Yeva let go of him and staggered back so she could retrieve her pack and her bow. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then turned and stumbled off again.
She put as much distance as she could between her and Solmir, praying he didn’t change his mind. If he kept his word—and she had no reason to think he wouldn’t—then it would buy her some time. If she could not return in the next few days, then at least her sisters would be taken care of, and Solmir would not come blundering after her through the woods.
She had no time to think of Solmir. She knew, now, what she was searching for in these woods.
By the end of the day her vision was blurring with exhaustion. She knew she needed sleep, but after so long moving she found it hard for her limbs to settle. She put her head down on her pack, wrapping herself in the extra cloak by her meager fire. Her tired eyes sought patterns in the flames, saw wings of fire stretching skyward, and she fell asleep hearing her father’s voice telling her stories of the Firebird deep in the heart of the wood.
In her dreams a serpent glided toward her, red-gold eyes capturing and holding her as if she were a rabbit facing its death. Unable to run or cry out, she could only watch as it slithered across her chest. Its skin was ice cold and smooth as it reached her face, sliding over her lips and cheeks like a frigid kiss. It hissed as its head brushed her ear, jerking her out of her daze.
She sat bolt upright, gasping for air and clawing at her face, trying to throw the serpent away only to find her fingers closing around half-melted snow. The fire was nearly dead, its last embers hissing desperately under the onslaught of a new storm. Yeva blinked and looked up to find heavy snowfall drowning the camp, covering the whole lower half of her body.
“No,” she gasped, numb lips struggling to form the word. “No, no—Pelei—”
She scrabbled under the snow for her bow and her pack, then stumbled over onto her hands and knees. Dawn was breaking, pale light cast diffusely across the wood. Pelei’s trail was only visible as a faint series of hollows in the snow, almost indistinguishable from other features, obscured by the new snow—and filling fast.
Yeva scrambled to her feet and bolted down the trail, still shaking off the remnants of her nightmare, mind barely functioning. But Pelei’s trail was nearly gone, and without it she would only be one person in a vast, uncharted wood, with no way of ever finding her father. She could not afford to waste half a second collecting herself.
The snow fell more and more thickly, the wind picking up to toss it against her face and blind her at every turn. Pelei’s trail had also become more twisted, reflecting some confusion in the dog’s original path. Twice she had to stop and go back, retracing her steps to the point where she had mistaken a dip in the terrain for the trail.
She lost all track of time in the storm, the clouds and the falling snow too heavy for her to see any sign of the sun. The trees were growing together more thickly here, allowing little of the snow through. It meant there was less snow to cover Pelei’s trail, but that there had also been less snow to preserve it in the first place.
Eventually she stumbled over a hidden log, falling hard onto her stomach. Her breath stopped, leaving her groaning and trying to force her lungs to suck in new air. She rolled onto her back and lay there until she could fill her lungs normally, head spinning. She sat up, casting about for Pelei’s trail—and could see nothing. There was only the uneven expanse of snow in every direction, and her own scattered trail leading back the way she’d come.
Yeva dragged herself to her feet, shivering now that she’d stopped moving and the perspiration from exertion settled on her skin. Though the denseness of the trees prevented the snow from being too blindingly thick, she could no longer see any distinct path to follow. She stood there, eyes straining through the gloom, heart pounding and breath steaming the air.
As she turned in a slow circle, something stung at the insides of her nose, distinct from the icy burn of falling snow. Tracking by scent was usually impossible in such cold—everything was wiped clean by the frozen air. But Yeva could smell a faint, metallic tang that made the hairs rise on her arms.
Blood.
BEAST
Blood everywhere. It burns us, horrifies us, sets us ablaze. We hunger. We roar. We want to revel in it, and we want to run. We pace across the blood-soaked snow, our heart thrumming in our ears.
But something comes. We pull back and hide our scent, waiting. Another hunter—so like the first, but younger, smaller. We slink closer through the thick trees to look.
It is female. We stop abruptly, sniffing again. Her scent is unmistakable. A mate? No. She is young and he was old.
Offspring.
Perhaps our plan is not lost. We watch her from our hidden place, breathing her smell and listening to the silence of her steps. She moves like an animal in a woman’s body.
She moves like beauty.
FIVE
YEVA DROPPED INTO A hunter’s stance. Where there was blood there would be scavengers—and wolves fed as a pack. And while wolves would ordinarily flee a human’s presence, if they felt their kill was being threatened, they might try to defend it. With her every sense tuned, she crept forward, feet feeling for any hollows or obstacles that might trip her up.
Whatever had been killed here was much larger than a rabbit or a fox. Blood splashed the area, painting the trees and the snow red in the half-light. The falling snow had covered large portions of it—she estimated that the blood had been spilled only hours before.
Had her father been here? Had he encountered the Beast of his stories, and killed it? Yeva dropped to one knee to touch a finger to the ground. The blood was frozen. Perhaps it had been longer than she’d guessed. A shadowy irregularity caught her eye a few steps away, and she reached down and cleared the snow from the object.
It was her father’s ax.
Yeva stared at the weapon, her mind refusing to process what it was seeing. A sense of wrongness built up in her gut. Why would he have abandoned it? Its handle was specially-carved, shiny-smooth from use, and fitted to his hand. Had he dropped it after killing the Beast?
And then Yeva saw what the sense of wrongness was trying to tell her.
The blade of the ax was clean, unbloodied. It had not shed the blood staining the ground.
Some distance beyond, a familiar shape dragged her forward—she uncovered his bow, then a few feet farther she found his pack, the leather torn and the contents strewn about beneath the snow.
With shaking hands she knelt over the next snow-covered hump, brushing the snow aside. She glimpsed something like raw meat, the white of bone glinting in the dim light.
A moan tore itself from her throat as she hurled herself away from the thing, which was too small to be a whole body. She fell onto her hands and knees, gasping for breath, staring blindly at the red snow before her eyes. There was only the rushing in her ears and the agony in her chest as her lungs fought for air.
She realized she was clutching his bow, its string pressed against her cheek, its long curves digging into her chest. Her numb arms refused to let it go. Her body shook, nausea clawing its way up from her belly.
A smell made its way into her awareness and her mind seized on it, grasping for anything with which to distract itself. This scent wasn’t blood, but something wilder, richer. Musky, but not unpleasant. Yeva opened her eyes, staring through the gloom of the forest. Her blood surged through her, a wild flood of fury.
The bow was still in her hand. She gripped it hard enough for her knuckles to shine white as bone.
All at once an immense shadow moved, and Yeva was stunned into momentary inaction. She had been searching for a creature the size of a wolf, but it was as though an entire section of the forest had suddenly thrown itself backward through the clearing.
Without further pause she swung her father’s bow around and drew it in one smooth movement. The arrow flew straight and true. There was a bone-shaking roar of fury and pain that threw her to the ground with its intensi
ty, and then the shadowy giant bounded off through the wood.
She lay there stunned, brain trying to understand what it had seen. No natural animal could have made that sound or loomed so huge. It wasn’t until the smell of her father’s blood reminded her of where she was that she shook her head to clear it.
Yeva strapped her father’s ax to her back, then lurched to her feet and took off after the Beast. She left her own bow behind, gripping her father’s bow white knuckled, no space left for rational thought. There was only the hunt, the need to kill, to spray the creature’s blood across the snow. The blizzard had stopped, and the sun was setting behind its concealing layer of clouds. The forest grew darker by the second, but she didn’t care. The Beast who had slain her father was here. And she was going to destroy it.
Just there—a spatter of fresh blood some distance from where she stood. Too fresh to have belonged to her father. Droplets led from the spot, and a trough in the snow told of something large moving away.
She broke into a long, smooth run, her eyes on the ground, intent on the trail. Even if the tracks of its great body dragging through the snow weren’t a clear path, she would have been able to track its scent. Its blood was a black, wild tang of metal in the back of her throat. Were it a smaller creature she would’ve guessed it to be an arterial hit, but she had seen the size of the Beast as it loomed up, before she pulled the trigger. For an animal so huge, the quantities of blood spattering the ground would not be fatal. If she was lucky, she’d punctured a lung, and the Beast would be slowly suffocating. If she could track it far enough, she’d be able to kill it.
Her father had taught her this stride, steady and low to the ground, covering distances smoothly and quickly and quietly. She raced along behind the Beast. The smell of it grew stronger with each step as she closed the gap between them.
All was silent save for the occasional dull thud of snow sliding from the pine boughs. With the storm now passed, the forest was still and dry and aching with the weight of winter. There were no other animals, only the Beast and, closing on its heels, its hunter.
The dusk leached the color from the world, and the spots of blood on the snow were a rich gray. Not long now.
Up ahead she heard a sound. Something coughed. Wet, labored breathing rippled through the air. Yeva’s pulse beat fiercely in her temples. Her father’s bow held at the ready in her right hand, she reached up with her left to finger the handle of her father’s ax. The weight of it was a comfort.
A clearing opened up ahead of her. The gloom of the forest lightened to a treacherous twilight, revealing the massive shadow slumped in its center. The rise and fall of it was uneven. It heaved labored, rattling breaths that caught and gasped on the exhale. Great clouds of condensation rose, catching the mix of moonrise and sunset.
She crept forward, searching under the snow with the tip of her boot until she found a stick. She stepped on it smartly, sending a sharp crack into the air, no quieter for its muffling white blanket.
The lump of shadow twitched, its breath wheezing. It extended a forepaw and tried to rise, only to collapse to the snow again, where it lay still but for its heaving breath and quivering fur.
Yeva could wait for it to die, for the air and the blood to run out. But she could not bear to wait, and that was too gentle a death—a gradual slowing of the body that ended in sleep. That death was too kind for this monster. The lust was rising in her, the wild hiss of revenge bubbling up to replace the hunter’s cold reason.
She wanted to feel the crunch of its skull through the handle of the ax, see its life spill onto the snow in a steaming torrent. She wanted to see the face of the Beast that killed her father in the moment it understood it had lost. She wanted to watch it die.
Slinging her father’s bow over her shoulder, she reached up to free her ax from its strap, gaze intent, every step pillow-soft in the powder. As she drew nearer she saw that it was not a monstrous bear, as she had thought, but something different and strange. She decided she would sever its spinal cord and take its head, which had the delicate elegance of a wolf’s with the bone-crushing jaw muscles of a wolverine’s. This trophy she would not sell. This one was hers.
She shifted her grip on her ax, careful to stay back out of range of its claws, which now dug into the snow, grasping for salvation.
Closer still, and she could see its eyes in the gloom. It rolled them at her, baleful, pleading, animal. The bloodlust swelled.
How had her father ever given up this life? In her mind’s eye a tapestry unfurled, the life she could have led as her father’s daughter, side by side with him. If only he had brought her on his final hunt. If only he had then not found this Beast on his own. If only.
The Beast growled and the tapestry vanished like the ghost of its breath in the air. The growl turned to a whine, and she guessed her earlier shot had indeed punctured its lung. It tried once more to rise, but buckled again with a thump, its fur dusted white with snow. Its eyes rolled shut, mouth hanging open as it gasped and bled.
She was close enough now that the force of its breath stirred the fur lining her hood. The air smelled of blood and damp, and wild musk. She inhaled, nostrils flaring.
“For you, Daddy,” she whispered, lifting her ax.
Her only warning was the glitter of its eyes as they opened. Too late she saw that the Beast’s hind legs were crouched beneath its bulk, muscles tense and ready. Too late she saw the corpses of several rabbits, decapitated and cooling in the fresh blood that led her to the clearing. Too late she realized how close to the Beast she was standing.
The Beast lunged at her, knocking her ax aside with a blow that numbed her from the shoulder down, arm falling uselessly to her side. The sound of its roar was the sound of the forest, the vibrations shaking snow from every branch and flinging it to the ground in a perverse echo of the winter storm that had brought it. The impact of the Beast’s body hitting hers sent her head snapping forward out of its concealing hood, as it lifted her from her feet.
Her last thought, strangely rational as their bodies sailed through the air, was: This is no Beast, to lay such a trap for me. This is a hunter.
And then its body crushed hers into the ground and it was to the dull snap of her bones breaking that she lost consciousness.
Yeva woke in utter darkness. The air was heavy with the sense of earth pressing in on her. She blinked several times, convincing herself that her eyes were working—there was no difference between having them open or closed.
She was lying on her back, spread-eagled on stone. Staving off the panic that she’d gone blind, she attempted to sit up. Shooting pain pierced through her right side, causing her to gasp aloud. She tried to clap her hands to the spot, but only her right arm moved. The left twitched with the clanking sound of metal, a frigid cuff cutting into her wrist.
Yeva slowly took inventory of the rest of her body. With careful fingertips she found not one but three ribs that made her eyes water when touched. She could move her legs, bend her spine—with great pain in her side—and her neck. Her head ached, and when she moved it she felt an agonizing tender spot at its back. Whoever had put her here had dropped her without care. She must have hit her head on the stone floor. She could smell blood in the air, and wondered if it was hers.
I am chained underground with broken ribs and no light, she told herself, closing her eyes and letting the fear wash through her. Her father had always told her that no matter the predicament, a hunter should never lie to himself. Only by understanding the problem can one see past it. Her father—Yeva clamped her lips together, eyes prickling behind closed lids. She could not afford to think of him now.
The last thing she remembered was the roar of triumph before the Beast had flung itself at her. She swallowed, neck prickling. It should have torn out my throat. By comparison, captivity and broken ribs seemed trivial.
Had someone saved her before the Beast could finish killing her? But why save her only to chain her in a cave?
Befo
re she could think of an explanation there came a grating rasp of metal and stone. She inhaled sharply, feeling the stab of the breath in her broken ribs, and lifted her head but could see nothing in that direction. Something clattered to the floor and then scraped across it, as if it was being shoved toward her. Yeva strained and blinked in the blackness. Before her eyes could discern anything except the faint outline of a rectangle, the grating shriek of hinges came again, followed by the sound of something slamming closed.
Forcing herself to take shallow breaths, Yeva tried to calm herself. Not a cave, then, if there was a door—although the sensation of being underground remained. She tried to think if she had seen a figure in the doorway, but the darkness had been too complete.
She tried to sit up again, gritting her teeth against the pain, and managed to lift herself up on an elbow. Reaching out with one leg, she hooked her heel over the edge of the object that had been placed in her cell, and dragged it toward her. She was barefoot—someone had removed her boots. And her cloak and pack too, she realized.
And her weapons.
She got the object close enough to reach it with her fingertips, and then drew it the rest of the way to her. It was a tray, she discovered, exploring its contents with her fingers in the dark. She recognized the texture of dried meat, as well as uncooked tubers and a skin of water. They were from her own supplies.
There were also two strips of something rough and semistiff under her fingers. She picked one up, holding it to her nose and then brushing it with her lips, which were far more sensitive to touch than her fingers. Tree bark.
Her heart surged with confusion as she touched the strip to her tongue. Willow bark. For pain. She broke a bit off with her teeth and chewed, the bitterness so strong she had to fight the urge to spit it out again immediately. Chew, don’t swallow. She sucked at the bark, head aching with the foul taste of it—but the pain began to ease, both in her head and her side. She spat out the pulpy mass and reached for the water skin to wash away the taste.
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