Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [63]
So far the Rusalka was keeping her promise.
He arrived at the lake as the moon was rising, and looked around. The atmosphere was little changed, but, nevertheless, it was changed. Again, the scent was subtly different; not rank with a hint of corruption, but cool, a bit damp, and ever so faintly scented with waterlily. There were still wafts of fog on the surface and wreathing around the verge, but they didn’t go above waist-high, and the moonlight illuminated the area quite brilliantly.
There were no evil little silver slivers of fish in the clear water. Just an ordinary carp nosing about the bottom, a few tiny sticklebacks darting past, and a perch dozing just under a lily pad. And frogs were singing all around.
He dismounted from his horse, took the first loaf of bread from his pannier, laid it on a stone near the edge, and waited.
He didn’t have to wait for very long.
A head shot up out of the water, shaking long, silvery-blond hair out of her eyes. “Bread!” the Rusalka exclaimed. “Do I smell fresh bread?”
“From today’s baking,” Sasha replied. Rusalkas, although technically ghosts, still ate. It was a contradiction that Sasha had never been able to reason out, and so he had never bothered to try. “A bargain for a little information. Sorry I don’t have butter.”
The Rusalka jumped out of the water and seized the loaf of bread, sitting right down on the stone to tear a chunk off and start eating. She paused with the bite halfway to her mouth. “What sort of information?” she asked.
“Is there anything you know of that might be stirring to the north that would attract the attention of the King of the Sea?” he asked.
Frogs punctuated the silence. “Hmm.” She ate her first piece while she thought.
“Just guesses would be fine,” he said encouragingly.
“Well…I would have mentioned Katschei the Deathless, except that he didn’t manage to live up to his name,” she said, smirking. “His castle is vacant, but I doubt that anything would have moved into it. He was a vile thing, and would have left it completely filled with traps of all sorts.” She shook her head. “It is not a place I would venture into, no matter what treasures are there.”
He made a mental note of that anyway. If something was strong enough, clever enough, to get past the traps, it would certainly be strong and clever enough to capture Katya. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Baba Yaga roams up there.”
He bit his lip over that one. Baba Yaga never was, and Traditionally never would be, the sort to stir up the kind of trouble that would get the Sea King’s attention. Not that she didn’t stir up trouble! And not that she wasn’t absolutely deadly! But she didn’t ever involve herself in the matters of Kingdoms. He suspected that she just didn’t enjoy the sort of impersonal misery that conquest and subjugation created. She performed her evil one person at a time.
So, probably not Baba Yaga, though it was entirely possibly that Baba Yaga could have ambushed Katya on the way to her goal. “Anything else?”
The loaf was half gone. The Rusalka must have been starved for the taste of bread. He made a mental note to see that she got it more often. “They say Chernobog is seen there.” She looked up then, and shivered, eyes going opaque.
He didn’t blame her. Chernobog was said to be a god, though who knew? It was impossible to say. Whatever, the Dark One was very, very powerful, and was interested in the lives of mortals, and was entirely arbitrary so far as Sasha could make out. You could not tell what he would and would not do. Like many ancient spirits, he acted only as he pleased, and in tune with some balance and some logic that only he and The Tradition understood or could predict.
Though if it was Chernobog, the Dark One would not be acting directly, but rather through someone else. He had no interest in being a king himself—for a spirit as powerful as he was, that was a distinct demotion—but oh, how he loved to meddle in the lives of mortals! Meddle, then stand back and watch and laugh. No use appealing to him either; he let you