Here is one of the spell-stories I will tell them to remind them of their strength and where they come from: A while since, two men went missing from a lakeside town and were assumed drowned when their boat washed ashore. The men of their families all rowed across to visit the Rusalka women living on the far shore. They kept their boats close together in the fog. The Rusalki were waist-deep in the water, searching for duck mussels with their toes. The men knew to wait until they beached their boats and had their boots on dry land before addressing the women.
“We’ve come for the bodies of our sons,” said the two boys’ fathers, “so that they may rest beside their kin.”
“It was not us who took them,” said one of the women. “It was one of those among you now, a man we know as Vodnik. He’s been made an officer to the faeries, and has been haunting the shallows as of late.
“There he is, the one with water dripping from his coattails even when your journey was dry,” she finished.
The man she gestured to was old and bent, but he sprung off and dove into the reeds at the lake’s edge when he heard this.
Another woman spoke. “You will not pry the bodies from him, but we will tell you how we ward him away.” She held up her wrist, where a needle was tied flat to her skin. “Keep a sharp iron needle on you when you are on the water and do not let it dull. Vodnik will be too afraid you might use it and let the lake-water out of him.”
The men and boys put the boats on their shoulders and began the long walk back to their village, where their wives with their needles were waiting.
We three all understand that in this story the Rusalka women are our people, not those women in the town, but it is not a story that I, the youngest, will tell my daughters. If those powers over the water were ever really ours, they do not apply to this salt world that my sisters and I stand waiting in. Our mother was cast-up here by wreckers and their false lights, far from the home she’d left and
32 | Psychopomp Magazine