling against what he suddenly realized was a wet and equally frightened boy.

“God!” he yelled, grabbing a willow root and trying to hold on to Sasha at the same time, Sasha gasping and thrashing and trying to hold on to him, flailing with the sword in his other hand.

“I thought you were dead!” Sasha cried.

“Then what were you doing?” he yelled, and choked and dragged the boy as high as he could hold him, so that Sasha could get a grip on the willow.

Sasha climbed, flung the sword onto the bank and hauled himself up where he could be of some help himself, hauling at Pyetr’s coat, pulling him up where Pyetr could climb, shivering and coughing, onto the roots and the bank and as far from the water as he could pull both of them.

“Fool!” he shouted at the boy, shaking him, still himself trembling with fright.

Then it dawned on him by the boy’s white face and his lack of a coat and his having the sword that Sasha might not have fallen in. That so shocked him he sat there with his fist knotted in the boy’s wet shirt and the boy staring at him as if he expected to be murdered, and could not move, except he had to cough, and let Sasha go.

“Don’t ever do a thing like that!” he said when he could get his breath. “God, boy.”

Sasha just stared at him with his teeth chattering and his lips turning blue. Pyetr gathered his shaking limbs under him and gave Sasha a shove toward the coat that was lying on the bank. “Wrap up,” he said, shivering. “Get moving. You’ll take your death…”

He picked up his sword. He found the sheath. His coat was running a steady stream of water, water cold as the wizard’s daughter favored—

He looked back at the willow, the only living tree in all the woods, and recollected the bones down in the cave.

Sasha pulled at his arm, said, with his teeth chattering, “Come on,” and he gathered his wits back and made what speed he could up the hill.

Uulamets still had the fire going. He looked up with a certain surprise—maybe to see two of them, Pyetr thought, with thoughts of wringing Uulamets’ neck—which perhaps the black fur-ball quite well understood, because it ran forward and growled and hissed as they came stumbling down the hill soaking wet and shivering.

“Get out of my way!” Pyetr snarled at it, and gave it a swipe with his sword. “Get!”

It spat and hissed and kept its distance as they came up to Uulamets.

“I delivered your damn bottle,” Pyetr said. “I think we found your tree. It’s the other side of the hill. I don’t think you’ll like the company it keeps.”

Uulamets looked alarmed, and got up and went running off up the ridge, abandoning his pots, his bag, everything but his staff. The Thing went running after him. Sasha looked as if he was thinking about it, but Pyetr grabbed him by the arm and shoved him toward the fire. “Keep it going,” he ordered the boy, tossed him the sword and went over to the edge of the pit, lay down and dragged the dead limb up the slide.

What he could break off it kept the fire going, at least, built a fair good fire, at least enough to take the chill off, enough warmth for him to work his coat and his shirt off and to wring out at least the bulk of the water and heat up the shirt before he put it back on. He was doing the same for Sasha’s shirt when the old man came back over the ridge, furiously angry, striking at the grass with his staff, the Thing dogging his track down the slope.

Pyetr scowled at Uulamets when he arrived at the fire, ready to give the old man word for word anything he was ready for; but Uulamets said not a word to either of them, only squatted down with a thunderous frown and began to pack up his little jars.

“So what do we do now?” Pyetr asked.

“Stay here and do nothing]” Uulamets snarled under his breath, took his bag of pots and left, with the Thing scurrying behind him.

“Good riddance,” Pyetr said, gave Sasha’s shirt a furious twist and stuck it on a long branch, toasting it over the fire while Sasha stayed bundled up in his coat. “Get the breeches off. And the boots. Hold this.”

He went after more wood, squishing as he walked, warming himself with temper and with work. He gathered a good armload up on the ridge, keeping an eye on the boy at the fire, and came back to build the fire three times its size.

“Could you see master Uulamets?” Sasha said, worried. “If it came back—”

“Let it choke on him.” Pyetr sat down, pulled his wet boots off, pulled off his own breeches and wrung them out, making a puddle in the grass. He sneezed violently, wiped his nose, and put the breeches back on, wet as they were.

“I don’t think I even know where the house is,” Sasha said.

It was a grim thought, for a moment. Then Pyetr jutted his chin toward the river. “Good as any road. I know where we are. Use your wits, boy. You don’t get everything by wishing.”

Sasha’s face reddened past its pallor, and Pyetr remembered then calling him a fool and half drowning him.

“You did all right,” he said, and pulled his coat off and laid it on the grass, figuring the shirt was the only thing that was going to dry in any reasonable time. He wrung it out a second time, found himself a couple of sticks and spread it on them, to hold over the fire. “Just for the god’s sake what did you think you were going to do?”

“Bring you your sword,” Sasha said. “Then it came out of the hole. I knew it was out. Before I went in the water.” He started shivering again, having trouble with his tongue. “What was in there?”

Pyetr stared at the fire, keeping his shirt out of it, concentratedly keeping it from scorching, keeping his eyes on the bright warmth. “Bones. Lot of bones. I think I know what happened to his daughter.”

“You think he knew?”

Pyetr shrugged, recollecting a pretty face. A girl Sasha’s age. Not a ghost, a memory of a ghost. “Maybe,” he said. “He knew about the Thing in the river. He wasn’t surprised, was he?”

“He says he can bring her back.”

“Bones are damn hard to bring back. Aren’t they?” He remembered Sasha saying, the morning after his own illness—Pyetr, you were dying and he brought you back-He did not want to remember that. He did not want to guess what the old man was doing over the ridge. He did not want to remember the inside of the cave, or the feel of the vodyanoi’s body or that mud in the entrance, with the bones in it.

He said, in Sasha’s long silence, “About time we got out of here. We’ll get grandfather home, get him settled. He owes us, this time. He can’t say we didn’t try.”

Somehow the prospect of trekking down the riverside was both more and less frightening than it had been. At least, if there was such a thing as a vodyanoi, it could be cut, it—whatever master Uulamets said—hated the sun, it preferred the water, it skulked around in underwater caves and there was a way to avoid it on those terms, simply keeping to the general line of the river for a guide through the forest and never spending the night without fire, which they could get the same way master Uulamets got it, with a clay firepot.

“We walked in,” he said to Sasha, “we can certainly walk out again, in a direction we want to go.”

“We still need his help,” Sasha whispered, as if anything they said could carry across the ridge. “Just please, please don’t fight with him, don’t make him angry.”

He had seen Sasha’s face when the wizard was talking. Sasha’s deference to the old man infuriated him. But he had thought the Thing was a dog; and sometimes it still looked that way; and he had thought a vodyanoi was a bad dream; and it still felt that way; and he would have said Sasha’s wishes were no likelier to come true than anyone’s—but he saw at least the chance that an old man twice as stubborn and set on his way could scare a youngster like Sasha, who was convinced his least ill-wish could work terrible, far-reaching harm.

“The old man’s damned me often enough,” Pyetr said. “If there was anything to that, do you think that Thing down there would have gone running?”

“He wanted it to.”

“Oh. god,” Pyetr said in disgust, and rescued his shirt from scorching. It was hot, and burned his hands. “Damn!”

“Please don’t. Not here. Not now.” Sasha was shivering again, hands clasped between his knees, hardly fit to get the words out.

“Good luck to him, then,” Pyetr said, to have peace. “He needs it.” And on a more charitable impulse: “He needs somebody to talk him out of this woods, is what he needs. He needs to go downriver, get among sane people. Maybe he is a wizard.—Maybe all this is because he’s a wizard, maybe that’s all it is, did you ever think of that? Maybe he makes people think they see things.”

“You’re hopeless!” Sasha cried, as angry as ever Pyetr had seen him. “Do you think all this is for your benefit? It’s none of it a joke, Pyetr! His daughter died! Don’t make fun of him!”

With which Sasha got up and pulled his coat around him and headed off toward the river, three steps before Pyetr flung his sticks and his shirt down and caught him.

“Don’t you be a fool! All right, he’s a wizard, he’s anything you want, just stay away from there, I believe in it, I believe anything you want, all right?”

Sasha stopped fighting, out of breath. “Something’s wrong,” he said, trying to twist his hands free, casting anxious looks toward the hill. “Something’s wrong with him. You said that—and things just stopped…”

“I’m not any wizard,” Pyetr said. The wind was cold on his back. The boy’s nonsense upset his stomach. “He won’t thank you for going over there. If he’d wanted you, he’d have asked. Just stay out of it.”

“Just up the hill,” Sasha said. “Just up the hill. No more than that.”

The boy was set on it. Pyetr tagged after, shivering all the way, as far as the top of the ridge and the view of the willow below.

The old man was lying there, sprawled on the hillside, his pots scattered about him. Sasha started to run. Pyetr did, with a sudden curse remembering he had left his sword back at the fire—slipped and slid down the grassy slope on the boy’s track.

The Thing from the yard was lying in the middle of the old man. It snarled at them as they came running up.

The old man was breathing. Pyetr felt an uncharitable regret, seeing that, and the Thing growled the moment the thought crossed his mind.

Sasha spoke softly to it. It sank down then, whining like a dog, and holding to Uulamets’ robe with tiny manlike hands.

“Careful!” Pyetr said, when Sasha bent closer.

But it scuttled off Uulamets’ chest, seeming smaller still, and hid its face against the old man’s sleeve.

Master Uulamets shook his head and stared into the fire, that was all the response he gave to the most careful questions Sasha posed. The pots were scattered and broken, whatever powders master Uulamets had mixed were lost over by the riverside.

And the sun was past noon.

“/think we’d better get him home,” Pyetr said grimly. “And start now. That Thing likes the dark. How long do we want to sit around here?”

Master Uulamets said nothing to that, either. Sasha looked desperately from one to the other of them, unable to figure why everything came down to him, or why Pyetr was asking him what they ought to do.

Except, when he thought about it, there was no one else to consult. Master Uulamets hardly seemed able to know what had happened to him. And someone had to agree that that was the case.

“I think we’d better,” Sasha sighed. “I’d better go back and get what I can salvage—”

“Leave it,” Pyetr said sharply. “We’re not risking another trip over there. We’ve had enough accidents, thank you.—Come on, grandfather.” He took master Uulamets very gently under the arm and pulled him to his feet. Uulamets did not protest, and Pyetr said, “Get his staff. I suppose he sets some store by it.”

Sasha picked it up, and poked the dying fire with it, to spread it out a little in the circle they had made. They had nothing to dig with. He went to the edge of the pit, lay down and took up a double handful of the loose earth, ran back and dumped it on the fire, did it three more times in breathless haste, before he grabbed up the staff and went running down the knoll and up to the ridge where Pyetr and Uulamets had stopped to wait for him.

“Out?” Pyetr asked.

Sasha bobbed his head, winded, expecting Pyetr to find fault with his caution; but he hated fire, he never trusted it, not in the kitchen, not a candle in the stable. When he thought of them arriving back at the house, safe, he thought of a great fire sweeping through the dead woods, taking everything. He wished it dead back there on the knoll—last effort dial he could make—with a force that for a moment left him breathless.

“All right, boy?”

He nodded, leaned on the staff and caught his breath. Pyetr clapped him on the shoulder and shook him. “Plenty of time. We’re all right. Hear?”

He nodded again, no more able to talk than Uulamets was. It might be fear of leaving a fire. It might be the vodyanoi wanting harm to them. It might be the ghost, it might be all the dead Pyetr said were in this place.

He had only this terrible feeling of leaving something vital undone and unaccounted for, even after he had tried to tie up all the ends. “Master Uulamets,” he said, laying his hand on the old man’s arm, “is there anything else? Is there anything I should do?”

Uulamets did not answer, gave not even the shake of his head or the nod that he had given before. He stood there looking back toward the knoll. Perhaps he had not even heard the question.

Pyetr took Uulamets’ arm and pulled it over his shoulders. Sasha took the other side and they started down the ridge.

Thunder muttered beyond the woods.

“Wished the fire out, did you?” Pyetr said.

He threw Pyetr a look past master Uulamets. It was good to know that Pyetr still could make light of their troubles, but he was too frightened and too worried to appreciate it at the moment. He had no desire to have Father Sky vexed with them into the bargain. “ Don’t—”

“—do that,” Pyetr breathed, still mocking him.

“I’m sorry. I’m scared.”

“Smart lad,” Pyetr said. “Mind your feet.”

Master Uulamets took the offered cup in trembling hands, stronger, now, with the fire going strong in the hearth, and the warmth in the house sufficient finally to dispel the chill. Sasha poured another cup and gave it to Pyetr, who likewise sat at the hearth, coughing and worn to exhaustion—master Uulamets’ strength not having been enough, after all: Pyetr had had to carry him.

And all master Uulamets had had^to say for it was, once, when Pyetr slipped on a leafy bank’and fell, “Fool.” After which Uulamets had struck Pyetr with his fist. Pyetr had sat there in the rain hardly able to get his breath and said, not joking atall, “Old man, you can crawl home from here for all I care.”

But Uulamets had been out of his head with what had happened at the river, and Pyetr half out of his with exhaustion, and when Sasha had tried to carry the old man the way Pyetr had been doing, Pyetr had gotten up, roughly shoved him aside and hauled Uulamets up again…

Sasha poured himself a cup of tea, strong and laced with honey and vodka, and sat down by the fire to sip it.

The Yard-thing had not come back. Babi, whatever its name was, had just gone away at some moment and Sasha had no idea where.

“Have you seen the Yard-thing at all?” Sasha asked Pyetr quietly.

“I’ve no desire to see it,” Pyetr said, wiped his nose and suddenly sneezed. “Damn. If grandfather could just wish this cold away—”

“If you had done as you were told—” Uulamets said with sudden violence, and slopped tea on his quilts. “Damn your interference!”

“What’s wrong with him?” Pyetr asked furiously. “What did I say? I nearly drowned with his damned bottle. I carried this whining old man in the rain—”

“Pyetr,” Sasha pleaded, and held out an entreating hand. “Just—no. Let be. Let be.”

“Leave a simple matter,” Uulamets muttered under his breath, “in the hands of your ilk. You don’t believe in things, do you? Not even simple instructions to stay on your own side of the hill.”

“Master Uulamets,” Sasha said, “I was the one who crossed the hill. Something had already gone wrong. We saw that. Then we came down after you.”

Uulamets wiped his mouth. He looked years older, and full of uncertainties. “It should have worked,” he said.

Pyetr shook his head.

“What do you know?” Uulamets asked him sharply. “You’re the fault. You’re the flaw in this. If you had lent even your most desultory support to this, instead of carping at every turn—I’d have my daughter back. She’s gone, do you understand? I don’t know what the result was back there. It all went to pieces. And she’s gone. What do you say to that? What do you care? What do you care about anything?”

Sasha braced himself for Pyetr’s outburst, but Pyetr shook his head a second time.

“What does that mean?” Uulamets said.

“Nothing. It means nothing.”

Everything felt dangerous. Sasha wished most earnestly for peace, and master Uulamets turned a scowl his way, at which Sasha froze, paralyzed with the thought that master Uulamets had just felt that wish, and that he had made wishes throughout their venture, though he had tried to make them wisely.

“What are you looking at him for?” Pyetr asked. “What did he do?”

“One wonders,” Uulamets said, and reached out and took Sasha by the shoulder, a terrible look in his eyes. “You’ve gotten very forward in the last couple of days, boy, altogether forward—”

“Let him be,” Pyetr said, but Uulamets did not give up his grip, and Sasha felt colder and colder.

“You do have ability,” Uulamets said. “We both know that.”

“I never wished anybody harm!”

“You wished your own safety. And his. At what cost? Did you care for that?”

“And yours,” Sasha said. “And that you’d find your daughter, and that everything would go right. If one worked, the other should have, shouldn’t it? Should it only work halfway?”

Uulamets’ mouth made a thin line, and trembled. His fingers bit into Sasha’s shoulder.

It is my fault, Sasha thought with a sinking feeling. It seemed entirely, appallingly possible.

Uulamets let him go of a sudden, swung around and flung his teacup into the fireplace. It shattered. Like the pots.

Pyetr flung his cup after it. It smashed, and the fire hissed and flared. But Pyetr said nothing, just got up, hitched his quilt around him and took another cup and the vodka jug off the table. He came back and sat down this time in his usual spot at the side of the fire, looking fury at Uulamets, between unstopping the jug and pouring a cup for himself.

“The boy did you no harm,” Pyetr said. “I’d go to bed, old man. Since this is mine, I’m in it. Good night to you.”

Uulamets stared at him a moment with an expression Sasha could not see: he only felt threat and desperately wished Pyetr well, because he was very much afraid of what master Uulamets might be wishing him. Uulamets was surely aware of that defiance too, and angry.

“You,” Uulamets said to Pyetr, “mistake your place in this house.”

Pyetr lifted the cup in salute. “Then fetch another cup and have a drink. Fetch your own cup for a change.”

Sasha felt the danger, felt it and threw ail his effort into stopping it.

The cup in Pyetr’s hand—shattered. Pyetr jumped and recoiled, wide-eyed and only then seeming to realize there was nothing accidental in it.

Pyetr began to pick the fragments off his quilt-covered lap with a visibly shaking hand. Sasha got up, quickly, grabbed his blanket about him and said, touching master Uulamets on the shoulder, as carefully as he had ever intervened with a trespassing customer, “Please, sir. It’s late. Can I get you anything else? I’d be very happy to.”

He was afraid. He felt Uulamets’ anger touch him.

And grow quieter then.

“Sir?”

“More cups,” Uulamets said, not: cup; cups. Sasha ran that through again, nodded anxiously and went and brought them, one for Uulamets and, as Uulamets seemed to intend, one for Pyetr.

Pyetr poured from the jug, still shaking a little, whether from exhaustion or from having a cup break in his hand that should not have broken. He leaned forward and poured for Uulamets, too, and put a little in Sasha’s cup.

Sasha sat down, picked up his cup, and took a sip, only half feeling the burn as it slid down his throat.

Outside, thunder rumbled. A fresh spatter of rain hit the shutters.

“My daughter,” Uulamets said quietly. “Did you see her—at any time I was beyond the hill?”

Pyetr shook his head. “No.” And looked up as if he had remembered something. “On the river. Before that. At the willow. Just a single glance.”

Uulamets rested his elbow on his knee and ran his hand back over his hair.

“But I’m not sure,” Pyetr said, “that what I followed there—”

A footstep sounded outside, on wet boards, a little louder sound than the rain.

They all froze in mid-breath. The footsteps hesitated, then came to the door. Someone knocked.

A second knock, then: Pyetr moved to take his sword from its rest beside the fireplace, with the thin hope that if a vodyanoi had no liking for it, other things magical might not—and his first thought for visitors on a night like this was the vodyanoi itself. But Uulamets was already struggling to his feet, with Sasha trying to help him: Uulamets shook him oif and headed straight for the door, his blanket tangling and trailing in his tattered robe.

Pyetr caught at his arm. “It might not be your daughter,” he said, he thought quite sanely. But Uulamets snarled, “Little you know,” and tottered past him.

“Fool,” Pyetr muttered, and seized Sasha instead, who was dithering in the way, and put him back to the side as master Uulamets threw up the latch and the wind pushed the door open.

A girl appeared in the lightning flicker, drenched, her blond hair and her white gown alike streaming water.

“Papa?” she said faintly, and flung her arms around Uulamets.

It was her, it was the ghost beyond a doubt—but not ghostly white now, only white from cold; and streaming water onto the floor—but it was, after all, raining…

And this girl who had plagued his dreams and eluded everyone else’s sight—was most surely visible to all of them.

He ought to have been shocked, perhaps—or glad for the old man, or afraid that she might suddenly transmute herself into weed and old bone… with the god knew what sort of deadly intention—

But of all things to feel, as she lifted her head from her father’s shoulder and looked dazedly around her, he truly expected—anticipated—that she would be pleased to see him.

She showed nothing of the kind. He and Sasha together might have been a table, an accompanying chair, of passing interest only because they were strange in her house.

Odd, to feel slighted by a ghost.

He watched Uulamets bring the girl to the fire and offer her the scattered quilts. He let his sword fall, while Sasha alone had the practical good sense to shut the door and latch it against the wind. Sasha also had the absolutely amazing self-possession to ask whether Uulamets’ daughter would care for tea.

She would.

Pyetr simply wandered to the far’side of the table and sat down on the bench with his sword still in his hands, watching while a doting father wrapped his soaked, rain-chilled daughter in the quilts, while he chafed her hands, helped her dry her hip-long hair, and murmured how cold she was and how he had lost all hope this morning, and how unspeakably happy he was now. Uulamets suddenly seemed to have a heart, for the god’s sake, or he was completely out of his head.

While the girl, who was more beautiful than any girl Pyetr had ever seen, soaking wet or otherwise, huddled in the blankets and clutched her father’s hands and said how glad she was to be home, and how—here for the first time she truly looked at Pyetr—she had tried so hard to escape her plight, but that she had no wish, considering a rusalka’s essential nature, to come anywhere near her father. So she had sought other means to speak to him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and tears spilled onto her pale cheeks, which blushed with hectic color. “I’m so sorry. Everything’s dead—I didn’t want it to die. But I didn’t want to fade. And I would have. I didn’t know anything to do, but to try to stay alive, and they died, everything died, and I’m sorry—”

Upon which she began to cry, while Sasha was attempting, delicately balanced on one foot, to get behind her to take the water kettle from the hearth.

It all should have been ludicrous, the boy teetering on one foot, the recent ghost sobbing away against the old man’s shoulder-But Pyetr watched father and daughter, with the sword lying on the table in front of him, and very much wished that it was his shoulder, and that she would look his direction, and that he could decide whether her eyes were dark or light.

And he wondered if he was only one more of her victims or whether she had had a special, secret reason for choosing him to approach—

It had seemed so to him—it had very much seemed to him, at the willow, that she had been trying to warn him, and last night in the house, after the wind, she had come to him in his dreams, less as a haunt than as a desperately lost girl, speaking to him in words he could almost hear…

She was only a girl, after all. Silly girls threw themselves at him all the time—a distraction, a momentary amusement, a nuisance in some measure: a man with his looks soon learned what it was all worth. Mature ladies were his real interest. But every move this girl made as flesh and blood was amazing to him—no longer drifting, but——real…

Sasha brought the tea and the girl looked at him and necessarily brushed his hand with her fingers as she took the cup. That touch made his blood run a little faster, which was a feeling he had no notion what to do with—or rather he did, but he had never been within half a step of any girl who made him feel that way, and he backed away, in the same moment stepping on a knot of blankets and having to catch his balance, looking like a fool, if she was paying any attention to him—which he really hoped she was not, just then. But just as he hoped that, the thought occurred to him that a wizard’s daughter might know things about people the way he did, being sometimes unnaturally sensitive to the world around her.

That possibility embarrassed him beyond good sense, and of course the harder one tried not to think about a thing, the stronger the feeling got. He reeled away into the shadow and made a wide circuit around Uulamets and his daughter, his face burning. She surely thought he was a complete fool, and she might well resent him, especially since he had what Uulamets called ability, and here he had been sleeping in her house, asking valuable questions of her father-That was his experience of household situations, at least, in which he always seemed to be the interloper.

He sat down on the bench beside Pyetr and put his elbows on the table, figuring that beside someone as mature and self-possessed as Pyetr he was a good deal less conspicuous.