Rusalka

CHAPTER 27

NO FIRE. No breakfast. Once at hours like this, Pyetr told himself, he had been lazing about in a soft, warm bed no magician was going to chase him out of. Now he could not remember when he had last been thoroughly warm, his hand was hurting again, and he had soaked his left boot, the one with the split seam, in a boggy spot some distance back.

Uulamets, once he had decided to move, did it with disconcerting energy, pushing branches out of the way with his staff and often as not carelessly letting them spring back—while Eveshka drifted through the brush faster than flesh and blood could move, finding the path at her father’s bidding, beckoning them to a way through and vanishing for long moments in this headlong pace they kept.

It felt wrong. Eveshka’s flitting haste, her increasingly lengthy disappearances, worried him. Faster and faster. Up hills and down and no notion in the world where they were going, except that it had to do with Chernevog and the old man knowing where he was.

So what do we do with him when we catch him? Pyetr asked himself. What do you do with a man who can make your heart burst in your chest or wish a tree to fall on you—

“Slow down!” Pyetr said, out of breath, seeing Uulamets get further ahead of them. Uulamets cared nothing whether the man behind him caught a released branch in the face, Uulamets went charging through with complete disregard for him behind, and Pyetr found himself lagging further and further back, dodging the branches that snapped at him, trying not to do the same thing to Sasha, who, struggling with a considerable pack for a lad, was having trouble enough keeping up with him, “Slow down!” he asked Uulamets a second time, but if Uulamets paid him any attention at all, it was short-lived.

He swore, trying both to take care of himself and Sasha, with the gap widening in front of them, vexed that an old man with a pack of his own could get away from him—but woodcraft was making that much difference in the dark. “Eveshka!” he called out, increasingly anxious as the gap widened, hoping she might realize their plight.

But she was out of view now, and Sasha had stopped, suddenly having snagged his pack on a branch.

“Wait!” Pyetr called out to Uulamets, “Sasha’s hung up!” He cast a glance over his shoulder to keep track of Uulamets while he jerked and broke the thorn branch off Sasha’s pack, tearing his hand again, but Uulamets was only a fading grayness in the dark, paying him no heed.

“Come on,” he said to Sasha, and tried to follow, but he could not find the way Uulamets had taken through, and the gap was getting wider: he could see the old man ahead but he could not see precisely where he stepped, and it only grew worse.

“He wants to lose us,” Pyetr muttered, shoving his way through brambles. It was bad enough being behind, but with his hand hurting and no idea where the shore was, or when the River-thing might put out some slithery coil about them, he had no wish to be out of Uulamets’ vicinity for a moment.

But something cold brushed against his arm, chilling right through his coat. Eveshka, he thought, had realized they had fallen behind, Eveshka had come back for them, and he looked around to speak to her—

And saw a man’s pale face, a bearded, rotting face with staring eyes.

He yelled as it reached for him and the cold went right through his arm and numbed it.

“Let go of him!” Sasha cried.

It whipped away, wailing faintly through the woods: three more joined it in its flight.

“What was that?” Pyetr breathed, only then thinking of his sword—but it did not seem one of those things a sword might help.

Then he thought about those ghosts—three of them. “Eveshka,” he cried, and started fighting his way through the brush, desperately afraid they might threaten her more than him. “Eveshka!”

Sasha was close behind—Pyetr hoped that was who bumped into him, as all around them other ghosts came skulking in, reeking of the grave, rough and shaggy men armed with swords and knives, flitting through the brush without a care for the thorns, occupying the way ahead of them and cutting them off with a hedge of drawn and ghostly swords.

“Bandits!” Sasha said.

“Dead ones,” Pyetr murmured, halted with his hand on his own sword, for what small good it might be. The ghosts moved closer on all sides, swords drawn. “Uulamets!” Pyetr yelled, as one of them popped up right in his face, grinning at him. “Sasha!”

Suddenly Eveshka was there, a bright white shape of streaming edges in the midst of the others, which dimmed and shied away like so many curs.

“Away!” Eveshka cried, flinging out her arms, and they shredded and vanished on the winds.

Like that.

Pyetr stared at her, impressed—dismayed at being rescued by a slip of a girl; and likewise to see the rage on her face—as if he and Sasha might well stand next in her intentions.

But it was to the woods and the dark that she turned that grim expression, where the breaking of brush heralded something solid coming toward them. In a moment more, Uulamets’ gray shape came striding through the thicket, the black bird fluttering somewhere in the trees—one could hear the wings, beneath Uulamets’ panting and cursing.

“Lag back and halloo through the woods, why don’t you? Something might still be asleep!—And you, girl, don’t you turn your face from me. Don’t you pretend you don’t hear me!”

“I don’t want you here, papa, I don’t want you, let me alone!”

“That’s foolishness!”

“I want them out of here! Both of them! Now!”

“For fear they’ll see your handiwork? They’ve seen your victims, girl, they’ve seen it plain! If that hasn’t put your young man off, I don’t know what I can tell him. And what will you do else, leave them to this woods?”

Eveshka began to come apart in threads again, turning her face away from them.

“Eveshka,” Pyetr said, “listen to him. Look at me.”

She would not. She looked out into the woods, all shrouded in blowing hair and tattered gown, her face in profile to them. “There’s nothing for you to fear from them,” she said. “They’re trying to warn you. It’s an obligation on the dead.”

Whereupon she drifted off through the brush where they could not follow. Uulamets swore and began to follow her, as Pyetr jerked his sleeve free and held the brush with his back, keeping the way open for Sasha long enough to get him through, while he kept his eye on Uulamets’ steps. But Uulamets, thank the god, was going slower this time.

“There’s ghosts following us,” Sasha muttered after a moment, at his back. “Eight or ten at least.”

“Won’t hurt us,” Pyetr said to himself, “won’t hurt us, god, I want out of this damned woods.”

“Won’t help,” someone whispered against his ear.

“They’re back,” he said to Sasha, panting, planting his feet carefully on a slope the old man ahead of him took faster than he dared.

Being master of his own luck.

“Wish me to find the right way,” he said to Sasha. “Damn that old man.”

“Don’t—”

“I’m not a wizard, I can’t wish for myself, I can’t even curse him—”

“Can’t escape,” another voice said.

“I’m doing all I can,” Sasha protested. “It’s not doing any good.”

“It’s so cold here.” A third voice, up against Pyetr’s ear. Instinctively he swatted at it, and chill numbed his hand.

“Don’t trust her,” something said at his other side.

“Don’t go.”

“Go back while you can…”

“Thanks,” Pyetr muttered, panting, overtaking Uulamets with a major effort. But Uulamets only moved the faster, then, and Eveshka still went ahead of them.

“Go back,” the ghosts whispered. White shapes flitted in the tail of his eye, almost having faces. “Don’t go,” one said. Another: “Go back while you can—”

“Eveshka!” Pyetr called out, and shuddered from a cold, reeking touch at his face. “God! Eveshka! They’re back! Do something!”

Insubstantial hands touched him, tugged at his sword, one attempted his pocket. Bandits and thieves for certain.

And an old man’s voice whispered, “I miss my wife. I want to go home.”

Pyetr did not want to hear that one. He wanted to think that deer and rabbits and birds had fed Eveshka; and one by one, the trees—at worst, the bandits, who well deserved it; but there was that voice—

Then a young, frightened voice: “Papa, mama, where are you?”

A chance thorn branch ripped across his neck, and he clumsily fended it off, aware he was bleeding, remembering, even if he had had no grandmother to tell him tales, that there was something about ghosts and blood; and ghosts and guilt—

Not even Sasha’s wishing could cure the truth or mend the past: the ghosts streamed raggedly through the brush—not threatening now, but wailing into his ears, rushing at him and circling him.

“Go back while you can,” they said.

Not armed now, but altogether desperate, anguished, importunate: “Go back!” they wailed. “You’re going to die!”

“Go away!” Uulamets snarled, swatted at one and hung his own sleeve in the brush. “Damn!”

So much for Uulamets’ pious advice, Pyetr thought; and in the same moment Eveshka came streaming back to them in tatters, confronting the ghosts with a wild and frightened countenance.

“Leave them alone!” she cried, and the woods seemed to howl and to swarm with ghosts then. White shapes whirled around them and swept away with an ear-piercing shriek.

“God!” Pyetr said, and shuddered as a ghost came up in his very face, but it was Eveshka, when she looked at him, Eveshka who brushed his hand with hers.

“Come on,” Uulamets said, and Pyetr was willing to go anywhere that got them clear of this, but Eveshka cried, “No, papa!” and shook her head so that her hair streamed like smoke. “No, no further, no closer—we aren’t strong enough! Listen to me! Don’t be crazy!”

We’re in deep trouble, Pyetr thought, with cold touches starting to come at him from his left, and voices starting to whisper again. He had a sudden, sinking feeling that they had finally found their stopping place, for good and all, the wizards all fighting each other and the ghosts wearing them down touch by cold touch.

“Keep going!” Uulamets said.

“No!” Eveshka cried, catching at him with insubstantial hands. “Papa, you’re failing, you’re all slipping deeper and I can’t hold on any longer, I can’t! Make a fire—quick, papa, please!”

“In this thicket?”

“Do what she says!” Pyetr said, it seeming to him that someone had to make up his mind and do something; and it seeming to him that it was a lot easier to keep one’s wits in the light: Uulamets himself had said that once, or Sasha had. “Let’s not panic, shall we? She’s a ghost. And a wizard. Doesn’t she know what she’s talking about?”

While he was shivering, himself, and trying not to, considering Eveshka owed no one any sympathy about dying.

Uulamets jerked a sleeve free of the brush, shoved a branch aside and squatted down to open his bag of supplies, snarling, “All right, all right, then, let’s get a little clear spot here, let’s get some dry tinder.”

Pyetr broke branches for tinder and to clear a space overhead for the fire, Sasha cleared a small spot of leaves from the ground, while ghosts howled and dived right past their hands, bitter cold.

Uulamets coaxed a tiny spark to life, bright and brighter, catching a pungent lump of moss, a little drop of fire that grew by what they added to it and blinded the eyes to everything but itself.

Then the sound of the ghosts sank away, less now than the sighing of the trees, and the cold touches stopped.

Sasha gave a little sigh, and rubbed his face for warmth before he sank down beside Pyetr, to warm his hands at the little fire. “That’s better!” He was still shivering. He could not explain to himself why he had lost his wits, or why he had started believing the ghosts, or precisely why he had been able to think clearly again at the first gleam of light, except that one wanted the light, and it grew, and that one little moment had turned things around.

“Better, indeed,” Uulamets muttered, and looked up beyond the fire, where the only ghost in sight was Eveshka, so dim she hardly showed at all. “If you’d kept your wits about you, and not kept us harried—”

“I don’t want you here.”

“Don’t be contrary!” Uulamets cracked a larger stick and fed it in, while the raven fluttered to a perch somewhere nearby. “A daughter that won’t use the sense she was born with—”

“A father that won’t listen!”

“Stop it!” Pyetr said. “It’s not helping.”

The anger in the air was thick enough to breathe. One thought of angry ghosts—and tried not to.

“They—” It was another one of those slippery thoughts, the sort that kept sliding fishlike out of Sasha’s grip and wriggling away, but he calmed himself and held onto it long enough to ask, “Why the bandits? Why here?”

“Hers,” Uulamets said. “He’s using them.”

“Our enemy?” Pyetr asked.

“No, fool!—Of course our enemy! Have we friends?”

“You’ll not win any.”

“Don’t press me.”

“Mind your—”

“Pyetr!” Sasha said, and seized his arm, scared, distracted and knowing what could get at them if he or Uulamets let that take hold. “Pyetr, for the god’s sake—be patient. Master Uulamets is working. You’re distracting him.”

“Thanks,” Pyetr muttered under his breath.

“And me.” Sasha squeezed his wrist, desperately afraid. “Don’t fight. You said it yourself. Don’t fight.”

Pyetr said nothing. Firelight showed his jaw clenched, his nostrils flared.

“Don’t be mad, Pyetr.”

“I’m not mad.”

“I’ve got to think. Please. Don’t ask questions, don’t want things from us, not now. I’m losing things—I’m scared, Pyetr, don’t distract me.”

Pyetr scowled and shook off his grip, looking into the fire with his arms locked around his knees.

Bandits, Sasha recollected, careful of the thought of ghosts, fearing they could gain a foothold in his wishes. Bandits. And ordinary people. Traders and travelers from long ago, maybe, when the East Road had been open and there had been no bandits in the woods—

The grandmothers said ghosts haunted the places of their deaths, and he had never known—another slippery thought—that Eveshka had haunted this side of the river, where the trees were still alive.

He’s using them, master Uulamets had said, and Sasha held on to that thought, desperately reminding himself to remember and sure now they were under attack from worse than ghosts.

He saw Eveshka standing looking out into the dark as if she were guarding them, faint, gossamer figure all in tatters.

She did not speak to them now, in any sense, only kept staring outward like that. Toward what, he wondered, and wanted Babi back, desperately. He was afraid Babi was not coming back, and he was sure if they had had Babi along on this stretch, they would not have been half so afraid—and then Eveshka would not, Uulamets had said it, have distracted them so with her own panic: they might have gotten all the way—

Where? he wondered—distracted then by a slight rustle as Pyetr delved into his pack and pulled out a little packet of dried fish. Pyetr offered some to him, and he ate and passed the packet to Uulamets.

Uulamets glowered, took a piece and passed the packet back.

Of a sudden the raven swooped and landed, and looked with its one eye at the fish. Sasha surrendered the I; it piece in that packet and it flapped back up into the dark with its prize.

Pyetr frowned at him about that. Or about everything in general. Sasha wanted Pyetr not to be angry at him—

And remembered he had promised not to do that.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, at which Pyetr looked confused as well as mad at him. “Pyetr, I don’t mean to—”

Pyetr still frowned at him, maybe thinking—Pyetr had surely been close to magic long enough to understand—that that fact was more dangerous to them than the ghosts were.

“It’s all right,” Pyetr whispered back, then, with a gentler expression. “It’s all right, boy. Just get some sleep if you can.”

He shook his head. “You,” he said, at which Pyetr looked further put off. Sasha had not wanted that, not wanted above all to treat Pyetr the way Uulamets did. “I can’t,” he whispered, wishing Pyetr would understand him and not feel the way he so evidently did.

Which, unintended, broke his promise again with a dangerously wide magic.

“God,” he said—swearing began to seem scarcely adequate for what was welling up in him, and he could not even remember aunt Ilenka’s face any longer, let alone hear her admonishments. He rested his eyes a moment against his arm. “Pyetr—don’t be mad. Please don’t be mad at me. I’m so tired.”

“Shut up!” Uulamets snapped at them both.

Pyetr reached out and gently squeezed Sasha’s shoulder, after which Pyetr’s hand suddenly fell away from him and he put the other to his forehead as if he had grown faint.

Sasha looked at master Uulamets, who scowled at him and said, “For all our good.”

When he looked back Pyetr had collapsed sidelong, in sound sleep.