Little Knife Read Free Page B

with her father and the priest, trailing all the townspeople and the grumbling Prince behind them.
    They found Semyon by the shattered dam, the river spilling its banks.
    “What has happened here?” asked the Duke.
    Semyon still wore his threadbare rags, but now he spoke with pride. “I have your coin,” he said. “Give me my bride.”
    The Duke held out his hand in expectation.
    “Show them, Little Knife,” said Semyon to the seething waters.
    Yeva frowned. “What is little about the river?” she asked. But no one heard her question.
    The coin shot from the river’s depths to skip and dance on its surface.
    “It’s true!” exclaimed the Duke. “By all the Saints, he’s found it!”
    The Duke, Semyon, and the Prince all reached for the coin—and the river roared. It seemed to hunch its back like a beast preparing to charge, a wild, pulsing swell that crested over the crowd.
    “Stop this!” demanded Semyon.
    But the river did not stop. It twisted and turned, forming a mighty column that churned with reeds and broken rocks, rising high above the forest floor as the onlookers cowered in fear. What did they see in its waters? Some would later say a demon, others the pale and bloated bodies of a hundred drowned men, but most said they saw a woman with arms like breaking waves, with hair like storm-cloud lightning, and breasts of white foam.
    “Little Knife!” cried Semyon. “What do you do?”
    A voice spoke, terrible in its power, rumbling with the sound of rain-choked waterfalls, of tempests and floods. “I am no blunt knife to cut your sorry bread,” it said. “I feed the fields and drown the harvest. I am bounty and destruction.”
    The people fell to their knees and wept. The Duke clutched the priest’s hand.
    “Then who are you?” begged Semyon. “What are you?”
    “Your tongue is not fit for my true name,” the river boomed. “I was once a spirit of the Isenvee, the great North Sea, and I roamed these lands freely, tumbling down through Fjerda, to the rocky coast and back again. Then, by unhappy accident, my spirit was trapped here, bound by this dam, free to run but doomed to return, forced to keep that cursed wheel spinning, in endless service to this miserable hamlet. Now the dam is no more. Your greed and the Prince’s axe have seen to that.”
    It was Yeva who found the courage to speak, for the question to ask seemed simple. “What do you want, river?”
    “It was I who built the tower of trees,” said the river. “And I who earned the mirror from Baba Anezka. It was I who found the magic coin. And now I say to you, Yeva Luchova: Will you remain here with the father who tried to sell you, or the Prince who hoped to buy you, or the man too weak to solve his riddles for himself? Or will you come with me and be bride to nothing but the shore?”
    Yeva looked at Semyon, at the Prince, at her father standing beside the priest. Then she tore the veil from her face—her eyes were bright, her cheeks were flushed and glowing. The people cried out and shielded their gazes, for in that moment she was too lovely to look at. She was terrifying in her beauty, bright like a devouring star.
    Yeva leapt from the banks and the river caught her up in its waters, keeping her afloat as her jeweled
kokoshnik
sank and her silken gown billowed around her. She hovered there on the surface, a flower caught in the current. Then as the Duke stood stunned and quaking in his wet boots, the river wrapped Yeva in its arms and carried her away. Through the woods the river thundered, leaving trees and fields drenched by her eddying skirts, smashing the mill to bits in her wake. The waterwheel snapped free of its moorings and rolled wildly down the banks, knocking the Prince and all his retainers to the ground before disappearing into the underbrush.
    The townspeople trembled against each other and when the river was finally gone, they looked upon the empty riverbed, its damp rocks glittering in the sun. Where the