C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“I don’t say we’re not,” Sasha muttered.

Which comforted him not in the least.

Damn! the ache… He remembered a nightmare of a cave under willow roots, rot-smelling dark, and the lap of water—

“We’d better get moving,” he said, and shoved himself to his feet, leaning against a tree trunk a moment until Sasha had gotten up. The pain dulled, perhaps because Sasha was well-wishing him, perhaps because the Thing that had caused it was busy, he had no idea.

But Eveshka’s presence suddenly went dark to him. He could say that she had been in the direction he was facing, but there was nothing there now, as if he had gone stone blind to her.

“God!—She’s gone!”

“Not far,” Sasha said. “We know where she was. Come on.”

He followed Sasha, half running in the direction that was his own last feeling, up the wooded slope and headlong down the other side. He took the lead, stopped his downhill plunge against a tree, bruising his shoulder, then splashed across a rill that might be the one from which they had started, for all he knew. The branch-laced sky gave him no clue. The stars were obscured in cloud or the beginning of dawn, he had no idea.

But he felt acute pain in his hand then, and a sense of direction came with it, different and colder.

Oh, god, he thought, and delayed a moment until Sasha overtook him. “The River-thing,” he said between gasps for breath, and indicated the rill beside them. “It’s somewhere around here—”

Sasha looked, for what good it did, and said, calmly, “Salt,” as he slipped off his pack. “Salt will hold it. It’s nearly dawn.”

Pyetr shivered, telling himself all the while that the vodyanoi was afraid of them—he had beaten it off twice with plain steel.

“But where’s she ?” he asked. His sword hand ached to the bone. His fingers could hardly feel the hilt when he closed on it. He drew, willing his fingers to stay closed, having to look at his own hand to be sure they did—while Sasha started to make a circle of salt around them in the dead leaves.

The pain eased of a sudden and the feeling began to come back to his fingers. “Sasha,” he said, because the hair was rising at his nape, with an inexplicable conviction someone was looking at his back: Sasha stopping his circle-making, looking up and past him, was no reassurance at all.

Pyetr turned, slowly, holding a sword he could not feel, to /that quarter of brush and trees where the circle was incomplete. Something large and winged suddenly dived at him and flapped heavily away.

“What was thatl” he breathed, reeling back—and in the same instant felt Eveshka’s presence again, so subtle that it might have been there for a heartbeat or two before he knew it, faint as a breath of air, a whisper out of the dark…

“Brother Raven,” Sasha murmured, behind him, as the feeling of Eveshka’s presence grew quite, quite certain. Pyetr looked up and saw the bird clearly—in a sky catching the first faint glow of the sun.

It dipped a wing and glided off over the ridge, opposite to Eveshka’s direction.

“Follow it!” Sasha said. “It’s Uulamets’ creature. Eveshka’s off the track—she knows it now, she’s coming as fast as she can, but so is it’t For the god’s sake—move!”

It was not Pyetr’s inclination to abandon the salt circle, but Sasha wished him into motion, he felt it, caught a breath and started climbing, slipping and sliding on the slick leaves with Sasha close behind him. Eveshka was coming toward them—Eveshka had seen the raven, called it in some fashion from downriver, Pyetr knew that in a solid, no-nonsense way that he connected with Sasha’s meddling, not Eveshka’s—but he did not, this time, resent Sasha shoving things on him neither of them had breath for. He reached the top of the ridge ahead of Sasha and skidded down the leafy slope on the other side, down among thick trees again. His hand ached . He felt an unreasoning dread here, in the dark of these trees.

Sasha arrived as the pain grew acute; from the one side Eveshka’s presence was rushing at them and from the other—from the woods all around, but especially straight ahead—came a sense of cold hostility.

“Can you feel it?” Sasha asked.

Pyetr nodded, saving his breath, willing his fingers to hang on to the sword. The presence he felt ahead of them was not the vodyanoi: that one had a feeling all its own, and he had learned to trust those differences. “Woodsmoke,” he said as the wind carried that to them, and reckoning no Forest-thing would build a fire, he fended brush aside with his sword and started in the direction of that apprehension.

Wings snapped: something swooped past him and brushed his face. The raven settled on a low branch by him, shadow in shadow—

A white shape had appeared in the woods ahead of them, coming toward them; and a dimmer, grayer figure beside it.

“Master Uulamets?” Sasha called out, from Pyetr’s side.

“Who told you to leave the boat?” the gray one snarled as it walked, waving an arm. “Damnable fools!”

“Certainly sounds like him,” Pyetr muttered.

“Papa,” the white one said in Eveshka’s voice, stopping and catching at Uulamets’ sleeve to stop him. “Papa, don’t trust him! Don’t trust anything you hear from them—”

“She’s lying,” Sasha said, and if there were wishes flying, if there was wizardry going on, Pyetr felt nothing but Eveshka , coming from behind him like a hawk’s strike—like a scream in the air—

She was there—ducked under a branch beside him and passed without a glance at either of them, walking straight toward Uulamets and the Eveshka at his side…

“No,” it cried, lifting a hand as if to fend her off. Uulamets lifted his, as if to do the same, but Eveshka walked up to her rival and stretched out her hand. Fingers scarcely met. Then—so quickly Pyetr’s eyes refused to see the change—a single white ghost drifted where both had stood.

Uulamets recoiled, cried out: “No! Damn you—”

“Damned, indeed,” ghost-Eveshka said, and pointed down at her feet. “This is your daughter , papa, this is the daughter you called up—”

Pointing down at a muddy skull and a glistening pile of water-weed.

“God,” Pyetr murmured, as Uulamets stepped back.

Eveshka said, plaintively, “I couldn’t reach you, papa. You wouldn’t listen—”

Uulamets turned away and leaned his arm against a tree, his head bowed.

Pyetr stood there with his sword still in his hand and a cold feeling in his stomach. He hoped it was his Eveshka that had survived that encounter.

Then, gathering his wits: “Babi?” he called.

Almost immediately a body pressed against his boot. It whined. The god knew it had reason.

But it turned up with this Eveshka. It always had, with the one he knew for his.

“I’m here ,” Eveshka was saying to Uulamets. “Papa?”

But Uulamets gave no sign he heard.

“Papa, can’t you see me?”

Uulamets gave no answer then, either.

“Your daughter’s here ,” Pyetr said, recovering his sense of balance. “Old man, she’s real. She’s the one who’s survived. Babi’s with her. Doesn’t that say it’s her?”

Uulamets pushed himself away from the tree and walked off from them.

Sasha stepped forward, made a sudden, hurt sound. Sasha’s hand lifted as if to ward off some invisible attack as Pyetr looked at him in alarm—both of them frozen for a heartbeat, Sasha in the shock of whatever was happening to him, himself in doubt what to do or what to fight, until Sasha dropped that hand to his sword arm.

“She—” Sasha said, and fell on Pyetr’s neck and hung on him as if all strength had just left him. “Oh—god, Pyetr—”