C. Cherryh - Yvgenie

Now she was afraid to think about her friend, because she knew that a mother who was scared she was going to fall into the river and drown would have a great deal to say about rusalki, and have very definite wishes about the only company besides her parents and her uncle she had ever had or hoped to have—without even asking whether he had ever hurt her, or, the god forbid, listening to her explain she had known him all her life—

He was not a rusalka who was going to drink up her life or do harm to the woods. The leshys would never let anything wicked come into the woods, her parents had said that— though her father had said, once, that the leshys did not see good and bad the same way wizards did, that a nest of baby birds and a little girl were all the same in their sight, and that she should be careful in the deepest woods—where there were wild leshys who had no memory of debts to any of the two-footed kind, and who defended the woods with their ability to deceive and to cast true spells—because they were magical.

Which meant they would never let her friend come here if be harmed anything—if ghosts were truly magical creatures, or if wizardly ghosts were, and if the leshys could do anything to prevent him.

That was a question. That was, as her uncle would say, a very good question. She had no idea what the limits of the leshys might be: she remembered them visiting the hillside when she was small—like walking trees in a very faint dream. Her parents said the oldest had once held her in his arms and first called her mouse. Her uncle said they were shy creatures, and shyer as time passed—but she had always trusted in them to keep harm away. She had no idea, now she thought of it, what the limits of a ghost might be against the Forest-things she had believed in so implicitly, or whether rusalka could even describe a young man, who said—

Said (though he had never spoken before) that he had not died by drowning.

She was well along the path to the river shore, in the shivery kind of fear he had begun to make in her, when she thought, Maybe he won’t be there this time either. Maybe I broke some rule, finding out what kind of ghost he really is. Ghosts are supposed to follow rules. Maybe he can’t come back now. —Or maybe mother wished something to banish him forever. Maybe I’ll never see him again!

She hurried along, batting brush aside, through thickets that caught at her skirts, in an afternoon that, in the thick of the woods, seemed much farther along toward twilight than she had realized. There was shadow enough now to see a ghost, with the sun far below the trees, and the shade was deepening by the moment.

The path let out on the river well beyond the old ferry dock, at the place she had last seen him. She took the steep slope with now and again a catch at a leafy branch, right down to the marshy edge of the water, where rushes grew— careful there: she had no desire to come home to supper with wet feet.

She looked up and down the shore, even looked up into the trees, in the thought of spotting Owl, who often came before him.

No more than this morning. She sighed; and felt a little chill down her back.

“Hello,” he said.

She turned on her heel and looked directly at his chest—up, quickly, into pale, misty-lashed eyes.

“Where were you this morning?” Fright made her entirely too sharp with him.

“Near. Near you last night, too, but you’ve so many guards.” He touched her cheek with icy fingers, and put chill arms around her. “Ilyana.”

Babi turned up in the kitchen, looking for tidbits in advance of supper. From the yard, Pyetr’s saw ripped away at a board for the cellar trap, and from high on the hill, came an impression that Sasha was busy with his book: Eveshka listened no more deeply than that into other people’s business, no matter her daughter’s opinion.

In the same virtue she did not wonder where her daughter was, late as it was getting. Pyetr was right. There was no cause for alarm and she did not wish to know, or worry, or do any other thing that a rebellious young girl might construe as spying.

But after Babi had had his bits from the kitchen counter, and she said, “Babi, where’s Ilyana?”— then was time to worry, because Babi dropped his head onto small manlike paws, and made a despairing sound quite unlike Babi.

God, she did not like that.

So she went outside and called out to Pyetr over the noise of the saw: “Where’s Ilyana?”

Pyetr stopped, straightened with a stretch of his back and wiped his brow. “I don’t know. Down by the stable.” He looked over his shoulder to see. But there was no Ilyana.

She had a worse and worse feeling. She looked up the hill toward Sasha’s house, and saw Sasha get up from a seat on his porch and look—

Toward the river.

She had a dreadful impression then, of danger, of—

“Pyetr!” she cried, and ran down the walk-up, across the yard, through the hedge and headlong down the slope to the ferry dock—

Past the gray, weathered boat, then, with a stitch in her side, off the dry boards of the dock and down the overgrown shoreline, fending her way through reeds and a thin screen of young birches.

Ilyana was standing there, wrapped in mist, two lovers, one mortal, one—

“Ilyana!” Eveshka flung up an arm to ward off the white owl that instinctly flew at her. It whisked away, shredding on insubstantial winds.

“Mother!” Ilyana gasped, thank the god she could cry out—while the ghost, the very familiar ghost, turned to face her with a familiar lift of the chin.

Young. Oh, yes, he would be that, here, with Ilyana. She remembered him that way, remembered him in the house, in her father’s time.

“You damned dog!” she cried. “Wasn’t I enough? Get out of here! Don’t you dare touch my daughter!”

The whole world swirled and moved, and stopped, ringing with her mother’s voice. Ilyana blinked, still dazed, still tingling to a touch unlike anything she had ever felt, a magic so intoxicating that for a moment yet she had no breath in her body.

Her mother screamed, “You sneaking bastard, get away from her!”

And her friend said faintly, “Eveshka, listen to me… Please listen.”

“Get out of here! Out, do you hear me? You’ve no right here! You’ve no claim on me and none on my daughter, Kavi Chernevog!”

“He wasn’t doing anything!” Ilyana found breath to say, and ran and caught her mother’s arm. The look her mother threw her was cold as ice, a rage that did not belong on her mother’s face—

And oh, god, her father was here with the axe in his hand, but the same moment uncle Sasha slid down the bank through the sapling birches, all out of breath, with leaves snarled in his hair.

Her mother seized her arm so hard it bruised, shouting. “Go awayl “ at her friend. “Never come back, never!”

She wished her mother not to say that, and her mother wished at her with a force that made her dizzy.

Her uncle grabbed her and embraced her, and with an angry force she never imagined her gentle uncle had: “Get out of here, Chernevog, go back! You’ve no right here.”

Her friend lifted his wrist and collected Owl, who assembled himself out of misty pieces. He looked at her then with a dreadful sadness and said, so faintly a breeze could have drowned his voice, “Ilyana, don’t forget me, don’t forget—”

Forget him?

She could not. She never would. Her friend and Owl were fading. Her uncle surrendered her to her father, but she did not want to go to him: he had the axe in one hand. She had never been scared of her father before: he had never carried a weapon in her sight, not the sword that hung among the coats next the door, not so much as a stick the time he had chased the bear out of the yard. Her father caught her face painfully in his hand and made her look him in the eyes. “Are you all right?” he demanded of her. “Ilyana?”