The old man had gone soft-headed over his daughter, or his entire attention was taken up with keeping his daughter from going back to bones, the god only knew. Pyetr took his cup and went over to the fireside where it was warm, sitting on Eveshka’s cot while Sasha took to clearing away the dishes and the old man sat and talked to his daughter.
Snatches of their low voices came to him—Eveshka’s fear of the vodyanoi, Uulamets’ assurances they could deal with it—
They, Pyetr thought disgustedly—they. They, with his sword and his going down into dark places, which he had no intention whatsoever of doing twice.
Then Eveshka said something that made him strain his ears and stop in mid-sip. She said, “Papa, I lied: I was running away. The vodyanoi—I think he made everything go wrong. Mama, and Kavi, and everything—I think he made her hate me…”
“A lie. It was the woods your mother hated. She came from the east. She stayed a season. Her folk came back and she went away, that’s all. She wanted nothing of mine and nothing of this place.” Here, in Pyetr’s troubled glance, Uulamets hugged his daughter’s head against his shoulder, pale gold against snowy white.
How old was he? Pyetr wondered.
Uulamets said to his daughter:
“Don’t mourn might-have-beens. Magic can’t work backwards, only forward. I taught you better than that.”
“I remember.” Eveshka’s faint voice tugged at Pyetr’s heart, made him regret doubting her and made him wish he could in fact do something—something quite practical, like proposing they all go down to the boat in the morning and set out to Kiev, where things were surely much more reasonable.
But maybe in a place where things were much more reasonable Eveshka would not even be alive.
“Pyetr,” Uulamets said suddenly, and Pyetr looked up, but Uulamets only wanted him to give Eveshka her cot back. He got up, and gave a little bow and said, confidently, because she looked so frightened, “We dealt with it once. It won’t get in.”
Eveshka gave him a sidelong anxious glance, as if she was not certain he was not a threat himself, then sat down on her cot by the fire, turned her back and began to unfasten her belt and her boots—which Pyetr watched in somber fascination until Uulamets took him by the sleeve and drew him and Sasha over into the corner.
“We have to catch the creature,” Uulamets said in a low voice. “We have to constrain it.”
“How?” Pyetr asked, and drew a breath. “If you have any notion of me going back in that damned cave, old man—”
“Be still!” Uulamets gripped his arm and shook it. “Listen to me. I’ve no strength tonight to suffer fools.”
“Listen yourself, grandfather…”
“Collect your alcohol-soaked wits. That creature has a hold on her.”
Pyetr had his mouth open to argue; he slid a glance toward Eveshka, whose slender shape showed, firelit through cloth—
“I want you to go outside just before dawn,” Uulamets said. “Walk down to the river—taking something of hers with you. That’s all you have to do.”
“All I have to do.” Pyetr started to suggest Uulamets could do it himself, but Uulamets said, clamping down hard on his arm,
“Failing which—I give nothing for any of our lives, do you understand me? I will not sleep tonight, but I can hold out only so long. Pay attention!” Uulamets said as he opened his mouth a third time, and the grip was all but painful. “You will go out at that hour, you will take the things I give you—you will do exactly as I tell you. Both of you.”
Chasing after the vodyanoi when it was on the retreat at the knoll was one thing; stalking it on its own terms was quite another. He truly wanted to say no.
But if they lost Uulamets, he admitted to himself, he did not trust the sword that much, and, unhappily, there seemed no way for an old man, a boy, and a ghost to do much against a thing like that, either, without the sword and some fool to use it.
“Well,” he said, and scratched a prickling feeling at the nape of his neck when Uulamets had told him the simple details, “lead it up to the porch. How fast is it?”
“Very,” Uulamets said. “I wish I could tell you that exactly.”
“You’re sure it won’t cross your line.”
“It shouldn’t,” Uulamets said.
So they all went out onto the porch at the first of the dawn, himself and Sasha and Uulamets and Eveshka, Sasha with one of Uulamets’ precious pots in hand and his own instructions, namely to stay step for step with him down the walk-up, then to duck down underneath immediately as they reached the bottom and stay there.
“Just stay out of my way when I come back,” Pyetr said to Sasha as they reached that point. “I’ll be coming fast.”
He earnestly hoped so, at least, as he made the lonely walk across the yard to the dead trees and the beginning of the path they took down to the river for water. The river, Uulamets said, was the best place to attract the thing.
Certainly, Pyetr thought.
A nocturnal creature like the vodyanoi was a little dim-sighted, Uulamets had said, where it regarded things unmagical; and therefore the small bracelet Pyetr wore about his right wrist, braided from a lock of Eveshka’s hair, would shine like a lamp, Uulamets swore, so far as the vodyanoi was concerned—
Uulamets said walk slowly down to the river.
Uulamets said dip the bracelet into the water and be on his guard.
God, it was dark down there.
Sasha shivered in his hiding place, his knees going numb against the ground, while he peered out into the dark and waited.
And waited, what seemed an ungodly long time.
Pyetr would be coming fast when he came up the hill, that was the plan: attract the thing right up onto the porch, which was the highest point they could lure it; and right there, right beyond the fence and across the road, was the gap in the trees where the first rim of the sun always showed and always cast its first light on the house.
Master Uulamets had the end and the sides of the walkway up to the porch secured with a dusting of salt and sulphur; and his own post was here, with another jar of the same, when Pyetr should come racing up that walkway with the creature in pursuit.
His own job was to dash out then and draw one line with the salt and sulphur to seal the trap.
That was the plan.
But he very much wished, as he sat shivering in his hiding-place, that Uulamets had set his trap a little closer to the river, and he hoped that Pyetr would not take any chances.
There was a sudden, a clearly audible splash. He heard Pyetr yell.
And nothing else.
CHAPTER 15
PYETR COLLECTED himself on his feet, his sword still in his hand, by some presence of mind he would not have credited in himself. He could see, in the faint sky-sheen on the water, vast ripples where the thing had gone back under. He hoped to the god it had gone back—whatever had come lunging up out of the water right for his face—a horse, a snake, or something huge, dark, and wet that no rational man could ever admit seeing, involving, his shocked memory recollected, a vast array of teeth.
His legs began to shake under him. The tremor spread to his arms and his hands and he was ashamed of himself for that, but not very: it was time, he thought, to make a sensible retreat—the more so because for one very dangerous moment he had lost track of it. For that lapse he was honestly vexed with himself, and anxious, seeing the huge wallow in the clay where it might have slipped back into the river. He hoped it had.
He had been scrambling for his life at that moment. He had never seen anything so fast, never expected it to be out of the water in one move—the wallowed track went as far as the brush; and to his chagrin he realized that that brush went as far as the stand of dead willows between himself and the boat dock and the road.