Free Chernevog by C.J. Cherryh Page B

got Misighi if he gets in any real trouble. You know they're the hardest thing to feel, even if they don't mind talking to us. Just calm down, let's see what we're dealing with. ”
    She was frightening both of them, anxieties flying back and forth between them as they reached the bathhouse. She flinched from his hand on her arm, wanted him to stop interfering with her, in all respects—and she was so strong in her fright, so terribly, dangerously strong—
    “ Calm down! ” he begged her, catching her hand.
    Calm won suddenly, a quick clasp of fingers, a meeting of eyes at the bathhouse door. “ I know my question, ” she said on a breath, thinking determinedly of Pyetr, and pulled the door open.
    The presence inside retreated into shadows on a gust of wind, an oppressive dread slipping farther and farther from their hold, circling around the edges of their magic. It whispered, it muttered, it racketed suddenly about the walls and shrieked at them.
    “ It's not ours! ” Eveshka cried, collided with Sasha in the doorway and caught his arm. “ It's not the one I know—look out! ”
    Sasha pushed her behind him, demanding of it to know why it retreated from them, wanting to see with his own eyes the shadow that moved around the walls, a crooked shape that might have been a boy and might have been something far less savory, leaping with blinding quickness from bench to bench to firepit.
    It hissed at him. It lunged for him with long-nailed fingers and raked his arm: Sasha gasped and jumped back with the impression of wild eyes and spiky hair and a feeling of cold and dam p —
    And the most terrible premonition about a place of thorns and branches.
     
     
    6
    Very little was left of the old road: it was getting increasingly overgrown, most confused where the fall of old trees had let in the sun, stretches rife with new bracken, saplings as apt to grow in the roadway as in the woods about. There were the occasional deadfalls, there were washes and slips where the death of trees had let streams run unchecked—rough ground and unpredictable, and Pyetr had had every notion of taking it easy on himself and on Volkhi this first outing, simply seeing, sedately and sanely, how Volkhi had fared these last several years.
    But Volkhi's traveling stride, sure-footed and sensible, ate up the distances, made little of the obstacles, and in the shadowed places, the barren ground beneath the old trees, Volkhi threw his head and danced, never minding Babi turning up in his path—actually not odd at all, Pyetr thought, reckoning that a horse probably knew a dvorovoi when it smelled one. Babi skipped and trotted and panted along quite briskly, crossed right under Volkhi's feet, and Volkhi never made but a skip and a kick like a colt..
    Pyetr laughed aloud, dusted Volkhi's rump with his cap, jumped him over an old log and, Volkhi taking it into his head just then to race, ran Babi a wild course for a long stretch down j the old road—but Babi cheated: Babi kept popping up just ahead of them.
    * * *
     
    Sweet oils and pine, bay for foreseeing: it was not what one hurried so much as the thought one put into it, master Uulamets would say. They filled the bathhouse with aromatic smoke and steam: they flung herbs into the small stone furnace and wished for visions in the firelit dark.
    “ Bannik, ” Sasha asked it, most respectfully, “ is there a danger to anyone of this household? ”
    “ Not is! ” Eveshka said. “ It only knows the future. Bannik, excuse us and show us the fireside this evening. ”
    Hut they had nothing from the bannik beyond that first vision, only the creak and pop of settling timbers, ask though they would, however politely and respectfully.
    Not their bannik, Eveshka had said: and Sasha was sure it was not, not the Old Man of the Bath of Eveshka's childhood, not even the angry creature that had fled from Uulamets, but something much darker—something which, so far as Sasha had seen it, resembled nothing so