C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“Most people have the instinct for magic,” Uulamets had said to him, that morning that Uulamets had begun to teach him. “Some have a minuscule ability—and don’t manage it at all except by smothering it entirely. Or they smother their good sense instead, and make a thorough mess of themselves, wishing this and wishing that to patch what they last wished and never understanding anything: I tell you, good hard work and talent enough to nudge luck a little is a good combination. But everybody wants the one without the other.”

“And mine?” he had asked, full of trepidation.

“Might not be small,” Uulamets had said. “Let me tell you: it’s a law of nature: magicians and magical creatures can be affected by magic more easily than ordinary folk. The very talents which extend them into dimensions impossible for ordinary people likewise mean that wizards can be affected by incantations against which ordinary people would be immune—”

“Can a person—stop these things? Can he—?”

“Turn a spell aside, you mean? Yes. You know how.”

He did. He had thought so.

“Let me tell you,” Uulamets had said then, at the table that morning: Sasha could still see the old man’s cautionary lifting of a finger, feel the danger in the air. “It’s always easiest for the young: remember I told you that. Remember this with it: it’s very easy for a naive talent to get quite deep into the spirit world, rather too little resistance to be safe—”

The other clothes they were washing—

Papa had a student , Eveshka had said, Kan …

“—and the deeper you get, the easier it is to bind and to be bound, do you understand, boy? Be careful. Power is very attractive. Aggression is easier than defense. Using is easier than restraining, doing than undoing. Set things in motion only in one direction at a time, or at least remember the sequence of things you wished and know everything you’re moving, directly or indirectly. That’s very important. Most of all beware of ill-wishing anything.”

To the black god , Uulamets had said, with Kavi Chernevog …

Most particularly…

“Where did the flour come from?” Sasha asked, out of breath, as he handed the two buckets to Pyetr. “Where did the flour come from this morning?”

“Sometimes I have trouble following you,” Pyetr said.

“At breakfast,” He realized he had started in the middle of his thoughts. “This morning.”

Pyetr gave him a very odd look. Or maybe Pyetr was thinking. Pyetr headed down the path to the river and Sasha sat down on the tree root to wait.

He watched Pyetr go down to the riverside and dip the two buckets full. Pyetr came up the trail, hard-breathing, set the two buckets down and said:

“The old man must be trading with somebody. On the river, maybe.”

“It wasn’t there. Or he had it hidden. Why hide a jar of flour?”

Pyetr gave a large sigh. He looked worried. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just left. Maybe she knew where it was.”

“Flour won’t keep forever. The forest’s been dead for ages. Nobody sails the river…”

“So maybe he put a spell on it. Don’t wizards do that kind of thing?”

It was a thought. It was better than the thoughts he was thinking, that whatever they had really had for breakfast might be very odd. There was oil. There was flour enough for six cakes, and more, assuming one would hardly use up one’s entire store on one breakfast. Oil and flour and berries. It was entirely odd.

Sasha trudged back to the bathhouse with the heavy buckets, up in the yard where Eveshka worked amid clouds of steam. “There,” she said; he poured the buckets into the rinse tub and negotiated the boggy ground taking them back to Pyetr at the tree.

“Mostly,” Pyetr said when he got there, “I want to know why the spell worked.”

“Which spell?”

“The one for her.” Pyetr took the buckets. “There were bones in that cave. How do you do anything with bones? How do you bring a body back?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “That’s what that book is, all the things he’s ever done or heard, written down.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“That’s the kind of things wizards have. He told me. You have to keep track of things. You can’t forget what you’ve done or you don’t dare do anything. He could have worked years on that spell. Pieces of it. Step by step.”

Pyetr looked at him as if he thought he was lying. After a moment he turned and went down the hill.

When he came up again, carrying the buckets full, he said, frowning, “All that book?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what he said.”

“But hasn’t he ever tried this before? Why did it work this time?”

That was one worrisome question. He could think of others. “Where’s the domovoi? Where’s the dvorovoi? Babi, he calls it. We haven’t seen him since out there by the knoll.”

Pyetr gave a worried grimace, and looked toward the house. “I don’t know. I never saw a place that had any. Maybe grandfather just conjured them up to keep him company. Maybe he’s forgotten about them now.”

Not impossible, Sasha thought. It could be the case. He picked up the heavy buckets and trekked back to the bathhouse, panting by the time he arrived.

“You don’t have to go so fast,” Eveshka said.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Would you tip out the rinse water for me?”

He did. He poured fresh water in. Eveshka’s dress was wet and clung embarrassingly and he tried not to stare. He took his buckets back to the tree.

“I haven’t seen the raven either,” he said to Pyetr. “I’m worried.”

“About that damned bird?” Pyetr was being deliberately obtuse, which meant he was annoyed.

“About everything.” He was afraid-Pyetr was going to pro pose running off into the woods. But he was far from certain that was not safer than where they were. “I don’t think we ought to go running off from here. Master Uulamets may be in trouble, but the kind of trouble I’m afraid of—he’s the only one who can handle it. I can’t. And a sword can’t stop a ghost.”

Pyetr frowned more and more darkly. “You think she is.”

“I don’t know what she is.”

“You know better than I do. I never paid any attention to the granny-tales. I never had a grandmother. What’s out there? What could be?”

That was a terrible question. All sorts of tales leapt into Sasha’s head, things with clutching claws and long, long teeth, things that led you astray and things that pulled you into rivers and things that just took away your mind. “Leshys and such,” he said.

“Worse?”

“They could be.! don’t know. Sometimes I think Babi’s all bluff. But we saw him when he wasn’t.”

“Damned dog’s tucked tail and run,” Pyetr muttered, snatching up the empty buckets. “Or something ate him .”

With which Pyetr flung himself away downslope at some speed. Sasha saw him stop at the bottom and stand, just staring up the river a moment before he filled the buckets and slogged back up the hill.

“She was never malicious,” Pyetr said, setting the buckets down.

“Maybe she couldn’t be,” Sasha said. “Maybe she couldn’t do anything. Now—I don’t know. He said—he said the more magical a creature is the easier it is to control it.”

“That’s rot! Cut Uulamets and he bleeds, I’ll bet you. That Thing didn’t.”

“For magic to control it,” Sasha objected, but it seemed to him that Pyetr had pointed out an essential flaw in Uulamets’ reasoning, and he thought about that, and about what a rusalka might do in ghostly form and in a human one.

“What good’s magic,” Pyetr asked, “if a fool with a sword can cut your throat?”