C. Cherryh - Rusalka

He sat there all day listening to the boy tell Uulamets what precisely had happened on the river, listening to Sasha, damn it all, tell Uulamets about his investigating the dockside, if not the boat; and finally admitting that, too, in Uulamets’ persistent questioning. Pyetr stared at the rafters, ground his teeth, and asked the gods why he was saddled with a fool.

But the answer to that, he told himself, was simply that Sasha had found in Uulamets what he had always wanted, a wizard to tell him his fancies were true and his wishes could change things in ways he wanted.

“What about the horses?” he asked Sasha when Sasha came near the fire.

“What horses?”

“Or the tsar’s own carriage. Either one would do. Maybe our host could wish them up—you being only a novice.”

“Pyetr, listen to him. Please listen to him.”

He gave a flourish of his hand. “Of course. All day. Constantly. Inner eyes and all that. God, boy. I did think you had more sense.”

“Pyetr—”

“He wants to find a damned tree. Fine. Let’s go out in the woods and I’ll find him a nice one. And while we’re stumbling about in the dark, supposing we don’t fall in a bog, he’s going to sing his daughter up out of the grave. That should be a sight. I’ll pass on the stew tonight. I’ll make my own dinner.”

Sasha looked hurt. “I never was careless. Master Uulamets—”

“ Master Uulamets, is it?”

“He’s telling us the truth. I swear to you. She’s why there aren’t any animals. It was my luck got us as far through these woods as it did. It got us to him.”

“Bravo. So we can be ghost bait.”

“If we can find her tree or if he can put a spell on her—we’re safe. We won’t be, even here, otherwise. She won’t give up on you.”

“Persistent young lady. Why don’t we just open the door and ask her in?”

“Don’t say that. Be careful what you invite her to do. This isn’t something to joke about.”

He had that cold feeling up his back again.

It was colder, after supper—stew for them and a couple of small turnips for himself, and no drink at all. He had a great deal of trouble falling asleep, with the creaking the house beams made. Unstable ground, he decided.

Until they creaked and the whole floor seemed to shift a little.

But senses could trick a body, especially close to sleep. Sasha was sleeping peacefully beside him on the hearthstones, wrapped in a quilt. Uulamets had finally given up writing in his book and taken to his bed, snoring softly. Pyetr rested his head on his arms in the half-light the dying fire provided and listened to the house creaking and listened to the wind in the dry trees.

Suddenly a single footstep sounded on-the walk, and another on the porch.

He took a breath to call out to Uulamets, who doubtless knew his visitors and their habits. But for some reason without reason he held that breath for a moment and made no movement or sound.

Someone knocked on the door.

Sasha stirred. Uulamets sat up in bed.

No one moved for a few heartbeats. Then Uulamets got up and headed for the door.

“Don’t open it!” Pyetr cried, saw he was going to do it, and scrambled under the table and past the bench, groping in the near-dark for his sword as the door opened, as a wind swept in and blew at the embers.

He grabbed at his sword and unsheathed it, heart pounding—flung an arm over the bench and hurled himself for his feet.

She was there, white and filmy and wavering in the wind. Dripping with river weed.

Then the wind swept inside, wreaking havoc of falling herb bunches and clanging pots and sparks flying from the fire.

“Shut the door!” Pyetr cried. “For god’s sake shut the door!”

For once someone listened to him. Uulamets heaved it shut, Sasha threw his weight at it, and the bar dropped down. The broom thumped down onto the floor. A last cup fell off the shelf and shattered.

“God,” Pyetr breathed.

Uulamets looked at him. Sasha looked like a ghost himself, still bracing himself against the door, although the wind had died away.

Pyetr did not even try to sheathe the sword. He laid it on the table, picked up the vodka jug and a cup and managed to get the liquid in it instead of on the table, that was all his hands could manage.

While the house creaked and whatever-it-was in the cellar growled in displeasure.

He truly wished himself in Kiev—or any place else tonight, for that matter.

“Only the wind?” Uulamets gibed at him.

He took the drink and looked up at the old man with a sinking feeling that hereafter Uulamets knew the territory and he did not.

Hereafter Sasha knew the territory better than he did. And Pyetr was still far from trusting that Uulamets had any good motives toward Sasha or toward him. The steel sword on the table seemed as formidable as it always had been—except when one dealt with ghosts.

Sasha began picking up the herb bunches and the surviving cups and withered objects that had fallen off the rafters, the god alone knew what some of them were.

“Move, move,” Uulamets said, waving Pyetr aside, and Pyetr took his cup, his sword and its sheath and went over to sit on his blankets while Sasha swept up.

He was useless, Pyetr thought glumly, he was absolutely useless to the old man or to Sasha, if the law of the place favored magic and not honest wit. He had no urge whatsoever to get up and help. It was Sasha’s old man. So let him work for him. The old man had wanted Sasha for ghost bait, the old man discovered instead that Sasha had some kind of ability—so the black god take Pyetr Kochevikov, if he was stupid enough to be here, on the peripheries of what Sasha had wished up.

Or what the old man had wished, who knew?

Sasha had no more use for him anyway. Sasha had changed his mind and his loyalties, and who knew? Maybe the old man had ‘witched him into it.

But if magic did it, Pyetr thought, and Uulamets was the master in that, then what could Sasha do or what could he himself have done, except to have gotten them away before they ever fell this deep into Uulamets’ plans?

And what could he look for in Kiev, but more Dmitri Vene-dikovs and more betrayals and more of the same as Vojvoda? Sasha was the only friend he had ever had who would endure any inconvenience for him, the only one who would, god knew, have carried him through the woods or defended him from a ghost.

So why go to Kiev, anyway, if the only friend he had was here, at Uulamets’ beck and call?

He set the cup down and ran the sword back into its sheath, he cast a jaundiced glance at Uulamets sitting over at the table with his gnarled hands clenched in front of his forehead, his lips moving in some god-knew-what-kind-of-incantation, which might or might not work—he still had his doubts on that score, even if there were ghosts. There was no surety spells worked; there was no surety even if some spells worked, that Uulamets’ spells did, against—

—whatever she was.

Pyetr said, without moving from where he sat, “Well, what are we going to do about her?”

Uulamets went on talking to himself. Sasha stopped sweeping and leaned on his broom, looking at him with some indefinable expression: worry, maybe.

“So we find her tree,” Pyetr said, feeling increasingly foolish with every word that left his mouth. “Then what? Ask her to leave me alone?”

His wits kept trying to rearrange things sensibly. There had not been a wind, Sasha was not sweeping up broken pottery—but this time he deliberately set himself to remember that face that kept fading on him, and the wind, and the fear: he could not believe in it now, but he held on to it, reminding himself that he had made up his mind and that, reason aside, he was going to believe it, if that was what it took to exist here and deal with this woods. And Sasha still had the broom in his hands and a pile of broken pottery at his feet.