Rusalka

CHAPTER 22

A HARD WALK from day into dark and now out onto the trail again in the mid of the night, tired as they were—townfolk without Eveshka’s woodcraft to guide them… “Dammit, can’t you magic us through?” Pyetr cried, still with that feeling of imminent danger behind them: there was a thorn-brake where Sasha had led them, and it was not the way Eveshka had gotten through: she was far too substantial, he was sure she was.

“I’ve got other things on my mind,” Sasha said.

“We’re losing her!” Pyetr protested; “We won’t,” Sasha said in that maddening, lately-acquired inscrutability of his, but all the same they had to go far around. Thickets closed about them and forced them to backtrack too often, branches raked their faces, snagged on their packs, and they found themselves going far aside from the course Pyetr knew was right—because there was no way through the thorn thickets and the brush.

Pyetr’s hand was hurting, his feet had blisters, his forehead hurt from a scratch a branch had put on it, and something about supper was not sitting well on his stomach.

Worse, he suddenly lost touch with what he knew was behind them and still knew where Eveshka was with unsettling certainty. Her state of mind, terrified for herself and terrified of their pursuer, muddled him and made him misstep and miss branches, which only made him angrier and more desperate.

“It’s gone,” he muttered at Sasha’s back as they slogged along, trying to find a way through this thicket, “it’s gone out.—Sasha, can you still feel it back there?”

“I’ve lost it,” Sasha said. “I don’t like it.”

“Don’t like it! Don’t like it—God, hurry us up.”

“I’m doing what I can.”

“Maybe it’s been lying to us all along. Maybe she has.”

The doubt came to him suddenly, left again. He had no idea what the source of it was—

And did.

“God, next time wish me to know you’re wishing me to think something, do you think you can do that?”

“I’m not doing it now,” Sasha said.

“How do I know that?”

“Believe me.—Stop talking to me!”

The boy he was talking to had no deep feeling of his owner he had, but Eveshka had it instead, if Pyetr guessed anything that was going on. He was embarrassed, he had been made a fool of in his most private thoughts and he hated both of them—between moments that he wanted her with all his heart, or moments that he reckoned if the intention that drove her now truly was Sasha’s, then she was likely doing everything she had done for good reasons—for Sasha’s kind of reasons, Sasha being so ready to blame himself for others’ fault; and Eveshka, damn her, having so much real blame for this situation.

Maybe, he thought between times, that was where she had found the strength to realize what was going on, that there was something stalking them—or found the strength to defy it before it killed them. If it was Sasha’s heart in her, it must be near breaking with the guilt she really deserved—and if that guilt was somehow hurting Sasha he wanted to wring her neck—or shake sense into her, because a girl with Sasha’s heart was all too likely to do something brave and foolish where that damned River-thing was concerned, endangering everything in the world he loved—

His feet skidded suddenly on a slick, leaf-covered slope; he caught himself against a sapling trunk—a branch jabbing him painfully in the eye. “Damn!” he gasped, flailed out against the brush and fought his way on downhill to keep up with Sasha.

Sasha waited for him. But Pyetr sat down when he got to the bottom, out of breath, with a stitch in his side, and Sasha slumped bonelessly down beside him.

“Rest a moment,” Pyetr said, drawing deep breaths, bent over and holding a hand over his eye. He still had a sense where Eveshka was, but it seemed dimmer. “She’s weaker. Farther away.” Another breath. “I don’t know what she thinks we are. A man can’t do this all day and all night—”

He was so scared his hands were shaking. He had no idea whose fear it even was. Sasha said nothing. Sasha just leaned on his knees and breathed.

How far can an old man walk? Pyetr wondered to himself, and cradled his wounded hand, which ached the worse since his near fall on the slope up there. “God, we should have found him by now. I think we’re going in circles. Wizards wishing this and wishing that, getting us damned lost, is what we are!”

“I don’t say we’re not,” Sasha muttered.

Which comforted him not in the least.

Damn! the ache… He remembered a nightmare of a cave under willow roots, rot-smelling dark, and the lap of water—

“We’d better get moving,” he said, and shoved himself to his feet, leaning against a tree trunk a moment until Sasha had gotten up. The pain dulled, perhaps because Sasha was well-wishing him, perhaps because the Thing that had caused it was busy, he had no idea.

But Eveshka’s presence suddenly went dark to him. He could say that she had been in the direction he was facing, but there was nothing there now, as if he had gone stone blind to her.

“God!—She’s gone!”

“Not far,” Sasha said. “We know where she was. Come on.”

He followed Sasha, half running in the direction that was his own last feeling, up the wooded slope and headlong down the other side. He took the lead, stopped his downhill plunge against a tree, bruising his shoulder, then splashed across a rill that might be the one from which they had started, for all he knew. The branch-laced sky gave him no clue. The stars were obscured in cloud or the beginning of dawn, he had no idea.

But he felt acute pain in his hand then, and a sense of direction came with it, different and colder.

Oh, god, he thought, and delayed a moment until Sasha overtook him. “The River-thing,” he said between gasps for breath, and indicated the rill beside them. “It’s somewhere around here—”

Sasha looked, for what good it did, and said, calmly, “Salt,” as he slipped off his pack. “Salt will hold it. It’s nearly dawn.”

Pyetr shivered, telling himself all the while that the vodyanoi was afraid of them—he had beaten it off twice with plain steel.

“But where’s she?” he asked. His sword hand ached to the bone. His fingers could hardly feel the hilt when he closed on it. He drew, willing his fingers to stay closed, having to look at his own hand to be sure they did—while Sasha started to make a circle of salt around them in the dead leaves.

The pain eased of a sudden and the feeling began to come back to his fingers. “Sasha,” he said, because the hair was rising at his nape, with an inexplicable conviction someone was looking at his back: Sasha stopping his circle-making, looking up and past him, was no reassurance at all.

Pyetr turned, slowly, holding a sword he could not feel, to /that quarter of brush and trees where the circle was incomplete. Something large and winged suddenly dived at him and flapped heavily away.

“What was thatl” he breathed, reeling back—and in the same instant felt Eveshka’s presence again, so subtle that it might have been there for a heartbeat or two before he knew it, faint as a breath of air, a whisper out of the dark…

“Brother Raven,” Sasha murmured, behind him, as the feeling of Eveshka’s presence grew quite, quite certain. Pyetr looked up and saw the bird clearly—in a sky catching the first faint glow of the sun.

It dipped a wing and glided off over the ridge, opposite to Eveshka’s direction.

“Follow it!” Sasha said. “It’s Uulamets’ creature. Eveshka’s off the track—she knows it now, she’s coming as fast as she can, but so is it’t For the god’s sake—move!”

It was not Pyetr’s inclination to abandon the salt circle, but Sasha wished him into motion, he felt it, caught a breath and started climbing, slipping and sliding on the slick leaves with Sasha close behind him. Eveshka was coming toward them—Eveshka had seen the raven, called it in some fashion from downriver, Pyetr knew that in a solid, no-nonsense way that he connected with Sasha’s meddling, not Eveshka’s—but he did not, this time, resent Sasha shoving things on him neither of them had breath for. He reached the top of the ridge ahead of Sasha and skidded down the leafy slope on the other side, down among thick trees again. His hand ached. He felt an unreasoning dread here, in the dark of these trees.

Sasha arrived as the pain grew acute; from the one side Eveshka’s presence was rushing at them and from the other—from the woods all around, but especially straight ahead—came a sense of cold hostility.

“Can you feel it?” Sasha asked.

Pyetr nodded, saving his breath, willing his fingers to hang on to the sword. The presence he felt ahead of them was not the vodyanoi: that one had a feeling all its own, and he had learned to trust those differences. “Woodsmoke,” he said as the wind carried that to them, and reckoning no Forest-thing would build a fire, he fended brush aside with his sword and started in the direction of that apprehension.

Wings snapped: something swooped past him and brushed his face. The raven settled on a low branch by him, shadow in shadow—

A white shape had appeared in the woods ahead of them, coming toward them; and a dimmer, grayer figure beside it.

“Master Uulamets?” Sasha called out, from Pyetr’s side.

“Who told you to leave the boat?” the gray one snarled as it walked, waving an arm. “Damnable fools!”

“Certainly sounds like him,” Pyetr muttered.

“Papa,” the white one said in Eveshka’s voice, stopping and catching at Uulamets’ sleeve to stop him. “Papa, don’t trust him! Don’t trust anything you hear from them—”

“She’s lying,” Sasha said, and if there were wishes flying, if there was wizardry going on, Pyetr felt nothing but Eveshka, coming from behind him like a hawk’s strike—like a scream in the air—

She was there—ducked under a branch beside him and passed without a glance at either of them, walking straight toward Uulamets and the Eveshka at his side…

“No,” it cried, lifting a hand as if to fend her off. Uulamets lifted his, as if to do the same, but Eveshka walked up to her rival and stretched out her hand. Fingers scarcely met. Then—so quickly Pyetr’s eyes refused to see the change—a single white ghost drifted where both had stood.

Uulamets recoiled, cried out: “No! Damn you—”

“Damned, indeed,” ghost-Eveshka said, and pointed down at her feet. “This is your daughter, papa, this is the daughter you called up—”

Pointing down at a muddy skull and a glistening pile of water-weed.

“God,” Pyetr murmured, as Uulamets stepped back.

Eveshka said, plaintively, “I couldn’t reach you, papa. You wouldn’t listen—”

Uulamets turned away and leaned his arm against a tree, his head bowed.

Pyetr stood there with his sword still in his hand and a cold feeling in his stomach. He hoped it was his Eveshka that had survived that encounter.

Then, gathering his wits: “Babi?” he called.

Almost immediately a body pressed against his boot. It whined. The god knew it had reason.

But it turned up with this Eveshka. It always had, with the one he knew for his.

“I’m here,” Eveshka was saying to Uulamets. “Papa?”

But Uulamets gave no sign he heard.

“Papa, can’t you see me?”

Uulamets gave no answer then, either.

“Your daughter’s here,” Pyetr said, recovering his sense of balance. “Old man, she’s real. She’s the one who’s survived. Babi’s with her. Doesn’t that say it’s her?”

Uulamets pushed himself away from the tree and walked off from them.

Sasha stepped forward, made a sudden, hurt sound. Sasha’s hand lifted as if to ward off some invisible attack as Pyetr looked at him in alarm—both of them frozen for a heartbeat, Sasha in the shock of whatever was happening to him, himself in doubt what to do or what to fight, until Sasha dropped that hand to his sword arm.

“She—” Sasha said, and fell on Pyetr’s neck and hung on him as if all strength had just left him. “Oh—god, Pyetr—”

Pyetr cast an alarmed look at Eveshka, whose expression was quite, quite cold—and guessed by that what transaction might have passed: a bargain paid, or simply that Uulamets’ daughter might have found a heart entirely too fragile a possession after all.

Please the god, Pyetr thought, that Sasha was still sane. But the boy felt something, finally; the boy could beg his pardon for getting him deeper into this place, and swear that he had never wanted to be a wizard—

“Can’t help what you’re born,” Pyetr said, holding on to the boy, sword and all, knowing that Pyetr Kochevikov had never believed that, and that if he had, he might have died the way his father had, instead of the way he figured now he was likely to—take his pick, he could, a ghost without a heart or a Water-thing who wanted to make supper of him, neither one of which he could consistently believe in. Gambler’s luck, it seemed.

Someone had to bury the remains, even if Eveshka seemed to care nothing about the matter and Uulamets stayed by his fireside and gave no sign of interest in it either. So Pyetr used his sword to loosen the dirt, and by a cloudless dawn he and Sasha piled up wet dirt and leaves such as they could, for decency’s sake.

Sasha still was pale, his hands, flecked with bits of earth and wet leaf mold, were white. Wind burn was the only color in his face.

More than that, he did not look up oftener than he must, and then with some vague shame that gnawed at Pyetr’s peace of mind—such as Eveshka left him.

Pushing him and pulling him all at once, that was what it felt like to Pyetr: his would and would-not where she was concerned was so violent and muddled with anger this morning he felt half crazed himself, and he clung to the real world of mud and bone and Sasha’s pale face with all the desperate attention a man could pay to anything after a night of no sleep.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Sasha?”

Sasha nodded without looking at him, and Pyetr gnawed his lip in distress.

“Let’s get the old man moving,” he said. “Look, whatever we decide later, let’s get everyone back to the boat, go back to the house, try this all again—”

Sasha shook his head, and did meet his eyes this time, with a bleak, exhausted look. “It won’t get us out of this. We can’t get there.”

“Do you know that?” Pyetr asked carefully. He felt cold himself, and sick and scared. “Sasha—can you tell, are you free of her?”

Sasha stared through him a moment, and said, “None of us are free…”

Pyetr shook at his arm. “Sasha, damn it, don’t talk like that.”

Sasha gave him a strange look then—blinked and looked at him, laid a chilled hand on his and clenched his fingers. “I’m all right,” he said, and Pyetr’s confusion went away from him, Eveshka’s presence suddenly so quiet he felt drawn to look and see if she was there.

Something stopped him from turning his head. Something held him looking into Sasha’s face. Something told him not to be afraid.

And by everything he had been through he knew better than that.

But Sasha said to him, quietly, “Whatever else—whatever else, it’s got to get me first, Pyetr. And that’s not easy any more.”

He felt his arm begin to shake in its awkward position. He felt the cold of the ground under his knee. “Listen,” he said, fighting it out word by word, “I’m grateful, understand. But don’t do that. Don’t wish me not to worry about you, boy! That’s damned foolish, isn’t it?”

Sasha blinked and his mouth made a desperate, thin grimace of a smile. His grip tightened. “Yes.—But she’s not fighting me. She knows it’s not good for her. It’s all right a while. I can keep her away. Don’t worry about it.”

“Try asking out loud, like a polite boy.”

The grimace broadened into something like a grin. Sasha patted Pyetr’s hand, drew a deep breath and sat back on his heels.

As if it was Sasha, a wise, bone-weary boy carrying far too much on his shoulders. Pyetr rubbed the back of his neck and looked at him a second time, refusing to ask himself what they had just buried, or whether Uulamets’ daughter had ever had a heart in her life—until she borrowed Sasha’s.

And threw it back again, maybe before Uulamets broke it altogether.

Or maybe because Sasha’s own unselfish kindness would not let her hold on to it… and that was the inevitable trap she had fallen into.

“So what are we going to do?” he asked Sasha. “Do we even know grandfather’s sane?”

“I think he’s sane,” Sasha said, and added, with a tremor in his voice: “If any wi/ard is. I think after a while—after a while—”

“You’re not crazy,” Pyetr said. “I’m not sure about him, but I do know you, boy, and you’re not going his way. If you want my ignorant advice—wish us out of here. Fast. Grandfather with us.”

“When you wish, things happen that can happen, and not always the way you want.”

“What was this thing we just buried, then? What was with Uulamets, fixing us breakfast and sleeping in his daughter’s bed? Was that something that can happen? Not in Vojvoda, it can’t!”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said in a subdued voice, and with an uncomfortable glance at the pile of dirt between them. “We know what it was—but I don’t know for sure what raised it.”

“There’s at least two choices,” Pyetr muttered.

“At least two,” Sasha said, and looked aside as Pyetr did, where Uulamets sat beyond a screen of branches, beside the ashes of last night’s fire. “Maybe wanting something so much—”

“He didn’t want herl He wanted a daughter who’d agree with him, say, ‘Yes, papa,’ and keep his house clean.”

“That’s certainly what he got,” Sasha said, “isn’t it?”