C. Cherryh - Rusalka

He tried to say that.

But all that came out was, “I’ll try. I swear I’ll at least try…”

Before Uulamets shouted at them to move and Sasha scrambled to kill the fire.

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.