Yeva would have to turn back—but not yet. She stalked off, deeper into the forest, heels kicking up snow as she moved. This was not a hunter’s gait, but she was too angry, too unsettled, to care.
How could Solmir have come, with no warning and no announcement, to ask Yeva such a thing? And when she had scarcely ever spoken three words together to him. And yet, he’d been watching her. Listening to her chat so easily with the lowly huntsmen. Envying them—because they were the ones to whom she chose to speak.
And wasn’t Yeva always criticizing the townsfolk for their skittish indecisiveness? Hadn’t she wished for them to be more certain about their decisions, to act quickly and with strength and confidence?
She stopped, placing a hand against the tree trunk at her side. Speaking of wishes, whispered her thoughts, who wished for a man who would love her for her skill?
Marriage. To Solmir.
It would mean that she, her father, her sisters—all would be taken care of, no matter what might come. She would be baronessa, and her family secure on the baron’s estates. They would be safe. Happy. Solmir would take her hunting, would love her for her abilities. It was what she wanted. More than anything she’d dared to hope for.
So why did it feel as though a hollowness was crouched inside her? Why did she feel as though the bindings of a cage were closing in around her?
She tore the bow from her shoulder, nocking an arrow to its string with ease. She’d had no opportunity to test the bow that morning, but found that her body still remembered the motion. Her shoulders would ache later, but she could still draw it. She sighted along the arrow’s shaft, wrist straight and strong, elbow level.
A cascade of sound exploded from the right, and she nearly sent the arrow whistling off into the forest in shock. She managed to lower the bow instead, instinct preventing her from loosing an arrow she could not afford to lose. She whirled to face the sound, only to see something burst out of the brush toward her.
“Doe-Eyes!” exclaimed Yeva, knees weakening. The dog collided with her leg and ricocheted off, shaking snow from her short fur and beaming at her with a wide, gap-jawed smile, tongue lolling out to one side.
Adrenaline drenched Yeva’s thoughts, narrowing them into one furious torrent. It could have been a boar, a wolf, a bear; she had been paying so little attention. “Go home!” she ordered the dog, her voice cracking.
Doe-Eyes stared at her, tongue going still. She cocked her head in confusion.
“Bad dog!” Yeva shouted, waving the arrow at the creature. “Go back home, now!”
The dog backed up a step and then lay down tentatively in the snow, dropping first her front paws and chin and then her hindquarters. Eyes rolled upward, she gazed desperately at Yeva, tail thumping once in pathetic appeal.
Yeva passed a hand over her face, the rush of fear fading and with it, her anger. She dropped to her knees; recognizing forgiveness, Doe-Eyes leaped up to throw herself at her mistress. Yeva ran a hand down the dog’s spine as a cold nose thrust itself against her neck.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” Yeva whispered, pressing her hand flat against the dog’s body. Doe-Eyes was trembling, but whether from cold or from eagerness and delight, Yeva could not tell. “What possessed you to burst out of the wood like that?”
As if the dog could understand her, Doe-Eyes wriggled from her grasp and went dashing back into the bushes. Yeva could hear her thrashing, and was about to step closer when something small and brown came shooting out of the undergrowth, cutting back across the path Yeva had trampled.
Before she had time to think about it, Yeva had an arrow nocked to her bow and drawn back. When Doe-Eyes flushed out a second rabbit, she let the arrow fly.
The rabbit’s scream sent a thrill of satisfaction down Yeva’s spine. Elation coursed through her as she lowered the bow and slung it over her shoulder. The thrill faded as she approached and saw that the rabbit was still thrashing—not a clean kill. Her aim was not what it used to be, and she’d drawn a sharp, piercing arrow—a deer-hunting arrow. She’d have to relearn her own fletching codes to tell by feel which were the blunter-tipped arrows for small game.
She quickly reached out and wrung the creature’s neck, putting an end to its suffering, then lifted her head. No sign of Doe-Eyes, although she could hear a faint rustle in the distance.
Retrieving her arrow, she wiped it off, staining the snow bright crimson in the dappled afternoon sunlight. She ran a loop of her wire around the rabbit’s hind legs and hung it from her belt. Stew, she thought happily, or roasted on potato mash. It would be the first fresh meat they’d had since moving to the cabin. She began to retrace her trail, humming a marching song her father had given her to sing while she ran to keep time with his steps.
Doe-Eyes caught up to her a few moments later, shivering her delight and licking her chops. The first rabbit had clearly fared no better than its fellow, and Yeva would not have to feed Doe-Eyes scraps of bread and dried meat tonight.
She made her way back home, all thoughts of Solmir banished the second her arrow found its mark.
“Beauty, you didn’t.” Lena held the skinned, cleaned rabbit at arm’s length, although there was an undeniable eagerness in her voice at the prospect of fresh meat. “Father said you were not to go hunting.”
Yeva had stowed her bow once more in her father’s chest outside, and removed any trace of the day’s work. Her snares had turned up empty, but she would check them again at first light tomorrow. “I laid a few traps,” she said. It was not a lie—the traps were laid, after all.
Lena sighed. “And the checking of the traps is what kept you out most of the day?”
Asenka had not risen from her chair by the fire, but had smiled at Yeva when she came. It was like nothing had changed between them, despite the chasm Yeva felt stretched there. She saw that Asenka no longer sat with her skirt covering her feet, but had her twisted leg stretched out to the warmth of the fire.
No need any longer to hide her flaws.
Yeva closed her eyes. “I will go check my snares again,” she blurted, turning to make for the door.
“Yeva,” said Asenka. Her voice was soft, but it was enough to stop Yeva dead in her tracks. “Will you wind my wool for me?”
Yeva wanted nothing less. Except, perhaps, to upset her sister. So she went, sinking down onto the floor at Asenka’s side as Lena began to dismember the rabbit for stew. She picked up the loose skein of wool from the basket at Asenka’s feet and wound loops of the yarn around her hands, holding it so that it would feed easily as Asenka knit.
Asenka began to hum a tune their mother had favored. Yeva remembered it more from her sister, for she had been too young when their mother died for clear memories of her to take root. Yeva sighed and turned her head to the side, laying it against her sister’s knee. She felt the slight movements of Asenka’s body as she wound the wool around a needle, dipped it through the fabric, wound again.
After a time, under the sounds of Lena cooking dinner, Asenka whispered, “If you are happy, Beauty, then so am I.” She bent and pressed her lips to the crown of Yeva’s head.
Yeva said nothing, eyes burning and blurring as she stared resolutely at the uneven floor. If only she were as selfless.
Yeva took to spending her days in the forest, under the tall straight pines in the snow and the silence. Her skill at the bow returned quickly, muscles remembering what the rest of her did not. Her fitness was slower to return, forcing her to stop for rest far more often than she would have liked. She came to know the forest again, finding it as familiar and as comfortable as an old friend.
Doe-Eyes accompanied her on days when the sun was high, the temperatures otherwise too harsh for her slight build. Though Asenka promised to lavish her with affection on the days Yeva left her behind, the sight of the dog with her head slung low, haunting the doorway, often made Yeva relent at the last minute and allow the dog to come. She was grateful for the company, and for Doe-Eyes’s ability to flush prey out
of brush and thicket that Yeva might never have discovered on her own.
She never came back to the house empty-handed, and often with more than they needed for the day’s meal. Albe constructed a rudimentary smokehouse by the shed, and they began to supplement their stores of food rather than deplete them. The prey Yeva took was too small and unremarkable for saleable pelts, but she cleaned and scraped each hide anyway in the evenings, to save for their own uses in the burgeoning winter. They could not afford to waste anything.
She made a point of rising early enough to avoid her sisters, but once she woke to find Asenka kneeling at her side, stirring the fire. Yeva started to rise, but her sister set the poker down and laid a hand on her arm.
“Yeva,” she whispered, her eyes anxious. “Stay. You don’t need to go out every day. We have food. Stay with us today.”
Yeva’s eyes blurred, and she blinked hard. “I can’t,” she whispered back.
Asenka’s hand shifted to touch Yeva’s cheek, then brushed some of her sleep-tangled hair out of her eyes. “What is it you’re looking for out there?”
Yeva blinked again, about to reply that she wasn’t looking for anything, just game for their survival—but her throat closed. How was it her sisters knew her so well, better even than she knew herself? She drew a shaking breath. “I don’t know,” she breathed. “Something more.”
After a week had passed, their father returned. He arrived in the evening, knocking his feet against the doorframe to dislodge the snow on his boots, a thick, wild growth of stubble half masking his face. Pelei came barreling in so that he and Doe-Eyes could turn circles around each other, sniffing and sniffing and remembering.
Yeva’s father threw himself into his chair by the fire while Lena made tea. “It knows I’m here,” he said, stabbing a finger at the arm of the chair. “It is driving the other animals from me. Tracking me. I’ve seen not even a single rabbit all week.”
Yeva exchanged glances with her sisters. Not one of them mentioned the gradually increasing store of dried meats in their larder. Yeva took her father’s chilly hand in hers, as much to keep him from harming himself in his frustration as to comfort him. “Perhaps you are still learning the forest again,” she said carefully, “and that’s why you haven’t come across any game.”
“No,” grunted her father, sinking back into his chair and watching the fire, pulling his hand free of Yeva’s in order to rub at his bristly face. “No. There is something out there. Something cunning.”
“Father, surely there can’t be—”
“I have seen it before.”
Yeva glanced up to find Asenka watching them, her expression bathed in concern. Yeva tried again to touch her father’s hand, but he would not be calmed.
“What did you see before?” she asked softly.
But her father only shook his head, and shook his head again.
Eventually Albe and her sisters ambled off to bed and it was only Yeva and her father by the fire. And after a time, because she was tired from her day’s hunt, Yeva too drifted off to sleep. She had no memory of her father leaving the chair for his own bed.
He could not be convinced to stay, planning to depart again with Pelei at his side when the morning dawned clear and cold. He took food from the stores, not noticing that they had grown since he was last home. The single-mindedness with which he planned his return to the forest chilled Yeva. Always, he had confided in her. She had seen hints of this passion in him when she was very young, when he would tell her stories of the things he had seen in the heart of the wood. Things he’d hunted—things he’d killed. Things that had escaped.
The creatures he used to tell her about—the monsters and the wonders hidden deep within the forest, where the other hunters refused to go—they were stories. Fantasies invented to teach children good manners, to fascinate them on cold winter days when they could not play outside. Her father had always spoken of them as if they were real, but that was to delight Yeva, to let her believe, when she was still too small to know better. The way he was acting now, muttering about the thing tracking him, pacing as he recounted the old stories to himself, still acting as though they were true—it no longer delighted her. She was frightened.
“Father!” she shouted finally, on the morning of his planned departure. “Father, you must stay. Something is wrong. Please—let Lena make you some tea.”
“I don’t need tea,” he said, strapping his crossbow to his back and stamping his feet into his boots. He rubbed at his arm, which had been stiff and sore all morning.
“Then bring me with you,” she said, moving forward to take his hand. “If there is some creature out there with intelligence then two sets of eyes, two minds, will be better than you alone.”
“Too dangerous,” Tvertko grunted, jerking his hand away.
“You don’t know that,” she argued.
He stopped, looking up from his pack to meet her gaze, though he seemed to be staring through her at a distant memory. “It is a Beast,” he said. “A monster unlike anything in any story. It was there twenty years ago. When your mother asked me to give up hunting, it was the one thing I had not, could not catch. And it is there still. When I kill it, its head will bring such a price that we will be able to return home.”
Yeva heard one of her sisters, she could not tell which, stifle a gasp behind her. There was madness in her father’s face, and Yeva fought for control of her voice. “Let us just live here,” she begged. “Leave the Beast to the forest. We will hunt for food and sell pelts when the snow leaves in spring, and we will be happy. This is a fine home.” She wanted to tell him of Solmir’s offer, but the words stuck in her throat.
Her father only shook his head and moved to leave, calling Pelei to his side.
Yeva darted around him, putting her body between him and the door. “Daddy,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Step aside,” he ordered, the harshness of his face nothing like the smiling one she knew best. Pelei’s tail was tucked firmly between his legs, his head low as he watched.
“No.”
Her father barely gave her time to react, brushing her aside with an easy sweep of his arm. His physical strength had more than returned—but the wildness of his gaze frightened Yeva far more than the effortless way he knocked her to the ground. Pelei tried to lick her face, but her father gave a piercing whistle and the dog dragged himself away, slinking with his belly low to the ground in unhappiness.
Lena rushed forward to help her up, but by the time Yeva struggled to her feet again, their father was gone.
BEAST
We should not have let him see us.
He is mad with memory now, crashing through the forest loudly enough to frighten away the slowest and most dim-witted of creatures. He leans on his dog, who nudges him upright in the snow when he stumbles. We watch from some distance behind him as he forces his way through the forest. There is no beast in him left, no predator—there is only man. A madman.
He is useless now. When he was young he saw us and lived to dream about us. He could see the edges of the other world, the one that binds us. But now age has turned him, and we cannot use him for our purpose. We want to howl our rage and frustration, want to tear him limb from limb for making us hope, even the tiniest flicker, after all these long years. We want to destroy every part of him.
We follow him on silent paws.
FOUR
A COLD DREAD SETTLED in Yeva’s belly after her father left. Her sisters looked to her when it came to their father, for she knew him better than anyone. Yeva could not afford to let them see how frightened she was, or else they too would live with the same heavy tension at every moment, the feeling of the ax overhead, of waiting for it to fall. And so when she was at home, she smiled and asked her sisters about the inconsequential events of the day, and saved her fears and worry for the hunt.
Yeva saw his face as she moved through the forest, the distant gaze that had looked right past her, the negligent sweep of his arm as he sho
ved her from the doorway. She feared for whether he would come home—and she feared for what he might be when he did.
Despite her dread, the hours she spent in the wood were like light in the darkness. There was no Asenka, with her broken heart, no Lena to scold Yeva about muddying the floors. The weight of pretending all was well, that everything was normal and as it should be—it fell away. She knew she should be with her sisters, should be grateful they were all well and together and safe. Running to the quiet of the forest was selfish. But that shard of guilt, that tiny flicker of shame, fell silent when she stepped outside each sharp-frosted morning.
She felt herself growing stronger each day, moving more quickly, more quietly. Her breath no longer puffed loudly in the air when she paused, and the soles of her feet no longer ached when she returned home in the evenings. Albe and her sisters ate rabbit, fox, brush-hen, and deer. They cured the hides, and Asenka put her skill with the needle, learned from the leech, to work on leather instead of wounded flesh. She fashioned Yeva trousers, and the freedom they offered made her faster still.
Yeva was forced to leave Doe-Eyes at home more and more often as winter took hold of the forest. She kept her own trails clear, walking them each day there was new snow to tamp them down, but elsewhere in the forest the snow deepened. If the slim dog, bred for far warmer climates, tried to wade shoulder-high all day long, she’d risk frostbite or worse.
Yeva was striding down one of her trails one afternoon on her way back to the cabin, a trio of rabbits hanging from her belt, when the hairs on the back of her neck lifted in warning. She kept moving, but her senses went on alert, one hand shifting toward her bow. Her father’s words came back to her as if he were standing at her elbow.
There is something out there, he’d said. Something cunning.
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