C. Cherryh - Rusalka

THE WINTER dwindled in amber evenings and daytime haze: snow melted, puddles multiplied. Icicles dripped and crashed daily into the last snow-banks, with alarming sounds of breakage.

A particularly large one lingered where water ran off The Cockerel’s west porch, but it was not ice that shattered, it was aunt Ilenka’s butter-churn, when Pyetr Kochevikov rode his horse up onto the porch to reach it.

Sasha Misurov, his hands encumbered with buckets, watched in astonishment as the icicle fell, the horse thundered off the boards, skidded onto the split-log walk and off onto the mud, all four legs miraculously whole—and aunt Ilenka came flying out of the kitchen waving her spoon and calling on the Sun, the tsar, and all his magistrates.

“Pyetr Kochevikov! Look at my porch! Look at my walk! Oh, god—” Aunt Ilenka saw the churn with the milk dripping off the porch, and grabbed up her broom from the corner.

“Look out!” one of the young men cried. “Look out, Pyetr! You’re in trouble now!”

The broom swung, Pyetr took his horse out of the way, doffed his cap and bowed, and the young ruffians—the second and third sons of rich families in Vojvoda, such were Pyetr Kochevikov’s familiars—howled with laughter, pulling their horses back to afford the battle room.

Aunt Ilenka cornered Pyetr between the stable, the courtyard wall, and the bathhouse. Pyetr jumped his horse over the bathhouse bench and thumped back across the split-log walk, throwing up mud that spattered her from head to foot.

Eyes flew wide, aunt Ilenka grasped her broom for a renewed assault, but the hooligans were fleeing the yard now with a spatter of mud, a small shower of coin—”For the churn!” Dmitri cried, to the riders’ laughter; and with a second flourish of the cap: “For the drink!” Pyetr cried, flinging more coin—and missed riding into The Cockerel’s sign by the stableyard gate only by lying back flat in his saddle, whooping with laughter.

A last spatter of mud hit the fence as the ruffians rode away.

Sasha set down his buckets, ran and picked the silver out of the mud of the gateway and took it to aunt Ilenka, who was no more pleased than one could expect.

“Hooligans!” aunt Ilenka cried. And with a swipe of her broom at Sasha’s legs: “Clean this up!”

As if it was his fault. But most things were. He was unlucky, was Sasha Misurov; and if aunt Ilenka’s grandmother’s churn was broken and the butter was gone and Pyetr Kochevikov and his rowdy, well-born friends made a shambles of the tavern yard, why, look to Sasha’s luck, the more so since he was standing there like a fool. Thank the god for Dmitri Venedikov’s patching things up or aunt Denka would have taken the broom to him in earnest.

And uncle Fedya…

Uncle Fedya might have said, finally, after ten years’ patience, “Why do we keep the boy?”

Pyetr himself had no concerns. He had a belly full of drink, a fine horse he had won yesterday at dice, he had friends with connections close to tsar Mikula himself, and girls and women doted on Pyetr Kochevikov for his looks and his wit, all of which fortune was so accustomed he only scarcely remembered the times he had been hungry, and almost never remembered he had relatives in the town, since none of them had spoken to him for years except to borrow money.

He had not been, so to say, born to wealth. But he looked to gain it.

He had not been born to manners, but he had a ready wit and a rare ability to imitate, and the second sons and the third and seventh born, who had no prospects and less responsibility in many a noble family of Vojvoda, found, Pyetr Kochevikov an antidote, that was what he called himself: an antidote to ennui and a cure for too much seriousness.

As, this evening, riding away from The Cockerel, Vasya said, “Join us at the inn,” and Pyetr winked and said, grinning, “I have other business.”

Vasya understood, Vasya gave him a wink back, but foolish Ivan said, “What business?” so Vasya and Andrei took off their caps and hit him.

“Only,” said ’Mitri, “the rascal won’t name the lady.—Who is this, that our Pyetr prefers to dice?”

Pyetr said, archly, “A gentleman doesn’t tell,” and rode off at a brisk pace through Vojvoda’s High Market Street, to stable the newly acquired horse at The Flower, where he lodged, and to buy a handful of sweetmeats—

Since, the weather warming, old Yurishev was off gambling with his elderly cronies, the fair and entirely delightful Irina was, her maid had sworn, entirely unoccupied.

So Pyetr took himself around to the lady’s garden gate, and climbed by the bathhouse roof up to the lady’s stairs, and so up to the upstairs balcony and the door, which the same maid swore would be, by moonrise, unlocked.

A scant few moments later Pyetr Kochevikov was leaving the front of the house, by a second floor window not till then unshuttered, and old Yurishev himself, sword in hand, was pelting down his garden path and around the side of his house, shouting, “Help, the watch! The watch!”

Pyetr fell as he landed on the muddy street, scrambled up and attempted the stables at The Flower, but old Yurishev’s retainers came around the west side of the house and herded him back toward the east.

As their master came panting around the east corner with his sword leveled.

“Oh, damn!” Pyetr cried, slid to a scrabbling halt, writhing aside from the point, and, putting his foot on one of lady Irina’s herb pots, Pyetr fell, yelled, and rolled wildly to rescue himself from Yurishev’s frenzied thrusts.

“I have you!” Yurishev cried, stabbed again and a third time as Pyetr rolled and scrambled for his feet, and shutters flew wide up and down the street. “Villain!”

Pyetr staggered among the remnants of the herb pots, felt something hit his side, looked down at the improbable sight of old Yurishev’s sword hilt against his waist, and looked Yurishev in the face, the two of them locked in a dreadful moment of shock. He yelled aloud as Yurishev jerked the blade back through.

Perhaps the shock of the moment lingered on Yurishev. Pyetr staggered and clutched his side, spun about and ran before the retainers could stop him, across the street and into The Flower’s stable court—bound for the back gate and the lane.

He caught his breath in the dark, leaning against the other side of The Flower’s gate, and heard the search rampaging through the stableyard, a hunt which had the stable and his room in the upstairs of the inn yet to search.

So he started off, no brisker in his walk than any other homeward stroller, his heart thumping from the fright and the running. He felt no pain yet from his wound, felt no great amount of bleeding against his fingers, which encouraged him to hope that the wound had only caught the flesh above his belt and gone straight through—it would hurt in the morning, but it was of no great consequence, and surely would not even hamper him three days hence.

Damn the old man! he thought. Damn Irina, who had not even had the grace to call out a warning of ambush, who had not had the spine to advise him through her maid that her husband was forewarned. Probably Yurishev had confronted her and Irina’s resistance had collapsed entirely. Irina might tell her husband everything, Irina might claim the god knew what—

He saw riders pass at the end of the road, the search spread now to the streets and lanes. “He’s gone out by the back way!” he heard one rider say to another group. Then the thief-bell started, a pealing that brought other shutters open all along the lane where he was.

He kept to the shadows, then took a shortcut through a garden, which set a dog to barking. He began to run, terror lending him the strength to sprint the three more blocks to The Doe, and finally collected himself to stroll into The Doe’s lantern-lit stableyard with a calm face and pay the stableboy there to take a message to ’Mitri in the common room—”Because I have to talk to him,” he said, and added, lest the boy fear he meant some harm to ’Mitri: “A message from his sister—” hoping that no word had come there yet, and that the boy would take no alarm at his shortness of breath and his shaking hands. “Hurry, boy!”