C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“Liar!” Uulamets cried. “Begone! Go back to your grave! Go back to the worms with your carping and your spite, she’s nothing to do with your poison, Draga!”

“Licentious pig. I’ll see you dead.”

“Look to yourself on that day! God, what did I ever see in you?”

“I had the worst of that bargain. I had you. God, look at you, you withered stick. I don’t know what I saw in you.”

“There’s your mother,” Uulamets said, flinging up a hand, turning his shoulder to the ghost. “There’s your mother, girl, god, what a baggage—”

He wished suddenly with such cold violence that Sasha threw up everything, everything he had, and stood, afterward, with his heart thumping and the clearing holding only one ghost, one tattered, frightened ghost, who turned and fled.

“Eveshka!” Uulamets said, again sending out that force , and she paused at the forest edge, shedding little filaments of herself.

“Eveshka,” Pyetr called out to her, and more pieces came away, flying out into the dark.

“What happened to my mother?” she asked, and Uulamets said,

“I’ve no idea.”

“How did she die?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t my doing.”

Eveshka stared at him with eyes dark and deep and angry.

“You do know.”

“As happens, I don’t. She left after trying to steal my book, she left you behind, which was evidently the limit of her maternal affection. She was a wizard. Of course she was. Do you think she had a heart?” He reached out his hand and the raven flapped its wings and landed heavily on his wrist before he flung it for a sturdier perch overhead. “Hers would lodge in a snake. In a toad. In a cesspool. Don’t listen to her. You’re not her creature, you never were and you never will be.” He made a motion of his hand toward Sasha. “Put out the fire. Pack up.”

“Now?” Pyetr cried. “It’s dark out there! There’s the god knows what crawling around in the bushes, we’ve walked all last night, we’ve slept precious little of this one—”

“You wanted something done,” Uulamets snapped, and stamped his staff on the ground. “Move!”

Pyetr felt the shove the old man gave him, past his own pricklish shakiness of too little sleep, too many bad surprises, and too much effort yet to go. “Dammit—”

“Mind your language!” Uulamets said. “Don’t curse things and don’t name names and above all don’t mistake your dullness to magic for immunity. I’ll tell you once: yes, you’re hard to attack with magic, you’re slow to see, slow to feel, too dull to know what’s going on around you, but once something gets its material hands on you, or once you stand this close to a wizard, you’re in dire trouble, son. Distance does matter.”

“Don’t—” But he had just admonished Eveshka not to fight the old man. He swallowed his own bitter medicine and said, calmly, respectfully, “Can you make a sail rip, two and three days away?”

“You!” Uulamets said with a jut of his chin. “You damnable, arrogant, ignorant wretch, you with your insisting to be in the middle of things, you with your pig-headed interference, you’re the open door to any malign thing that wants a distraction—sit in the smoke till you sneeze, you damned fool: go help our enemy, why don’t you? It’s our only hope!”

Pyetr’s face burned: it was only the truth, he thought, the old man was justified in that; the old man could have spared calling him to task in front of Sasha and Eveshka both—though even that he could not complain of, since he had put them both in danger.

But it did not change the question he was asking.

“I’m still asking,” he said, “is this the best thing to do? If distance makes a difference, is it smart of us to do anything but go back to the boat—”

“Why don’t you teach your grandmother to suck eggs?”

“I’m saying I may be the only one in this party with his wits about him, I may be the only one with doubts about this—I’m asking can you beat this fellow? Is this the best thing to do?”

Uulamets leaned on his staff and glared at him, no less sourly, but with his brow furrowed. “Pack,” he said, and his jaw looked most like a turtle’s. “You think I’m hard, don’t you? My daughter thinks I’m hard. But I’m telling you in words—in words what I want you to do. That’s very polite of me, do you understand? That’s very patient. Do you understand ?”

Pyetr had a breath held for a sharp answer; but reckoning the odds, he decided that pride had occasionally to take second place to good sense, so he said, with a little bow, “Clearly,” and walked back toward his blankets to start throwing their belongings together. Eveshka was in his path. He stopped, looked at her, said, “We’ll get this straightened out—”

But Uulamets shouted, “Stay away from my daughter!”

So he went, remembering Eveshka’s stricken face, afraid for himself and Sasha and knowing nothing was going to make sense in a place where a ball of leaves tried to make away with your belongings and the girl you were halfway in love with was standing knitting and unknitting her edges in distress over a father whose only claim to virtue was that he had not murdered her mother.

Sasha came to help him, kneeling to pick up the scattered pans.

“Where’s Babi?” Pyetr said under his breath. “Can you wish him back?”

“It’s—”

“—a stupid wish.” A man in this company got very used to being wrong.

“Dangerous,” Sasha whispered, standing up. “Pyetr, don’t get near her, please don’t get near her! I don’t know, I’m not sure, I don’t like what I’ve heard—”

“There’s a lad.” He caught hold of Sasha’s shoulder, feeling solid bone and muscle, something real in this woods. “Sasha, listen to me, she’s all right, you are, there’s three of us if we work together—the god knows what her mother is.”

Sasha looked at him as if he had said something very distressing, and gripped his hand hard. “Pyetr, Uulamets is right—don’t believe her, don’t trust her—”

“More than her father, friend, I hope you’ve noticed how he gets along with his last student.” Pyetr snatched up their blankets, and added, since he had a stationary target: “Where in the god’s name are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what I think? I think we’re not so far from the river. I think we’ve come a long loop upcoast. The River-thing is no land-goer. I think upriver’s where we were going, and that’s the direction we’ve taken in this thicket, if either of us had kept track.”

“It makes sense,” Sasha admitted.

That was some vindication. Pyetr knelt down and tied up the blankets while Sasha packed the little items.

“Hurry up!” Uulamets shouted at them.

Pyetr muttered, “Can you kill a dvorovoi?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said, and with the firelight catching his jaw, did not at the moment look at all like the stablelad from Vojvoda. “It’s you and Eveshka I’m worried about. Remember what we promised each other? No ducking off without saying?”

Pyetr felt uneasy. In his heart there was already a contrary notion he had not realized until Sasha said that. “Promise me—” Pyetr almost said, Promise to stop wishing me. But he thought that might be a stupid thing to do, so he said nothing.

“Pyetr,” Sasha said, “for the god’s sake tell me before you do anything. At least trust me. All right?”

Pyetr nodded, and tried to explain what he felt about Eveshka, how he felt when she looked at him, how he had thought love was what people talked about when they wanted to get power over someone else, or when somebody else had power over them—and he had always sworn he would never be that crooked or that stupid. So here he was. It felt different than he had thought. There were moments when he was positively giddy—which might be a rusalka’s power; and everything he had always believed might be true—