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.”
CHAPTER 26
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?”
“Liar!” Uulamets cried. “Begone! Go back to your grave! Go back to the worms with your carping and your spite, she’s nothing to do with your poison, Draga!”
“Licentious pig. I’ll see you dead.”
“Look to yourself on that day! God, what did I ever see in you?”
“I had the worst of that bargain. I had you. God, look at you, you withered stick. I don’t know what I saw in you.”
“There’s your mother,” Uulamets said, flinging up a hand, turning his shoulder to the ghost. “There’s your mother, girl, god, what a baggage—”
He wished suddenly with such cold violence that Sasha threw up everything, everything he had, and stood, afterward, with his heart thumping and the clearing holding only one ghost, one tattered, frightened ghost, who turned and fled.
“Eveshka!” Uulamets said, again sending out that force, and she paused at the forest edge, shedding little filaments of herself.
“Eveshka,” Pyetr called out to her, and more pieces came away, flying out into the dark.
“What happened to my mother?” she asked, and Uulamets said,
“I’ve no idea.”
“How did she die?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t my doing.”
Eveshka stared at him with eyes dark and deep and angry.
“You do know.”
“As happens, I don’t. She left after trying to steal my book, she left you behind, which was evidently the limit of her maternal affection. She was a wizard. Of course she was. Do you think she had a heart?” He reached out his hand and the raven flapped its wings and landed heavily on his wrist before he flung it for a sturdier perch overhead. “Hers would lodge in a snake. In a toad. In a cesspool. Don’t listen to her. You’re not her creature, you never were and you never will be.” He made a motion of his hand toward Sasha. “Put out the fire. Pack up.”