Why would someone lock her here and then bring her food and medicine for pain? She ate the rations, some part of her mind asserting itself and reminding her that if she hoped to escape, she’d need her strength. With difficulty she followed the manacle chaining her left hand back to the wall and tried to prop herself up against it—but the pain in her ribs was still too great, despite the dulling effects of the willow bark.
The food and the medication had arrived only seconds after she’d awakened. Could someone have heard her gasp?
“Hello?” she called to the darkness, her voice rasping like the scrape of a knife cleaning leather. The sound of it was small, dull and without echo. The room she was in couldn’t be large. She swallowed and tried again, her voice a little stronger. “Hello? Thank you to whoever gave me the bark.”
Perhaps it was a servant of whoever held her, feeling sorry for her. “Please, I need light. I’m injured, but I can’t tell how badly without being able to see.”
There was no answer. She let her head fall back against the wall to which she was chained. The blackness spun around her, though she could not tell if it was from fear or pain or an overdose of the willow bark. She closed her eyes, and fell into a doze.
Her sleep was fitful at best, haunted by monstrous images and flashes of light. She dreamed she was blind, able only to see red streaks as though trying to see behind closed eyelids.
The streaks became a pair of eyes, the serpent’s eyes from her dream in the forest, but also the Beast’s—they stalked her and she found she was paralyzed as well as blind. The Beast moved closer, and when she tried to scream her voice had fled, and she jerked upright and felt the sting of fangs in her lungs and cried out, eyes flying open.
Yeva stared, gasping, at the ceiling as the dream fell away. Her side ached where her sudden movement had jarred her injured ribs. She blinked at the gray stone ceiling for long moments before her mind caught up with her.
The gray stone ceiling? She could see.
She rolled over onto her side with difficulty, her chain scraping the stone below her. A few feet away, sitting on the floor by the door, was a tiny oil lamp.
Someone had brought her light.
Yeva reached out and dragged the light closer, unable to take her eyes from it despite the way they burned and watered after so long in darkness. “Thank you,” she whispered to her invisible ally. “Thank you.”
She eased herself down again onto her back, unlacing her tunic so that she could raise her undershirt. Angry red and blue bruises spread across her side, tinged with the yellow of a stormy sky. She explored their edges with her fingertips and shuddered against a stab of pain. Broken, as she had feared. She slowly eased her shirt back into place and looked around.
The light allowed her to see that her cell was roughly square in shape, a bit longer than she was tall. There were no windows, only a solid timber door bound with iron and a thick lock. In the corner adjacent to the one where she was chained was a wooden hatch, no more than half a foot square. Though she could smell nothing, Yeva assumed she was meant to relieve herself there. The room was otherwise empty but for Yeva, her light, and the tray of uneaten, raw tubers.
She considered trying to roast the tubers over the oil lamp, but after a few halfhearted attempts decided that the flame was not hot enough. Whoever had left her food had merely taken the supplies from her pack and deposited them on the tray, with no thought for whether they were actually edible uncooked.
The lamp gave off a tiny amount of heat, and so she drew it in close to her body, trying to ignore the monstrous shadows she cast on the four walls of her tiny cell. The shadows reminded her far too much of the creature in the clearing before it had struck.
Yeva took in a deep breath, stirring the air enough to make the flame flicker across the walls. “I know you can hear me,” she said, voice sounding much more certain than she felt. “I don’t know who you are, or why you’re helping me. But I need medicines from the pack I brought with me. The willow bark was good but it is not enough.”
She waited, but there was only silence.
Yeva glanced her fingers over her ribs again, wincing at the pain but unable to leave it alone. “I need the salve from the small red pot. It will help me heal. Please.” She strained to listen, ears ringing with the quiet. There came a light scrape as of fabric or leather on stone, so faint she would have dismissed the sound, if it hadn’t been followed by a voice.
“You will have to put out your light.”
The voice was a rumbling bass, heavy and musical and rich. Yeva shivered in spite of herself—if anything she had expected a meek, gentle voice. Someone sympathetic enough to help but too weak to actually set her free. Everything about this voice spoke of strength, and very little of compassion.
“But it is the only light I have,” she replied, her free hand moving instinctively to the lamp. “I have no way of lighting it again.”
“I will leave you flint and tinder,” said the voice. The swish of leather or skin or cloth on stone came again, as though someone was shifting, unseen in the small cell. “But you must put it out.”
“Why?”
“No questions.”
Yeva shivered. The thought of being left alone in the dark again was enough to make her eyes sting, but she had no reason to distrust her benefactor. He would not leave her a light only to take it from her again.
“Very well,” she whispered, and turned the wick down, the light shrinking and quivering. Yeva almost didn’t see it go out, afterimages dancing before her eyes and blinding her.
The door squealed open, the noise of rusty hinges shredding the quiet. Yeva clapped a hand over her ears, grimacing. Then came that tiny sound, a footfall. The person, whoever it was, was wearing the softest of shoes. Or else they were barefoot, like she was.
“Are you a captive too?” she asked the darkness.
The voice didn’t answer right away. There came a quiet clatter as something was placed down on the tray of food. “Yes,” said the voice then, the word emerging like a sigh.
“And yet you are free to move around and see other prisoners?”
“I said no questions.”
There was a growl to the voice, a hint of anger that made Yeva want to scramble backward. She held her ground, calling on hours spent waiting outside rabbit dens to aid her in keeping still. “Thank you for helping me,” she said softly. She could not afford to alienate the one person who could give her aid.
“I wish you to get well.” Though the words were kind, the voice was not.
Yeva swallowed. “These roots. They must be cooked before I can eat them.”
“I care not,” said the voice. The door slammed shut with a screech of angry hinges, leaving her, once again, in silence.
Yeva’s breath left her in a gasp, her heart pounding. She crawled toward the tray, ignoring the pain in her side, and retrieved the salve. Then she felt around the tray’s surface until her fingers found what they were looking for: a pair of flints and a braided strip of wool for tinder. Yeva tightened her hand around them, not caring how the stones dug into her palm. At least she would not be left in the dark.
BEAST
We had no intention of hurting the female, but the bodies of humans are fragile. Even broken, she will serve. We will keep her alive until a hunter comes to retrieve her, and then we will take him to serve our purpose.
We stand often outside her door, listening to her breathe and learning the scent of her. This way if she tries to run we will be able to hunt her down. The light in the room is no more than a sliver along the bottom of the door. Very rarely it flickers as she passes between it and the door, a shadow of movement.
“Thank you,” she whispers when we leave her things.
We do not understand this gratitude—we are her captor. We will be her death. We are beast and she is as fragile as the other one was. We should show her our face and let her scream until she breaks. They will come for her whether she has her mind or not.
Why?
SIX
HER RIBS HEALED SLOWLY, in large part due to her inability to sit still. Yeva tested the confines of her cell, able to reach the hatch in the corner only by stretching as far as the chain would let her go. She could barely touch the edge of the door, fingertips grazing the iron bindings. When her meals arrived she never heard the sound of a lock turning. The chain kept her here—the door itself was unlocked. Which explained how it was that her ally could come and go.
Yeva asked questions of the darkness, hoping for the voice’s return. Though its tone had offered nothing of kindness or sympathy, the invisible ally had brought food, medicine, light. It didn’t speak again, but now and then Yeva’s requests were granted. She was given bandages for her wrist, which had gone raw and bloody within its manacle. The fuel in her lamp was replaced. The hinges on the door were oiled and no longer shrieked. And after one particularly cold and fitful stretch of sleep, she woke to find that a blanket had been deposited at her side.
But the voice never spoke.
She understood that if she wished her requests to be granted, she had to turn out her light and wait. The darkness then was so heavy, so stifling, she’d speak to fill the empty blackness.
Yeva had always preferred silence to the chatter of others, daydreaming of the forest quiet while the baronessa’s ladies laughed and gossiped. Her thoughts came to life in the stillness of the wood, nurtured by the air and the scent and the vividness of it. But as the days crept by in her cell, she discovered that she had never known silence—not true silence. In the forest the air was alive with smells of wood and wet, the sounds of her steps echoing in the vastness. Always there was the possibility of movement and life, a rabbit flashing out of a burrow or the briefest glimpse of a fox’s tail as it disappeared from sight.
The silence of her cell was small and stagnant. Heavy air pressed in on all sides, and any sounds she made were swallowed up by the weight of the earth overhead. She longed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was her own.
She took to speaking of anything and everything that came to mind, to fill the hungry silence. She described her featureless cell: the way the gray stone fitted together so seamlessly she could not see the mortar, the aching chill of the rock beneath her, the musical clatter of the tray, the frigid brush of her fingertips against the iron bindings on the door. She spoke of her lamp, gazing at its flame for hours, breathing in the faint burning scent and making it flicker with the breath of her words.
She imagined that the owner of that deep, rumbling voice was listening to her, and that when she spoke she was in some small way offering an exchange. His help, for her words.
When she ran out of things to describe she spoke instead of her family. Though she could not bring herself to remember her father, she talked about her sisters. She described Asenka’s twisted foot and explained how five minutes with her smile and her laugh made anyone forget her disability. She recalled Lena’s silly moodiness with a smile, though there was no one to see it. She even spoke of Albe and his clumsiness, and how his desire to please more than made up for his bumbling attempts to help.
“I left them,” she confessed to the shadows. “They begged me to stay, and I promised I’d return. I promised.” Her eyes burned. If only she had listened. She had not been able to help their father, and now . . . now it seemed likely she would never see any of them again. What is it you’re looking for out there? Asenka had asked her. Yeva’s throat closed.
Not this.
When she could no longer talk about her family without crying, her mind wandered to the stories her father used to tell her of the creatures that lived in the heart of the black wood. At first the stories were disjointed. It had been so long since she’d heard them, and the silence edging in on her was a distraction. Her cell was always cold, and the chill had weakened her, a gradual decay of strength that she had no way of preventing.
She told of the poor working boy who made the princess laugh and stole her heart, and of the girl who was polite enough to Father Winter to be rewarded with a chest of treasures. She told of Vasilisa the Beautiful, and how in one tale she bested her wicked stepsisters with Baba Yaga’s magic light; and in another, how she fooled a king who wanted to marry her into believing she was a boy by riding and hunting better than any man.
It was one of her favorite stories. Her voice had a tendency to go hoarse after she’d been speaking into the darkness for more than a few hours. She was half whispering by the time she neared the end of this last story, with her lamp turned low to conserve the oil. She sat leaning against the wall, eyes closed.
“And so finally the king commanded that the ‘young man’ take a bath with him,” she whispered. “But Vasilisa—” Her voice caught in her throat and turned into a cough, and she reached for the water skin to soothe it.
From the corridor beyond the door came a sound that she’d come to recognize: that lightest of scrapes signifying the step of bare feet or soft leather. Yeva froze, listening over the sound of her pounding heart. The invisible ally was outside.
The silence stretched until, so quietly Yeva felt it in the stones more than heard it, the voice said, “Go on.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Yeva’s mouth. She swallowed a mouthful of water and then whispered, “But Vasilisa was too quick for him. She changed and bathed and left before the king had finished taking off all his finery. She left a note for him, saying that for all his wealth and power he was not as quick or as smart as she, for she was not Vasili but Vasilisa, and he’d been fooled by a girl.”
Again there was silence, and then a melancholy sigh from beyond the door.
Yeva swallowed, crawling forward until she was as close to the door as her chain would allow. “Will you not help me escape?” she pleaded, voice cracking again into a whisper. “I don’t even know where I am, or who has captured me, or for what purpose.”
She heard him shifting his weight on the other side of the door. “I cannot.”
“Why risk helping me then?”
Silence. Then: “Why has no one come for you?”
“For me?”
“To rescue you. A brother or a mate. There is a trail to find you if they look.”
Yeva swallowed. “I don’t think they know I’m caught. They believe I’m looking for my father.” Her throat tightened at the mention of him.
“That is not how it should be.” The hint of a growl was back in his voice, the sound of barely controlled anger. “Someone should have come.”
Yeva stretched her hand toward the door, her fingertips touching the iron. “No one will come for me. You are all I have. Please, help me?”
There was no answer but the sound of footsteps fading down the corridor again.
The next time Yeva woke from her troubled dreams, she found by her head a plate full of tubers, roasted in their skins with oil and salt. They were still hot, steaming gently in the lantern light.
Her lungs and throat worsened over the next few days until speaking prompted a rattling cough that forced her to brace herself against the stone wall. The unrelenting chill of her cell had settled into her bones, and not even the blanket was enough to shield her from it. Her ally provided her with more of the willow bark from her supplies, but before long the store of medicine gave out, and no more bark turned up on her tray.
She knew she was showing signs of fever, but there was little she could do. She stopped telling stories, for they required more energy than she had, and she could not speak without coughing. Her head throbbed when she put it down to sleep, and ached when she sat up again.
“I am sick,” she whispered, stubbornly sticking to her father’s advice to be honest with herself about her predicament. It had been several days since she’d heard from the voice, and only the fact that food still appeared in her cell told her he was even there anymore. She strained to hear the sound
of his footsteps in the corridor beyond, but heard only silence punctuated by the throbbing of her head.
She sipped at the water skin until the rawness of her throat triggered more coughing, and then put her head down. The lamp burned at her eyes even closed, so she put out the light, bathing her eyelids in blessed darkness. Yeva rolled onto her back, lungs rattling with the effort of breathing.
“Can you walk?”
She had not heard the door open. Since her ally had oiled the hinges the door was quieter, but not silent; it was the labored sound of her own breathing that had masked it. Her eyes flew open, struggling to peer through the gloom. She could see nothing in the complete blackness, but she could sense him there nonetheless, no more than a few feet away.
“I think so,” she whispered.
Something soft fell against her ribs where she lay. “Put this on.” The voice held no emotion, though it was far from flat—full of richness and depth. There was no disobeying it.
Yeva sat up with difficulty, reaching for the object to discover that it was a strip of cloth, finer than any she’d felt in months. Silk, folded many times over. Her fingers closed around it.
“Over your eyes,” the voice clarified, impatience emerging in the barest hint of a snarl.
She hurried to comply, fingers shaking. Was he going to take her out of the cell? Was the blindfold so that she could not see him, and implicate him later if she were to be caught again?
The manacle around her wrist clanked open, and for the first time in weeks Yeva was able to press her naked arm against her body without the chafe of iron. She felt like collapsing with relief. But the voice commanded her to rise, and she did so by holding on to the wall and standing on quavering legs. How had she lost so much strength so quickly? And after she’d fought so hard to win it back again. Behind the blindfold she shut her eyes more tightly.
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