C. Cherryh - Rusalka

Pyetr began to pick the fragments off his quilt-covered lap with a visibly shaking hand. Sasha got up, quickly, grabbed his blanket about him and said, touching master Uulamets on the shoulder, as carefully as he had ever intervened with a trespassing customer, “Please, sir. It’s late. Can I get you anything else? I’d be very happy to.”

He was afraid. He felt Uulamets’ anger touch him.

And grow quieter then.

“Sir?”

“More cups,” Uulamets said, not: cup; cups. Sasha ran that through again, nodded anxiously and went and brought them, one for Uulamets and, as Uulamets seemed to intend, one for Pyetr.

Pyetr poured from the jug, still shaking a little, whether from exhaustion or from having a cup break in his hand that should not have broken. He leaned forward and poured for Uulamets, too, and put a little in Sasha’s cup.

Sasha sat down, picked up his cup, and took a sip, only half feeling the burn as it slid down his throat.

Outside, thunder rumbled. A fresh spatter of rain hit the shutters.

“My daughter,” Uulamets said quietly. “Did you see her—at any time I was beyond the hill?”

Pyetr shook his head. “No.” And looked up as if he had remembered something. “On the river. Before that. At the willow. Just a single glance.”

Uulamets rested his elbow on his knee and ran his hand back over his hair.

“But I’m not sure,” Pyetr said, “that what I followed there—”

A footstep sounded outside, on wet boards, a little louder sound than the rain.

They all froze in mid-breath. The footsteps hesitated, then came to the door. Someone knocked.

A second knock, then: Pyetr moved to take his sword from its rest beside the fireplace, with the thin hope that if a vodyanoi had no liking for it, other things magical might not—and his first thought for visitors on a night like this was the vodyanoi itself. But Uulamets was already struggling to his feet, with Sasha trying to help him: Uulamets shook him oif and headed straight for the door, his blanket tangling and trailing in his tattered robe.

Pyetr caught at his arm. “It might not be your daughter,” he said, he thought quite sanely. But Uulamets snarled, “Little you know,” and tottered past him.

“Fool,” Pyetr muttered, and seized Sasha instead, who was dithering in the way, and put him back to the side as master Uulamets threw up the latch and the wind pushed the door open.

A girl appeared in the lightning flicker, drenched, her blond hair and her white gown alike streaming water.

“Papa?” she said faintly, and flung her arms around Uulamets.

It was her , it was the ghost beyond a doubt—but not ghostly white now, only white from cold; and streaming water onto the floor—but it was, after all, raining…

And this girl who had plagued his dreams and eluded everyone else’s sight—was most surely visible to all of them.

He ought to have been shocked, perhaps—or glad for the old man, or afraid that she might suddenly transmute herself into weed and old bone… with the god knew what sort of deadly intention—

But of all things to feel, as she lifted her head from her father’s shoulder and looked dazedly around her, he truly expected—anticipated—that she would be pleased to see him.

She showed nothing of the kind. He and Sasha together might have been a table, an accompanying chair, of passing interest only because they were strange in her house.

Odd, to feel slighted by a ghost.

He watched Uulamets bring the girl to the fire and offer her the scattered quilts. He let his sword fall, while Sasha alone had the practical good sense to shut the door and latch it against the wind. Sasha also had the absolutely amazing self-possession to ask whether Uulamets’ daughter would care for tea.

She would.

Pyetr simply wandered to the far’side of the table and sat down on the bench with his sword still in his hands, watching while a doting father wrapped his soaked, rain-chilled daughter in the quilts, while he chafed her hands, helped her dry her hip-long hair, and murmured how cold she was and how he had lost all hope this morning, and how unspeakably happy he was now. Uulamets suddenly seemed to have a heart, for the god’s sake, or he was completely out of his head.

While the girl, who was more beautiful than any girl Pyetr had ever seen, soaking wet or otherwise, huddled in the blankets and clutched her father’s hands and said how glad she was to be home, and how—here for the first time she truly looked at Pyetr—she had tried so hard to escape her plight, but that she had no wish, considering a rusalka’s essential nature, to come anywhere near her father. So she had sought other means to speak to him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and tears spilled onto her pale cheeks, which blushed with hectic color. “I’m so sorry. Everything’s dead—I didn’t want it to die. But I didn’t want to fade. And I would have. I didn’t know anything to do, but to try to stay alive, and they died, everything died, and I’m sorry—”

Upon which she began to cry, while Sasha was attempting, delicately balanced on one foot, to get behind her to take the water kettle from the hearth.

It all should have been ludicrous, the boy teetering on one foot, the recent ghost sobbing away against the old man’s shoulder-But Pyetr watched father and daughter, with the sword lying on the table in front of him, and very much wished that it was his shoulder, and that she would look his direction, and that he could decide whether her eyes were dark or light.

And he wondered if he was only one more of her victims or whether she had had a special, secret reason for choosing him to approach—

It had seemed so to him—it had very much seemed to him, at the willow, that she had been trying to warn him, and last night in the house, after the wind, she had come to him in his dreams, less as a haunt than as a desperately lost girl, speaking to him in words he could almost hear…

She was only a girl, after all. Silly girls threw themselves at him all the time—a distraction, a momentary amusement, a nuisance in some measure: a man with his looks soon learned what it was all worth. Mature ladies were his real interest. But every move this girl made as flesh and blood was amazing to him—no longer drifting, but——real…

Sasha brought the tea and the girl looked at him and necessarily brushed his hand with her fingers as she took the cup. That touch made his blood run a little faster, which was a feeling he had no notion what to do with—or rather he did, but he had never been within half a step of any girl who made him feel that way, and he backed away, in the same moment stepping on a knot of blankets and having to catch his balance, looking like a fool, if she was paying any attention to him—which he really hoped she was not, just then. But just as he hoped that, the thought occurred to him that a wizard’s daughter might know things about people the way he did, being sometimes unnaturally sensitive to the world around her.

That possibility embarrassed him beyond good sense, and of course the harder one tried not to think about a thing, the stronger the feeling got. He reeled away into the shadow and made a wide circuit around Uulamets and his daughter, his face burning. She surely thought he was a complete fool, and she might well resent him, especially since he had what Uulamets called ability, and here he had been sleeping in her house, asking valuable questions of her father-That was his experience of household situations, at least, in which he always seemed to be the interloper.

He sat down on the bench beside Pyetr and put his elbows on the table, figuring that beside someone as mature and self-possessed as Pyetr he was a good deal less conspicuous.