R1 - Rusalka (27 page)

"What do you mean?" Sasha whispered back. So much, he thought, for wizardly sensitivity.

"Nothing," he said, and pulled the quilt over his head, exhausted and determined to sleep, entertaining himself with thoughts of Eveshka.

But immediately as he shut his eyes his traitorous mind conjured instead the sudden drop into the pit at the knoll; and when he banished that memory, gave him the cave and the vodyanoi's soft body wrapping around him—none of which promised pleasant dreams or a restful night.

Doggedly he remembered Eveshka by firelight, which chased the dark to the far edges of his mind.

Until his imagination, sly beast that it was, came around to Eveshka's image on the river, and the touch of her cold fingers—and then, by unpleasant surprise, brought back the feeling of the bones in the cavern mud.

So, well, but even as a ghost, Pyetr told himself, putting his unruly imagination to rout again, Eveshka had hardly done him harm, a little cold water on his face, a scowl and a retreat—which he could now attribute to her desperate frustration rather than to any anger directed at him: she had tried so hard to speak, always without a sound. She had tried, there by the willow that was her tree—

The cave came back, perniciously. He heard the vodyanoi saying, "Best three out of five," with his father's voice, which he reckoned was less prophetic than the fact that he had been recollecting his father with unusual clarity this evening.

Back to the fire, then, and Eveshka: his thoughts kept going in circles, and he sincerely wanted to put all of it away and get some sleep—but with darker and darker images beginning to drift through his eyes when they were shut, he decided he had rather stay awake awhile. Unlikely things seemed to have happened to him with such persistence these last few days that nothing seemed quite safe: his mind was all a-boü with sights it refused to reconcile, and he was beginning to have a great difficulty telling the imaginary from the real.

He was not, tonight, with a dead girl dreaming by the hearth and his whole body aching from the battering of the vodyanoi in the cave, entirely certain that he was in control of his life any longer, and he found that a very upsetting idea.

He could go away from here, he and Sasha could just walk away in the morning with no one to stop them (granted they kept an eye to the river), and two or three days after this he would be able to wonder again if he had ever seen a rusalka or a dvorovoi, or wrestled with a River-thing.

But of nights—

For the rest of his life, he feared he was going to dream about things he did not understand, His confidence and his courage were the only assets he had ever had in life, the fact that Pyetr Kochevikov would make a try while everyone else was hesitating. For a man who had a knowledge of the odds for his only inheritance from his father, the existence of unknowables and uncertainties threaded through every situation was a terrible revelation.

One had either blindly to discount them—the action of a fooler wisely to unravel them, which di4 not look to be a study of a handful of days.

Of course he could walk out of this woods. He could quite possibly look at the ladies of Kiev in years to come and not compare them too unfavorably with Eveshka's ethereal beauty. And between his light-fingered talent and Sasha's odd ability, he reckoned the two of them could make a tolerably comfortable living in a world of natural men and ordinary risks.

But he would always know there were other rules, and that at some fatal moment they could intervene and tip a balance he thought he had calculated.

It would always be a possibility, even in Kiev, particularly as long as he had Sasha Misurov in his vicinity. There might have been things even in Vojvoda he had been fortunate not to have come afoul of; and one of Vojvoda's wizards might have-No. Absolutely not. There was no wizardry at all in old Yurishev's death, and nothing but his own stupidity had brought him to that pass.

Unless—

Unless Sasha, the stableboy at The Cockerel, had, in a momentary slip, wished very, very hard to escape his lot, or to find a friend, or to understand what he felt he was—

Or he might once have wished that a real wizard would someday teach him how to handle that deadly gift of his—

Who knew?

God, maybe Uulamets himself had wished—had wished someone like Sasha to help him.

Who was safe anywhere in the world, if wizards could put a thumb on any balance, years and leagues away?

He wanted, damn it all, to understand what he was involved in before he left the place most likely to have the answers, and to know for a certainty whether he had any free will left, even in the choice to go or stay.

In the morning Eveshka was up before any of them: Sasha heard the rattle of a spoon, lifted his head and saw that Eveshka was mixing something in a large bowl. Beside him Pyetr was quite soundly sleeping, and Eveshka smiled and waggled her fingers at him to bid him lie down and take a little more sleep himself.

Certainly he had no wish to deal with her alone, Uulamets being still abed. It seemed far safer to take advantage of a little more sleep, so he ducked down in the quilts against the morning chill and shut his eyes.

It seemed only a moment later that he woke with the smell of cakes cooking: he could see past the table legs and the bench a three-legged iron griddle standing in the embers; and Eveshka was turning the cakes, talking to her father, who was up and dressing, and saying she had missed the taste of food.

It somewhat gave one a queasy feeling, thinking about rusalkas, and wondering exactly in what fashion they did sustain themselves, or what exactly her appetites had been.

But he decided he could no longer claim to be asleep, so he gathered himself up and waked Pyetr.

"Our lie-abeds," Uulamets greeted them cheerfully enough, though Pyetr muttered under his breath that he was due a little lying abed after carrying the old man home yesterday.

"We owe our young friends," Uulamets said, and took his daughter by the hand and introduced them each by their proper names, which attention embarrassed Sasha: no one to his recollection had ever introduced him to anyone, since everybody who ever came to The Cockerel had already known him—or had no interest in whether the stableboy had a name. He hardly knew what to do, except to look up at the girl with his face gone burning hot and, he was sure, quite red; while Pyetr in his turn made a bow and said he had never seen anyone so beautiful, not even the finest ladies in Vojvoda.

At which Eveshka looked pleased, and Eveshka was the one who blushed in that exchange, then exclaimed about her cakes and quickly rescued the griddle from the fire and dumped them onto the waiting plate.

"They're not burned," she said with a little sigh. "Go, go, everyone wash up. I'll make the tea."

They were wonderful flatcakes, better than aunt Ilenka's, Sasha thought: there were two apiece, with tart dried berries he had not himself discovered in Uulamets ' jars, and every crumb disappeared. Uulamets said Eveshka's mother had used to make cakes like that, and Eveshka smiled and laid her hand on her father's as they sat together at the table.

Altogether Uulamets looked very tired, worn to the bone by the last two days, but he looked changed in a better way, too—as if he had let go all the bitterness and the anger he had, and suddenly remembered, with Eveshka in the house, a kinder way of dealing with people. He set his hand over his daughter's and said to them, "I have to explain to you. There was so little I could honestly explain, there was so little I really knew, myself, except that Eveshka—" He pressed her fingers gently. "Eveshka might have run away from me. That wasn't the case. But I feared it might be, and if it had been, it would have been all but impossible to bring her back."

"Papa had a student, Kavi," Eveshka said. "Long ago. I was very young—very foolish. I believed he was innocent of the things papa said. He was very handsome. Very persuasive. But when I did find it out, I was so—" Eveshka. looked down, then looked at her father. "I was so embarrassed. You were absolutely right. But I was too ashamed to say so. That was why I left that morning. I only wanted to sit down on the dock and think a while. Then the vodyanoi—"

Tears clouded her eyes and she stopped talking. Sasha sat there beside Pyetr wishing he knew what to do or say to an upset girl who had—he began to realize—been a ghost for perhaps more years than he had been alive, and who was at once a girl of sixteen and much, much older. His stomach felt upset. He remembered the vodyanoi and its malice and felt doubly upset, thinking of Eveshka dragged down into that watery cave.

"I was afraid," Uulamets said quietly, "that she'd killed herself—or that that scoundrel had murdered her. I put nothing past Kavi Chernevog, absolutely nothing." He patted Eveshka's hand. "But you're back. That's all. To the black god with Kavi Chernevog. Do you know, I tried to keep your garden, but I'm afraid all I have luck with is turnips."

Eveshka dried her eyes with her knuckle and suddenly laughed.

"It's all there is to eat around here," Pyetr said, and Uulamets frowned. "But," Pyetr went on irrepressibly, "I can say this place has brightened considerably since yesterday."

The compliment pleased Eveshka. It clearly did not please Uulamets , who immediately stood up and suggested they clear away the dishes and straighten up the house.

Chests in the cellar gave up blankets and clothes—Eveshka's own, one supposed; and more shirts and trousers, fine ones, all of
3
. size. Eveshka ordered a rope strung from the bathhouse to the porch and ordered the laundry tubs rolled out—which activity trampled into submission the weeds around the bathhouse, and meant, Sasha foresaw it, an incredible number of heavy buckets carried up the hill.

But this time—Sasha had not expected it—Pyetr bestirred himself to help, even taking the harder part of the course, carrying the buckets to the top of the muddy, root-laddered path from the river and letting Sasha carry them across the yard to the bathhouse.

Pyetr wore his sword while he was doing this, by which Sasha knew exactly the danger Pyetr was thinking about. Pyetr did not go down to the river with one bucket while he was delivering the other: Pyetr took the harder way, carrying both at a time, then sat on a tree root and waited for him to bring the buckets back, a choice which kept them always in sight of each other, and that, too, said that Pyetr was concerned.

So was he, out under a clear sky, with time enough to get a breath of rain-chilled morning air and to consider that they had had an uncommon amount of good luck in the last couple of days. He was tempted to congratulate himself: perhaps Uulamets ' few pieces of advice had helped him manage his gift; or perhaps, as Uulamets had said, it was at least possible to stifle one's ability, to keep a tight grip on it in crises—

"Most people have the instinct for magic," Uulamets had said to him, that morning that Uulamets had begun to teach him. "Some have a minuscule ability—and don't manage it at all except by smothering it entirely. Or they smother their good sense instead, and make a thorough mess of themselves, wishing this and wishing that to patch what they last wished and never understanding anything: I tell you, good hard work and talent enough to nudge luck a little is a good combination. But everybody wants the one without the other."

"And mine?" he had asked, full of trepidation.

"Might not be small," Uulamets had said. "Let me tell you: it's a law of nature: magicians and magical creatures can be affected by magic more easily than ordinary folk. The very talents which extend them into dimensions impossible for ordinary people likewise mean that wizards can be affected by incantations against which ordinary people would be immune—"

"Can a person—stop these things? Can he—?"

"Turn a spell aside, you mean? Yes. You know how."

He did. He had thought so.

"Let me tell you," Uulamets had said then, at the table that morning: Sasha could still see the old man's cautionary lifting of a finger, feel the danger in the air. "It's always easiest for the young: remember I told you that. Remember this with it: it's very easy for a naive talent to get quite deep into the spirit world, rather too little resistance to be safe—"

The other clothes they were washing—

Papa had a student
, Eveshka had said,
Kan
…

"—and the deeper you get, the easier it is to bind and to be bound, do you understand, boy? Be careful. Power is very attractive. Aggression is easier than defense. Using is easier than restraining, doing than undoing. Set things in motion only in one direction at a time, or at least remember the sequence of things you wished and know
everything
you're moving, directly or indirectly. That's very important. Most of all beware of ill-wishing anything."