C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“We won’t lose her,” Sasha said. “I know where she is.”

“Where’s she gone?” A man could grow suspicious in the doings of wizards and leshys and such, and of a sudden, seeing Sasha’s face, seeing the evidence of exertion, he had the feeling that there was far more violence going on around him than an unmagical man could feel. “Sasha, dammit, what’s going on? What are you doing?”

“Helping her.”

He was bewildered. A host of possibilities came tumbling in, not least of them collusion between Sasha and Eveshka.

“Come on,” Sasha said, shouldering his own gear.

“Where? Where’s she going?”

“To find her father. As quickly as she can. She knows where he is, by the Thing knowing where we are—and it’s not far from here. She doesn’t need us slowing her down.”

“Doesn’t need us—” Everything that had happened since supper, even his anger and hurt, were suddenly in doubt where it came to wizards, both of whom had a piece of him, both of whom were surely wishing things at him. “God! What have you been doing to me?”

“Anything I can,” Sasha said hoarsely, and stood up and looked him square in the face, looking older than his years in the underlighting of the fire, looking haggard, fire trails in the sweat on his temples. “I rescued her from you, if you have to know. You disturbed her concentration.”

“What did you do? What did you wish for, dammit ?”

“For you not to like her too much,” Sasha said. “So does she. She’s scared. I told her go, while she could go, and we’re following her: I think she’s finally stopped lying to us. And herself. She knows what her choices are.”

They were on their way, on what track he could—god!—feel, like two lines strung between him and elsewhere, one downstream, deadly, that had to do with the pain in his hand, one moving upstream, sweetly dangerous, that had to do with the pain in his heart…

“How could you do something like that?” Pyetr exclaimed in outrage, dodging branches Sasha passed him, stumbling over roots and brush—remembering what mistakes of his youth Sasha’s spell had raked up, nothing a man wanted a fifteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl knowing about him… especially Sasha and Eveshka. “You don’t know what I’m thinking! You can’t pull things like that out of what I remember!”

“I don’t have to,” Sasha said. “I don’t have to know what you’re thinking. I just wish. That’s all. Things change the way they can change.”

“Dammit!”

“I know. I know you’re mad at me. But I don’t care, as long as it saves you from being stupid; I’m sorry , Pyetr.”

“With what ?” he said to Sasha’s back, and shoved at a branch that raked him—lost in this maze of wizardry, a grown man tossed about by two children as if his own innermost feelings were nothing. “What are you sorry with !”

But the boy was only trying to keep him alive. The boy evidently knew what he was doing, was allied with Eveshka in whatever was going on—which had to revise all opinions of her.

“God,” he exclaimed, “tell me who’s not lying!”

“I’m not,” Sasha said over his shoulder, out of the tangled dark. “You know I’m not, Pyetr Illitch.”

AHARD WALK from day into dark and now out onto the trail again in the mid of the night, tired as they were—townfolk without Eveshka’s woodcraft to guide them… “Dammit, can’t you magic us through?” Pyetr cried, still with that feeling of imminent danger behind them: there was a thorn-brake where Sasha had led them, and it was not the way Eveshka had gotten through: she was far too substantial, he was sure she was.

“I’ve got other things on my mind,” Sasha said.

“We’re losing her!” Pyetr protested; “We won’t,” Sasha said in that maddening, lately-acquired inscrutability of his, but all the same they had to go far around. Thickets closed about them and forced them to backtrack too often, branches raked their faces, snagged on their packs, and they found themselves going far aside from the course Pyetr knew was right—because there was no way through the thorn thickets and the brush.

Pyetr’s hand was hurting, his feet had blisters, his forehead hurt from a scratch a branch had put on it, and something about supper was not sitting well on his stomach.

Worse, he suddenly lost touch with what he knew was behind them and still knew where Eveshka was with unsettling certainty. Her state of mind, terrified for herself and terrified of their pursuer, muddled him and made him misstep and miss branches, which only made him angrier and more desperate.

“It’s gone,” he muttered at Sasha’s back as they slogged along, trying to find a way through this thicket, “it’s gone out.—Sasha, can you still feel it back there?”

“I’ve lost it,” Sasha said. “I don’t like it.”

“Don’t like it! Don’t like it—God, hurry us up.”

“I’m doing what I can.”

“Maybe it’s been lying to us all along. Maybe she has.”

The doubt came to him suddenly, left again. He had no idea what the source of it was—

And did.

“God, next time wish me to know you’re wishing me to think something, do you think you can do that?”

“I’m not doing it now,” Sasha said.

“How do I know that?”

“Believe me.—Stop talking to me!”

The boy he was talking to had no deep feeling of his owner he had, but Eveshka had it instead, if Pyetr guessed anything that was going on. He was embarrassed, he had been made a fool of in his most private thoughts and he hated both of them—between moments that he wanted her with all his heart, or moments that he reckoned if the intention that drove her now truly was Sasha’s, then she was likely doing everything she had done for good reasons—for Sasha’s kind of reasons, Sasha being so ready to blame himself for others’ fault; and Eveshka, damn her, having so much real blame for this situation.

Maybe, he thought between times, that was where she had found the strength to realize what was going on, that there was something stalking them—or found the strength to defy it before it killed them. If it was Sasha’s heart in her, it must be near breaking with the guilt she really deserved—and if that guilt was somehow hurting Sasha he wanted to wring her neck—or shake sense into her, because a girl with Sasha’s heart was all too likely to do something brave and foolish where that damned River-thing was concerned, endangering everything in the world he loved—

His feet skidded suddenly on a slick, leaf-covered slope; he caught himself against a sapling trunk—a branch jabbing him painfully in the eye. “Damn!” he gasped, flailed out against the brush and fought his way on downhill to keep up with Sasha.

Sasha waited for him. But Pyetr sat down when he got to the bottom, out of breath, with a stitch in his side, and Sasha slumped bonelessly down beside him.

“Rest a moment,” Pyetr said, drawing deep breaths, bent over and holding a hand over his eye. He still had a sense where Eveshka was, but it seemed dimmer. “She’s weaker. Farther away.” Another breath. “I don’t know what she thinks we are. A man can’t do this all day and all night—”

He was so scared his hands were shaking. He had no idea whose fear it even was. Sasha said nothing. Sasha just leaned on his knees and breathed.

How far can an old man walk? Pyetr wondered to himself, and cradled his wounded hand, which ached the worse since his near fall on the slope up there. “God, we should have found him by now. I think we’re going in circles. Wizards wishing this and wishing that, getting us damned lost , is what we are!”