C. Cherryh - Rusalka

She left me things, he had said to Pyetr, when Pyetr had tried ever so delicately to ask him if there was lasting harm in what Eveshka had done.

She taught me things, Sasha thought now.—I know why she did it. I still remember how clearly I could think on some things, and where I was blind… and I think I know why.

I knew how to be scared. That must be different than other feelings—at least when it’s for yourself.

I could worry about Pyetr… I knew he was my friend: I wouldn’t even want to be myself again without him, but only knowing he was important to me was enough to keep me doing right things—because they were the smart things.

Pyetr would say, Boy, don’t be stupid. But he’d mean, Don’t get hurt and don’t hurt people—because he never was üke those friends of his: he wouldn’t have broken aunt Ilenka’s churn on purpose, and certainly not if he knew it was her grandmother’s.

He’d say he was sorry if he knew that, and he’d really mean it, because he doesn’t always think through what he does: he can’t wish somebody dead. But he’s real smart about people, and what’s right and wrong—

And if a wizard doesn’t have somebody like him—and if he’s put his heart away someplace and he can’t feel what’s right, who’s going to tell him not to be a fool about what he wants?

Master Uulamets had stopped listening a long time ago, it seemed to him—even to Eveshka.

So he stood there and stood there, and finally cleared his throat again.

“Excuse me, sir. If you’re thinking, I apologize and you don’t have to listen, but we’re going to fix lunch and if you don’t have any idea what we ought to do after that, we’re going to pack up and start back to the boat and see if we can get it backed out i again.” I Uulamets said, “Not likely.”

“What is likely, sir?”

“Go away,” Uulamets said.

Sasha drew a deep breath, clenched his fists and told himself master Uulamets was probably listening and taking what he said into account even if he gave no sign of it.

Eveshka hardly seemed to think so. Eveshka was angry. He felt it. He wished her not to wish anything for a while… “Please,” he said aloud as he walked away and left Uulamets in peace. “Pyetr and I are tired. Please. Not now.”

He felt a shiver in the air—impatience, fear, anger. Always the anger. She was weaker, and that could only go so far—

I can’t die, she insisted he know, terrified; and other thoughts that kept bobbing up in his mind—

Murder. Anger and hurt —half-crazed and hungry and half-killed by her father’s wanting her to be different than she was… that was what had killed her. All her life she had fought just to be Eveshka, while her father was trying to wish Eveshka to be something else… and she wanted him to stop it, stop it, stop it—she wanted him dead—

“Shut up!” he yelled at her, and the whole woods seemed hushed, Uulamets and Pyetr both looking at him in startlement, while he stood in the middle of the clearing with his fists clenched. “Shut up, I did what you want, I killed my father and I killed my mother, and you don’t know what you’re talking about! I do , so shut up!”

And while Uulamets was looking his way in shock, while he had the old man’s attention and Pyetr’s, he plunged ahead with the rest of what she had set boiling in him, which he had no certainty he could ever remember in cold blood—

“You,” he said, pointing at Uulamets, and wanting his attention as Eveshka wanted Uulamets to know what he had to say, “ you drove your daughter away, every day you wished she was exactly what you wanted—”

“That’s not so,” Uulamets said. “That’s not so. I gave her every opportunity…”

“As long as you thought she was right. What if she just wanted—”

“Was Kavi Chernevog right?” Uulamets stood up, wild-haired, wild-eyed, and turned on Eveshka. “Was it your wishes got you here, girl? Was what you wanted so wise?”

Eveshka dimmed and retreated.

“Young folk,” Uulamets said, “have such potent wishes, and so damned little brains to make them doubt what they’re doing—”

“Old ones,” Pyetr said, from his seat on an old log, “get so damned self-centered.” Uulamets rounded on him and Pyetr said, “Turn me into a toad, why don’t you?” with Uulamets so furious Sasha wished with everything he had that Uulamets would not take that suggestion, but Pyetr kept right on going: “—because you haven’t done so well either, grandfather, or our boat wouldn’t be stuck in sand in the river, and we wouldn’t have had to track you days through the rain and the muck in this woods to rescue you from your own damned foolishness!—And you—” he said, with a look at Eveshka—

The raven screamed from its perch on a limb and made a sudden dive at Pyetr’s face. Pyetr flung up his arms and Sasha flung out an angry wish to drive it away, but quick as he could think it was already kiting skyward, and blood was welling up in a scratch on Pyetr’s wrist.

While Babi, a suddenly very much larger and more ominous Babi, was growling and hissing and bristling about the shoulders, not at Pyetr, as seemed, but looking up after the raven.

So was Uulamets looking skyward, frowning as the raven came back to sit in the top of a tree.

Sasha said, “Remember what I told you, master Uulamets? I’ll remember everything you do. And I don’t need you so much as I did.”

Uulamets turned, wild of eye, finger trembling as he pointed at him. “Now there’s a fool! Don’t need me, do you? You’re going to walk out of here, hike down to Kiev, you and your friend and my daughter, and make your fortune in the streets. Of course you are!—Fool! You can’t get him free of her, you can’t get him free of yourself’ , there’s his difficulty! There’s no family for a wizard, there’s no friend, there’s no daughter either. Take a lesson from me! I brought up a wizard-child, I let her grow the way a weed grows, without wishing more than her safety and her good sense, and that , it seems, was unfatherly neglect. When she got to a reasonable age and took to selfish wishes she didn’t want me to know about, we had discussions, oh, indeed we had discussions, boy , about wisdom and self-restraint and consequences—lessons you apparently learned by native wit and my own offspring abjectly failed to learn from my teaching, because my daughter was far more concerned with being a weed—and, like a weed, going her own way and getting what she wanted, having everything I forbade her to touch! My daughter grew up a fool , boy, against every principle I tried to teach her—because of course I was wishing her to learn, and wishing her to use good sense—”

“ Your good sense!” Eveshka cried, drifting into the way of things. “What about mine?”

“Oh, indeed! Is there a mine and thine to good sense? There’s one good sense, daughter, and if I have it and you don’t, then you’d do well to listen and do what you’re told!”

“And what if you’re the one who’s wrong? Pyetr’s right! You’re not doing so well, papa! You wouldn’t listen to me, you didn’t want me back, you took that thing in my place and let it sleep in my bed and you treated it the way you never did treat me, because I wouldn’t put up with your nonsense—”

“One hopes his daughter grows! One hopes his daughter learns something after all these years!”

“Everybody shut up!” Pyetr shouted, and quietly then, from his log, elbows on knees: “Does it occur to anyone that maybe something’s wanting us to act like fools, the way something wanted that sail to rip, and maybe it’s not having a real hard go of it, considering what it’s got to work with.”