Free R1 - Rusalka by C. J. Cherryh

die, and for ill luck and unseasonable storms and for fevers to set in and aches to find old wounds: that was what the townsfolk always said; and the last night before the turn toward spring, the towns-women would go out and unbraid their hair and shake out the knots from their belts and their laces and plow a trench about the walls of Vojvoda, beating on drums and calling on the Lady, at which time every male creature took cover and stayed there till dawn; excepting wizards, who were exempt, and who also beat on drums and spoke to the gods and the friendly spirits to guard the sick in this terrible season.
     
    But Pyetr had only a borrowed coat and a boy with notoriously bad luck, and if there was a place in the land unblessed it was this forest, which, far from having the outlaws and the wild beasts they had feared, had only dead trees and dying bushes, barren ground and lifeless brooks.
     
    If there was even a Forest-thing here, Sasha could not feel it; and secretly that night he took a few berries and a few grains and put them on a dead leaf and said, beneath his breath, while Pyetr was washing, "Please don't let us be misled. Please don't let Pyetr stumble, it hurts him. Please get us to some friendly place."
     
    It seemed too little an offering to appease a remote and un-hearing spirit, which might well be hostile or itself as unhealthy as its forest. So Sasha took a thorn and pricked his finger and squeezed out the blood until it fell in heavy drops. He had heard of sorcerers doing the like. He had heard of terrible things that could go wrong, once blood was in an offering, how there were things that liked it all too well.
     
    "What in the god's name are you doing?" Pyetr asked him, from the stream side where they had stopped to rest, and he was afraid Pyetr would say something to offend the spirits of the place, so he said, desperately,
     
    "Looking for roots."
     
    "You're not likely to find any," Pyetr said cheerlessly, in the same moment that Sasha realized that he had just lied at the very worst of times; and that if he had called the wrong thing to hear him there was all too much blood in their company.
     
    Jinx, he thought, accusing himself.—Oh, Father Sky, keep wrong things away from us. Pyetr never meant to hurt anybody. Pyetr doesn't deserve this trouble.
     
    But Father Sky was not a god to trouble himself often, especially not for scoundrels and fugitives in trouble, and it was too much to expect that Father Sky would save a fool from his folly, for whatever it was worth.
     

     
CHAPTER 6
     
    « ^ »
     
    P yetr slept, at least, laid his aching head down on his arm and waked in the morning in somewhat less pain than he had been feeling. That encouraged him for a moment, until he heard the crack of thunder and saw the forbidding gray of the sky.
     
    "Damn," he said, and shut his eyes again, not wanting to move, not believing any longer in anything. Kiev was a dream. Like dreams, it was for people more fortunate. What Pyetr Kochevikov got was a cold bed on cold ground in an endless forest and both he and the boy he was with starving to death in a very stupid series of mistakes.
     
    Mistake to have come this way. Mistake to have hoped, mistake to have expected, mistake to have left the fields at all. Hanging was better than this. Surely it was better than this.
     
    A raindrop hit him in the face. Another did.
     
    "Father Sky," Sasha said, on his knees, desperate. "Don't do this."
     
    "Father Sky isn't listening," Pyetr said in a voice more ragged than he had thought. "Father Sky was drinking late last night and he's in a rotten mood."
     
    "Please don't do that!"
     
    The boy was scared as he was. The boy believed in banniks and Forest-things and they had proved as treacherous as the thunder-rolling heavens.
     
    The boy came and helped him to his feet and found his sword for his hand while the chill rain came spatting down through the branches and pattering against the leaves.
     
    The boy