C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“You can’t,” Sasha said, staring past him. “It’ll let you go. It’s all right. Goon.”

“It isn’t all right, dammit!” He looked back at the Thing in the thicket, shaking in the knees and feeling that they had no chance, if it was down to him dealing with a Forest-thing. “Listen to me. Sasha’s not at fault. There’s a wizard dragged us up here, he’s gone off with something we don’t know what, and Eveshka’s only trying to stop him from killing himself. None of us want to be here. None of us want anything but to get the old man out of this woods and go home.”

He felt it listening. He stood arguing with what looked, between pounding heartbeats, like no more than a brushy tree, and tried to believe he was sane, tried to make himself believe in leshys—which was what he was sure it was—because he had to, he could not let it trick him into seeing just a tree and losing touch with it while it went on killing Sasha—

It was the forest. Or part of it. It owned what had fed him and it was trying to pull away from him, trying to be something else, that was what he knew, the same way he knew that it was not trying as hard as it could because they confused it.

Why? it wondered. Why and how this fighting me?

“Because we’ll never get south,” he said, seizing what was nothing more than a branch, holding to it while his hand and his eyes were trying to tell him that he was being a fool, he was talking to a damned tree, Sasha was exhausted and at the end of his wits and there was no such a thing as a rusalka, there never had been. “God!” he cried, shaking at it, “you hear me, dammit!”

But he was not even sure it could hear him any longer: Sasha said there was a necessary separation between magical things and ordinary folk and maybe it no more knew he was there any longer than he could see it for what it was. Sasha was standing there helpless and still and Eveshka and Babi were invisible if, he kept thinking—if they ever had existed.

It was like a curtain being drawn, separating him out of the magical, sending him back to the sane and the ordinary world—but it was taking Sasha with it.

“For the god’s sake listen to me! We never meant any harm here—” He had pleaded desperate cases with outraged landlords in Vojvoda, and it seemed no different to him. “We never wanted to be here, except this Thing—” He figured maybe it was a case of jurisdictions, “—lured her father off. She followed us all the way from the old ferry and she hasn’t the strength to keep going without what she borrowed—”

The branch moved under his hand. Twigs curled around his wrist, holding him prisoner. The creature opened its eyes and stared at him.

It said, “So you were feeding her deliberately. That’s very foolish.”

“She wasn’t trying to kill anything, not us, not anything in this forest. Neither was Sasha.”

Again that cool, tingling touch, from his wrist up and down. But he stopped being afraid of a sudden. He knew he was being looked at and looked into with a thoroughness no one ever had, and it was more curious now than angry.

“I forgive you,” the Thing said. “But you’ve still been very foolish.”

“None of it was Sasha’s doing—”

“There is no fault here. Not even hers.” It swayed and pointed with one of its many limbs to a mere pool of mist among the leaves. “But she has no heart: she’s taken your friend’s. She has no life; she’s stealing yours; and his; and mine.” He felt that tingle run from his head to his feet, felt comfortable , and safe , and thought it might be a lie more dangerous than Eveshka’s. “I would know if you lied to me,” the Forest-thing said, and Pyetr believed absolutely that was the truth. It said, while well-being coursed through him like cool water, and its attention like a warm breeze: “Do you know what your friend has done?”

He had no idea how to answer. It said, as if he had,

“Foolish. All young. All young.” It reached past him with another of its limbs and grasped Sasha’s shoulder. “Wanting me to let you go. Using my woods to feed him, against me . Death fighting death.—What shall I do with you?”

“Help us,” Sasha said, as a droplet of sweat trickled a clear path down his face. “Help us get out of your woods. Help us find her father. Help us get him free.”

The Forest-thing released them both and drew back with a rustling of twigs and leaves. “My name is Wiun,” it said.

“Pyetr,” Pyetr said.

“Sasha,” Sasha said. “—And Eveshka and Babi, if you please.”

It quivered, a little rustling of its branches as they lowered. “I don’t please,” it said. “A dvorovoi has no place here. A rusalka has no place among living things.—But I have no choice.”

The pool of mist spun upward like a milky whirlwind and spread itself wider and thinner, like tattered robes, like fine hair flying on a gale, like ghostly arms and hands and Eveshka’s pale, frightened face.

“Rusalka!” the leshy said. “Take, take once, and not again in my woods, on peril of what life you have. Do you hear me?”

Eveshka’s eyes widened; her hair and robes swirled about her, leaves flew in a whirlwind, and she blushed , not alone with faint rose on her face, but pale gold in her hair, pale blue in her tattered gown—

“Oh!” she cried, wide-eyed, and Babi yelped and sprang from somewhere to her arms, burying its face against her.

“I will not ask your promise,” Wiun said to her in that bone-deep voice, “for the welfare of my woods or your companions: you would do anything to live. You already have. I only advise you what you already know: a wizard who lies to others is one thing; one who lies to himself is quite another. Do you know why?”

Eveshka did not answer. She held Babi closer.

Wiun shifted back into the brush, or was part of it.

“—Because then all wishes go wrong,” Sasha murmured faintly, in the last whisper of the leshy’s going.

Eveshka looked at Sasha, looked at Pyetr, with the mist gathering like beads on her hair, with her eyes gone a soft blue and a little rosy blush on her lips. “Pyetr,” she said in a tremulous voice.

He trembled himself, while Sasha pulled sharply at his arm. He knew better. God, he knew better; she was afraid, he only hoped he knew why; but all he could do was stare at her until all she could do was stare back.

“Pyetr!” Sasha said, jerking at his arm.

He blinked and looked away, trying«to break the spell and get his breath back. He saw his sword lying in the brush and went and picked it up, shaking—

Because he wanted her so much, and he knew better, and Sasha was depending on him.

“We’ll find your father,” he said to Eveshka, making himself see the trees, the woods around them, and Sasha frowning at him. “He says he can bring you back. Well—dammit, he will!”

God, he thought, gone cold inside, he was talking about Ilya Uulamets.

TWILIGHT CAME EARLY in the depth of the woods, under a clouded sky, but they kept walking so long as there was the least light to see by. “How far yet?” was what Sasha had wanted to know of Eveshka when they had first set out from the leshy’s grove; and Eveshka had said she was not sure of that.

“Is your father even alive?” Sasha had asked next. “ Can you tell?”

Eveshka had not been sure of that either: she had confessed as much, evading his eyes, then quickly slipped away to take the lead—moving not as she had, as a wraith which had no need of paths, but with a sure woodcraft which still kept her out of their reach.

She clearly had no wish to sit at their fireside when they had stopped for the night, either; nor did she seem to need their food. No, she answered distantly when Sasha offered, after which she rose and walked away to the little spring-fed rill that gave them water.