C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“The god knows,” Uulamets muttered, still riffling pages, then looked up, and snarled, waving his hand at Pyetr, “Get away from him!”

Eveshka fled. And he knew Uulamets had absolutely good reason for his behavior, but he felt—

—lonely, after that. Even with Sasha there. That scared him. So did master Uulamets putting down his book and starting to delve into his bag, with purpose evident.

Pyetr set his hand on Sasha’s shoulder. “Better get some sleep,” he said, and wished Babi would come back. There was no sound out there in the woods, now, nothing like a struggle.

While Uulamets arranged little pots on the ground in front of him. “As happens,” Uulamets said, “I can use the boy.”

He hardly liked the sound of that.

So while Sasha squatted on his heels and helped the old man, and while Eveshka hovered silent and angry on the other side of the fire, Pyetr sank down and wrapped himself in his blanket with the fire between him and Eveshka, where he could watch what was going on.

Little pots. Coals from their fire.

“What’s the matter with this fire?” Pyetr muttered when Sasha came to collect that item.

Sasha gave him a distressed look, and got his coals between two sticks and came to put them in the lump of moss old Uulamets was arranging, after which a great deal of smoke went up, to gust directly in Pyetr’s face.

On purpose, he thought uncharitably, and glared at Uulamets, undecided between conceding his spot or stubbornly suffering the smoke.

He sat, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, he thought—if Eveshka could hear him—that there was no reasonable connection between smoke and ghosts and Uulamets’ bizarre doings, but then he thought that if there was anything to magic, and he was lately helpless to doubt it, his doubts were no help and perhaps a detriment—to Eveshka, and her welfare, which did count with him; and perhaps to their hopes of getting out of this woods, which very much did appeal to him.

So he wiped his nose, rested his hand on his chin and shut his eyes, patiently waiting and hoping that there was no danger to Sasha in the old man’s magicking.

What’s he doing? he asked Eveshka in his thoughts; but she sent him—if anything—only a feeling that finished upsetting his stomach.

There might be danger. Babi had not come back. There were River-things and Forest-things, and he had himself almost died, Sasha swore it was true, until Uulamets had brought him up from the grave…

The way he proposed to do with Eveshka.

Encouraging, perhaps. He wondered if Eveshka knew that. He still resisted believing it on the one hand and wanted to believe it for Eveshka’s sake.

Uulamets started his infernal singsong chanting, tootled a few notes on a pipe, the sort of sound that ought at least to send shivers through dead bones, and chanted and grunted. Pyetr slitted his eyes from time to time to keep watch over the business, wanting to ask precisely what it was supposed to do, and with the burning urge to ask whether there was some chance of it helping Eveshka immediately—

But the old man never was inclined to answer a civil question and certainly breaking in now hardly invited a civil answer. Himself, he recalled the last such episode, involving the salt pot and the vodyanoi and Uulamets blasting himself unconscious on the riverbank, and quietly slipped his sword around where it was convenient, swearing to himself that if there was another such incident and if the old man’s magicking harmed Sasha he was going to answer for it.

He hated that singing, that recalled his wits coming and going with fever, Uulamets doing things with knives—god! the smoke was giving him a headache, and he was starting to remember things-He rubbed his eyes to clear them of the stinging, thought that it was stupid to be sitting in the smoke with his eyes hurting and his nose running, and wondered if he dared move, but—

He was going to sneeze.

He stifled it desperately. But something happened of a sudden, the fire at his back suddenly blasted outward in a whirlwind of stinging cinders and ash, and he saw the pages of Uulamets’ book fly wild, the wind and the cinders blast back on Uulamets and Sasha, scattering burning bits of moss into their laps—he saw that while he was turning, getting to his feet, hand on his sword, to see what had happened—

To see a ghostly intruder confronting Eveshka—a thing that was at one instant a woman and at another a mouldering skeleton of a woman, with the reek of the earth about her.

“Well,” it said—one thought it said, although from moment to moment it was only bone, and looked at them though from one blink to another there were no eyes—”well, well, my loving husband… I thought that was your voice.”

SASHA STARED at the Thing they had raised, with no idea what had gone wrong, but something had, something had gone most dreadfully, dangerously amiss, and wishes shivered in the air, cold as knife blades.

It called Uulamets husband. And with the same dreadful jaws, said, “This must be my daughter.”

Eveshka looked at it in horror, and Pyetr—

“That’s it,” Pyetr said. “That’s it, that’s enough of this blundering about in the dark, let’s for the god’s sake do something with the little pots, put it back where it came from—”

“It’s late for that,” the creature said, frowning, what time it was not grinning bone, and looked at Pyetr with such attention that Sasha flung everything he had into Pyetr’s safety—

Which only brought that attention in his direction, the slow, deliberate gaze of a snake. He felt that gaze, felt it crawl over his skin with sensations that disorganized his thinking.

“Draga!” Uulamets said sharply, and the raven flapped aloft and shrieked in startlement, then fluttered down like something wounded, while Eveshka stood there losing threads and streamers in a wind that reeked of something unearthed.

“Afraid?” the ghost said. “Guilty?—What did he tell you, daughter? That I’d simply deserted you? I had no choice.”

“Nor sense of balance! Nor scruples!” Uulamets said, and raised his staff, waving her away. “Eveshka, trust nothing with this thief, this snake—”

“Your mother,” the ghost said. “ Come to me, Eveshka. I know everything that happened—the dead do know. And there’s no more pain, no more hurt. No one can do anything to you again—”

“Stay here!” Uulamets snapped, and the air went all to fire and ice, everywhere push and pull, go and come. Sasha lost his vision for a moment, his head spinning and himself without an anchor of any kind except Pyetr, except the realization that Uulamets was distracted, Pyetr was depending on him and that if he ever let go his hold on the world they would never see the sun again.

“—Your mother’s a common thief,” Uulamets said coldly. “When you were born she had no more interest in you than to hold you for ransom—”

“Liar!” the ghost said. “He never planned for offspring, saw nothing in a daughter but a threat to him— that’s why he stole you from me, that’s why I had to run for my life, that’s why he guarded you all those years—”

There was too much hatred, too much pain, altogether, when of a sudden Eveshka fled to Pyetr and held to him, saying, “Everyone’s lying. No one wanted me…”

“So you took in Kavi Chernevog,” the ghost said, on a cold wind. “And let him at my daughter. Damn your lies and your treachery… He murdered my daughter, and you were fool enough to take that boy in, teach him what you refused to teach my daughter, oh, I do know, I know you never would trust any of my blood, Ilya Uulamets, least of all one that shared yours. Most especially you never wanted any other wizard’s attentions to her. What did you have in mind for her?”