Until she died, Sasha thought, and maybe met others, to their regret-She drifted closer to him, more and more upset—of which Uulamets was quite aware. He realized that without looking around. Uulamets was suddenly upset with his line of thought, and he recollected the jug he had so casually bespelled: his most effective spell, Father Sky! The thing had resisted accident and almost cost Pyetr’s life—precisely as master Uulamets had warned him: Magic is easy for the young…
Nothing had stood in that spell’s way—no one had ever wished that the jug break, no one had ever had a contradictory motive toward it, and the god knew he had not had a hesitation in his head when the jar had flown across the deck and he had wished it stay whole.
Magic was so damnably easy—the jug showed that: he had gotten nonchalant about such little spells, being constantly in the midst of great and dangerous magic had dispersed his lifelong cautions and made him believe he could let fly a harmless wish—
But his spell on the jug was not harmless. It had evidently been more powerful than the protections he had set on Pyetr himself, for reasons he could not entirely understand—unless—
Unless his spells on Pyetr had flaws—like doubts—
But that was not the thread he had started to follow. He found himself disturbed to the heart, feeling a wish happening around him, like a brush against his skin—or that insubstantial periphery he sometimes described to himself that way.
Uulamets said, from behind him, “A rusalka is a wish. A wish not to die. A wish for revenge. That describes my daughter.”
“The leshy helped her,” Sasha said, most carefully, and swung halfway about to look at him. “I didn’t get the feeling there was anything—wrong about the leshy. The opposite, actually. It felt—”
“There used to be one near the house,” Uulamets said. “It’s not there anymore. Ask my daughter why.”
“It’s not her fault, is it? She didn’t ask to drown—”
Father Sky, there was a flaw in Uulamets’ story about Eveshka, Sasha thought suddenly and for no reason he understood. No matter what Uulamets had said at the first, he could never have believed his daughter a suicide: if a wizard really truly wished to die—
Everything we thought we knew from Eveshka—he thought, too—that was the Fetch who said it, or the vodyanoi through her. Pyetr’s right: too many wizards—and too many of them lying…
“Don’t waste your strength,” Uulamets said, suddenly rising, and Eveshka fled back a little. “What did I ever tell you, girl? Remember not to forget? Don’t wish without thinking? But you’re nothing but a wish yourself, and you don’t think and you don’t remember your mistakes.”
“I’m trying,” Eveshka whispered. “Papa, I’m trying—”
“For whom?” Uulamets snapped. “Get yourself together. It’s out there.—Boy, do you feel it?”
Sasha did—suddenly recognized the subtle chill in the brush out there, twisting and elusive as the snake it sometimes seemed. He wanted to move. He wanted to warn Pyetr—
“Bring it,” Uulamets snapped at them. “Wish it here. Bind it here!”
Sasha shied off with a single thought for Pyetr’s safety and Hwiuur lunged for an escape.
Stop! he thought, then, with Uulamets, with Eveshka, and felt it pinned, throwing wishes to this side and that like a snake under a stick. Pyetr waked with a cry of pain, that was one wish it sent: “God!” Pyetr cried, kneeling, bent over his hand, while a runaway spill of ink flowed out of the bushes and straight toward him—
Stop! Sasha ordered it; Uulamets ordered; Eveshka ordered. The front end began to rise, quickly taller than Pyetr’s head, rapidly thicker as more and more of it poured out of the dark.
He had to hold onto it, had to hold, while it tried every way it knew to get at Pyetr, who was stumbling to his feet with his sheathed sword in his left hand, trying, Father Sky, no!—to attack it—
“Liar!” Uulamets cried. “Deceive me, will you?” It tumbled down and circled into coils like a headless snake as Pyetr staggered out of its way. “Lie to me, will you?” The raven left its branch to dive and strike at the River-thing, and Babi, untidy fur stuck all over with leaves, bristled and hissed and nipped at it.
“Let be!” Hwiuur cried, writhing. “Let be, let be!” Its hide began to smoke. Pieces of it came away in its struggles. “Stop it!” Sasha was yelling at Uulamets ; even Eveshka was flinching from Uulamets’ torment of it, everything was falling apart and Hwiuur was going to go at Pyetr again—throwing a quick, snaky twist of its intent about Sasha’s revulsion and trying to pull him apart from Uulamets : but he kept thinking about Pyetr’s safety, and it thrashed and wailed in pain: “Not my doing—not my fault. Never—”
“The truth this time!” Uulamets shouted at it, and it curled itself into a knotty, smoking ball no larger than a man.
It snuffled, “The man made me do it.” Smaller and smaller. “I didn’t kill her. Kept the bones, that was all, he said I could have the bones. She could have the forest, I’d have the river, that’sail.”
Eveshka deserted the web. Sasha felt his own hold quiver like a plucked string, felt it about to snap, cried desperately, “Hwiuur: what man? Why did he do it?”
“She knows!” Hwiuur cried, twisted in knots and grew smaller still. “He killed her, he drowned her in the river, he took away her heart and he won’t let her go—he won’t let anything go, not her, not me, not you if you don’t stop him, and I know how! I know all the secrets she can’t tell, I know what you need to know, and you burn me, you tumble down my cave, you blame me for things he did! Well, damn you all! Why should I help fools? Ask me why your plans go astray! Ask me where your daughter’s mother’s gone!”
Suddenly it flowed into the ground like ink.
“Stop it!” Uulamets cried, Babi vanished on the instant, and there ensued a frightful yowling, a disturbance running a curving line under the mouldering leaves and into the brush, where violence thrashed and spat and hissed.
Pyetr was bent over, sword and all, holding his right hand against his knees, and Sasha stumbled to reach him, dizzy as he was.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course, of course,” Pyetr gasped, looking out into the woods, one arm braced against his knee. “What’s one hand? I’ve two.”
Sasha tried to help him, but his thoughts kept scattering to Babi, far out from the clearing now, to Eveshka, a distant glimmering among the trees, and Uulamets screaming at her to come back. His head ached; he could not stop the harm to Pyetr, that was what he kept thinking, and he had to want it more than he doubted before he could even begin to make headway against the pain.
“Thanks,” Pyetr breathed, surely unaware what a terrible botch he had made of his help—or what it had felt like a moment ago, holding the creature while Uulamets tore it in shreds—until Uulamets himself had flinched, or he had, he could not even remember in the chaos of those moments which of them then had been hurting it most… for Eveshka’s pain, for Pyetr’s…
“Come back,” Uulamets was still shouting at his daughter, or maybe Babi; and Pyetr, collapsing onto the log beside the fire, looked anxiously toward the woods.
“Chernevog,” Pyetr said between breaths. “It was Chernevog the Thing meant, it had to be. Her lover killed her. ‘He said I could have the bones…’—God, what kind of man is that?”
“A wizard,” Sasha said from a dry throat, thinking, I couldn’t let it go. It made me sick but I couldn’t let it go. Even Eveshka flinched, even Uulamets, and I didn’t.