The Stars and the Cookie Jar

            He was hungry, sunburnt and coughing. His dark hair tickled around his shoulders. Coming down the last pass, along the defile to the river in the rain, he had torn the hem of his shirt to bind it out of his eyes. Now he stood on a marble floor, still dripping, breathing in the scent of perfumes and lilacs and wine, barefoot as any beggar – his shoes had given out, finally, on the tarmac road into the city. He clasped his hands behind his back and thought he might kneel, to this king who had sent tribute to his father, if only they let him take a handful of grapes or a wing of roast chicken.
            When addressing your father, say 'all-gracious parent.' When addressing your mother, say 'my lady mother'. When addressing your wife…
            Nicolas did not remember the greeting for subject kings, before he heard footsteps and rustles of clothing, and went down on his knees instead.
            "It can't be Cousin Nicolas!"    
            "Nicolas Alexeivich, what happened to you? You look dead! You look drowned!"
            "My lady Ksenia," he said, swallowing a cough. "My lady Vera."
            When he got upright again, both women were holding their hands out to be kissed, as if nothing had happened in the world.
            They looked like Stas, in every feature, but their long unbound hair was drawn smooth. They smiled in unison, and moved like gazelles. He had forgotten, he had forgotten white dresses and finger-rings and stockings and sashes and pearls, he had forgotten any of it existed.
            They were not like Stas, Nicolas thought, as Ksenia, the eldest, came and mimed kissing his cheeks. Stas would have kissed him, in spite of stubble and mud. Vera, rose-scented, had not curtseyed to him, though she was younger; he could not imagine her curtseying to God.
            "Your sister," he said. "Anastasia," he said.
            "Alive," Ksenia answered.
            "Yes." Nicolas blinked. Vera had moved out of her sister's shadow, and she took his arm. "But the war, and – over the mountains – no news could come here?"
            "News comes to us," said Vera, and shrugged, and smiled. "But the mountains keep it from becoming much else."
            A fever had crawled inside his rain-drenched clothing, he thought; he was too tired to do more than accept the answer, and think, stupidly, that if Stas were here, the sisters would go up in height like the steps of a stair. And but for Ksenia's eyes that were green-blue, and Vera's that were gold-blue, and Stas' eyes the color of the river that cut the mountains, there would be no way of telling them apart.
            But Stas had cursed her sisters, in Nicolas' hearing, even before the world was wrecked and changed. The curse had sounded real, what he recalled of it, and Michael had put one hand, protective, across Nicolas' chest before he spat into the garden path.

Still denotebooking the ghost-raising scene, which cribs from ghost-eating, Greek epic and weird things gathered from lore and Petros. I just wanted to collect opinion on one point: how clear is it that there's something wicked wrong with these chicks? Does there need to be more wrongness?