R1 - Rusalka (26 page)

Uulamets rested his elbow on his knee and ran his hand back over his hair.

"But I'm not sure," Pyetr said, "that what I followed there—"

A footstep sounded outside, on wet boards, a little louder sound than the rain.

They all froze in mid-breath. The footsteps hesitated, then came to the door. Someone knocked.

A second knock, then: Pyetr moved to take his sword from its rest beside the fireplace, with the thin hope that if a vodyanoi had no liking for it, other things magical might not—and his first thought for visitors on a night like this was the vodyanoi itself. But Uulamets was already struggling to his feet, with Sasha trying to help him: Uulamets shook him oif and headed straight for the door, his blanket tangling and trailing in his tattered robe.

Pyetr caught at his arm. "It might not be your daughter," he said, he thought quite sanely. But Uulamets snarled, "Little you know," and tottered past him.

"Fool," Pyetr muttered, and seized Sasha instead, who was dithering in the way, and put him back to the side as master Uulamets threw up the latch and the wind pushed the door open.

A girl appeared in the lightning flicker, drenched, her blond hair and her white gown alike streaming water.

"Papa?" she said faintly, and flung her arms around Uulamets .

It was
her
, it was the ghost beyond a doubt—but not ghostly white now, only white from cold; and streaming water onto the floor—but it was, after all, raining…

And this girl who had plagued his dreams and eluded everyone else's sight—was most surely visible to all of them.

He ought to have been shocked, perhaps—or glad for the old man, or afraid that she might suddenly transmute herself into weed and old bone… with the god knew what sort of deadly intention—

But of all things to feel, as she lifted her head from her father's shoulder and looked dazedly around her, he truly expected—anticipated—that she would be pleased to see him.

She showed nothing of the kind. He and Sasha together might have been a table, an accompanying chair, of passing interest only because they were strange in her house.

Odd, to feel slighted by a ghost.

He watched Uulamets bring the girl to the fire and offer her the scattered quilts. He let his sword fall, while Sasha alone had the practical good sense to shut the door and latch it against the wind. Sasha also had the absolutely amazing self-possession to ask whether Uulamets ' daughter would care for tea.

She would.

Pyetr simply wandered to the far'side of the table and sat down on the bench with his sword still in his hands, watching while a doting father wrapped his soaked, rain-chilled daughter in the quilts, while he chafed her hands, helped her dry her hip-long hair, and murmured how cold she was and how he had lost all hope this morning, and how unspeakably happy he was now. Uulamets suddenly seemed to have a heart, for the god's sake, or he was completely out of his head.

While the girl, who was more beautiful than any girl Pyetr had ever seen, soaking wet or otherwise, huddled in the blankets and clutched her father's hands and said how glad she was to be home, and how—here for the first time she truly looked at Pyetr—she had tried so hard to escape her plight, but that she had no wish, considering a rusalka's essential nature, to come anywhere near her father. So she had sought other means to speak to him.

"I'm so sorry," she said, and tears spilled onto her pale cheeks, which blushed with hectic color. "I'm so sorry. Everything's dead—I didn't want it to die. But I didn't want to fade. And I would have. I didn't know anything to do, but to try to stay alive, and they died, everything died, and I'm sorry—"

Upon which she began to cry, while Sasha was attempting, delicately balanced on one foot, to get behind her to take the water kettle from the hearth.

It all should have been ludicrous, the boy teetering on one foot, the recent ghost sobbing away against the old man's shoulder-But Pyetr watched father and daughter, with the sword lying on the table in front of him, and very much wished that it was his shoulder, and that she would look his direction, and that he could decide whether her eyes were dark or light.

And he wondered if he was only one more of her victims or whether she had had a special, secret reason for choosing him to approach—

It had seemed so to him—it had very much seemed to him, at the willow, that she had been trying to warn him, and last night in the house, after the wind, she had come to him in his dreams, less as a haunt than as a desperately lost girl, speaking to him in words he could almost hear…

She was only a girl, after all. Silly girls threw themselves at him all the time—a distraction, a momentary amusement, a nuisance in some measure: a man with his looks soon learned what it was all worth. Mature
ladies
were his real interest. But every move this girl made as flesh and blood was amazing to him—no longer drifting, but——real…

Sasha brought the tea and the girl looked at him and necessarily brushed his hand with her fingers as she took the cup. That touch made his blood run a little faster, which was a feeling he had no notion what to do with—or rather he did, but he had never been within half a step of any girl who made him feel that way, and he backed away, in the same moment stepping on a knot of blankets and having to catch his balance, looking like a fool, if she was paying any attention to him—which he really hoped she was not, just then. But just as he hoped that, the thought occurred to him that a wizard's daughter might know things about people the way he did, being sometimes unnaturally sensitive to the world around her.

That possibility embarrassed him beyond good sense, and of course the harder one tried not to think about a thing, the stronger the feeling got. He reeled away into the shadow and made a wide circuit around Uulamets and his daughter, his face burning. She surely thought he was a complete fool, and she might well resent him, especially since he had what Uulamets called ability, and here he had been sleeping in her house, asking valuable questions of her father-That was his experience of household situations, at least, in which he always seemed to be the interloper.

He sat down on the bench beside Pyetr and put his elbows on the table, figuring that beside someone as mature and self-possessed as Pyetr he was a good deal less conspicuous.

«
^
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E
veshka…
that was her name… talked on and on with the old man, much of the time in words too soft for Pyetr to hear above the patter of rain on the roof, but Pyetr watched her, all the same, and caught snatches of Uulamets ' answers—how the old man had feared she had drowned herself, or that she might have met some accident trying to run away; but no, Eveshka said…

"I was walking down along the river," she said, in a soft, breathless voice, "and the vodyanoi caught me. I should have known him. I should never have listened. But he looked like a traveler…"

Odd, Pyetr thought. No one would expect travelers here… not for a hundred years.

But, he suddenly thought, the rusalka had killed the forest. The forest had been dead—how many years?

How old is she? How old is Uulamets himself? Could someone like him have a daughter so young?

"… and I came too close," Eveshka said in her soft, lilting voice, calmly telling things that would make a grown man blanch. She was so calm—like a tsarina, he thought: a face like that, hands like that, feet like that, should be set off with cloth of gold and jewels; but she wore only a thin white dress with ragged, dirty sleeves. "He asked my help, I was a fool, and he suddenly showed his real shape and wrapped me up in his coils.

The next thing I knew I was in the river. I breathed the water. That was all."

Uulamets hugged his daughter. Liar, Pyetr thought sullenly, hearing the crotchety old man whisper that he loved her very much, truly he did. If his own dice-loving father had ever hugged him and said he missed him in that adoring tone of voice, he would have been sure his father was up to no good. The present spate of endearments from Uulamets made his flesh crawl.

But he felt a little gnawing doubt of his own judgment, Ilya Kochevikov having been no good example of a father—and he felt the old resentment for that mixing in all his other feelings about Uulamets , and in his new reckonings about what might have happened to the girl…

How long ago?

Who was her mother, anyway?

"I knew," Eveshka said, her head on Uulamets ' shoulder, "that if anyone could help me, you could. I so much wanted to tell you I was sorry. I kept thinking… the last thing I'd ever done in this world was quarrel with you, and all through these years, I could see you come and go in the forest and I could watch you working in the yard—oh, I was there! And I couldn't even tell you I was sorry—"

She began to cry again. "Hush, hush, hush," Uulamets said, and stroked her hair and rocked her.

So much tenderness was acutely embarrassing. Pyetr found interest in the wood grain of the table in front of him, and in the firelight on the metal of the sword. He earnestly wished the house afforded somewhere else to go, and likely Sasha wished the same; but there was no such refuge. He would get up himself and rattle around pouring himself a drink and then ask the girl his own morbid questions—except she looked distraught, and where things might go with her then was too uncertain. She might take offense, and that certainly was not what he wanted—although he was far from sure precisely what he wanted from a dead girl whose bones he might well have touched this morning. It was altogether outside his experience.

So he sat still, beside Sasha, who was quite mouselike quiet, until Uulamets proposed his daughter was surely tired and might want to rest.

"I'm sure these young gentlemen won't mind giving up the hearth," Uulamets said. "You'll sleep in your own bed tonight—"

Pyetr inclined his head with some dignity; Sasha attempted to rise and make a bow, inside the limits of the bench as Eveshka looked at them, shyly lowered her eyes and said Thank you in a soft voice that could well get possession of more than a spot by the fire.

Uulamets went to his bed and began dragging another cot from under it. Sasha clambered over the bench and went to help him. Pyetr simply sat still at the table and watched Eveshka watching them, all white and gold, standing there in front of the fireplace, with her hair—dry now—floating around her like the light itself.

He reminded himself sternly then of Kiev, and of the certain fact that Uulamets would in no wise allow a man near the girl, particularly considering Uulamets ' estimate of him. Doubtless this dispossession from the hearthside was Uulamets ' signal to them both that he was quite ready to see their backs.

So they might set out down the river tomorrow with no thanks and probably cheated of half the provisions they had bargained for—and won!—while the old skinflint kept a girl like her locked away in a dying forest…

No matter that the condition of the forest was in some measure her fault. She was certainly no ghost now.

Was she not?

A sane man at least had to think the thought, as he began bedding down in the dark corner beyond the table.

"Do you suppose she's safe?" he whispered to Sasha in the faintest of voices as he lay down to sleep. It seemed to him if Sasha had wizardry talents he might be more sensitive to such things.