“Brother Raven,” Sasha murmured, behind him, as the feeling of Eveshka’s presence grew quite, quite certain. Pyetr looked up and saw the bird clearly—in a sky catching the first faint glow of the sun.
It dipped a wing and glided off over the ridge, opposite to Eveshka’s direction.
“Follow it!” Sasha said. “It’s Uulamets’ creature. Eveshka’s off the track—she knows it now, she’s coming as fast as she can, but so is it’t For the god’s sake—move!”
It was not Pyetr’s inclination to abandon the salt circle, but Sasha wished him into motion, he felt it, caught a breath and started climbing, slipping and sliding on the slick leaves with Sasha close behind him. Eveshka was coming toward them—Eveshka had seen the raven, called it in some fashion from downriver, Pyetr knew that in a solid, no-nonsense way that he connected with Sasha’s meddling, not Eveshka’s—but he did not, this time, resent Sasha shoving things on him neither of them had breath for. He reached the top of the ridge ahead of Sasha and skidded down the leafy slope on the other side, down among thick trees again. His hand ached. He felt an unreasoning dread here, in the dark of these trees.
Sasha arrived as the pain grew acute; from the one side Eveshka’s presence was rushing at them and from the other—from the woods all around, but especially straight ahead—came a sense of cold hostility.
“Can you feel it?” Sasha asked.
Pyetr nodded, saving his breath, willing his fingers to hang on to the sword. The presence he felt ahead of them was not the vodyanoi: that one had a feeling all its own, and he had learned to trust those differences. “Woodsmoke,” he said as the wind carried that to them, and reckoning no Forest-thing would build a fire, he fended brush aside with his sword and started in the direction of that apprehension.
Wings snapped: something swooped past him and brushed his face. The raven settled on a low branch by him, shadow in shadow—
A white shape had appeared in the woods ahead of them, coming toward them; and a dimmer, grayer figure beside it.
“Master Uulamets?” Sasha called out, from Pyetr’s side.
“Who told you to leave the boat?” the gray one snarled as it walked, waving an arm. “Damnable fools!”
“Certainly sounds like him,” Pyetr muttered.
“Papa,” the white one said in Eveshka’s voice, stopping and catching at Uulamets’ sleeve to stop him. “Papa, don’t trust him! Don’t trust anything you hear from them—”
“She’s lying,” Sasha said, and if there were wishes flying, if there was wizardry going on, Pyetr felt nothing but Eveshka, coming from behind him like a hawk’s strike—like a scream in the air—
She was there—ducked under a branch beside him and passed without a glance at either of them, walking straight toward Uulamets and the Eveshka at his side…
“No,” it cried, lifting a hand as if to fend her off. Uulamets lifted his, as if to do the same, but Eveshka walked up to her rival and stretched out her hand. Fingers scarcely met. Then—so quickly Pyetr’s eyes refused to see the change—a single white ghost drifted where both had stood.
Uulamets recoiled, cried out: “No! Damn you—”
“Damned, indeed,” ghost-Eveshka said, and pointed down at her feet. “This is your daughter, papa, this is the daughter you called up—”
Pointing down at a muddy skull and a glistening pile of water-weed.
“God,” Pyetr murmured, as Uulamets stepped back.
Eveshka said, plaintively, “I couldn’t reach you, papa. You wouldn’t listen—”
Uulamets turned away and leaned his arm against a tree, his head bowed.
Pyetr stood there with his sword still in his hand and a cold feeling in his stomach. He hoped it was his Eveshka that had survived that encounter.
Then, gathering his wits: “Babi?” he called.
Almost immediately a body pressed against his boot. It whined. The god knew it had reason.
But it turned up with this Eveshka. It always had, with the one he knew for his.
“I’m here,” Eveshka was saying to Uulamets. “Papa?”
But Uulamets gave no sign he heard.
“Papa, can’t you see me?”
Uulamets gave no answer then, either.
“Your daughter’s here,” Pyetr said, recovering his sense of balance. “Old man, she’s real. She’s the one who’s survived. Babi’s with her. Doesn’t that say it’s her?”
Uulamets pushed himself away from the tree and walked off from them.
Sasha stepped forward, made a sudden, hurt sound. Sasha’s hand lifted as if to ward off some invisible attack as Pyetr looked at him in alarm—both of them frozen for a heartbeat, Sasha in the shock of whatever was happening to him, himself in doubt what to do or what to fight, until Sasha dropped that hand to his sword arm.
“She—” Sasha said, and fell on Pyetr’s neck and hung on him as if all strength had just left him. “Oh—god, Pyetr—”
Pyetr cast an alarmed look at Eveshka, whose expression was quite, quite cold—and guessed by that what transaction might have passed: a bargain paid, or simply that Uulamets’ daughter might have found a heart entirely too fragile a possession after all.
Please the god, Pyetr thought, that Sasha was still sane. But the boy felt something, finally; the boy could beg his pardon for getting him deeper into this place, and swear that he had never wanted to be a wizard—
“Can’t help what you’re born,” Pyetr said, holding on to the boy, sword and all, knowing that Pyetr Kochevikov had never believed that, and that if he had, he might have died the way his father had, instead of the way he figured now he was likely to—take his pick, he could, a ghost without a heart or a Water-thing who wanted to make supper of him, neither one of which he could consistently believe in. Gambler’s luck, it seemed.
Someone had to bury the remains, even if Eveshka seemed to care nothing about the matter and Uulamets stayed by his fireside and gave no sign of interest in it either. So Pyetr used his sword to loosen the dirt, and by a cloudless dawn he and Sasha piled up wet dirt and leaves such as they could, for decency’s sake.
Sasha still was pale, his hands, flecked with bits of earth and wet leaf mold, were white. Wind burn was the only color in his face.
More than that, he did not look up oftener than he must, and then with some vague shame that gnawed at Pyetr’s peace of mind—such as Eveshka left him.
Pushing him and pulling him all at once, that was what it felt like to Pyetr: his would and would-not where she was concerned was so violent and muddled with anger this morning he felt half crazed himself, and he clung to the real world of mud and bone and Sasha’s pale face with all the desperate attention a man could pay to anything after a night of no sleep.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Sasha?”
Sasha nodded without looking at him, and Pyetr gnawed his lip in distress.
“Let’s get the old man moving,” he said. “Look, whatever we decide later, let’s get everyone back to the boat, go back to the house, try this all again—”
Sasha shook his head, and did meet his eyes this time, with a bleak, exhausted look. “It won’t get us out of this. We can’t get there.”
“Do you know that?” Pyetr asked carefully. He felt cold himself, and sick and scared. “Sasha—can you tell, are you free of her?”
Sasha stared through him a moment, and said, “None of us are free…”
Pyetr shook at his arm. “Sasha, damn it, don’t talk like that.”