“Why, what might that be?” Luka asked in surprise. “Minor mischief, as the Leshy inflict-a wind to blow somebody’s wash-ing off the grass, a nursling taken from its mother when she isn’t looking, but always soon given back-and a sprig of wormwood will keep her at a distance. No doubt a man who let her beguile him would be in mortal sin. But surely none will, nor does it seem she’s even tried. After all, a ghost is terrifying in itself. I know that, sir, I know it better than I wish I did.”
The merman gave the lad a close look. “How?”
Luka shivered in the sunlight, the noise and music and smoke.
“I was with my brother on that hunt where she found him, two
years agone. I too saw her face, the face of Nada who drowned
herself the year before-“
A hand grabbed him by the neck, flung him to the ground. “You lie!” Father Tomislav screamed. He had wandered up, un-noticed, and overheard. “Like the rest of them, you lie!”
Standing over the sprawled boy, amidst a stillness that spread outward, amidst eyes that stared inward, the priest mastered his fit. “No, you don’t, I’ll believe you don’t,” he said thickly. “A chance likeness or a sleight of Satan deceived you. I’m sorry, Luka. Forgive my foul temper.” He looked from person to person. The tears broke out of him. “My daughter was not a suicide,” he croaked. “She is not a condemned shade. She rests in Shibenik, in holy earth. Her, her soul… in… Paradise-“ He stumbled off. The gathering parted to let him go.
Rain dashed against castle walls, in a night that howled. Cold crept out of the stone, past the tapestries, and darkness laid siege to lamps. Ivan Subitj sat across a board from Vanimen of Liri. He had dismissed his servants, keeping his wife awake. She sat in a comer, warming herself as best she could at a brazier, till he signaled for more wine.
“Yes,” he said, “I’d better give you the whole tale. Else you might shun the lake; and I do have hopes of your settling down amongst us, enriching us by your fisher skills. Besides, there’s no shame for my family in what happened-not really. Grief-“ He gusted a sigh. “No, disappointment; and I’m well aware I do wrong to feel thus.”
He stroked the scar that puckered his countenance. “No shame to you either, Vanimen, that you recoiled from her: not if such beings are as fearsome in the North as you’ve related. I could tell you of horrors I’ll bear inside me to the grave, and I reckon myself a brave man. But-I know not why; maybe we’re different from the Rus in some way that endures after death itself-whatever the cause, a vilja is not the grisly sort of thing that you say a rousalka is. Oh, a man would be unwise to follow her. . . but he’d have a soul to lose. You-“ Ivan chopped his words off short.
Vanimen flashed a hard smile.
Ivan drank. Thereafter he said hastily: “My grudge against
Nada is just that she caused my older son to forsake the world. Well, I think she did. I could be wrong. Who knows the well-springs of the heart, save God? But Mihajlo was such a lively youth; in him, I saw myself reborn. And now he’s in a monastery. I should not regret that, should I? It makes his salvation likelier. Luka seems more cut out for a monk than ever Mihajlo was; and it’s become Luka who inherits- No, he won’t, for a zhupan is elected by the peers of his clan, or appointed out of it by the Crown, and they’ll see he’s not a fighter.”
Goblets went to mouths for a time in which the storm alone had voice. Finally Vanimen asked low, “Was the vilja indeed once the daughter of Tomislav?”
“He cannot endure that thought;’ Ivan replied, “and those who care for him do not bespeak it in his hearing. I forgive what he did to my son this day. No real harm, and Luka should have been more alert.
“Nevertheless-well, let me share with you what everybody hereabouts knows. Maybe you, who are of Faerie, can judge better than we’ve done, we humans.