Hunted

by Meagan Spooner

  Yeva gulped back her panic, her pounding heart starting to calm as she saw it was only the Beast and not some monster from her dreams.

  It was only the Beast? When did that happen?

  “You can’t come in here like that, while I’m asleep,” she gasped, lingering fears prompting irritation to sharpen her voice.

  The Beast’s brows lowered. “Why not?”

  “It’s not polite,” Yeva retorted, then took a breath as the ridiculousness of that sank in. What were manners to a Beast?

  But as she struggled for a reason he would understand, the Beast merely tilted his head a fraction to the side. “Very well. Do you wish us to leave?”

  Yeva’s voice sputtered to a halt. Yes, she thought. Or else let me kill you and end all of this. But aloud, she said only, “What do you want?”

  “Polite,” the Beast echoed, murmuring the word as if to himself. But there was a wicked gleam in his eyes that made Yeva stop short, a realization snapping into her mind like a spark from chafing wool.

  He was teasing her.

  “It is time for training.”

  Yeva’s head ached. She was weary, but more than that, she was frustrated. The more she understood of this world the Beast had shown her, the more she saw how little hope she had of avenging her father unless she could discover a weakness, some secret that would give her the upper hand.

  But it was clear she would not find the Beast’s weakness by ordinary means, and she could not afford to keep growing complacent, to let the days slip by unmarked. She would track these creatures in the wood, the ones she’d learned to see with the Beast’s help. One of them had to know something, anything, that would help her kill the Beast. And she’d hunt down every last one of them if it came to that.

  Quickly, she rose to her feet and crossed the room to splash frigid water from the basin onto her face. “Beast,” she said, earning herself a faint grunt in response. “I want to go into the forest on my own today.”

  The Beast’s brows lifted, but he said nothing, clearly waiting for an explanation.

  “I need to be able to navigate this world of yours alone, without your guidance.” Yeva could see the Beast shift his weight from one side to the other, see him start to reply. “And,” she added quickly, “whatever quarry I’m meant to find, we haven’t found it yet. Perhaps it won’t reveal itself to you. But maybe it will to me if I’m alone.”

  That brought the Beast up short, and he gazed at her with those steady eyes, tail swinging side to side like a slow, gentle pendulum. He stared at her so long that Yeva’s own eyes began to water with the effort of not looking away. When he spoke, his voice was low and careful. “I still have your word that you will not attempt escape?”

  Yeva swallowed at that reminder, bitterness on her tongue. “You still have my word. Since you will kill my family if I do.”

  Silence again, broken by the hiss and intermittent pops of the fire in the hearth. “Yes,” he said finally.

  Yeva hesitated. “Yes, you will kill my family if I escape? Or yes, I may go alone?”

  “Both.” The Beast’s brows lowered. “I accept your word. If you were given to lying, you would have promised not to kill me at the start. Since you did not, I believe you when you say you will not flee.”

  His voice was so low, so bitter, so full of loathing, that Yeva almost took a step back. The fire no longer seemed to hold any warmth for her, and she shivered. “You killed my father,” she whispered. “I can never let his death go unanswered.”

  The Beast’s eyes were flat and dull. “And that is why you stay. Not because of threats or fear. Because you believe one day we will drop our guard, and you can avenge him.”

  Yeva’s jaw clenched. She had little hope of convincing him otherwise, not when he saw through her so easily. So let them be enemies. She’d find a way to destroy him regardless. “Yes.”

  The Beast’s tail stilled. The flat eyes softened, his face suddenly so human that Yeva knew he had changed, that it was no trick of the light or her own eyes. He seemed torn between two warring natures, and whichever ruled him at any given time, that aspect took over.

  Just now, his face, his expression, was so full of anguish that Yeva’s fury vanished and her heart ached so much that she bit her lip.

  “We did kill him,” the Beast said after an eternity, and his face closed over again as he looked away toward the door. When he looked back, he was the Beast once more. “And maybe one day we will drop our guard. Then you will get what you most desire.”

  He turned and was gone.

  Yeva fought the instinct to wipe the frigid wash water from her face. She wanted to hold in the chill, wanted to remind herself she could not, would not be comfortable here. She was a prisoner in this decaying castle, tied to the thing that had destroyed the person she loved most in all this existence.

  But something, an ache that Yeva would not name, stirred deep in her heart. With those words the Beast had renewed her dedication to vengeance, shored up her determination to remain here. Even if he said she could go free tomorrow, she would stay, and wait, and find a way. . . .

  With those words he had ensured she would not try to leave him. It was a human thing to tell a person what they want to hear. A human thing to manipulate and hide the truth to serve one’s own ends. A human thing to lie.

  And in the moment he admitted to killing her father, he had seemed so very human.

  Though the sky was clear and sunny, the air was bitingly cold, and Yeva set a brisk pace to keep her blood pumping. Doe-Eyes trotted at her heels, her leg so improved she could accompany Yeva all day if necessary. Her father’s bow at hand, her pack filled with her own gear, Yeva felt more at home, more truly free, than she could remember ever feeling. Even without the Beast’s threats against her family, she would return to his castle by choice. Vengeance, not fear, would bring her back. And if all went well, she would return armed with knowledge of the Beast’s weaknesses.

  She could hear the music always now, a constant thread that lingered in the very back of her mind, unless she summoned it to her attention. It was not unlike the way she’d always heard the forest before, its tiny noises and breezes weaving together automatically to paint a picture beyond what she could see. It unnerved her, how easily the music became a part of that picture.

  She shoved those thoughts aside and concentrated, turning her head this way and that to locate the different threads of magic, like scent trails. She twisted toward the nearest, giving Doe-Eyes a sharp whistle to stay close, and set out.

  Yeva had learned from her excursions with the Beast that the creatures in this wood were rarely evil—and neither were they good. They simply were, the way animals were. Spirits that led travelers astray could also help them find the road again. Birds that warned of dangers ahead could also cry out and betray a person’s presence to waiting beasts.

  This was a world governed by balance. Evil deeds begot evil consequences. Blessings used for ill purposes could quickly become curses. Though Yeva would tread carefully, and knew any information she sought would require some kind of payment, she felt certain that even in this realm she could only be rewarded for seeking to destroy the Beast.

  She was several hours out from the castle, over the ridge and into the valley beyond it, when a movement caught her eye and made her stop. She put a hand on Doe-Eyes’s head, signaling silently for her to be still.

  Just ahead, mostly hidden by the trees, was a face. An old man was watching her, as still as the snowy world around him. His skin was lined and grooved like bark, his hair long and tinged green like moss, his eyes the pale blue of an icy pool. She had never seen him before.

  She took a breath and moved forward a step, but the instant her weight shifted the face vanished behind the tree again.

  “Wait!” she called, breaking into a run, eyes scanning for a shape darting through the woods. But when she reached the tree behind which the man had been standing, she found a fox there, sitting calmly in the snow and gazing
up at her.

  Yeva, breathless, stared at it, and it stared back. At her side, Doe-Eyes sniffed interestedly—but didn’t go stiff as she would have done had an ordinary fox appeared in their path.

  “Well?” said the fox.

  Yeva yelped, and couldn’t help but take a step back, half lifting her bow. She caught her breath, noticing the fox had the same pale-blue eyes the man had had. She swallowed. “What are you?”

  “I am Borovoi.”

  Yeva shifted her grip on her bow, forcing herself to relax lest the fox—or old man, or whatever he was—sense her nervousness. “Is that your name, or what you are?”

  The fox’s head tipped to the side. “I am Borovoi. What a waste of a question. You only have one more.”

  Yeva’s mouth opened to protest, but she stopped herself before she could speak. In her father’s tales, the number three was always important. Three sons, three wishes . . . this world was ruled by the laws of those stories. She took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully, and asked, “Can you show me how to destroy the Beast?”

  The fox paused for a long moment. Then his lips drew back into a wide, toothy grin, and he whirled with a flash of his red tail and darted off into the forest. Yeva broke into a run without thinking, shoving her bow onto her shoulder and sprinting as fast as she could. She could see no tracks, but the fox was always just ahead of her, visible as a flash of red fur against the white canvas of snow. She ran until she stumbled into a dense thicket, which tangled about her legs; her momentum tried to keep her moving and she went crashing down into the dry, leafless branches.

  Gasping, she crawled forward, detangling herself as best she could, ignoring the scratches on her face and the branches snagging her hair. When she finally stumbled free, she found herself in a snowy clearing—and the fox, Borovoi, was nowhere to be seen.

  Yeva stood panting, trying to catch her breath as Doe-Eyes came wriggling through the thicket after her. Tongue lolling, gap-jawed, Doe-Eyes gazed up at her mistress as though to say, What fun! Again! Still winded, Yeva dropped into a weary crouch. She rubbed at Doe-Eyes’s ears as she scanned the clearing.

  There had to be a clue here, some importance to this section of the wilderness. Though tricksters were everywhere in fairy tales, they rarely lied—any misfortunes were always the fault of the hero or heroine, misunderstanding what was really being said. So Yeva doubted she would find some weapon buried beneath the snow that could kill the Beast, but she knew some piece of the answer must lie here.

  She set off across the clearing, steps cautious, eyes scanning. It wasn’t until she was nearly halfway across that she noticed a flat expanse that was lower than the rest, and mostly clear of snow.

  When she drew closer she found that it was a pool, a woodland spring that had frozen over in the cold. Yeva strode halfway around it, peering at the ice, which showed little but black water beneath it. Ordering Doe-Eyes to stay put, Yeva gingerly stretched a foot out to test the ice’s surface. It gave only the tiniest groan in response as she shifted more of her weight onto that foot.

  She was about to take another step when a flash of gold beneath the ice made her stop short. Heart pounding, she stared into the black depths, hoping for another glimpse. It came again, a sweep of fire gold, and then abruptly it was there.

  The Firebird.

  Yeva gasped and threw herself down onto her knees to stare beneath the ice. The Firebird was trapped there, its golden wings outstretched, beating futilely against the ice’s surface. With a cry, Yeva drew her fletching knife from her boot and chipped at the ice—she forgot about Borovoi, forgot about her reason for coming to the wood alone, forgot even the Beast himself. She could see only the Firebird, hear only its muffled cries, each one a stab at her heart.

  All her life she’d longed for the tiniest glimpse of this creature. She would not let it drown—she would free it, take it for her own, feel the heat of its fiery wings on her face. She stabbed down at the ice again and again, feeling it shudder beneath her. Each groan of the ice made her work harder, faster. Doe-Eyes’s frantic barking at the pool’s edge faded to a distant buzzing in her ears. All she heard, all she was, was the Firebird’s song.

  The ice gave a mighty crack, and a spray of water flecked Yeva’s face. She moved so she could drive down at the hole with her boot, putting every ounce of strength she had behind it—and then the entire sheet gave way with a roar.

  Yeva was in the water before she knew what was happening, air driven from her lungs and rushing back in a huge gasp before her head went under. For a long instant she felt nothing—no cold, no wet, no fear at the sudden darkness—only the need for the Firebird, the longing to touch it even once, even if it flew away and she never saw it again.

  Something wrapped around her from behind and she turned, joy flooding her heart as she expected to see the Firebird at last, whole and in front of her, not obscured and blurred by the ice. Instead, a rotting face loomed out of the blackness at her, bony arms pulling her close. It had once been a woman, her long hair still clinging to what remained of her scalp, and the flesh of her cheeks had sunken and rotted so that Yeva could see her teeth in profile as the thing leaned forward to whisper in her ear.

  “Stay with me,” the dead woman sighed, holding on to Yeva with unnatural strength. They were sinking, down into darkness, far deeper than a meadow pool should be. The thing’s hair curled around Yeva, wrapping around her neck, slithering along her skin beneath her clothes.

  Yeva tried to scream, but all that came was a torrent of bubbles. The spell broken, her longing for the Firebird gone, Yeva’s body struggled for survival. Her lungs were burning even before she’d wasted air trying to scream, and she struggled to pull one of her arms free from the thing’s grip. When she’d hit the cold water her muscles had seized, and in her hand was still the knife she’d been using to chip at the ice. Yeva’s mind felt slow and sluggish, and every second they sank deeper made it harder to think.

  She lifted her head and saw the distant glimmer of the pale winter sun, and with a wrenching effort that drove another flood of bubbles from her lungs, she tore her arm free of the dead thing’s grasp. She stabbed the knife down as hard as she could, driving it into the thing’s shoulder until it grated against bone. It howled, a cry as much of grief and despair as of pain, but its grip only tightened. Yeva stabbed again, her vision growing blurry, and again, and again—finally the knife crunched through the thing’s skull, and abruptly its arms fell away. Yeva tried to swim upward, her own body barely responding to her mind’s commands. When she looked down, all she saw was a ghostly pale form sinking slowly, quietly, into the black depths.

  She clawed her way up, the glimmer of light above her seeming farther with every stroke—but eventually her arms remembered how to swim, and just as her lungs readied to breathe water if she could not find air, she broke the surface with a gurgling cry.

  The pool itself was small, and though the ice was too thin for her to climb on top of it, she could make her way to shore, the ice shattering around her. She fell into the snow, dizzy and shivering, sobbing for air. The roaring in her ears began to fade, replaced by Doe-Eyes’s frenzied barking; Yeva opened ice-crusted eyelashes to find her dog dancing above and around her, nudging her from all sides. She couldn’t even feel it when Doe-Eyes began licking the water from her hands.

  All she wanted was to lie there in the snow and breathe and stare at the sky, which was turning gray with clouds. Some distant part of her mind knew, though, that this was wrong. She must move, or die from the cold. With a moan, she rolled over onto her side and drew her knees in close to her body, then slipped her pack from her shoulders. Most of her supplies were wet, including her tinder for starting a fire, but she had no firewood or kindling anyway, and that wasn’t what she was after. She kept her sleeping-roll blanket at the bottom of the pack, and the pack’s leather and the layers of supplies had protected it somewhat. It was damp, but far drier than anything else.

  She peeled off the s
opping outer layers of her clothes, moving as quickly as her numb, shaking fingers would allow. Her shivering began to slow, but rather than making movement easier, it seemed harder and harder to move. She knew that was bad—that all of this was bad—that she would die of exposure. She wondered what would happen to her family, whether the Beast would kill them for her failure, or if they’d simply go on living in that cabin forever. She imagined Lena learning to hunt, then found herself laughing at the thought of her prim sister trying squeamishly to retrieve an arrow from a deer.

  It was a sharp bark from Doe-Eyes in her ear that brought her back to herself, wrenching her thoughts from home with an effort. A surge of fear that she was losing her ability to think got her the rest of the way out of her cloak and clothes until she was only in her wool undershift—that she kept on, for even wet the wool would help her somewhat. Then she tried to call Doe-Eyes, her voice cracking and whispery thin. The dog tucked her body in close and Yeva wrapped herself around her, and the blanket around them both, and tried to think.

  Her tinder was soaked but if she could make it to the forest perhaps the thicket she’d fallen into on her way to the clearing would have wood dry enough to ignite from sparks. If she could get her hands working she could shave curls from it with her knife. If she had a lantern she could warm some water to drink . . . she ought to ask her invisible friend to bring her one, to unlock her manacle, to let her out of the chilly cell and into the room with the blue divan, and the hearth. She curled more tightly around the warm body alongside hers and mumbled, “Asenka, your toes are so cold. . . .”

  Doe-Eyes’s barking roused her and she groaned, “Hush, it isn’t dawn yet!” But there was light against her eyelids, and a shadow moving across them. She tried to open her eyes but her lids wouldn’t listen; she tried to lift a hand to pry them open but couldn’t tell if her arm was moving. “Where’s my arm—I need that to shoot. . . .”

  “Hush,” said a voice in her ear, tense and deep. Not her father’s voice. But familiar somehow. Warm like velvet. “I will carry you on my back. But you must hold on or you will fall off.”