C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“We’ve gotten where we are,” Uulamets muttered, and brushed past, leaving Sasha to whisper, ever so quietly,

“I think he was holding the boat together. I think he just gave out.”

“/think we’re in trouble,” Pyetr said.

Eveshka set up their little stove on the stern and lit a fire in its pan with wood they had brought, though the god knew they had twigs enough lying on the deck and accessible just off it. Soon enough there were cakes baking and Eveshka even brought out a little honey to go on them—while master Uulamets lit the lamp, set it on the ledge of the deckhouse, which was really too tiny for anything but the stores they had brought and stowed there, then sat down with his book and his inkpot to write down the things he had done—

And to think, Sasha supposed: certainly Uulamets would not want to be disturbed with questions this evening.

“How far have we come?” Pyetr asked Eveshka, as they sat with her around the little stove. “Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

Eveshka looked up. Her hair was plaited in two huge braids that made her face look very small and her eyes very large-eyes pale and softened, as it happened, by the little light that came up from the stove and down from the lamp. She had said hardly two words to anyone since breakfast. She had stood by Uulamets’ side the day long, helping her father and suffering his anger; and now she looked very worried.

“To find Kavi,” she said. Her voice left a hush like a spell on the air; any voice would seem coarse after that; and the water lapped and the branches scraped and the fire crackled and snapped.

“Where?” Pyetr insisted finally.

“My father knows where he is.”

A page turned, behind them.

The silence went on a moment or two while Eveshka turned the cakes, a scrape of the spatula on the stove top. She said, “I was foolish to trust him. My father was right. I know that now.”

“What are we going to do about this Kavi Chernevog?” Pyetr asked. “What’s this about hearts? What did the Thing mean, this morning?”

Eveshka stopped, then turned a last cake, her eyes set on her work. She said placidly, “I was foolish. My father was absolutely right.”

Sasha felt a little chill. Perhaps Pyetr did: he cradled his hand in his lap and looked at Eveshka as if he suspected what Sasha had begun to feel, that there was indeed something hollow about her.

Pyetr looked at him. Sasha said nothing, only sent him a warning look back, fearing that too many questions now might upset the peace—if there were more answers in Eveshka at all, or if she were free to speak them. The god knew what kind of hold Chernevog still had on her.

Eveshka served the cakes. They sat together in the flickering light from master Uulamets’ oil lamp, ate their supper, and had a little of the vodka—the first of their jars having fetched up against the deck house unbroken: Sasha had done that much. But Uulamets took his supper over in the light, sitting cross-legged on the deck, poring over his book and paying no attention to them.

Pyetr said, “I suppose we’ve got to fix that sail. Did we bring any cord?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “Eveshka?”

“Yes,” Eveshka said softly, and got up and went around to the deckhouse.

“What’s this about hearts?” Pyetr whispered urgently when she was out of earshot. “What was he talking about? What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha whispered back. “I never did understand.”

Pyetr looked disappointed in him—as if Pyetr expected wizardry answers from him. He could not so much as keep Pyetr’s hand from hurting—he knew that it was, even at the moment—and still Pyetr trusted him in life and death ways and expected him to come up with miracles.

That scared him more than the River-thing did—but maybe it was part of being a man, not to ask for help. Maybe it was part of being a man to try to do what people expected.

There was master Uulamets, for one thing, with his book that recollected everything he had ever done—while Sasha had never thought that he ought to do the same: at least he had never even imagined that he could write, until master Uulamets saw fit to teach him. But he thought now that he had not been very responsible throughout his dealings with Uulamets and the vody-anoi, wishing this and wishing that at random, simply because master Uulamets had told him he had the gift—exactly the kind of mistake master Uulamets had said most people made: but a wizard had to remember, that was all, had to figure out the connections before he made a wish, the very way he himself had used to sit and think in the quiet of the stable, sometimes for hours before he decided what he wanted about a thing.

Then Pyetr had come along, half again his age and wiser about the world than he was; and for the first time in his life having a friend, what could he do but want what Pyetr desperately needed?

But he had never until now understood how much he had lulled himself into thinking it was only himself and Pyetr and Uulamets involved in his wishes. It never had been. There was the River-thing and Eveshka and now somebody named Kavi Chernevog, and he had made so many desperate wishes lately he was on the edge of not remembering all the things he had wished earlier in his life and he was far past understanding how things fitted together. He could not even clearly remember the stableboy at The Cockerel, because that boy felt like someone else, someone he did not know how to be, now—

Because if he should meet Mischa now, and Mischa shoved him off a walk, he would not be afraid; he—

He could kill Mischa: he pulled back from that idea with a chill close to panic, and wished hard, not wanting Mischa to die, no, please, not wishing anything harmful, no matter how far away in the world, because he had been a fool. He thought-even aunt Ilenka had kept a tally with a charcoal stick, just of turnips and cabbages.

But so many things had tumbled on him one after the other he had somewhere stopped thinking how they fit together; and it was not The Cockerel’s stable any more, where days were one after the other the same and where he knew everything and everyone and nobody wanted more than his supper on time.

“What’s the matter?” Pyetr asked him, nudging his arm.

Sasha wiped sweat from his lip, hearing Eveshka’s quiet returning step on the boards, and shook his head.

Eveshka set a basket by him. There was cord and there was an awl.

“Too dark now to do anything about it,” Pyetr said, and gulped the last of his cup as Eveshka bent to pick up the little stove with its ashes. He motioned toward the bow of the boat. “Grandfather’s got his book. Let’s get some sleep.”

It was a good idea, Sasha thought. He felt guilty: he thought he should oifer to help Eveshka clean up, but he knew he should not leave Pyetr alone either, and he thought with longing of blankets and a soft spot in the canvas piled on the deck up there.

But once he had it, and once his eyes were shut, with the river lapping at the hull and the branches raking back and forth against their side, he kept thinking of things he had wanted and about aunt Ilenka and the tally board, and wondering what his added up to by now.

Pyetr for his part had no trouble getting to sleep, no matter that the dark behind his eyelids was alive with the vodyanoi’s coils and murky water, and that he still felt the deck tilting under him: he knew where he was now—tied to a forest he did not want to think about, but as far as safety it looked to be the most he was going to have—and the hand hurt, but it had hurt ever since carrying the loads down to the boat, so he reckoned finally he had simply bruised it.

He was reasoning more clearly now that the boat was at rest and his stomach was less queasy. Uulamets certainly had other, more subtle ways to do away with him than pitching him off the boat, which Sasha would never believe an accident; and the boat, if they could get it to move at all, was surely not going to roll over tomorrow any more than it had today—not with three wizards preventing it…