C. Cherryh - Rusalka

He went after more wood, squishing as he walked, warming himself with temper and with work. He gathered a good armload up on the ridge, keeping an eye on the boy at the fire, and came back to build the fire three times its size.

“Could you see master Uulamets?” Sasha said, worried. “If it came back—”

“Let it choke on him.” Pyetr sat down, pulled his wet boots off, pulled off his own breeches and wrung them out, making a puddle in the grass. He sneezed violently, wiped his nose, and put the breeches back on, wet as they were.

“I don’t think I even know where the house is,” Sasha said.

It was a grim thought, for a moment. Then Pyetr jutted his chin toward the river. “Good as any road. I know where we are. Use your wits, boy. You don’t get everything by wishing.”

Sasha’s face reddened past its pallor, and Pyetr remembered then calling him a fool and half drowning him.

“You did all right,” he said, and pulled his coat off and laid it on the grass, figuring the shirt was the only thing that was going to dry in any reasonable time. He wrung it out a second time, found himself a couple of sticks and spread it on them, to hold over the fire. “Just for the god’s sake what did you think you were going to do?”

“Bring you your sword,” Sasha said. “Then it came out of the hole. I knew it was out. Before I went in the water.” He started shivering again, having trouble with his tongue. “What was in there?”

Pyetr stared at the fire, keeping his shirt out of it, concentratedly keeping it from scorching, keeping his eyes on the bright warmth. “Bones. Lot of bones. I think I know what happened to his daughter.”

“You think he knew?”

Pyetr shrugged, recollecting a pretty face. A girl Sasha’s age. Not a ghost, a memory of a ghost. “Maybe,” he said. “He knew about the Thing in the river. He wasn’t surprised, was he?”

“He says he can bring her back.”

“Bones are damn hard to bring back. Aren’t they?” He remembered Sasha saying, the morning after his own illness—Pyetr, you were dying and he brought you back-He did not want to remember that. He did not want to guess what the old man was doing over the ridge. He did not want to remember the inside of the cave, or the feel of the vodyanoi’s body or that mud in the entrance, with the bones in it.

He said, in Sasha’s long silence, “About time we got out of here. We’ll get grandfather home, get him settled. He owes us, this time. He can’t say we didn’t try.”

Somehow the prospect of trekking down the riverside was both more and less frightening than it had been. At least, if there was such a thing as a vodyanoi, it could be cut, it—whatever master Uulamets said—hated the sun, it preferred the water, it skulked around in underwater caves and there was a way to avoid it on those terms, simply keeping to the general line of the river for a guide through the forest and never spending the night without fire, which they could get the same way master Uulamets got it, with a clay firepot.

“We walked in,” he said to Sasha, “we can certainly walk out again, in a direction we want to go.”

“We still need his help,” Sasha whispered, as if anything they said could carry across the ridge. “Just please, please don’t fight with him, don’t make him angry.”

He had seen Sasha’s face when the wizard was talking. Sasha’s deference to the old man infuriated him. But he had thought the Thing was a dog; and sometimes it still looked that way; and he had thought a vodyanoi was a bad dream; and it still felt that way; and he would have said Sasha’s wishes were no likelier to come true than anyone’s—but he saw at least the chance that an old man twice as stubborn and set on his way could scare a youngster like Sasha, who was convinced his least ill-wish could work terrible, far-reaching harm.

“The old man’s damned me often enough,” Pyetr said. “If there was anything to that , do you think that Thing down there would have gone running?”

“He wanted it to.”

“Oh. god,” Pyetr said in disgust, and rescued his shirt from scorching. It was hot, and burned his hands. “Damn!”

“Please don’t. Not here. Not now.” Sasha was shivering again, hands clasped between his knees, hardly fit to get the words out.

“Good luck to him, then,” Pyetr said, to have peace. “He needs it.” And on a more charitable impulse: “He needs somebody to talk him out of this woods, is what he needs. He needs to go downriver, get among sane people. Maybe he is a wizard.—Maybe all this is because he’s a wizard, maybe that’s all it is, did you ever think of that? Maybe he makes people think they see things.”

“You’re hopeless!” Sasha cried, as angry as ever Pyetr had seen him. “Do you think all this is for your benefit? It’s none of it a joke, Pyetr! His daughter died! Don’t make fun of him!”

With which Sasha got up and pulled his coat around him and headed off toward the river, three steps before Pyetr flung his sticks and his shirt down and caught him.

“Don’t you be a fool! All right, he’s a wizard, he’s anything you want, just stay away from there, I believe in it, I believe anything you want, all right?”

Sasha stopped fighting, out of breath. “Something’s wrong,” he said, trying to twist his hands free, casting anxious looks toward the hill. “Something’s wrong with him. You said that—and things just stopped…”

“I’m not any wizard,” Pyetr said. The wind was cold on his back. The boy’s nonsense upset his stomach. “He won’t thank you for going over there. If he’d wanted you, he’d have asked. Just stay out of it.”

“Just up the hill,” Sasha said. “Just up the hill. No more than that.”

The boy was set on it. Pyetr tagged after, shivering all the way, as far as the top of the ridge and the view of the willow below.

The old man was lying there, sprawled on the hillside, his pots scattered about him. Sasha started to run. Pyetr did, with a sudden curse remembering he had left his sword back at the fire—slipped and slid down the grassy slope on the boy’s track.

The Thing from the yard was lying in the middle of the old man. It snarled at them as they came running up.

The old man was breathing. Pyetr felt an uncharitable regret, seeing that, and the Thing growled the moment the thought crossed his mind.

Sasha spoke softly to it. It sank down then, whining like a dog, and holding to Uulamets’ robe with tiny manlike hands.

“Careful!” Pyetr said, when Sasha bent closer.

But it scuttled off Uulamets’ chest, seeming smaller still, and hid its face against the old man’s sleeve.

Master Uulamets shook his head and stared into the fire, that was all the response he gave to the most careful questions Sasha posed. The pots were scattered and broken, whatever powders master Uulamets had mixed were lost over by the riverside.

And the sun was past noon.

“/think we’d better get him home,” Pyetr said grimly. “And start now. That Thing likes the dark. How long do we want to sit around here?”

Master Uulamets said nothing to that, either. Sasha looked desperately from one to the other of them, unable to figure why everything came down to him, or why Pyetr was asking him what they ought to do.

Except, when he thought about it, there was no one else to consult. Master Uulamets hardly seemed able to know what had happened to him. And someone had to agree that that was the case.

“I think we’d better,” Sasha sighed. “I’d better go back and get what I can salvage—”

“Leave it,” Pyetr said sharply. “We’re not risking another trip over there. We’ve had enough accidents, thank you.—Come on, grandfather.” He took master Uulamets very gently under the arm and pulled him to his feet. Uulamets did not protest, and Pyetr said, “Get his staff. I suppose he sets some store by it.”