C. Cherryh - Rusalka

But Pyetr muttered something half-dazed and vulgar just then, and started shivering, too, which convinced him that it was most probably Pyetr he was holding. Pyetr looked about him of a sudden, tried to get up in his confusion, stumbled free of him and sat down hard, facing Uulamets.

“My daughter prefers you ,” Uulamets said in a harsh, hoarse voice. “I shouldn’t have been surprised.” Uulamets shoved the staff in their direction, striking Pyetr on the foot. “Where did she go?”

“Your daughter,” Pyetr murmured, and shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. “Your daughter , old man—”

“Where did she go?” Uulamets shouted. Pyetr drew his knees up into his arms and Sasha scrambled forward, thinking the old man might hit him, thus unprotected. But Pyetr drew a large breath and lifted a hand, pointing toward the woods ahead of him; and Uulamets got up and peered in that direction as if there was something to be seen but moonlight and dead trees.

“Can you see her?” Sasha whispered, and Pyetr shook his head, shook it fiercely this time, and sat there until Uulamets walked back toward them.

“We should go back to the house,” Uulamets said, which Sasha thought was a very good idea.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and, taking Pyetr by the arm, pulled and helped him to his feet.

Pyetr had nothing to say, not then nor on the trek home, except once to protest that he could walk on his own, although he was limping, and although he faltered at the rougher places and had frequently to catch his breath and his balance.

“Help him,” Sasha begged of Uulamets, but Pyetr would have none of that either, shaking him off and continuing on until they were back at the dockside, and then by a steep climb up the hill, in the yard itself.

Something went crashing off into the hedge. “Probably a rabbit,” Sasha said, because Pyetr had stopped still at the gate and seemed frozen there. He seized Pyetr by the arm and pulled him along in Uulamets’ track, himself afraid to look back or to wonder what might be watching from the hedge.

Everything was real. He knew that it was and he knew that he was a part of it, and that Pyetr was in the most terrible danger, because that creature, that white thing, was dead, and haunting the riverside, and Uulamets had said, speaking to Pyetr, My daughter prefers you …

“Just a little further,” he said to Pyetr, for Pyetr’s strength finally seemed to give out on the walk-up, or the cold seemed to be too much for him.

Then he felt the chill, too, and saw the white visitor from the tail of his eye.

“Master Uulamets!” he said, holding fast to Pyetr.

Uulamets turned quickly about.

“It was here,” Sasha said. “It was here, following us—”

“Inside,” Uulamets said from the porch, and pulled the latchstring in haste, bringing the door open, bringing a gold flood of firelight out onto them, to make shadows on the porch. “Inside. Quickly .”

As if—Sasha thought—as if, daughter or no, the old man was in dire fear of what they had attracted.

THERE WAS WARMTH, there were quilts to wrap in when they had shed the dew-damp coats, there was a cup of spirits, and Pyetr finally felt warm again.

He felt foolish, too, and altogether put upon. He stood there in front of the fire sipping vodka while Uulamets went straight to his precious book, by oil light, and Sasha hovered between the fireside and the old man’s mutterings, scared and half-soaked from the ground as he was, and both of them like to take their deaths, Pyetr reckoned, from all this foolishness.

“Here,” Pyetr said sullenly, offering the cap to Sasha, “have some. Warm up.”

Sasha drank a little, made a face as he swallowed, and gave the cup back.

Not a word out of him, not a word out of Uulamets. Only there was something shifting about uncomfortably under the house, like a bear or something that had decided to make a den of the cellar—only it was past that time of year that bears waked, by all he knew, and nothing made sense anyway.

Sasha hovered between the fireside and the table, watching him, watching Uulamets. It annoyed him. He wished most of all that it were morning, when the sun would make sense out of the night made confused, and most of all he wished he would wake up from this bad dream. Probably, he thought, his memory was already confused, probably he had hit his head when he had fallen, and believed the boy’s addled nonsense, and imagined the girl who had wafted right through a thorn thicket, the solidity of which his right hand very bloodily attested.

He took another sip. Uulamets turned another page and another, opened up an inkpot and wrote, with a black raven quill. Pyetr found himself shivering, his throat pricklish, his stomach upset.

He thought about Uulamets at dinner, about the chance that Uulamets had slipped something into the stew or even—he swallowed a mouthful of vodka too suddenly, and it burned his raw throat all the way down—into the drink. That was too cruel.

He thought, We have to get out of here, tomorrow, first thing, before he does us some violence—

Uulamets rose from his place at the table, closed the inkpot and closed the book.

Then Uulamets walked over to them at the hearth, frowning. “Did she,” Uulamets asked, “did she seem— unhappy ? …”

Pyetr shoved back his hair, lifted the cup, and glared at the old man. “ Who seem unhappy? Your imaginations? Your conjurations from mushrooms and whatever you dropped into the tea?”

“My daughter,” Uulamets shouted at him. “My daughter. Did she seem unhappy?”

“She’s your daughter!” Pyetr cried, flinging off the quilt, ignoring Sasha’s reach for his arm. “Can’t you tell if she’s unhappy?” The whole question was ridiculous. He found himself answering and disgusted with himself, sat down in front of the fire with his vodka and tugged the quilt up about his shoulders. “She’s a damn mushroom. A taint in the tea. How should I know if she’s happy or not?”

Except it seemed to him that the girl he had dreamed of had been lost and wrathful, and that she had tried to speak to him—a soundless speaking face all pale and beaded with water—

“ Insolent hound!” Uulamets said and snatched the quilt away. “My daughter never had any sense about men. So she’s chosen you. “

Pyetr stared up at him with the sinking realization that Sasha equally well consented in this insanity. Sasha was kneeling, tugging at his elbow, asking him to answer Uulamets—

“His daughter,” Sasha whispered at his side. “He’s worried about her. She’s dead , Pyetr—”

“Well, he has perfectly adequate cause to worry about her, then! This is all crazy, this is all absolutely crazy!” He contemplated his cup in desperation and feared indeed that it was drugged.

“Tell him!”

“She was soaking wet, was how she was,” Pyetr snapped, “and I doubt she was happier than I was.” His teeth started to chatter and he took a deep drink of the potion that was surely the cause of his visions—but there was no cure for them until dawn, he knew there was not, and he humored the boy, if not the old man. “She tried to talk. She went away—”

“To which tree?” Uulamets demanded of him.

“To which tree? It’s a damned forest out there, haven’t you noticed? To which damned tree? How should I know?” The grandmothers said that drowned girls haunted trees. Lured lovers to die. He had had to follow, in his dream. The dose of drugs had been too strong and he had fallen, and Uulamets wove lies, encouraging them by his questions to remember, as charlatans would, exactly what he intended they should remember. “I didn’t ask her about her tree , for the god’s sake. It didn’t occur to me.”