C. Cherryh - Rusalka

Fingers tightened again. “How did you feed my daughter?”

“I—” He panicked, unsure of what he was guilty, or what the old man suspected he had done.

“Where did you get what you gave her?”

“From the woods, from the—”

“From living things. Like the rusalka, from living things, from the inexhaustible earth—”

Is it inexhaustible? Sasha wondered, helpless, stupid curiosity, with everything tumbling through his mind, cold and distant now. He thought of the dead forest…

“—or from things that are magical. The vodyanoi certainly would lend us his, he wants to lend us his, as he lends it to our enemy, and do you know where he gets it?”

“From the river—”

“From the river, from the earth, from his victims, but what he is , boy, is cold, and linked to other things like him—I don’t speak of evil, boy, there’s no name for Vhat it is, except self interested and slippery and rarely holding an ambition that has to do with men— men hold that kind of thought, do you understand me?”

Sasha tried to shake his head.

“You borrow from him, boy, and he’ll give you all you want, he’ll give you cold power, and deep power,, and rivals, oh, you can’t allow rivals, not on that level of power, boy, because the last thing you want is another wizard to want things his way—”

“I’m not against you,” Sasha said faintly.

“You’re lying.”

“No, sir! No!”

“I taught once, and twice, and had a daughter—and what does it come to? To this! To this damned woods and a creature that for my simple asking would make me more powerful than the young fool who killed my daughter, than the young fool who fights me every step of the way—”

“I’m not fighting you, I’m sorry—”

“Let me tell you, boy, his whole use for my daughter was revenge on me, his whole purpose in coming to me was to take everything I had, including my free will. At least my thieving wife left me something—but look what that came to! The girl was her mother’s daughter—”

“Eveshka never betrayed you. You don’t believe that Thing…”

“I believe in fecklessness. I believe in youthful stupidity. I believe in self-interested treachery , I’ve seen too much of it, and here we both are, boy, in the middle of this damnable woods, with you with one purpose and me with mine, crossing each other at every turn, while there’s no resource our enemy doesn’t have. I thought I had my daughter back, the way she was before that blackguard came, but no, I should have known the difference; my Eveshka went straight for another light-minded, pretty scoundrel—”

“Pyetr’s not like that!”

“I’m not expecting to get my daughter back. Not my daughter! All I’m trying to do is stop her from joining him , because she will. I’m here to stop a fool who’s dangerous to everything alive, because that’s what he’s become, that’s why I wouldn’t let him have my daughter and that’s why I’m risking everything I’ve got left, damn you! I should have killed both of you at the start, I should have killed you when I knew how wrong things had gone. I more than’ don’t need you,’ you’re good , you’re powerful as hell, boy, and he’s got both my daughter and your friend, do you understand me, do you know what you’re going to do about that?”

“Kill him if I have to.” Sasha had never imagined intending a thing like that, he had never thought he could, but he saw where master Uulamets was leading him and what master Uulamets was asking.

Till Uulamets shoved him back hard and said, “And then who’ll be the power, boy, have you gotten that far in your thinking?”

“I—don’t want anything but—”

My friends safe, he thought, trying to figure what else that hid; and felt Uulamets’ hand relax, and close again on his shirt and pull him upright. The raven fluttered and settled on Uulamets’ shoulder as Uulamets pulled him into the circle of his arm.

“Believing stops,” Uulamets said, holding him so tightly for a moment his joints cracked, before he roughed his hair and let him go. “Then there’s nothing. You understand: there are very few old wizards. And thank the god, most of the young ones lose it fast.—Make a fire, boy, do what I tell you, do absolutely what I tell you.”

Sasha opened his mouth to plead their need for haste, then smothered that objection and said, bowing his head, “I’m trying not to wish, sir, but—”

Uulamets’ hand came up under his chin and held him eye to eye in a little patch of starlight. “But.”

“j__”

“Want nothing but what I want. There’s another place to get magic. Do you imagine what it is? It’s very dangerous.”

“From another magician,” Sasha said, with a little flutter of dread: he did not know whose thought that was.

Uulamets said, still holding him, “You have to stop fighting me, boy. You’ve got the power, I’ve got the experience, and it has to flow my direction: you don’t want to see the harm you can do. Will you do what I want? Will you absolutely do what I want? I’m going to work a real magic in a moment. It won’t be pleasant for you.”

“Pyetr—”

“No promises. No promises. We don’t even know he’s alive. But that blackguard student of mine is going to kill both of us—or worse. There is worse—if we don’t do something. Hear how quiet things are? He’s thinking. We haven’t much time.”

“He’s making the ghosts—?”

“He’s feeding them. He’s doing all of this. The vodyanoi is helping him; and he doesn’t want us dead, that isn’t half what he wants.”

Sasha thought he understood. He was afraid of what he understood, and afraid of mistakes.

And helpless, by that fact.

“Go ahead,” he said to Uulamets, trying not to let his terror show. “Whatever you have to do.”

They went in a hail of twigs and leaves, a passing dark flurry of branches, so rapidly that Pyetr ducked his head, held on to Misighi and when some crashing impact or downward drop made him sure he was going to die—he held the tighter, Eveshka clinging as a weightless chill about his neck, told himself that leshys would never fall, and never drop him, and kept his mouth tightly shut no matter what—until of a sudden they plummeted into empty air: “God!” he cried—

But they stopped abruptly and bounced up again, continuing to bounce slightly—like his heart, he thought, swallowing the outcry he had made: Misighi had evidently caught a resilient branch to stop them. Misighi immediately stretched out the arm holding him, opened all the myriad twiggy fingers and slipped others from his grip until he dangled only from his hands, and lowered him and Eveshka rapidly down and down through empty air.

“Fare well,” Misighi said, the mere creaking of branches, as its face retreated into the dark above him and shadowy limbs rushed up past them. “This is the boundary. Further than this is impossible for us.”

Pyetr’s feet touched ground, and it let them go, uncurling its fingers from his grip.

Then he did well to keep his shaking legs under him—instinctively tried to steady Eveshka, but his hands only met cold; and he looked up into the dark: “Thank you,” he said foolishly—difficult to bow to something far above his head; and only had a shower of leaves for his trouble, the creatures passing above them like a storm through the woods.

Eveshka had his hand, always able to touch him, surer of his edges, he supposed, than he was of hers. He looked about him at a woods no worse than where they had been—and beyond, at a starlit forest of dead limbs, dead as Eveshka’s own.