R1 - Rusalka (43 page)

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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?"