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“I will not give my daughter to a demon. She is a Christian maid.” The raw fear in Pyotr’s voice was new, born of Konstantin’s sermons.
“Then she must have a husband,” said Dunya simply. “The sooner the better. Frost-demons have no interest in mortal girls wed to mortal men. In the stories, the bird-prince and the wicked sorcerer—they only come for the wild maiden.”
“VASYA?” SAID ALYOSHA. “MARRIED? That rabbit?” He laughed. The dry barley-stalks rustled; he was raking beside his father. There were straws in his brown curls. He had been singing to break the afternoon stillness. “She’s a girl still, Father; I knocked down a peasant that watched her overlong, but she noticed nothing. Not even when the oaf went about for a week with his face all bruised.” He had knocked down a peasant that called her witch-woman as well, but he did not tell his father that.
“She has not met a man that caught her fancy, that is all,” said Pyotr. “But I mean that to change.” Pyotr was brisk, his mind made up. “Kyril Artamonovich is my friend’s son; he has a great inheritance, and his father is dead. Vasya is young and healthy, and her dowry is very fine. She will be gone before the snow.” Pyotr bent once more to his raking.
Alyosha did not join him. “She will not take kindly to it, Father.”
“Kindly or not, she will do as she’s told,” said Pyotr.
Alyosha snorted. “Vasya?” he said. “I’d like to see it.”
“YOU ARE GOING TO BE MARRIED,” said Irina to Vasya, enviously. “And have a fine dowry and go live in a big wooden house and have many children.” She stood beside the rough post-and-rail fence but did not lean upon it, so as not to smudge her sarafan. Her long chestnut braid was wrapped in a bright kerchief and her small hand lay delicate on the wood. Vasya was trimming Buran’s hoof, muttering dire threats to the stallion should he choose to move. He looked as though he was debating which part of her to bite. Irina was rather frightened.
Vasya put the hoof down and glanced at her small sister. “I am not going to be married,” she said.
Irina’s mouth creased in half-envious disapproval when Vasya vaulted the fence. “Yes, you are,” she said. “A lord is coming; Kolya has gone to bring him. I heard Father say it to Mother.”
Vasya’s brow wrinkled. “Well—I suppose I must marry—someday,” she said. She tilted her sister a sideways grin. “But how am I to catch a man’s eye with you about, little bird?”
Irina smiled shyly. Already her beauty was talked of between the villages of their father’s domain. But then— “You will not go into the woods, Vasya? It is nearly suppertime. You are all-over filth.”
The rusalka was sitting above them, a green shadow along an oak-branch. She beckoned. The water dripped down her streaming hair. “I’ll be along presently,” said Vasya.
“But father says…”
Vasya leaped for a limb, one foot on the trunk, catching the branch overhead in her strong hands. She hooked a knee over it, dangling head-down. “I’ll not be late for supper. Don’t worry, Irinka.” The next instant she had disappeared among the leaves.
THE RUSALKA WAS GAUNT and shivering. “What are you doing?” Vasya said. “What is wrong?” The rusalka shivered harder than ever. “Are you cold?” It hardly seemed possible; the earth gave back the day’s heat, and the breeze was scant.
“No,” said the rusalka. Her lank hair hid her face. “Little girls get cold, not chyerti. What is that child saying, Vasilisa Petrovna? Will you leave the forest?”
It came to Vasya that the rusalka was afraid, though it was not easy to know; the inflections of her voice were not like a woman’s.
Vasya had never thought in those terms before. “One day I will,” she said slowly. “Someday. I must marry and go to my husband’s house. But I did not think it would be so soon.” How faint the rusalka was. The rustling leaves showed through her gaunt face.
“You cannot,” said the rusalka. Her lips peeled back from her green teeth. The hand that combed her hair jerked, so that the water falling down ran from her nose and chin. “We will not survive the winter. You did not let me kill the hungry man, and your wards are failing. You are only a child; your bits of bread and honey-wine cannot sustain the household-spirits. Not forever. The Bear is awake.”
“What bear?”
“The shadow on the wall,” said the rusalka, breathing quickly. “The voice in the dark.” Her face did not move like a human face, but the pupils of her eyes swelled black. “Beware the dead. You must heed me, Vasya, for I will not come again. Not as myself. He will call me, and I will answer; he will have my allegiance and I will turn against you. I cannot do otherwise. The leaves are falling. Do not leave the forest.”
“What do you mean, beware the dead? How will you turn against us?”
But the rusalka only reached out a hand, with such force that her damp, cloudy fingers felt like flesh, locked around Vasya’s arm. “The winter-king will help you as you can,” she said. “He promised. We all heard it. He is very old, and the enemy of your enemy. But you must not trust him.”
Questions crowded Vasya’s lips so fast they choked her silent. Her eyes met the rusalka’s. The water-sprite’s shining hair fell around her naked body. “I trust you,” Vasya managed. “You are my friend.”
“Be of good heart, Vasilisa Petrovna,” said the rusalka, sadly, and then there was only a tree, with stormy silver leaves. As though she’d never been. Perhaps I am mad, in truth, thought Vasya. She caught the limb beneath her and dropped to the ground. She was soft on her feet as she ran home through the glorious late-summer twilight. All around her the forest seemed to whisper. The shadow on the wall. You cannot trust him. Beware the dead. Beware the dead.
“MARRIED, FATHER?” THE CLEAR green dusk breathed coolness onto the parched and gasping earth, so that the oven-fire comforted and did not torment. At noon they had eaten bread only, with curds or pickled mushrooms, for there was no time to spare from the fields. But that night there was stew and pie, roasted fowl and green things dipped in a little precious salt.
“If anyone can be brought to have you,” said Pyotr, none too kindly, putting aside his bowl. Sapphires and pale eyes, threats and half-understood promises, thrashed unpleasantly in his skull. Vasya had come into the kitchen with a wet face, and there were distinct signs that she had tried to clean the dirt beneath her nails. But the water had only smeared the grime. She was dressed like a peasant girl in a thin dress of undyed linen, her black hair uncovered and curling. Her eyes were huge and wild and troubled. It would be much easier to see her married, Pyotr thought irritably, if she would contrive to look more like a woman and less like a peasant child—or a wood-sprite.
Pyotr watched the successive objections rise to her lips and fall away. All girls married, unless they became nuns. She knew that as well as anyone. “Married,” she said again, striving for words. “Now?”
Again, Pyotr knew a pang. He saw her heavy with child, bowed over an oven, sitting before a loom, the grace gone…
