C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“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—