Rusalka

CHAPTER 20

THE MIST BEGAN to fall again by afternoon, slow, sifting rain, only enough to moisten the leaves and drip down one’s neck when a tree let fall a drop. Eveshka was a sparkle of such droplets, which fell and hesitated and fell again in continuous motion.

The touch of her hand left a chill moisture on Pyetr’s fingers as she came close to tug at him and make him hurry—as if, he desperately hoped, they might be close now, although he had never ceased to feel anxiety from her. He had never thought in all his life he would want to see Uulamets, but now he did, Uulamets being in his own reckoning the only help for this disaster—Eveshka and Sasha locked in silent battle and himself in the middle of it. His wits were clear enough now to know what a muddled mess they had been most of the day and to know—at least when he worked at knowing it—that they were only clear because Sasha was helping him.

Which they might not be if he shook Sasha back to good sense and rescued Sasha from the wizardry effort that was turning him short-tempered and strange to him. He had Eveshka’s presence constantly flitting through his attention, recollecting to him the feeling he could have, he could still have, if only he would let go and give way to her.

He wanted to. That was the problem. Wanting her came and went like fever and chill: sometimes he was able to know quite clearly the trouble he was in (Sasha/s influence, he was sure)

and at others (his own weak will, perhaps: he knew his faults) he wanted what he knew damned well would kill him (but a few moments of that feeling made death seem so absolutely impossible…)

He wished he had managed better than this; he certainly wished he had advised Sasha better than this—but, then, against a good handful of wizards with their minds made up he did not know what choice was even his any longer, or whether his own will weighed anything in the wizardly gale he knew was blowing.

He thought, desperately, that Sasha being the wizard he was might have an edge in figuring out things like that; and if Sasha had, then he hoped Sasha had a good reason for spending so much effort on him. In the god’s name why! he asked himself again and again: in the god’s name what good was he, an un-magical man with a sword, with no sense what he was doing, haunted by rain-sparkle and an apprehension in his heart?

He was more afraid the boy had no purpose in spending so much on him: he was afraid for Sasha’s own generous nature, a boy attempting things he had no understanding of, all to save a fool from his own weaknesses.

“Tell me what to do,” he begged of Sasha when they were passing through dense trees—no hindrance to Eveshka, but he and Sasha had to hand branches off one to the other and eel around the unbending brush, the limbs overhead all the while shaking water drops down on them. He felt Eveshka suddenly pulling at him with unreasoning anxiety, and it seemed to him that things had gone on entirely too long with no sight of an old man who could not have walked faster than they had.

“Move,” Sasha said, and pushed him to make him hurry.

Which was not the advice he hoped for.

God, he thought, what’s the matter with her?—Because she was moving faster and faster, feeding into him a sweating panic that had no object, only that sense of something behind them again.

Maybe it was Sasha himself, or Sasha’s wizardly essence that alarmed her. Maybe to Eveshka’s frightened mind he seemed that cold and dangerous. Or maybe this panic was only a weapon she had begun to use, wearing at him and through him at Sasha…

Move, Sasha said, as if Sasha himself was slipping beneath Eveshka’s spell. If that was true, Pyetr thought, then they were both done, doomed to be bones in some thicket or other.

At some times, within blinks of his eyes, he could not even believe Eveshka existed; at others, even looking elsewhere, even distracted with some precarious slope, he felt her presence as surely as Sasha’s; heard her whispering in his heart that she was not lying, that the danger was there and real as she was.

Run, she whispered in his heart, run, don’t look back, Pyetr—

The rain-sparkle of her shape faded as she passed into thicker shade. The shadow seemed everywhere deeper and they were losing her ahead of them.

“Dammit,” Pyetr said, fighting past a branch, with the black fur-ball darting in and out around his ankles, whining. He tried to hand the branch on to Sasha, but Sasha suddenly stopped and turned to look into the woods behind them.

Don’t look back, Eveshka urged him, don’t look, Pyetr, no, keep running—

He did look—saw something moving on their track, impossibly quick, stirring the brush as it came; and there was no time for argument: he grabbed Sasha by the collar and snatched him through the brush, branches raking them as Sasha flailed out and tried to get his feet under him. Pyetr did not risk letting him go, only tried to haul him upright and keep them both moving. The disturbance was following them through the brush, he heard it snapping behind them, then heard it pass virtually over their heads, sending a hail of broken twigs down on them—

Then it was gone, and Pyetr looked around him in panicked confusion, Eveshka suddenly lost from his sight and his heart, Sasha catching his arm for balance on his right hand and Babi whimpering and shivering between his feet.

“What was that?” Pyetr asked.

Something touched him on the shoulder.

He yelped and spun around, colliding with Sasha, grabbing him, and seeing a branch in his face, knobbly wood, a dozen twigs for fingers—Maybe, he thought as his heart started to settle, he had staggered into it without knowing he was moving…

But slowly the branch reached, the gray, thin twigs quivering just in front of his face as the tree blinked and scowled at him.

He caught a breath and held it, afraid Sasha was going to offend it, afraid most of all that multiplicity of bare twigs that twitched and hesitated a scant impulse removed from his eyes.

Babi trembled against his legs and hissed. The tree blinked again. He felt Sasha gather a handful of his sleeve, about to do something or simply as scared as he was, he had no idea. His heart was thumping against his ribs in helpless panic, faster and faster, until he feared it was going to burst.

Worse than Hwiuur, worse than Eveshka. Much worse. If anything, he hoped for Eveshka to come back and deal with this creature that quite evidently Sasha could not.

The twig-hand twitched and quivered its dozen fingers away from his face and past him toward Sasha, slowly then drawing them both forward as Sasha’s fist clenched the tighter on his sleeve and the sleeve threatened to tear. Real twigs snapped as the Thing leaned closer.

Pyetr got a grip on Sasha’s arm and pulled back, lost that grip in the inexorable pull and in desperation grabbed the Forest-thing’s knobby wrist instead; but it seized him, then, blindingly quick, horrifically strong. It grabbed his other arm, dropping Sasha, and dragged him toward its trunk.

“Sasha!” he yelled, feeling human hands pulling at his shirt, feeling them losing their grip. He tried to kick it, hoping it would drop him, but all he hit was a yielding mass of twigs. “Sasha—get the sword! Get the sword!”

Sasha clawed at his waist as it dragged him upward, whether Sasha was trying simply to hold on to him or to get at the weapon. Babi yapped, then yelped suddenly like a kicked cur as Pyetr felt Sasha’s hands slip from his belt and from his leg and his ankle as it carried him through the brush.

In sole possession of him then, it let go of one of his arms, the other most painfully held while it ran twiggy fingers over his body and sniffed at him. He hung there with one shoulder all but breaking, tried to kick it, but that only shot pain through his ribs and shoulder, stifling his breath. Its fingers paused then on his face, and it held him so close he could see nothing but brown eyes and two centers of deep, deep black.

“Healthy,” it said in a voice that went through his bones, and took him by both arms again, relief but no reassurance. “Healthy.”

“I assure you,” Pyetr gasped, with what wind he had gotten in that moment, “if we’ve trespassed, we certainly had no intention—”

“You’ve brought death with you,” it said.

“She’s only looking for her father.” He realized how ominous that sounded. He stared the creature full in the eyes with no idea what Sasha was doing, or whether he was conscious or even alive. He said quickly, on a ragged breath, “We’ll most gladly leave—”

Its attention prickled through him, stranger than Eveshka’s, much stranger and more thorough. One moment he was near to screaming, the next he was half fainting, his feet meeting the ground and his legs tingling with strength to hold him up, from what reserve he had no idea.

“Go,” it said, relaxing its grip on him.

“Sasha—” He turned with a rush of that tingly strength through all his limbs and a sudden, desperate hope of getting the boy out of this. Sasha was there, but he only stood numbly when Pyetr took hold of him, and the same instant Pyetr thought of snatching Sasha away by force he felt a dread so thick he could hardly breathe.

“You can’t,” Sasha said, staring past him. “It’ll let you go. It’s all right. Goon.”

“It isn’t all right, dammit!” He looked back at the Thing in the thicket, shaking in the knees and feeling that they had no chance, if it was down to him dealing with a Forest-thing. “Listen to me. Sasha’s not at fault. There’s a wizard dragged us up here, he’s gone off with something we don’t know what, and Eveshka’s only trying to stop him from killing himself. None of us want to be here. None of us want anything but to get the old man out of this woods and go home.”

He felt it listening. He stood arguing with what looked, between pounding heartbeats, like no more than a brushy tree, and tried to believe he was sane, tried to make himself believe in leshys—which was what he was sure it was—because he had to, he could not let it trick him into seeing just a tree and losing touch with it while it went on killing Sasha—

It was the forest. Or part of it. It owned what had fed him and it was trying to pull away from him, trying to be something else, that was what he knew, the same way he knew that it was not trying as hard as it could because they confused it.

Why? it wondered. Why and how this fighting me?

“Because we’ll never get south,” he said, seizing what was nothing more than a branch, holding to it while his hand and his eyes were trying to tell him that he was being a fool, he was talking to a damned tree, Sasha was exhausted and at the end of his wits and there was no such a thing as a rusalka, there never had been. “God!” he cried, shaking at it, “you hear me, dammit!”

But he was not even sure it could hear him any longer: Sasha said there was a necessary separation between magical things and ordinary folk and maybe it no more knew he was there any longer than he could see it for what it was. Sasha was standing there helpless and still and Eveshka and Babi were invisible if, he kept thinking—if they ever had existed.

It was like a curtain being drawn, separating him out of the magical, sending him back to the sane and the ordinary world—but it was taking Sasha with it.

“For the god’s sake listen to me! We never meant any harm here—” He had pleaded desperate cases with outraged landlords in Vojvoda, and it seemed no different to him. “We never wanted to be here, except this Thing—” He figured maybe it was a case of jurisdictions, “—lured her father off. She followed us all the way from the old ferry and she hasn’t the strength to keep going without what she borrowed—”

The branch moved under his hand. Twigs curled around his wrist, holding him prisoner. The creature opened its eyes and stared at him.

It said, “So you were feeding her deliberately. That’s very foolish.”

“She wasn’t trying to kill anything, not us, not anything in this forest. Neither was Sasha.”

Again that cool, tingling touch, from his wrist up and down. But he stopped being afraid of a sudden. He knew he was being looked at and looked into with a thoroughness no one ever had, and it was more curious now than angry.

“I forgive you,” the Thing said. “But you’ve still been very foolish.”

“None of it was Sasha’s doing—”

“There is no fault here. Not even hers.” It swayed and pointed with one of its many limbs to a mere pool of mist among the leaves. “But she has no heart: she’s taken your friend’s. She has no life; she’s stealing yours; and his; and mine.” He felt that tingle run from his head to his feet, felt comfortable, and safe, and thought it might be a lie more dangerous than Eveshka’s. “I would know if you lied to me,” the Forest-thing said, and Pyetr believed absolutely that was the truth. It said, while well-being coursed through him like cool water, and its attention like a warm breeze: “Do you know what your friend has done?”

He had no idea how to answer. It said, as if he had,

“Foolish. All young. All young.” It reached past him with another of its limbs and grasped Sasha’s shoulder. “Wanting me to let you go. Using my woods to feed him, against me. Death fighting death.—What shall I do with you?”

“Help us,” Sasha said, as a droplet of sweat trickled a clear path down his face. “Help us get out of your woods. Help us find her father. Help us get him free.”

The Forest-thing released them both and drew back with a rustling of twigs and leaves. “My name is Wiun,” it said.

“Pyetr,” Pyetr said.

“Sasha,” Sasha said. “—And Eveshka and Babi, if you please.”

It quivered, a little rustling of its branches as they lowered. “I don’t please,” it said. “A dvorovoi has no place here. A rusalka has no place among living things.—But I have no choice.”

The pool of mist spun upward like a milky whirlwind and spread itself wider and thinner, like tattered robes, like fine hair flying on a gale, like ghostly arms and hands and Eveshka’s pale, frightened face.

“Rusalka!” the leshy said. “Take, take once, and not again in my woods, on peril of what life you have. Do you hear me?”

Eveshka’s eyes widened; her hair and robes swirled about her, leaves flew in a whirlwind, and she blushed, not alone with faint rose on her face, but pale gold in her hair, pale blue in her tattered gown—

“Oh!” she cried, wide-eyed, and Babi yelped and sprang from somewhere to her arms, burying its face against her.

“I will not ask your promise,” Wiun said to her in that bone-deep voice, “for the welfare of my woods or your companions: you would do anything to live. You already have. I only advise you what you already know: a wizard who lies to others is one thing; one who lies to himself is quite another. Do you know why?”

Eveshka did not answer. She held Babi closer.

Wiun shifted back into the brush, or was part of it.

“—Because then all wishes go wrong,” Sasha murmured faintly, in the last whisper of the leshy’s going.

Eveshka looked at Sasha, looked at Pyetr, with the mist gathering like beads on her hair, with her eyes gone a soft blue and a little rosy blush on her lips. “Pyetr,” she said in a tremulous voice.

He trembled himself, while Sasha pulled sharply at his arm. He knew better. God, he knew better; she was afraid, he only hoped he knew why; but all he could do was stare at her until all she could do was stare back.

“Pyetr!” Sasha said, jerking at his arm.

He blinked and looked away, trying«to break the spell and get his breath back. He saw his sword lying in the brush and went and picked it up, shaking—

Because he wanted her so much, and he knew better, and Sasha was depending on him.

“We’ll find your father,” he said to Eveshka, making himself see the trees, the woods around them, and Sasha frowning at him. “He says he can bring you back. Well—dammit, he will!”

God, he thought, gone cold inside, he was talking about Ilya Uulamets.