C. Cherryh - Rusalka

It certainly made sense. “Pyetr’s got a point,” Sasha said before Uulamets could say anything. “We felt the River-thing out there. It’s somewhere around here. And if that’s what’s happening, maybe we ought to trust Pyetr’s sense about it—being as he’s not magical, and it’s harder for it to confuse him, isn’t that what you told me?”

Uulamets gnawed his lip and cast a narrow glance at Pyetr.

“I’d advise,” Pyetr said, “we get back to the boat, but Sasha says we’ll never make it that far, so what are we going to do? Go on believing the River-thing who told us this was a good idea? Or just salt it down once for all and see if that doesn’t improve our luck.”

“You can’t kill a magical creature,” Uulamets said in a preoccupied way, and walked off to the log where he had been sitting.

“What—?” Pyetr started to say, but: “Shut up!” Uulamets hissed, and went and picked up his book from the log, sat down and started leafing through it.

“More magic,” Pyetr said, and looked at Sasha. “I hope he’s got a way to wish us out of this. Maybe if you and he and Eveshka got together on what you wanted—”

“You can wish a rock to fall,” Uulamets snarled, turning pages. “You can wish a man to rise. But you won’t wish either to fly, and you won’t wish a force of nature not to exist, not if you have any sense.”

“So what would happen?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On strength and intent. Shut up! You’d try a stone’s patience.”

“I want to know,” Pyetr said in a low voice, looking back at Sasha, “how if you can’t wish what can’t happen—what we just buried back there could be walking around and calling him papa.”

Eveshka vanished, just shredded like smoke and whipped away across the clearing to take shape again with her back to them.

“I don’t know the answer,” Sasha said under his breath.

“I didn’t mean to upset her. But that thing’s damned scary. How do we even know the old man’s what he seems to be?”

Pyetr always had had a knack for scary questions. Sasha cast a look over at Uulamets and wished hard, that being all he could think of, to see the truth about him. All he saw was a bony, frightened old man with a book that preserved the things he had done or thought of doing, but which would tell him very little about the things he had never thought of at all.

Unless one could think like Pyetr—just throw down the walls of what was scary and what was dangerous and ask questions like that.

Why? Why not? And, Why won’t it?

Actually, Sasha thought, trying to answer Pyetr’s questions for himself—I don’t know why we can’t wish ourselves out of this.

Why not?

Why not all try it?

Master Uulamets thinks it’s dangerous. Why? Because he’s never tried it? Because none of us really can agree what we want? Why did he answer that by talking about nature?

If you wish a fire not to burn, some other force of nature has to move in a rainstorm. If you wish a stone to fly, some force of nature has to move in and lift it.

If you want a bone to live and move—nature doesn’t want to do that. At least in Vojvoda it wouldn’t, Pyetr’s absolutely right.

But there are things that don’t come to Vojvoda.

Why not?

Because ordinary people are hard to magic?

Because working with all those people that can’t be magicked is like lifting a lot of rocks, all the time?

He wished Eveshka would not be angry at Pyetr, and that she would tell him what she knew about magic.

Maybe, he thought, his thinking was Eveshka answering him.

What did we bury? he wondered suddenly, and went, ignoring Pyetr’s startled, “Where are you going?” to see the place where they had buried the skull.

Pyetr caught up to him as he reached the spot. And there was no mound, just a hole.

“God,” Pyetr said, and hastily looked around them.

“I don’t know what it was,” Sasha said, “but it wasn’t dead. Size doesn’t mean a thing to a vodyanoi. Shape doesn’t either. We’ve seen that.”

“Why didn’t it kill us?” Pyetr asked. “It had a hundred chances.”

“Something wants us here,” Sasha said uncomfortably. “I think you’re absolutely right about that.”

“ Eveshka knew what this thing was,” Pyetr said angrily. “She killed it—”

“Not killed.”

“Whatever she did to it—she’s a wizard, isn’t she? She has to know more than we do, doesn’t she? She could have said, ‘Pyetr and Sasha, don’t touch that thing, it’s not dead!’ She might have said, I’m just not sure about that,’ she might have said, ‘Don’t waste your time burying it, it’ll just leave when you’re not looking.’”

A cold thought came to him. “Why didn’t Babi growl at it? Babi’s your friend.”

“Babi’s her dog,” Pyetr said in a subdued voice. “Or whatever. Babi didn’t go close to it. And grandfather , for that matter—didn’t open his mouth. He’s the chief wizard around here, isn’t he? So why didn’t he tell us?”

“Master Uulamets isn’t doing very well,” Sasha said, feeling his stomach increasingly upset. “And I don’t know why she didn’t tell us. I don’t know why she disappeared for a moment on the trail, or why the vodyanoi kept coming and going. I don’t know why she’s acting the way she is, but she’s upset at her father and she’s not—”

He lost whatever he had been going to say. It just dropped out of his mind.

And again something dropped out.

That scared him, and he wished he could remember what it was.

“I’m being absent-minded,” he said, and lost touch with the forest around him for a moment. He wished not to, and made himself look around. “We’re in trouble.”

“God,” Pyetr muttered, and shook at his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like what’s going on.” He looked up at the ridge, and into the trees around them, and he took Pyetr’s arm and drew him back into the clearing where Uulamets and Eveshka were.

“Eveshka,” he said, quietly, so as not to disturb her father. “We want to talk to you.”

She slipped away into the woods, pale and silent, not quite out of sight, but not talking to them about what was not in that small grave either.

NOBODY TALKED about doing anything. “Are we going back to the boat?” Pyetr asked Sasha, who at least was talking to him; and: “I don’t think so,” Sasha said.

The next reasonable question: “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said, managing not to look him quite in the eye.

The third: “Is everybody waiting on grandfather to make up his mind? Or is it perchance the vodyanoi we’re waiting for?”

“Grandfather’s thinking,” Sasha said.

Pyetr muttered his succinct opinion, got into their supplies and had himself a drink, had himself two, for good measure, after which he came at least to the temporary philosophical conclusion that he was doomed, everyone was bent on a course that was assuredly going to kill them all, and if no one else wanted to take the trouble to hike back to the boat, damned if he wanted to make a pointless, exhausting trek.

At least, in a more practical vein, they could rest, eat, bandage blisters and mend rips and such against such time as it might please grandfather to think about going back to the boat and back to the house to reconsider this whole mad venture.

So Eveshka drifted in and out amongst the trees, grandfather read his book and the god knew what stalked them in the brush while the sun passed noon, afternoon, and it got on toward dark.