Yvgenie by C.J. Cherryh Page B

mop the damn floor? ’
    ''If my cellar floods— ’
    ‘ If our cellar floods, dear wife, I'll bail it. I might eve fix a rim around the trap s o the water doesn't drip straight t hrough. Some things a little carpentry solves better than magic. ’
    Pyetr had not a smidge of magic, none, he swore it. But he certainly had an uncanny way of getting things he wanted out of two or three wizards of her acquaintance, and the wizards in question could wonder for days exactly what had happened to them and why they felt so good afterward.
    ‘ Bargain? ’ he said.
    It was very certainly magical. She hugged him tight and felt a tingle from her head to her feet, which she had felt the first time she had laid eyes on him.
     
    Her father was talking to her mother, with what good result Ilyana was dubious; but the air felt clearer, at least, and uncle Sasha had gone up the hill to sit on his porch with his book and his inkpot, so long as the light lasted: she could see him from the garden fence, where the berry vine made part of the hedge—almost ripe, she decided, coincidentally, and plucked an early dark one and popped it into her mouth, for a sweet, single taste.
    She felt better, over all: a nd she put away everything her f ather had said in a place to consider later, on a day when she had not been so angry at her mother. At least she was not angry now. She did not think her mother was angry at her any longer either, and all in all she felt more cheerful, never mind she had given up the ride she had coaxed her fa ther for since the weather had warmed, no matter she had done it because she had thought her friend might be down by the river this morning.
    She pulled another berry which somehow was not as sweet us the first, and thought (she could not help it) tha t this year had gotten off to a bad start. Nothing she did seemed right. Her friend turned out —
    Turned out both handsomer and more scary than she wanted to think about near the house, so she slipped through the garden fence and down the old road toward the woods.
    Not directly or by any straight path toward the river, no, not right past the house this time, with mother always worrying about her drowning—
    I don't wish to drown, mother! she was wont to declare, in her father's way of speaking. I swear to you, I absolutely wish not to drown, and I'm perfectly safe down on the dock, god!
    Her mother had not been amused, or convinced.
    Her mother, direly: Vodyaniye don't ask you to fall in. They'll come ashore after you.
    Well, I haven't seen him, she had said to that. And her mother: Wish him asleep. Don't think about him.
    All her life, don't think about this, don't think about that—
    Now she was afraid to think about her friend, because she knew that a mother who was scared she was going to fall into the river and drown would have a great deal to say about rusalki, and have very definite wishes about the only company besides her parents and her uncle she had ever had or hoped to have—without even asking whether he had ever hurt her, or, the god forbid, listening to her explain she had known him all her life—
    He was not a rusalka who was going to drink up her life or do harm to the woods. The leshys would never let anything wicked come into the woods, her parents had said that— though her father had said, once, that the leshys did not see good and bad the same way wizards did, that a nest of baby birds and a little girl were all the same in their sight, and that she should be careful in the deepest woods—where there were wild leshys who had no memory of debts to any of the two-footed kind, and who defended the woods with their ability to deceive and to cast true spells—because they were magical.
    Which meant they would never let her friend come here if be harmed anything—if ghosts were truly magical creatures, or if wizardly ghosts were, and if the leshys could do anything to prevent him.
    That was a question. That was, as her uncle would say, a very good