Sasha braced himself for Pyetr’s outburst, but Pyetr shook his head a second time.
“What does that mean?” Uulamets said.
“Nothing. It means nothing.”
Everything felt dangerous. Sasha wished most earnestly for peace, and master Uulamets turned a scowl his way, at which Sasha froze, paralyzed with the thought that master Uulamets had just felt that wish, and that he had made wishes throughout their venture, though he had tried to make them wisely.
“What are you looking at him for?” Pyetr asked. “What did he do?”
“One wonders,” Uulamets said, and reached out and took Sasha by the shoulder, a terrible look in his eyes. “You’ve gotten very forward in the last couple of days, boy, altogether forward—”
“Let him be,” Pyetr said, but Uulamets did not give up his grip, and Sasha felt colder and colder.
“You do have ability,” Uulamets said. “We both know that.”
“I never wished anybody harm!”
“You wished your own safety. And his. At what cost? Did you care for that?”
“And yours,” Sasha said. “And that you’d find your daughter, and that everything would go right. If one worked, the other should have, shouldn’t it? Should it only work halfway?”
Uulamets’ mouth made a thin line, and trembled. His fingers bit into Sasha’s shoulder.
It is my fault, Sasha thought with a sinking feeling. It seemed entirely, appallingly possible.
Uulamets let him go of a sudden, swung around and flung his teacup into the fireplace. It shattered. Like the pots.
Pyetr flung his cup after it. It smashed, and the fire hissed and flared. But Pyetr said nothing, just got up, hitched his quilt around him and took another cup and the vodka jug off the table. He came back and sat down this time in his usual spot at the side of the fire, looking fury at Uulamets, between unstopping the jug and pouring a cup for himself.
“The boy did you no harm,” Pyetr said. “I’d go to bed, old man. Since this is mine, I’m in it. Good night to you.”
Uulamets stared at him a moment with an expression Sasha could not see: he only felt threat and desperately wished Pyetr well, because he was very much afraid of what master Uulamets might be wishing him. Uulamets was surely aware of that defiance too, and angry.
“You,” Uulamets said to Pyetr, “mistake your place in this house.”
Pyetr lifted the cup in salute. “Then fetch another cup and have a drink. Fetch your own cup for a change.”
Sasha felt the danger, felt it and threw ail his effort into stopping it.
The cup in Pyetr’s hand—shattered. Pyetr jumped and recoiled, wide-eyed and only then seeming to realize there was nothing accidental in it.
Pyetr began to pick the fragments off his quilt-covered lap with a visibly shaking hand. Sasha got up, quickly, grabbed his blanket about him and said, touching master Uulamets on the shoulder, as carefully as he had ever intervened with a trespassing customer, “Please, sir. It’s late. Can I get you anything else? I’d be very happy to.”
He was afraid. He felt Uulamets’ anger touch him.
And grow quieter then.
“Sir?”
“More cups,” Uulamets said, not: cup; cups. Sasha ran that through again, nodded anxiously and went and brought them, one for Uulamets and, as Uulamets seemed to intend, one for Pyetr.
Pyetr poured from the jug, still shaking a little, whether from exhaustion or from having a cup break in his hand that should not have broken. He leaned forward and poured for Uulamets, too, and put a little in Sasha’s cup.
Sasha sat down, picked up his cup, and took a sip, only half feeling the burn as it slid down his throat.
Outside, thunder rumbled. A fresh spatter of rain hit the shutters.
“My daughter,” Uulamets said quietly. “Did you see her—at any time I was beyond the hill?”
Pyetr shook his head. “No.” And looked up as if he had remembered something. “On the river. Before that. At the willow. Just a single glance.”
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—”