The Bear and the Nightingale(30)

Vasya had shrugged and followed, wringing the water from her braid. She wanted her soup. But late in the long spring twilight, when each leaf and blade of grass stood out black against the blue-tinged air, Vasya had returned to the lake. She sat down on the verge, toes in the water.

“Did you wish to eat him?” she asked the water conversationally. “Can you not find other meat?”

There was a small leaf-filled silence.

Then—“No,” said a rippling voice. Vasya sprang to her feet, eyes flicking through the foliage. It was luck more than anything else that her glance lit on the sinuous outlines of a naked woman. The rusalka crouched on a limb, a glimmering white thing clutched in one hand.

“Not meat,” the creature had said with a shudder, hair scudding like wavelets over her skin. “Fear—and desire—not that you know anything of either. It flavors the water and nourishes me. Dying, they know me for who I am. Otherwise I’d be no more than lake and tree and waterweed.”

“But you kill them!” said Vasya.

“Everything dies.”

“I will not let you slay my people.”

“Then I will disappear,” replied the rusalka, without inflection.

Vasya thought for a moment. “I know you’re here. I can see you. I am not dying, and I am not afraid—but—I can see you. I could be your friend. Is that enough?”

The rusalka was looking at her curiously. “Perhaps.”

And true to her word, Vasya would come looking for the water-spirit, and in spring she threw flowers into the lake, and the rusalka did not die.

In return, the rusalka taught Vasya to swim as very few could, and to climb trees like a cat, and so it was that the two found themselves together, lounging on a limb overlooking the road, as Father Konstantin approached Lesnaya Zemlya.

The rusalka saw the priest first. Her eyes gleamed. “Here comes one who would be good eating.”

Vasya peered down the road and saw a man with dusty golden hair and the dark robes of a priest. “Why?”

“He is full of desire. Desire and fear. He does not know what he desires, and he does not admit his fear. But he feels both, strong enough to strangle.” The man was coming closer. It was indeed a hungry face. High, protruding cheekbones cast gray shadows over his hollow cheeks; he had deep-set blue eyes and soft, full lips, though set sternly as though to hide the softness. One of her father’s men rode beside him, and both horses were dusty and tired.

Vasya’s face lit. “I’m going home,” she said. “If he is come from Moscow, he will have news of my brother and sister.”

The rusalka was not looking at her, but down the path the man had taken, a hungry light in her eyes.

“You promised you wouldn’t,” said Vasya sharply.

The rusalka smiled, sharp teeth gleaming between greenish lips. “Perhaps he desires death,” she said. “If so—I can help him.”



THE DOORYARD BEFORE THE HOUSE churned like an ant pile, washed in gold by the afternoon light. A man was unsaddling the weary horses, but the priest was nowhere to be seen. Vasya ran for the kitchen door. Dunya, who met her at the threshold, hissed at the twigs in her hair and the stains on her cut-down dress. “Vasya, where—?” she said, then, “Never mind. Come on, hurry.” She hustled the girl off to have her hair combed and her dirty clothes exchanged for a blouse and embroidered sarafan.

Flushed and smarting, but more or less presentable, Vasya emerged from the room she shared with Irina. Alyosha was waiting for her. He grinned at her appearance. “Maybe they will manage to marry you off after all, Vasochka.”

“Anna Ivanovna says not,” Vasya replied composedly. “Too tall, skinny as a weasel, feet and face like a frog.” She clasped her hands and raised her eyes. “Alas, only princes in fairy tales take frog-wives. And they can do magic and become beautiful on command. I fear I will have no prince, Lyoshka.”

Alyosha snorted. “I’d pity the prince. But do not take Anna Ivanovna to heart; she does not want you to be beautiful.”

Vasya said nothing, and a quick shadow darkened her face.

“Well, so there is a new priest,” Alyosha added hastily. “Curious, are you, little sister?”

The two slipped outside and circled the house.

The look she gave him was limpid as a child’s. “Aren’t you?” she said. “He is come from Moscow; perhaps he will have news.”



PYOTR AND THE PRIEST sat together on the cool summer grass drinking kvas. Pyotr turned when he heard his children approach, and his eyes narrowed when he saw his second daughter.

She is nearly a woman, he thought. It is too long since I looked at her truly. She is so like and so unlike her mother.

In truth, Vasya was still awkward, but she had begun growing into her face. The bones were still rough-hewn and overlarge, her mouth still too wide and full-lipped for the rest of her. But she was compelling: the moods passed like clouds over the clear green water of her gaze, and something about her movements, the line of her neck and braided hair, caught the eye and held it. When the light struck her black hair it did not gleam bronze as Marina’s had, but dark red, like garnets caught in the silky strands.

Father Konstantin was regarding Vasya with raised eyebrows and a slight frown. And no wonder, Pyotr thought. There was something feral about her, for all her neat gown and properly braided hair. She looked like a wild thing new-caught and just barely groomed into submission.