C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“My daughter,” Uulamets muttered at their backs, “is very much its creature. And you are hers. Remember that, too.”

Pyetr said nothing to that disturbing assertion. He only looked daggers at the old man, who was back at his book.

“He means be careful,” Sasha said.

“He has a damned nasty way of saying so.” He took the jug from Babi, who was waiting anxiously, unstopped it and poured a big helping into Babi’s waiting mouth: Babi had earned it.

On which thought he poured him a little more.

The jug, about half empty, seemed not particularly lighter by that. It had not, he suddenly began reckoning, gotten emptier all day.

Maybe, he thought, that was Babi’s wish. Who knew?

Pyetr took to his blanket and slept, finally—Sasha saw to that, a very little wish, a very cautious little wish, for Pyetr’s own good: Pyetr might catch him at it, but Pyetr was in so much misery, much of which Sasha held for his fault—as Pyetr said, what was one more at this point?

Sasha added the jug to the tally of wishes on his stick, like all the others, some not even lightly made or unconsidered—but all unsummed, until for the same reasons as Uulamets he had begun that long-postponed ciphering, spiderwise trying to patch a web that should have been orderly from the start, but which he discovered frighteningly random. Writing was beyond him, but he made marks he wished to remember—

While Eveshka brushed near him, angry at him, as if his attempt to understand things terrified her in some way too obscure for him.

Then he remembered that she had died at near his age.

He made a mark for that, in the line that was Eveshka.

Young for all her years since, because it seemed to him she could learn about things, without learning things, sometimes acting exactly sixteen, in his reckoning, especially about Pyetr—

No, she insisted, from across the fire.

And maybe about her father, too, he thought, making another mark. Grown folk maybe puzzled Eveshka more than they did him: working at The Cockerel had shown him a lot more about people—and she had only met a few living souls in her whole life, all of them wizards.

Until she died, Sasha thought, and maybe met others, to their regret-She drifted closer to him, more and more upset—of which Uulamets was quite aware. He realized that without looking around. Uulamets was suddenly upset with his line of thought, and he recollected the jug he had so casually bespelled: his most effective spell, Father Sky! The thing had resisted accident and almost cost Pyetr’s life—precisely as master Uulamets had warned him: Magic is easy for the young…

Nothing had stood in that spell’s way—no one had ever wished that the jug break, no one had ever had a contradictory motive toward it, and the god knew he had not had a hesitation in his head when the jar had flown across the deck and he had wished it stay whole.

Magic was so damnably easy—the jug showed that: he had gotten nonchalant about such little spells, being constantly in the midst of great and dangerous magic had dispersed his lifelong cautions and made him believe he could let fly a harmless wish—

But his spell on the jug was not harmless. It had evidently been more powerful than the protections he had set on Pyetr himself, for reasons he could not entirely understand—unless—

Unless his spells on Pyetr had flaws—like doubts—

But that was not the thread he had started to follow. He found himself disturbed to the heart, feeling a wish happening around him, like a brush against his skin—or that insubstantial periphery he sometimes described to himself that way.

Uulamets said, from behind him, “A rusalka is a wish. A wish not to die. A wish for revenge. That describes my daughter.”

“The leshy helped her,” Sasha said, most carefully, and swung halfway about to look at him. “I didn’t get the feeling there was anything—wrong about the leshy. The opposite, actually. It felt—”

“There used to be one near the house,” Uulamets said. “It’s not there anymore. Ask my daughter why.”

“It’s not her fault, is it? She didn’t ask to drown—”

Father Sky, there was a flaw in Uulamets’ story about Eveshka, Sasha thought suddenly and for no reason he understood. No matter what Uulamets had said at the first, he could never have believed his daughter a suicide: if a wizard really truly wished to die—

Everything we thought we knew from Eveshka—he thought, too—that was the Fetch who said it, or the vodyanoi through her. Pyetr’s right: too many wizards—and too many of them lying…

“Don’t waste your strength,” Uulamets said, suddenly rising, and Eveshka fled back a little. “What did I ever tell you, girl? Remember not to forget? Don’t wish without thinking? But you’re nothing but a wish yourself, and you don’t think and you don’t remember your mistakes.”

“I’m trying,” Eveshka whispered. “Papa, I’m trying—”

“For whom?” Uulamets snapped. “Get yourself together. It’s out there.—Boy, do you feel it?”

Sasha did—suddenly recognized the subtle chill in the brush out there, twisting and elusive as the snake it sometimes seemed. He wanted to move. He wanted to warn Pyetr—

“Bring it,” Uulamets snapped at them. “Wish it here. Bind it here!”

Sasha shied off with a single thought for Pyetr’s safety and Hwiuur lunged for an escape.

Stop! he thought, then, with Uulamets, with Eveshka, and felt it pinned, throwing wishes to this side and that like a snake under a stick. Pyetr waked with a cry of pain, that was one wish it sent: “God!” Pyetr cried, kneeling, bent over his hand, while a runaway spill of ink flowed out of the bushes and straight toward him—

Stop ! Sasha ordered it; Uulamets ordered; Eveshka ordered. The front end began to rise, quickly taller than Pyetr’s head, rapidly thicker as more and more of it poured out of the dark.

He had to hold onto it, had to hold, while it tried every way it knew to get at Pyetr, who was stumbling to his feet with his sheathed sword in his left hand, trying, Father Sky, no!—to attack it—

“Liar!” Uulamets cried. “Deceive me, will you?” It tumbled down and circled into coils like a headless snake as Pyetr staggered out of its way. “Lie to me, will you?” The raven left its branch to dive and strike at the River-thing, and Babi, untidy fur stuck all over with leaves, bristled and hissed and nipped at it.

“Let be!” Hwiuur cried, writhing. “Let be, let be!” Its hide began to smoke. Pieces of it came away in its struggles. “Stop it!” Sasha was yelling at Uulamets ; even Eveshka was flinching from Uulamets’ torment of it, everything was falling apart and Hwiuur was going to go at Pyetr again—throwing a quick, snaky twist of its intent about Sasha’s revulsion and trying to pull him apart from Uulamets : but he kept thinking about Pyetr’s safety, and it thrashed and wailed in pain: “Not my doing—not my fault. Never—”

“The truth this time!” Uulamets shouted at it, and it curled itself into a knotty, smoking ball no larger than a man.

It snuffled, “The man made me do it.” Smaller and smaller. “I didn’t kill her. Kept the bones, that was all, he said I could have the bones. She could have the forest, I’d have the river, that’sail.”

Eveshka deserted the web. Sasha felt his own hold quiver like a plucked string, felt it about to snap, cried desperately, “Hwiuur: what man? Why did he do it?”

“She knows!” Hwiuur cried, twisted in knots and grew smaller still. “He killed her, he drowned her in the river, he took away her heart and he won’t let her go—he won’t let anything go, not her, not me, not you if you don’t stop him, and I know how! I know all the secrets she can’t tell, I know what you need to know, and you burn me, you tumble down my cave, you blame me for things he did! Well, damn you all! Why should I help fools? Ask me why your plans go astray! Ask me where your daughter’s mother’s gone!”