R1 - Rusalka (49 page)

"He didn't get me back, he didn't want me back, he took that
thing—"

"It wasn't easy to see through. It fooled all of us."

"He wanted his daughter, his own way!"

Pyetr shook his head, hands tucked in his belt, and said—god, he could not believe he was saying: "He risked his neck for you—a damn lot more than my father would have done for me, I'll tell you."

Eveshka just stood there, losing and collecting little gossamer threads of herself.

"So," Pyetr said with a shrug, everyone else leaving matters to him, "so maybe you should wonder why. The god knows your father's got his faults, but he's been at his game a long time. It only makes sense to work with him, doesn't it?"

"That's what I said!" Uulamets snapped.

"Not very well, papa!"

"Shut up," Pyetr said. "Everybody. You—" he said to Eveshka. "Don't fight. Just don't fight. Not everything's important all the time. First things first. Like getting out of here. Old grievances don't help."

"They certainly don't," Uulamets said. "Think, girl! Our enemy's
wanting
us to act like fools, he wants us to forget he's in the game, he's damned powerful, and we don't gain anything by sending it one more help—which you'd assuredly be, going off on your own, daughter, don't you mistake it. When we came up here, I had some naive hope of dealing with him reasonably, but that's clearly out of the question."

"Out of the question! Papa, you can't talk with him, you can't—can't come near—"

Eveshka seemed to lose her way in mid-word again, staring off into distances, lips still shaping some word, part and parcel of other things that seemed to be going on where it came to Kavi Chernevog, things that collectively sent a chill down Pyetr's back.

"Seems to me," Pyetr said, looking momentarily at the ground to break the spell Eveshka's own face cast, "seems to me we've been doing a lot of odd things since we got here. As if we didn't have this—" He remembered about names in time, not so much that he believed the warning, but that he wanted no argument with Uulamets . "—As if you'd never had a reason for leaving the boat and trekking off through this woods—"

"He's right," Sasha said thickly. "Pyetr's harder to magic, isn't he? Maybe we should listen to him."

"Damn right somebody should listen to me! Does anybody remember what we're doing here? We buried a Thing that won't stay buried, the vodyanoi's trying for the rest of me,
nobody's
talking about doing anything but sit here while everything in this woods has a go at us, and I'm not sure who's to blame for the sail, but I don't think there's much chance involved with this many wizards."

"There's not likely to be," Uulamets said, looking narrowly at him. "Pyetr Illitch, you're certainly someone's; tonight I really wonder whose."

Upon which Uulamets walked off to the fireside alone.

"What does he mean?" Pyetr asked Eveshka and Sasha, looking from one to the next. "What did he mean by that?"

"I don't know," Sasha said, while beyond the fire:

"Damn you!" Uulamets cried suddenly, jabbing his staff into the moldy ground.

Pyetr ran, sword in hand: Babi and he arrived one after the other, Uulamets still stabbing with the heel of his staff at a traveling lump of leaves. His book had fallen from the log where he had earlier been sitting to lie open on the ground, and a separate lump of leaf mold flowed over it on the retreat, escaping Uulamets ' staff—after which with a curse Uulamets fell bodily on the book and covered it. Pyetr whacked one leaf ball in two as it moved, and both halves and the whole rippled off toward the brush with Babi in pursuit.

Pyetr had no urge to chase it. He grimaced in disgust, looked at his sword, fearing something noisome might have stuck to it—leaf fragments had—then reached down to help the old man up.

Uulamets gained his feet with his help and struck away his arm once he was up, hitting him twice more for good measure.

Pyetr did not hit him back, Pyetr fended him off with a lifted elbow and contained his thoughts of knocking him flat, as Eveshka and Sasha arrived to get between them.

"Is it all right?" Eveshka asked.

Meaning the book, Pyetr understood, but Uulamets gave her no answer, as courteous with family as with friends, it seemed—only sat down on the log and started turning pages in rapid succession.

Trying to find that answer, Pyetr supposed. Time was, he would gladly have chucked the book in the fire, and Uulamets after it: but not here and not now, in their precarious situation. "The River-thing was distracting us," he said, feeling his knees shaky. "We knew it had help, dammit, we were over there arguing and it was over here trying to steal the book—"

"It couldn't do that," Eveshka said, faintly. "It's protected." He felt her against his side. After a moment one could not feel the cold she brought. He thought distractedly, That's dangerous.

She shouldn't do that… But in their situation that presence against his side felt reassuring as Sasha's was, in a night grown altogether too lonely and too dark.

Sasha said quietly, "Sir, can it read?"

"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."

«
^
»

S
asha 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.