C. Cherryh - Chernevog

Dangerous, probably, to feel that. He watched Sasha let Chernevog go, Chernevog standing with his back to Volkhi’s side.

“Move!” Sasha said.

“I’m not sure—” Pyetr found himself saying Not sure and plunged ahead. “I don’t know if we shouldn’t listen this time. The way the ghosts took off—”

“Pyetr, that’s him wanting you to say that.”

“I’m not sure it isn’t my idea too. —If some Thing or other is really looking for him, isn’t it going to start there?”

“I thought time mattered.”

Eveshka. God. He felt a sudden deep embarrassment, to be so foolish, and Sasha was unwontedly sharp with him. Deservedly. He said, “Come on, Snake,” and offered him help to climb up.

Chernevog cast an anxious look at Sasha over his shoulder.

“I’ll take him,” Sasha said.

Time was when he had felt obliged to stand between the boy and any sort of trouble. It was a strange feeling, to watch a sudden, stern-faced young man climb up (however ungracefully) onto his horse and offer his hand—and see it was Kavi Chernevog who looked afraid to take it.

“Following a notion,” the voice said from the brush and the deepening twilight. There was an intermittent long slide of a massive body, a crackling of small branches. “And where will this notion take you, I wonder? Did you know your willow’s greening up this spring? I wonder why.”

Eveshka ignored the vodyanoi as much as possible. It was time to stop soon, and to make a fire, and to ring herself with protections the River-thing could not pass, but there was nothing savory about this thicket. The forest here might never have died, but it had not prospered either: there was no clear spot to build a fire, and no clear spot either to build her protections.

“I smell smoke, pretty. Do you? I’ll bet if you go much further you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

She smelled nothing. But she felt a chill all the same. Old Hwiuur had his wicked ways, and he lied, but he loved tormenting someone in trouble, too, and one got to know when he was getting to the point of things.

“ Never been this far up the river, pretty?”

She clenched her jaw and kept walking, breathing at a measured pace, thinking if she could find a place to build a fire and boil water, she might give the damned creature a salt-water bath. That might send him elsewhere awhile.

But-she dared not believe it, she dared not do anything that risked sending the vodyanoi south, not even that she believed Pyetr and Sasha might not deal with it—

But if Kavi was with them, god, the leshys had surely failed, if that was the case, and Kavi might use the vodyanoi, might be using him now. Hwiuur would by no means tell her any straight truth. Kavi was with them—how?

The scent of smoke reached her, very faint. She said, “Hwiuur, who lives hereabouts?”

“Oh,” the vodyanoi said, “now are we polite, pretty bones?”

She wanted to know, unequivocally. But Hwiuur was hard to catch with one intent, or two, or three. He said,

“If we’re not polite, I’ll leave, pretty. I’ll tell you. Better yet, I’ll show you. Just a little gather.”

He was moving away from her for a moment. Then she heard something at her left, looked and saw her father standing there.

“Not so much farther,” he said, this gray, shadowed figure that was no ghost.

Then it dissolved and flowed down onto the ground, rushing past her like a runaway spill of ink.

A damned shapeshifter… in her father’s likeness.

Recent lie? she asked herself. Or a lie from the start?

She stood very still for a moment. She heard Hwiuur’s slithering progress in the brush, coming from the other side now. It passed behind her.

“Stop playing games,” she cried. “Hwiuur, damn you!”

Movement stopped. The whole woods was still.

But the feeling—the assurance that had been with her from childhood, of something especially, uniquely waiting for her— was with her again in that quiet.

Perhaps, she thought, Hwiuur had been trying, in his malicious way, to mislead her from what was essential for her to find.

Or perhaps, in the presence of such malicious creatures, it might mean something utterly dreadful about her childhood longings—that mysterious assurance of special worth somewhere, most private and most central to her heart.

She walked forward, down a slope and past an old, old tree, found herself facing a strange hill of sod and logs.

Set in that hill, dim in the last of the light—was a door.

It was a most uneasy feeling Sasha had as they rode into view of the ruin, and he wondered if Chernevog was somehow to blame for that uneasiness: Chernevog had scared him terribly, going at Pyetr as he had a while back, and he had no idea what was the matter with him since, that had his hands trembling with anger and his heart racing—whether it was Chernevog that disturbed him or whether it was some other abrading influence in this place.

He was not one to let feelings get away from him, no matter Pyetr’s advice to let his temper go—no matter Pyetr thought him weak and indecisive… he was not Pyetr, he had all but panicked with Chernevog, and he could not ride into this place as Pyetr did, looking as if trouble had better watch out for him and not the other way around. He was frightened, he was angry at Chernevog, and most of all-Most of all he did not really want the meeting they were here to get, which might well prevent it happening at all. He kept thinking, What do I do if the old man does want me?

“Not much of the place left,” Pyetr said. It was true—ordinary luck might easily have missed the house entirely in the almost-dark, the planting of trees was so thorough. Only the burned beams above the trees showed them where the old building had stood, fire-charred timbers standing stark and washed with rain.

I’ve seen this, too, Sasha thought, uncomfortably aware of Chernevog’s presence brushing his back. Missy moved at her deliberate pace, constant movement of muscle and bone beneath him: Missy was smelling rain and young leaves and old fire— nothing in the way of dangers that horses understood.

“Looks as if the leshys flattened what was standing,” Pyetr said. “The big tree in the yard is gone. Trees must be planted right over the grave.”

“We’ll find it,” Sasha murmured distractedly. He felt nothing precisely amiss about the place, but it seemed far more haunted than the woods, full of memories and old wishes. He said to Uulamets’ ghost, if it chanced to be listening, Master Uulamets, it’s me, Sasha. We’ve got Chernevog with us: don’t be startled—

“Sasha,” Chernevog said. Chernevog had not held to him in their riding together, had avoided him as much as two people could avoid each other on the same horse, but of a sudden Chernevog touched his arm. “For the god’s sake we’re close enough!”

“Shut up!” he said.

The ruin stood in seedlings that made a deep green deception In the twilight, level as if it were some knee-deep lake the horses waded. The dead tree that had stood in the yard was indeed gone, there were only scant traces of a wall and the tumbled foundations, except one wing. They passed the remains of a wall, a charred round ruin where the bathhouse had stood, all half-drowned in infant birch trees.

He stopped Missy, bade Chernevog get down, and slid off as

Pyetr did. They were virtually over the grave, as best he recalled it. The light was fast leaving them, the green birches faded to faint, moist gray, the edges of the forest lost in rain, the burned timbers black against the clouds. The only sound was their breathing.

“Master Uulamets,” he said aloud, defying all that silence. “Master Uulamets?”

He waited. He wished earnestly for the old man’s good will, he tried earnestly to remember that Uulamets had also saved their lives, and not to hold Uulamets’ motives against him.