“Now?” Pyetr cried. “It’s dark out there! There’s the god knows what crawling around in the bushes, we’ve walked all last night, we’ve slept precious little of this one—”
“You wanted something done,” Uulamets snapped, and stamped his staff on the ground. “Move!”
Pyetr felt the shove the old man gave him, past his own pricklish shakiness of too little sleep, too many bad surprises, and too much effort yet to go. “Dammit—”
“Mind your language!” Uulamets said. “Don’t curse things and don’t name names and above all don’t mistake your dullness to magic for immunity. I’ll tell you once: yes, you’re hard to attack with magic, you’re slow to see, slow to feel, too dull to know what’s going on around you, but once something gets its material hands on you, or once you stand this close to a wizard, you’re in dire trouble, son. Distance does matter.”
“Don’t—” But he had just admonished Eveshka not to fight the old man. He swallowed his own bitter medicine and said, calmly, respectfully, “Can you make a sail rip, two and three days away?”
“You!” Uulamets said with a jut of his chin. “You damnable, arrogant, ignorant wretch, you with your insisting to be in the middle of things, you with your pig-headed interference, you’re the open door to any malign thing that wants a distraction—sit in the smoke till you sneeze, you damned fooclass="underline" go help our enemy, why don’t you? It’s our only hope!”
Pyetr’s face burned: it was only the truth, he thought, the old man was justified in that; the old man could have spared calling him to task in front of Sasha and Eveshka both—though even that he could not complain of, since he had put them both in danger.
But it did not change the question he was asking.
“I’m still asking,” he said, “is this the best thing to do? If distance makes a difference, is it smart of us to do anything but go back to the boat—”
“Why don’t you teach your grandmother to suck eggs?”
“I’m saying I may be the only one in this party with his wits about him, I may be the only one with doubts about this—I’m asking can you beat this fellow? Is this the best thing to do?”
Uulamets leaned on his staff and glared at him, no less sourly, but with his brow furrowed. “Pack,” he said, and his jaw looked most like a turtle’s. “You think I’m hard, don’t you? My daughter thinks I’m hard. But I’m telling you in words—in words what I want you to do. That’s very polite of me, do you understand? That’s very patient. Do you understand?”
Pyetr had a breath held for a sharp answer; but reckoning the odds, he decided that pride had occasionally to take second place to good sense, so he said, with a little bow, “Clearly,” and walked back toward his blankets to start throwing their belongings together. Eveshka was in his path. He stopped, looked at her, said, “We’ll get this straightened out—”
But Uulamets shouted, “Stay away from my daughter!”
So he went, remembering Eveshka’s stricken face, afraid for himself and Sasha and knowing nothing was going to make sense in a place where a ball of leaves tried to make away with your belongings and the girl you were halfway in love with was standing knitting and unknitting her edges in distress over a father whose only claim to virtue was that he had not murdered her mother.
Sasha came to help him, kneeling to pick up the scattered pans.
“Where’s Babi?” Pyetr said under his breath. “Can you wish him back?”
“It’s—”
“—a stupid wish.” A man in this company got very used to being wrong.
“Dangerous,” Sasha whispered, standing up. “Pyetr, don’t get near her, please don’t get near her! I don’t know, I’m not sure, I don’t like what I’ve heard—”
“There’s a lad.” He caught hold of Sasha’s shoulder, feeling solid bone and muscle, something real in this woods. “Sasha, listen to me, she’s all right, you are, there’s three of us if we work together—the god knows what her mother is.”
Sasha looked at him as if he had said something very distressing, and gripped his hand hard. “Pyetr, Uulamets is right—don’t believe her, don’t trust her—”
“More than her father, friend, I hope you’ve noticed how he gets along with his last student.” Pyetr snatched up their blankets, and added, since he had a stationary target: “Where in the god’s name are we going?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what I think? I think we’re not so far from the river. I think we’ve come a long loop upcoast. The River-thing is no land-goer. I think upriver’s where we were going, and that’s the direction we’ve taken in this thicket, if either of us had kept track.”
“It makes sense,” Sasha admitted.
That was some vindication. Pyetr knelt down and tied up the blankets while Sasha packed the little items.
“Hurry up!” Uulamets shouted at them.
Pyetr muttered, “Can you kill a dvorovoi?”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, and with the firelight catching his jaw, did not at the moment look at all like the stablelad from Vojvoda. “It’s you and Eveshka I’m worried about. Remember what we promised each other? No ducking off without saying?”
Pyetr felt uneasy. In his heart there was already a contrary notion he had not realized until Sasha said that. “Promise me—” Pyetr almost said, Promise to stop wishing me. But he thought that might be a stupid thing to do, so he said nothing.
“Pyetr,” Sasha said, “for the god’s sake tell me before you do anything. At least trust me. All right?”
Pyetr nodded, and tried to explain what he felt about Eveshka, how he felt when she looked at him, how he had thought love was what people talked about when they wanted to get power over someone else, or when somebody else had power over them—and he had always sworn he would never be that crooked or that stupid. So here he was. It felt different than he had thought. There were moments when he was positively giddy—which might be a rusalka’s power; and everything he had always believed might be true—
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.
CHAPTER 27
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.