He swore, trying both to take care of himself and Sasha, with the gap widening in front of them, vexed that an old man with a pack of his own could get away from him—but woodcraft was making that much difference in the dark. “Eveshka!” he called out, increasingly anxious as the gap widened, hoping she might realize their plight.
But she was out of view now, and Sasha had stopped, suddenly having snagged his pack on a branch.
“Wait!” Pyetr called out to Uulamets, “Sasha’s hung up!” He cast a glance over his shoulder to keep track of Uulamets while he jerked and broke the thorn branch off Sasha’s pack, tearing his hand again, but Uulamets was only a fading grayness in the dark, paying him no heed.
“Come on,” he said to Sasha, and tried to follow, but he could not find the way Uulamets had taken through, and the gap was getting wider: he could see the old man ahead but he could not see precisely where he stepped, and it only grew worse.
“He wants to lose us,” Pyetr muttered, shoving his way through brambles. It was bad enough being behind, but with his hand hurting and no idea where the shore was, or when the River-thing might put out some slithery coil about them, he had no wish to be out of Uulamets’ vicinity for a moment.
But something cold brushed against his arm, chilling right through his coat. Eveshka, he thought, had realized they had fallen behind, Eveshka had come back for them, and he looked around to speak to her—
And saw a man’s pale face, a bearded, rotting face with staring eyes.
He yelled as it reached for him and the cold went right through his arm and numbed it.
“Let go of him!” Sasha cried.
It whipped away, wailing faintly through the woods: three more joined it in its flight.
“What was that?” Pyetr breathed, only then thinking of his sword—but it did not seem one of those things a sword might help.
Then he thought about those ghosts—three of them. “Eveshka,” he cried, and started fighting his way through the brush, desperately afraid they might threaten her more than him. “Eveshka!”
Sasha was close behind—Pyetr hoped that was who bumped into him, as all around them other ghosts came skulking in, reeking of the grave, rough and shaggy men armed with swords and knives, flitting through the brush without a care for the thorns, occupying the way ahead of them and cutting them off with a hedge of drawn and ghostly swords.
“Bandits!” Sasha said.
“Dead ones,” Pyetr murmured, halted with his hand on his own sword, for what small good it might be. The ghosts moved closer on all sides, swords drawn. “Uulamets!” Pyetr yelled, as one of them popped up right in his face, grinning at him. “Sasha!”
Suddenly Eveshka was there, a bright white shape of streaming edges in the midst of the others, which dimmed and shied away like so many curs.
“Away!” Eveshka cried, flinging out her arms, and they shredded and vanished on the winds.
Like that.
Pyetr stared at her, impressed—dismayed at being rescued by a slip of a girl; and likewise to see the rage on her face—as if he and Sasha might well stand next in her intentions.
But it was to the woods and the dark that she turned that grim expression, where the breaking of brush heralded something solid coming toward them. In a moment more, Uulamets’ gray shape came striding through the thicket, the black bird fluttering somewhere in the trees—one could hear the wings, beneath Uulamets’ panting and cursing.
“Lag back and halloo through the woods, why don’t you? Something might still be asleep!—And you, girl, don’t you turn your face from me. Don’t you pretend you don’t hear me!”
“I don’t want you here, papa, I don’t want you, let me alone!”
“That’s foolishness!”
“I want them out of here! Both of them! Now!”
“For fear they’ll see your handiwork? They’ve seen your victims, girl, they’ve seen it plain! If that hasn’t put your young man off, I don’t know what I can tell him. And what will you do else, leave them to this woods?”
Eveshka began to come apart in threads again, turning her face away from them.
“Eveshka,” Pyetr said, “listen to him. Look at me.”
She would not. She looked out into the woods, all shrouded in blowing hair and tattered gown, her face in profile to them. “There’s nothing for you to fear from them,” she said. “They’re trying to warn you. It’s an obligation on the dead.”
Whereupon she drifted off through the brush where they could not follow. Uulamets swore and began to follow her, as Pyetr jerked his sleeve free and held the brush with his back, keeping the way open for Sasha long enough to get him through, while he kept his eye on Uulamets’ steps. But Uulamets, thank the god, was going slower this time.
“There’s ghosts following us,” Sasha muttered after a moment, at his back. “Eight or ten at least.”
“Won’t hurt us,” Pyetr said to himself, “won’t hurt us, god, I want out of this damned woods.”
“Won’t help,” someone whispered against his ear.
“They’re back,” he said to Sasha, panting, planting his feet carefully on a slope the old man ahead of him took faster than he dared.
Being master of his own luck.
“Wish me to find the right way,” he said to Sasha. “Damn that old man.”
“Don’t—”
“I’m not a wizard, I can’t wish for myself, I can’t even curse him—”
“Can’t escape,” another voice said.
“I’m doing all I can,” Sasha protested. “It’s not doing any good.”
“It’s so cold here.” A third voice, up against Pyetr’s ear. Instinctively he swatted at it, and chill numbed his hand.
“Don’t trust her,” something said at his other side.
“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!”