Rusalka (v1.3)

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Move,” Sasha said, and pushed him to make him hurry.

  Which was not the advice he hoped for.

  God, he thought, what’s the matter with her?—Because she was moving faster and faster, feeding into him a sweating panic that had no object, only that sense of something behind them again.

  Maybe it was Sasha himself, or Sasha’s wizardly essence that alarmed her. Maybe to Eveshka’s frightened mind he seemed that cold and dangerous. Or maybe this panic was only a weapon she had begun to use, wearing at him and through him at Sasha…

  Move, Sasha said, as if Sasha himself was slipping beneath Eveshka’s spell. If that was true, Pyetr thought, then they were both done, doomed to be bones in some thicket or other.

  At some times, within blinks of his eyes, he could not even believe Eveshka existed; at others, even looking elsewhere, even distracted with some precarious slope, he felt her presence as surely as Sasha’s; heard her whispering in his heart that she was not lying, that the danger was there and real as she was.

  Run, she whispered in his heart, run, don’t look back, Pyetr—

  The rain-sparkle of her shape faded as she passed into thicker shade. The shadow seemed everywhere deeper and they were losing her ahead of them.

  “Dammit,” Pyetr said, fighting past a branch, with the black fur-ball darting in and out around his ankles, whining. He tried to hand the branch on to Sasha, but Sasha suddenly stopped and turned to look into the woods behind them.

  Don’t look back, Eveshka urged him, don’t look, Pyetr, no, keep running—

  He did look—saw something moving on their track, impossibly quick, stirring the brush as it came; and there was no time for argument: he grabbed Sasha by the collar and snatched him through the brush, branches raking them as Sasha flailed out and tried to get his feet under him. Pyetr did not risk letting him go, only tried to haul him upright and keep them both moving. The disturbance was following them through the brush, he heard it snapping behind them, then heard it pass virtually over their heads, sending a hail of broken twigs down on them—

  Then it was gone, and Pyetr looked around him in panicked confusion, Eveshka suddenly lost from his sight and his heart, Sasha catching his arm for balance on his right hand and Babi whimpering and shivering between his feet.

  “What was that?” Pyetr asked.

  Something touched him on the shoulder.

  He yelped and spun around, colliding with Sasha, grabbing him, and seeing a branch in his face, knobbly wood, a dozen twigs for fingers—Maybe, he thought as his heart started to settle, he had staggered into it without knowing he was moving…

  But slowly the branch reached, the gray, thin twigs quivering just in front of his face as the tree blinked and scowled at him.

  He caught a breath and held it, afraid Sasha was going to offend it, afraid most of all that multiplicity of bare twigs that twitched and hesitated a scant impulse removed from his eyes.

  Babi trembled against his legs and hissed. The tree blinked again. He felt Sasha gather a handful of his sleeve, about to do something or simply as scared as he was, he had no idea. His heart was thumping against his ribs in helpless panic, faster and faster, until he feared it was going to burst.

  Worse than Hwiuur, worse than Eveshka. Much worse. If anything, he hoped for Eveshka to come back and deal with this creature that quite evidently Sasha could not.

  The twig-hand twitched and quivered its dozen fingers away from his face and past him toward Sasha, slowly then drawing them both forward as Sasha’s fist clenched the tighter on his sleeve and the sleeve threatened to tear. Real twigs snapped as the Thing leaned closer.

  Pyetr got a grip on Sasha’s arm and pulled back, lost that grip in the inexorable pull and in desperation grabbed the Forest-thing’s knobby wrist instead; but it seized him, then, blindingly quick, horrifically strong. It grabbed his other arm, dropping Sasha, and dragged him toward its trunk.

  “Sasha!” he yelled, feeling human hands pulling at his shirt, feeling them losing their grip. He tried to kick it, hoping it would drop him, but all he hit was a yielding mass of twigs. “Sasha—get the sword! Get the sword!”

  Sasha clawed at his waist as it dragged him upward, whether Sasha was trying simply to hold on to him or to get at the weapon. Babi yapped, then yelped suddenly like a kicked cur as Pyetr felt Sasha’s hands slip from his belt and from his leg and his ankle as it carried him through the brush.

  In sole possession of him then, it let go of one of his arms, the other most painfully held while it ran twiggy fingers over his body and sniffed at him. He hung there with one shoulder all but breaking, tried to kick it, but that only shot pain through his ribs and shoulder, stifling his breath. Its fingers paused then on his face, and it held him so close he could see nothing but brown eyes and two centers of deep, deep black.

  “Healthy,” it said in a voice that went through his bones, and took him by both arms again, relief but no reassurance. “Healthy.”

  “I assure you,” Pyetr gasped, with what wind he had gotten in that moment, “if we’ve trespassed, we certainly had no intention—”

  “You’ve brought death with you,” it said.

  “She’s only looking for her father.” He realized how ominous that sounded. He stared the creature full in the eyes with no idea what Sasha was doing, or whether he was conscious or even alive. He said quickly, on a ragged breath, “We’ll most gladly leave—”

  Its attention prickled through him, stranger than Eveshka’s, much stranger and more thorough. One moment he was near to screaming, the next he was half fainting, his feet meeting the ground and his legs tingling with strength to hold him up, from what reserve he had no idea.

  “Go,” it said, relaxing its grip on him.

  “Sasha—” He turned with a rush of that tingly strength through all his limbs and a sudden, desperate hope of getting the boy out of this. Sasha was there, but he only stood numbly when Pyetr took hold of him, and the same instant Pyetr thought of snatching Sasha away by force he felt a dread so thick he could hardly breathe.

  “You can’t,” Sasha said, staring past him. “It’ll let you go. It’s all right. Goon.”

  “It isn’t all right, dammit!” He looked back at the Thing in the thicket, shaking in the knees and feeling that they had no chance, if it was down to him dealing with a Forest-thing. “Listen to me. Sasha’s not at fault. There’s a wizard dragged us up here, he’s gone off with something we don’t know what, and Eveshka’s only trying to stop him from killing himself. None of us want to be here. None of us want anything but to get the old man out of this woods and go home.”

  He felt it listening. He stood arguing with what looked, between pounding heartbeats, like no more than a brushy tree, and tried to believe he was sane, tried to make himself believe in leshys—which was what he was sure it was—because he had to, he could not let it trick him into seeing just a tree and losing touch with it while it went on killing Sasha—

  It was the forest. Or part of it. It owned what had fed him and it was trying to pull away from him, trying to be something else, that was what he knew, the same way he knew that it was not trying as hard as it could because they confused it.

  Why? it wondered. Why and how this fighting me?

  “Because we’ll never get south,” he said, seizing what was nothing more than a branch, holding to it while his hand and his eyes were trying to tell him that he was being a fool, he was talking to a damned tree, Sasha was exhausted and at the end of his wits and there was no such a thing as a rusalka, there never had been. “God!” he cried, shaking at it, “you hear me, dammit!”

  But he was not even sure it could hear him any longer: Sasha said there was a necessary separation between magical things and ordinary folk and maybe it no more knew he was there any longer than he could see it for what it was. Sasha was standing there helpless and still and Eveshka and Babi were invisible if, he kept thinking—if they ever had existed.

  It was like a curtain being
drawn, separating him out of the magical, sending him back to the sane and the ordinary world—but it was taking Sasha with it.

  “For the god’s sake listen to me! We never meant any harm here—” He had pleaded desperate cases with outraged landlords in Vojvoda, and it seemed no different to him. “We never wanted to be here, except this Thing—” He figured maybe it was a case of jurisdictions, “—lured her father off. She followed us all the way from the old ferry and she hasn’t the strength to keep going without what she borrowed—”

  The branch moved under his hand. Twigs curled around his wrist, holding him prisoner. The creature opened its eyes and stared at him.

  It said, “So you were feeding her deliberately. That’s very foolish.”

  “She wasn’t trying to kill anything, not us, not anything in this forest. Neither was Sasha.”

  Again that cool, tingling touch, from his wrist up and down. But he stopped being afraid of a sudden. He knew he was being looked at and looked into with a thoroughness no one ever had, and it was more curious now than angry.

  “I forgive you,” the Thing said. “But you’ve still been very foolish.”

  “None of it was Sasha’s doing—”

  “There is no fault here. Not even hers.” It swayed and pointed with one of its many limbs to a mere pool of mist among the leaves. “But she has no heart: she’s taken your friend’s. She has no life; she’s stealing yours; and his; and mine.” He felt that tingle run from his head to his feet, felt comfortable, and safe, and thought it might be a lie more dangerous than Eveshka’s. “I would know if you lied to me,” the Forest-thing said, and Pyetr believed absolutely that was the truth. It said, while well-being coursed through him like cool water, and its attention like a warm breeze: “Do you know what your friend has done?”

  He had no idea how to answer. It said, as if he had,

  “Foolish. All young. All young.” It reached past him with another of its limbs and grasped Sasha’s shoulder. “Wanting me to let you go. Using my woods to feed him, against me. Death fighting death.—What shall I do with you?”

  “Help us,” Sasha said, as a droplet of sweat trickled a clear path down his face. “Help us get out of your woods. Help us find her father. Help us get him free.”

  The Forest-thing released them both and drew back with a rustling of twigs and leaves. “My name is Wiun,” it said.

  “Pyetr,” Pyetr said.

  “Sasha,” Sasha said. “—And Eveshka and Babi, if you please.”

  It quivered, a little rustling of its branches as they lowered. “I don’t please,” it said. “A dvorovoi has no place here. A rusalka has no place among living things.—But I have no choice.”

  The pool of mist spun upward like a milky whirlwind and spread itself wider and thinner, like tattered robes, like fine hair flying on a gale, like ghostly arms and hands and Eveshka’s pale, frightened face.

  “Rusalka!” the leshy said. “Take, take once, and not again in my woods, on peril of what life you have. Do you hear me?”

  Eveshka’s eyes widened; her hair and robes swirled about her, leaves flew in a whirlwind, and she blushed, not alone with faint rose on her face, but pale gold in her hair, pale blue in her tattered gown—

  “Oh!” she cried, wide-eyed, and Babi yelped and sprang from somewhere to her arms, burying its face against her.

  “I will not ask your promise,” Wiun said to her in that bone-deep voice, “for the welfare of my woods or your companions: you would do anything to live. You already have. I only advise you what you already know: a wizard who lies to others is one thing; one who lies to himself is quite another. Do you know why?”

  Eveshka did not answer. She held Babi closer.

  Wiun shifted back into the brush, or was part of it.

  “—Because then all wishes go wrong,” Sasha murmured faintly, in the last whisper of the leshy’s going.

  Eveshka looked at Sasha, looked at Pyetr, with the mist gathering like beads on her hair, with her eyes gone a soft blue and a little rosy blush on her lips. “Pyetr,” she said in a tremulous voice.

  He trembled himself, while Sasha pulled sharply at his arm. He knew better. God, he knew better; she was afraid, he only hoped he knew why; but all he could do was stare at her until all she could do was stare back.

  “Pyetr!” Sasha said, jerking at his arm.

  He blinked and looked away, trying«to break the spell and get his breath back. He saw his sword lying in the brush and went and picked it up, shaking—

  Because he wanted her so much, and he knew better, and Sasha was depending on him.

  “We’ll find your father,” he said to Eveshka, making himself see the trees, the woods around them, and Sasha frowning at him. “He says he can bring you back. Well—dammit, he will!”

  God, he thought, gone cold inside, he was talking about Ilya Uulamets.

  CHAPTER 21

  TWILIGHT CAME EARLY in the depth of the woods, under a clouded sky, but they kept walking so long as there was the least light to see by. “How far yet?” was what Sasha had wanted to know of Eveshka when they had first set out from the leshy’s grove; and Eveshka had said she was not sure of that.

  “Is your father even alive?” Sasha had asked next. “ Can you tell?”

  Eveshka had not been sure of that either: she had confessed as much, evading his eyes, then quickly slipped away to take the lead—moving not as she had, as a wraith which had no need of paths, but with a sure woodcraft which still kept her out of their reach.

  She clearly had no wish to sit at their fireside when they had stopped for the night, either; nor did she seem to need their food. No, she answered distantly when Sasha offered, after which she rose and walked away to the little spring-fed rill that gave them water.

  Again, Sasha noted uneasily—water.

  They had a stew of fish and the early mushrooms and fern-heads that Eveshka had found and assured them were wholesome to eat. Sasha looked with new misgivings at the supper he was cooking, and again with misgivings at Pyetr gazing after Eveshka.

  “I’m not so sure about these mushrooms,” Sasha said.

  Pyetr said, distantly, “Does she need to poison us?”

  One supposed not. Sasha shrugged and dished up the stew, which thanks to Eveshka had more than dried fish and water in it, and thanks to Eveshka’s lack of appetite, afforded a good helping apiece for them.

  “You know she’s not answering questions,” Sasha said.

  Pyetr took his dish, took up a spoonful and blew on it—which evidently made it reasonable for him to ignore questions, too.

  Sasha set out a little for Babi. Babi sniffed his and growled at it, but that was, one hoped, the heat, or a distaste for mushrooms.

  Sasha took a gingerly, carefully cooled sip of his own dish and found it more than palatable, looked up again at Pyetr, who was staring off into the trees at Eveshka—wishing something on his own, Sasha feared, in a very different direction than he was wishing himself.

  Maybe he should have sympathy for that—but he was vexed, more than vexed, seeing Eveshka use those soft-eyed looks on Pyetr, with what might not be, considering she had a heart to confuse her, in any sense reasoned or reasonable. In fact Sasha tried to put a stop to that, exerting himself not on her, which he suspected could demand much more strength than he wanted to spare—but on Pyetr… which still took more strength than he wanted to spend, fighting a natural urge that could affect even someone altogether heartless.

  But considering that Eveshka could not, after all, sustain herself on the food they used—

  “She’s not eating,” Sasha said, hoping Pyetr would think further down that line.

  “Mmnn,” Pyetr replied.

  “She’s not alive, Pyetr, she can’t eat, she’s got to get it from somewhere and it can’t be the forest—”

  “We’ll find her father,” Pyetr said, and dug into his stew.

  That was the help he got from Pyetr. Sasha ate his supper, he fed the fire, glad at leas
t that the rain had stopped.

  Finally he said to Pyetr, “If we don’t find her father soon, and if he can’t do anything—she’s not going to stay the way she is, Pyetr. You heard what the leshy said. She can’t help herself.”

  “Shut up,” Pyetr said.

  Even that curt reply failed to make him angry. Perhaps it should have, but his thinking was too clear and Pyetr’s was too muddy at the moment, even to deserve it.

  “She’ll turn on us,” Sasha reminded him, “or on her father r if we do manage to find him, just as fast. I’ve been noticing the way she’s acting—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the way she’s acting. She just doesn’t want to be here right now.”

  “Don’t make excuses for her. She can’t help it, that’s what the leshy was telling us…”

  “I know it. You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “I do. You’re not listening.”

  Pyetr gave him an angry look, and asked, “What’s this about hearts? What’s all this about hearts the leshy was saying?”

  Sasha shrugged. He had no wish to go deeply into that with Pyetr tonight, or to try to explain it—knowing well enough Eveshka would seize the chance to confuse things: to confuse Pyetr, more to the point. A boy with a girl on his mind might be close to his understanding, but Sasha had no notion what to do with a man whose intentions were muddled up with a girl who was not only dead but dangerous, with feelings he had a deep fear might not be the rusalka’s own idea in the first place.

  How did one explain that possibility to Pyetr—reasonably?

  “That Thing,” Pyetr insisted, “said, ‘She hasn’t any heart, she’s taken your friend’s.’ What was he talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can somebody take somebody else’s heart, for the god’s sake?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know everything. Your supper’s getting cold.”