Rusalka - C.J. Cherryh

Rusalka throws together a sort of rogue named Pyetr and a careful, frightened stableboy named Sasha. They've fled their town of Vojvoda, Pyetr for being caught with a married woman (and because her husband abruptly died while stabbing Pyetr and the old man's guard cried witchcraft), Sasha because he was worried about Pyetr, and everyone in town thinks he's a wizard anyway. Or at least bad luck

Pyetr's wound is not helped by spending nights in the woods during a Russian winter, and so he's in bad shape by the time they find an old shack, which happens to belong to an old wizard named Uulamets, who agrees to save Pyetr if Sasha will work off the debt. Uulamets recognizes the potential in Sasha and figures it could be useful in his plan to resurrect his daughter. While Pyetr's insistence on being involved complicates things, it does seem that Eveshka returns from the dead. Which, as they say, is where all the trouble begins.

Cherryh presents magic as something largely about focus and will. It can be supplemented with potions or herbs, but at the end of the day, it seems to largely come down to knowing what it is one wants to happen, and concentrating fully on that. The problem lies in not knowing how precisely one's wish will be carried out (wanting someone to be beyond harm could make them dead, for example), and in keeping track of past wants one's had, because it would be easy for them to conflict or mingle, and who knows what that might do? Then there's the matter of what happens when your "want" butts up against some other wizard's (or magically inclined being's) wants.

Which makes Pyetr the reader identification character I suppose. The perspective switches between he and Sasha, but Pyetr is the one with no apparent magical ability. He's the one who doesn't believe in any of it, then doesn't want to believe in it, then has no choice but to believe, but what can he do about it? He knows, for example, that there are times when Sasha wants Pyetr not to be mad at him, and it happens. Largely because Sasha's very bad at concealing the fact from him. How can Pyetr know what choices are his, and when he's a puppet on a string? At times, there are as many as five beings with power and the will to use it around him, each with different goals, and all of them place a certain value on Pyter. Maybe as a tool, maybe as a friend.

It put me in mind of the later books in Asimov's Foundation series, after we learn about the Second Foundation, it becomes a question of who may be getting manipulated by these shadowy telepaths whose primary allegiance is to Seldon's Plan, and then their own survival, with everything else being secondary. A person could never be certain the action they took was truly their own, and not some suggestion or order planted in their mind by a telepath with an agenda. That's essentially Pyetr's problem. He's pretty sure he does care about Sasha, and that he wants to help Eveshka, but after awhile, how can you tell?

So I found the question of how much free will he had very interesting. Also, the fact that it was much easier for him to trust that he did have free will the less he knew. The more he's confronted with wizards and their powers, the more it calls into question for him. It makes the reader question how much of what happened was chance, and how much came about because of careless or unspecific wishing on someone's part, and how, if someone really wanted to master such things, they'd have to be extremely careful, and what that kind of caution could do to them.

Think about how often in a day you might say - even just in your head - that you wish {insert example}, or you want {insert example}. Most of the time we probably aren't very specific about the "what" or "how". If I'm at a laundromat, and some other person brought their kid with them, and the kid won't stop crying or screaming, I might think, 'I wish that kid would be quiet.' But that could happen in lots of ways. The kid could get sleepy. Their parent could distract them with something, or take them outside. Or the kid could get stung by a bee and go into anaphylactic shock. Because I wasn't specific, if I was even aware I thought it.

Looking at it that way, that kind of power is kind of terrifying. Which is why, when people ask about superpowers you'd hypothetically want, I always just pick Spider-Man's powers. Speed, strength, and wall-crawling are a lot safer.