Rusalka

CHAPTER 32

PYETR DID NOT remember arriving at Chernevog’s house. He only recollected a screen of dead hedges and gray, dead trees, hiding a towered and rambling structure as decrepit as Uulamets’ cottage; remembered walking toward it, not of his own accord, until his knees gave way under him and spilled him helplessly on his face in the dust. He was sure that that much was real.

He thought that at one point, in a room of polished wood, Chernevog had spoken to him again, saying with wizardly persuasion, “You might still redeem yourself with me—” He thought he had refused then—refused, though he was less and less sure he was right, or sane, or that he had chosen right in leaving Sasha to Uulamets.

“Come now,” Chernevog had said again, or at some other time. “Isn’t it foolish to fight me, when all I want is to give you everything you want? Listen to me, that’s all.”

“Sure,” he had said, “why not?”

“But you have to believe in me,” Chernevog had said, “and you’re lying, aren’t you? Stop pulling away from me. Do you want to live, fool?”

“Yes,” he said, eventually, screamed it, because Chernevog insisted, then tucked himself up on the floor where he had fallen and held his stomach—

Or it was long ago in Vojvoda, on a dark lane with a couple of bad losers—who had robbed him besides—

One bully’s like another, Pyetr thought now bitterly. Never satisfied, never satisfied, no matter how much you give them.

“Yes,” he said when Chernevog asked, or “No,” when Chernevog insisted; “I swear!” when Chernevog half-suffocated him; anything that Chernevog wanted, he agreed to, because he had no choice if Chernevog moved his limbs, stopped his breathing, dashed him to the ground—no choice and no effect to his wishes, for good or ill.

At last he felt cold against his face, and heard Eveshka pleading, “Pyetr, Pyetr, get up, hurry.”

He did try. Every joint hurt. “Please,” she whispered, “please, quickly, quickly, do what I tell you. He’s asleep. You’ve got to get out of here.”

He hauled himself up by the edge of a tottering bench that made a sound like thunder, got his knees under him and shoved himself to his feet. Eveshka tried, with little touches that could not touch him, to assist his balance, guiding him through an archway of carved fishes and up a short flight of steps.

“Where’s my sword?” he asked, catching at the doorframe, at a shelf then, for balance, within a little of knocking a pot off it. His heart thumped as the vessel rocked and settled. “Where’s my sword? Where is he?”

“It’s too dangerous, no! I can’t get past that door. He’s protected! Just get away—”

“Where’s the damn sword?” he insisted, but she wanted him out the door, wanted him to get to Sasha and her father—wanted him simply out of her way:

“Help my father!” she said. “Help where you have a chance: you can’t face him, you can’t do anything against him, you can’t even get in there. Just get out of here! It’s all you can do, Pyetr!”

He saw his sword by the door, staggered that direction and picked it up, having then to lean against the wall, his knees shaking under him.

“Please,” Eveshka said, and touched his face, tears shimmering in her eyes. “Please! You’re no help to me, you only hurt me—”

“It’s a trick,” he said. “Dammit, it’s a trick!” He struck out at her, passed his hand through cold: that was like Eveshka—who recoiled from him, hands clasped in front of her mouth.

“Get out of here! Please.”

The door beside him blasted open on a gust of wind and damp straight from the outside. He looked out on gray daylight, the tops of dead trees beyond a porch railing. Misting rain gusted into the room. Wind knocked something rattling, with a sound to wake the dead.

He turned his head in alarm, saw Eveshka’s eyes widen, her mouth open in that instant as something blocked the wind at his back.

He whirled around face to monstrous face with the vodyanoi’s head swaying snakelike above the porch rail, sleek and black and glistening with rain.

“Well, well,” Hwiuur said, “come ahead, come outside. The master certainly doesn’t mind. He truly doesn’t. He said you’d be coming.”

Pyetr moved to slam the door shut, but a rain-laden gust blew it back at him, and the vodyanoi struck through the doorway like the serpent he was, blocking it from closing as his strong, small hands seized Pyetr’s ankle.

“Stop!” Eveshka was screaming. “Kavi! Kavi, no, stop it! Make it stop! It’s going to kill him—”

Pyetr gave up holding on, slung the sheath off his sword and beat at the River-thing’s head and body as it dragged him out into the light. His hand ached and went numb; he all but dropped the sword, sky and boards changing places as wet coils flowed over him. The sword did leave his hand. Pain ran up that arm to his ribs, where Hwiuur’s weight pressed.

“Got you at last,” Hwiuur said, wrapping around him.

Then the vodyanoi flinched upward and hissed: “Salt! Treachery!”

They could see the towers through the woods, a huge house that might have graced some great city, sitting instead in desolation, weathered gray as the barren trees about it.

“There,” said Uulamets, out of breath.

And Sasha, with a pounding of his heart, with far too many unwelcome memories of this place and Uulamets’ own boyhood: “Do we just walk up to it?”

“Until someone objects,” Uulamets said, and struggled up the rise the land took here, up the mist-slick and muddy slope. He faltered, and Sasha without thinking steadied him, not surprised when the old man shoved him off at the top, not offended at the anger and the concentration that refused outside interventions. Quiet, that concentration wished on them both: invisibility, unexpectedness.

It encouraged Kavi Chernevog, told* him reassuring things about his own power, his own cleverness—it told him Ilya Uulamets was old and failing, and that there was no reason to worry in this encounter Chernevog had long schemed to provoke. Every power hereabouts was afraid of Chernevog, even the leshys.

It was easy to believe that, it was especially easy because that was what Chernevog sent out to them, and they echoed back to him with small slight changes for his own suspicious, heartless character:

Beware of Eveshka.

She doesn’t love you. Could you expect that? She never did: she only wanted power for herself.

Then a soft, insinuating doubt came from the other direction, the certainty that Pyetr was alive and with Chernevog.

Sasha faltered, felt a cold, cruel impulse to distrust Uulamets, remembering that Uulamets would spare nothing, not even Eveshka, certainly not him or Pyetr in his purposes, and rescuing Pyetr was out of the question.

Then Uulamets caught his arm and said, “Watch yourself, watch yourself, boy. That’s him, too. You can’t believe a thing.”

But he was increasingly certain where Pyetr was, next a tree in a yard he had never, except through Uulamets’ eyes, seen in his life; and he was certain that Eveshka had given way to Chernevog and accepted his gift of strength, Pyetr having no more to spare…

As for Sasha Misurov, the seductive whisper came, if he would simply stand aside, if he would do that, then Chernevog would make him powerful in his own right, over all the people in the world that had ever despised him, because Chernevog did not discount him, Chernevog recognized his presence with Uulamets and knew that, but for youth, he was far more than Uulamets—

A boy who would pledge himself to Chernevog would be part of Chernevog’s own household, along with Eveshka, along with Pyetr, ageless, ruling over cities and kingdoms if he desired it—

Or he could die, seeing Pyetr die before him—

“If Pyetr’s there,” Uulamets breathed as they walked, “Chernevog won’t kill him, not while he’s got you upset. Trees, boy!”

He was worth nothing, at the end, except as a hostage, a weapon on Chernevog’s side, a point of leverage between Uulamets and Sasha, who were going to walk into this place—

Chernevog perhaps wanted him to know that, or Hwiuur did; or perhaps he had wit enough occasionally to know some things without a wizard to explain it to him: he no longer was sure where his thoughts came from, sitting where Hwiuur had dragged him, in the mud of the yard, at the foot of a dead tree-once Chernevog had gotten from him the little packet of salt that Sasha had given him at the start of their trek.

God, he had never once thought of it; and maybe that was the kind of luck a wizard made for himself. But to have Chernevog take it from him and throw it contemptuously into the mud-Smiling.—God!

“Hold him,” Chernevog said then to the vodyanoi; and to Pyetr: “They’re still coming. The old man’s tricked your young friend, quite the way he’d have used me or his own daughter, ultimately—gotten hold of him in a way your friend wouldn’t choose for himself, I assure you. You might pull him away.”

To you, Pyetr thought, and turned his face against the smooth, cold bole of the tree, expecting pain for that refusal.

“Don’t you owe him to do that?” Chernevog asked.

Only stop fighting me, Chernevog kept saying, in countless ways: I have everything. I’ll give you anything you want…

Eveshka had tried, god, longer than flesh and bone could hold out, while Chernevog who could have killed him with a spare thought kept him alive—

“Eveshka’s reconsidered,” Chernevog said. “I think you understand that. Shouldn’t you do the same? You could save your young friend, who has so much potential. You could amount to something. You could do so much good with your life. And you da nothing.”

Pyetr went—finally, while Chernevog walked off to the house, and the exhaustion and the doubts about Chernevog and Uulamets both overwhelmed him. He hung his head and tried to get his wits about him, ignoring the soft slither of Hwiuur’s coils constantly circling the tree, occasionally sliding over his legs, Hwiuur whispering in his cold, sibilant voice: “Not so glib now, are you? Not so clever after all. Such a disappointment you’ve proved to your friends. And to the woman.”

I’m not a disappointment, Pyetr thought, remembering ’Mitri, remembering pronouncements from every father in Vojvoda.—Everyone expected me to be a failure.

“They’re coming,” Hwiuur said, and nudged him with his head, jaws against his cheek. “Look, look, just atop the hill.”

Sasha, with Uulamets, he could make them out through the brush, under the gray and flickering sky—the both of them walking steadily toward the house, whether by their own will or not.

“You’ll find out, now,” Hwiuur said, resting his jaw on Pyetr’s shoulder, gusting dank breath into his face.

“God!” Pyetr flinched from under that weight. “Get away from me! Sasha, dammit, run, for the god’s sake!”

“Pyetr?” Sasha’s voice came drifting across the distance, thin and frightened. He saw the boy start to run then.

Toward him.

I’m a damn jinx, Pyetr thought, cursing himself—

In a wizard-quarrel, where every player but himself could load the dice—

A gambler’s son knew a crooked game when he saw it.

“He’s in the house!” Pyetr yelled, and quicker than he could get it out, the vodyanoi’s coils went about him, tightening. “Chernevog’s in the house: get him!”

Sasha had stopped cold, looking at the house, Pyetr saw that as his ribs began to creak—joints cracking with his effort to keep the coils apart.

Suddenly something small, winged, and black flurried into the space between his face and Hwiuur’s, driving its beak again and again at the vodyanoi’s eyes.

And a heart-stopping flash of light and shock burst in the yard, with a crack of thunder.

Sasha sprawled in the mud, scrambled toward master Uulamets while burning bits of the bathhouse were still showering down around them.

While—he thought, Uulamets thought, having wished Chernevog’s bolt aside—the lightnings were reshaping themselves over their heads: their hair was rising on end, skin prickled the way it had when Uulamets had realized that one was corning.

Uulamets had wanted it toward the house, but Sasha had simultaneously flinched, disagreed, feverishly compromised on something belonging to Chernevog—

Remembering his parents’ voices behind a sheet of fire—

“Sasha!” he heard Pyetr screaming, then, while the lightning aimed at them again, while Uulamets a second time wanted the house—

Sasha wished with him of a sudden, scared, knowing Pyetr was in trouble.

The sky tore, the world tore, a seam of bright light. The east tower of the house went white and showered bits of burning wood.

Fire leapt up in the shattered tower and at places on the roof, fire spread on the winds of Uulamets’ intention—wind rushing toward the house.

“Lightning likes tall things,” Uulamets muttered, as Sasha wished a sudden, stolen swirl of wind and sparks toward the vodyanoi—wished Pyetr /ree—while more lightning was readying itself and Uulamets was trying to concentrate their attention and fight Chernevog’s direction of it in less than a heartbeat.

Lightning intended them, the house, them again—struck the mud of the yard beyond them. Sasha flung up his arms to shield himself, the shock flung him flat on his back, and when he scrambled to his knees and to his feet he could see nothing of the tree and Pyetr but that rip in the world, floating over and over through his vision, heard nothing but the roar in his ears—blind and deafened and helpless to know what had happened.

“Pyetr!” he cried, while Uulamets was damning him for a fool, Uulamets was directing his attention to the house, to Chernevog, somewhere in that direction, not dead, and not through with them…

Hwiuur writhed away, lashing wildly with his coils, and Pyetr lurched upward and sprawled in the mud, shocked in every joint, scrambling away from the creature on his knees and one arm, the other collapsing under him, broken for all he knew: he only moved as fast as he could manage, half-blind, all but deafened.

Then his hand fell on something in the mud, a sodden lump tied with string, and he recognized what luck or a wizard’s wish had put under him—with the vodyanoi hissing like steam off iron, thumping about and searching blindly toward him.

He clutched the packet in his fist, rolled over and sat there as it came at him, tore at the string with his teeth, and failing that, feverishly, at the leather.

It came open, as Hwiuur kept coming, as Hwiuur’s cold breath hit him in the face.

He flung the salt wide, scattering it toward the River-thing.

Hwiuur screamed, reared back, Sasha knew what was happening: Uulamets saw it; and flinging an arm about him, Uulamets wished his sight clear, his ears to hear—

“Boy!” Uulamets said, while the light that blinded his eyes turned red, and black, and became a haze. “He’s coming out, boy, Chernevog’s coming out, never mind the River-thing—pay attention]”

Sasha blinked, wiped streaming eyes, and, looking toward the house, saw a fair-haired young man arrive on the porch and walk down toward them, holding a book in his arms.

“Pyetr!” Sasha called out, wanting him with them, suddenly, obsessively, fearing to have Pyetr out of sight: the feeling the lightnings brought was growing again, and of a sudden ghosts swirled about them, cold and shrieking. The lightning was going—was aiming in Pyetr’s vicinity—

It struck the tree instead, and the earth itself shook under their feet.

“Chernevog!” Uulamets shouted into the wind, wanting him, wanting his enemy’s attention and Sasha’s with unequivocal force. “Remember the teaching, remember, young fool, the things I told you about recklessness—”

A thin, blond-haired boy came to the river house, a sullen lad who held more power than was good for any young wizard, arrogant in his ways-Dangerous, Sasha thought. That boy had been a fool, gifted as he was…

Uulamets said, aloud, shouting against the wind: “I’ll teach you a new lesson, boy! There is a way to undo the past!”

“You’ve lost your wits, old man!”

“It’s very simple, Kavi, lad: know its effects; and cancel them!”

“Do you want the past, old man? I’ll give you the past!” Memories of Chernevog’s came, Draga, not Uulamets sitting by the hearth, with an open book: Chernevog a younger boy, no more than ten or twelve; or again, sixteen, in Draga’s bed—

“Draga’s lover!” Uulamets said aloud, and laughed with a sarcasm that made Sasha wince. “Father god, the woman leaves my bed, and takes to seducing pretty boys, no less! God, I should have known: you were too precocious. So it was all Draga. Did she set you to stealing, boy?”

The wailing of the ghosts faltered. “It wasn’t,” Chernevog said, “all Draga.”

“Ask yourself that.”

Another faltering.

“Poor boy,” Uulamets said.

“Poor boy,” Chernevog cried, and Sasha wished Chernevog’s attention centered on them both, wished Chernevog to know what they both knew of Draga; what he knew of Uula mets—himself, Chernevog’s successful replacement in Uulamets’ household—

What they both knew of consequences and wild magic, that from Uulamets—

The lightnings tried to gather. The air shivered with the power, with the ghosts screaming about them.

“I killed her,” Chernevog said, with his hair and theirs standing up, the wind swirling at them. He looked like a crazy man. “I killed her when she went too far with me, old man.—I slept with your wife, don’t you care about that?”

“No more than she did,” Uulamets said. “She used you, boy. She ate you alive.”

The lightning was going to strike, was going to strike, them or Chernevog. Sasha felt his hair rise, felt sparks dancing between his fingers—

And wished it onto the bathhouse again, a course no one was resisting, no one else expecting it. The ground shook, the ghosts screamed.

But of a sudden Pyetr was coming through the roiling smoke behind Chernevog: Sasha saw him, betrayed him with that quick, repented thought—and suddenly realized Pyetr a danger to them, diverting his attention from Uulamets, from their own defense, while more lightning crackled in the air.

Uulamets himself wished, then, and of a sudden—

Fed everything into Sasha’s hands, power that fed straight through to Pyetr, caught for a heart-beat motionless and then moving, Chernevog having caught the last lightning flash in his eyes: Pyetr hit him while he was turning, a single blow with a rock, in the same moment Uulamets himself fell against Sasha, Sasha distractedly, vainly trying to hold the old man as he slid through his arms to the ground.

Chernevog fell, Uulamets had fallen, the ghosts screamed away into silence, and Sasha was on his knees facing Pyetr over Uulamets and Chernevog both, still feeling Uulamets’ memories, but no longer feeling the source of them—only an overwhelming silence where a presence had been.

“Grandfather?” Pyetr asked, in the real-world crackle and roar of the burning house.

“I think he’s dead,” Sasha said, numbly, and saw Pyetr take up the rock again to break Chernevog’s skull once for all.

Maybe it was his wish that stopped Pyetr. Maybe it was Pyetr’s own, that brought his hand down slowly, and had sweat glistening on his face. “What in the god’s name-do we do with him?”

Memory said, so strongly Sasha shivered: Wish only good.

Memory stretched out his hand, the way Uulamets had done with him: he gently touched Chernevog on the brow, wishing him a long and dreamless sleep.

“Pyetr!” Eveshka cried from the direction of the fire: Sasha could see her, on the descent from the house, clinging to the rail and hurrying, smoke-smudges on her face, her tattered blue gown. Pyetr scrambled up and stumbled, catching himself with difficulty, but Eveshka ran, ran all-out toward him and into his arms, saying, “Sasha? Papa?”

Memory said, so clearly Sasha felt Uulamets die all over again: Do it, boy; and take care of my daughter-Memory said: To raise the dead—always costs the living.

And Sasha thought: He meant to kill Pyetr—or me. He didn’t care. He didn’t die for her. I had the way to Chernevog’s back: he had to give me everything to win, that was all.

He did not know what to say to Eveshka.

Finally he did say, because he wanted it over with, and he did not want to exist behind a mask with her: “He passed me everything.”

But he did not think Pyetr would understand.

“Help me get the fires out,” he said, when Eveshka said nothing, nor wept, only stood there, pale and distraught. She looked him in the eyes, then, and he stood up and looked at her with too many and too confused memories.

A long, long moment like that.

“What’s going on?” Pyetr said. “What’s happening, dammit?”

“The fire,” Sasha said to Eveshka. “Help me, please, Eveshka.”

They found the raven dead, a sodden lump of feathers near the splintered tree, and a long, long wallow down to the streamside.

Pyetr gathered it up, smoothed its feathers, felt a genuine sorrow for the creature that had defended him, even if it was a stupid bird; and he took it back and laid it beside Uulamets, where they were making a cairn around him, saying, defensively, “It ought to be with him.”

He had mixed feelings about the gesture then, because it made Eveshka cry, and she had not, until he said that.