Hunted

by Meagan Spooner

  “I’m not a child,” Yeva protested. The voice ignored her, and she expected to feel a pair of arms lifting her. Instead something clamped onto her shoulder, a firm pressure, and dragged her back and halfway up onto a soft slope.

  “Climb,” the voice ordered.

  Yeva grabbed automatically, fingers closing around handfuls of fur. Her muscles seemed weak for some reason as she dragged herself upward, a task that should’ve been easy. The soft thing beneath her moved, staggering to the side and half knocking her upward. Then it rose, making her stomach lurch.

  “Hold on.” This time the voice came from beneath her, rumbling against her chest and cheek like a house cat’s purr, or the stirring of distant thunder. The thing began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster until Yeva pressed her face in against the spicy fur so the wind would not sting her cheeks.

  As Yeva’s consciousness slipped away, she heard the voice again, murmuring, Hold on.

  BEAST

  We are not afraid. We are never afraid. It has been centuries since we knew fear, even longer since there was any being, beast or man, strong enough to harm us.

  And yet our heart pounds like thunder in our ears, echoing like a voice shouting at us to run harder, move faster. Our paws feel clumsy, and half the time we sink into snow that we long ago learned to cross without leaving a trace. Though we always know exactly how far we are from the castle it feels twice, three times as far as it ought to be.

  The body against our back is cold. She is no longer moving. Only that she has not fallen, that her hands still grip our fur, tells us that she is still alive.

  Hold on, Beauty.

  Hold on.

  FIFTEEN

  YEVA WOKE BECAUSE HER skin was on fire. Her voice was cracked and she found she could barely move, and that when she did, it made her body burn all the more.

  “Go slowly,” said a low voice. She knew that voice. The Beast.

  She opened her eyes to find him crouched several paces from her, his eyes narrowed onto her face. The tip of his tail twitched as she met his gaze, then twitched back as though he wished to hide that tiny hint of reaction.

  Yeva was lying on the floor before the hearth in her room, on top of several layers of blankets, the uppermost of which was of soft fleece—and yet it scratched against her skin like burlap. Some detail prickled at her mind sluggishly, and it wasn’t until she looked away from the Beast that she realized what it was.

  She was naked.

  Yeva gave a low, horrified cry and snatched up the blankets to gather them around her body. Her fingers felt clumsy and swollen, but she forced them to grip the blankets.

  The Beast’s eyes narrowed all the more, lips curling back. Yeva could not tell if he was snarling or smiling. “You are improved,” he said.

  “Did you undress me?” Yeva demanded, starting to shiver—the fire in the hearth had been warming her far more than the blankets around her were doing now.

  “If I had not you would likely have died.” The Beast’s tail lashed once. “Would you have preferred death over preservation of your modesty?”

  Fragments of memory were coming back now: the shocking cold of the icy water; the flood of terror when she turned to find not the Firebird, but a haunted wraith before her eyes; the smell of the Beast’s fur as he carried her on his back. She gulped for air, remembering the burning in her lungs as she began to drown. Doe-Eyes was at her side, and crept in close—Yeva opened the blanket enough for the dog to crawl in alongside her, giving off heat like a furnace.

  When Yeva didn’t answer, the Beast gave a low growl and sat up, leaning back on his haunches so that he once more loomed over Yeva, prone on the floor. “What should it matter? I am a beast no different from the hound at your side.”

  Yeva clenched her jaw a moment, gathering Doe-Eyes in against her body and then glaring up at the Beast. “We both know that’s not true,” she snapped.

  The Beast’s hair lifted along the ridge of his spine, a crest of irritation Yeva had come to recognize as plainly as the furrow in a man’s brow or the thinning of his lips. He turned toward the door.

  “Wait.” Yeva’s breath caught as the Beast halted. She knew she ought to thank him for saving her, but the words stuck in her throat. To thank her father’s murderer? Her captor? He had only saved her because of his need for a hunter, and yet she’d felt the urgency in the Beast’s gait as he ran, the raggedness of his breath as he pushed himself harder, faster, to get her back into the shelter of the castle.

  Thank you.

  But when Yeva opened her mouth again, she said only, “What was it? The thing in that pool?”

  The Beast turned back, eyeing her before settling onto his haunches again. “The pool belongs to one of the Rusalka, a girl killed long ago by a lover or a father or brother. She appears to men as their heart’s desire to lure them to their deaths.”

  Not just men, Yeva thought bitterly. “And what of Borovoi?”

  “Borovoi?” The Beast’s brows lifted in that expression so like surprise that it almost made Yeva forget about the teeth, the eyes like a wolf’s, the ears that pricked toward her when she spoke. “You met him? He rarely shows himself.”

  “He brought me to the Rusalka’s pool.”

  “Borovoi is one of the leshy, the forest spirits. He grants answers, though the answers he gives often lead travelers astray. What did you ask?”

  Yeva’s lips pressed together. She’d asked him how to destroy the Beast, but if she was to have any hope of lulling the Beast into lowering his guard, she certainly could not tell him that. “I . . . I cannot remember.”

  The Beast was silent for a time, long enough that Yeva wondered if he might know she was holding back the truth. But then he bowed his head and took a step backward. “I will let you recover. You will not have to train tomorrow.”

  Yeva, still shivering despite Doe-Eyes’s trembling warmth, watched as the Beast padded softly toward the door, tail sweeping gently behind him. She’d asked the leshy how to destroy the Beast, and it had brought her to a place that, had it not been for the Beast, would have been her death. She knew that the Beast needed her skills as a hunter, that he hoped she’d play some part in unlocking his curse. But her death would hardly destroy him, only delay his freedom until he found some other hunter to use.

  The Beast paused in the doorway for a few seconds before glancing back over his shoulder. “What did you see?” he asked quietly. “In the Rusalka’s pool. What was your heart’s desire?”

  Yeva’s pulse sounded quick and loud in her ears. She could still see the Firebird there, its great gold wings sweeping against the ice, calling to her. “I—I saw my family.” The lie came so haltingly she felt sure the Beast would see it.

  But he only inclined his head once, eyes dropping to the floor before he vanished, leaving her alone.

  Yeva crept closer to the hearth, making sure the Beast was gone before opening the blankets to let the fire warm her. She shouldn’t have had to lie. She should have seen her family, or Solmir, or her father alive again. She should have seen home, her old life, the comfort of a world without monsters and curses and Beasts. But instead, she’d seen the one thing that most symbolized the world she’d dreamed of as a child.

  Instead, she’d seen magic.

  As if the Beast could somehow control the weather, no sooner had Yeva recovered enough to venture outside again than the dead of winter hit like an iron fist, and it was no longer safe for Yeva to brave the woods. Blizzards howled through the castle, forcing her to shut up the doors and huddle with Doe-Eyes close to the fire. She half expected to find the Beast waiting behind her, as he did in the wood when she hunted, but he never came. She did return once from the kitchen to discover that layers of tapestry had been fixed over the high window frames, which had been letting in the cold. She could not think how the Beast could have reached them, and for an instant the image of him trying to climb a ladder with four paws and a tail made her want to laugh. But her room was much w
armer, and she’d fall asleep on the rugs before the fire gazing up at the high tapestries and imagining what stories lay hidden beneath the centuries of fading and dust.

  She saw very little of him during those dark weeks. For a time, the only sign he was even there was the occasional refreshed store of game in the larder. Every now and then she’d catch a flash of red-gold eyes vanishing into the shadows as she explored the castle, or a glimpse of a tail disappearing around the corner, but he never stayed or sought her out.

  Doe-Eyes was her constant companion, following her everywhere. Even if the dog was dead asleep, rolled over on her back in front of the fire, if Yeva rose so much as to visit the latrines, Doe-Eyes would wake, scramble to her feet, and trot along at Yeva’s side. Her leg had healed almost as good as new, only a slight limp left behind when Yeva failed to keep the fire burning hot enough and the cold crept in. Yeva was glad Doe-Eyes had found her so miraculously in the wood that day, saving her from the ache of loneliness.

  And yet, despite her dog’s warm body leaning against her as she slept, something twinged deep in her psyche, a discontent that Yeva could not—or would not—name. She’d watch the windows as she wandered the empty castle, the landscape sometimes obscured by storms, sometimes a white, crystalline stillness. Once she saw the silhouette of a distant bird of prey circling the wood—then saw it turn, and the flash of a long, forked tail made her breath catch. She is a dragon, the Beast had told her after her brief encounter with Lamya in the wood. Now, as Yeva blinked, and the silhouette stooped into a dive after some prey unseen behind the next ridgeline, she could not be sure of what she’d seen. Cooped up indoors, surrounded by snow and emptiness, her eyes could easily play tricks on her.

  I miss the outdoors, she told herself, turning her back on the window. I miss hunting. I miss my family.

  Only occasionally, when she let herself dwell too long on the feeling of being unsettled, incomplete, did she remind herself, He killed my father. He is a murderer. He is a Beast.

  I do not miss his company.

  The castle itself was enough of a mystery to keep Yeva’s mind occupied during the long, dark weeks of winter as she waited for her chance to roam outside again. With Doe-Eyes at her side, she took to exploring by lantern light the endless corridors and rooms. Some, especially on the top floor, were in such disrepair that the roof had caved in. In those places all was snow and rubble and it was impossible to tell what the room had once been used for. Others were almost entirely intact, and but for the centuries of dust and cobwebs, could have been abandoned only yesterday.

  From the look of the pristine, freshly fallen snow outside the castle doors each morning, she could tell the Beast was not spending his nights in the lair beneath the castle. Yeva supposed he could be concealing his tracks, but he’d never done so before on his way to the cave, so she couldn’t think why he would now. She assumed he must be living in the castle, but the room down the long spiral stair where she’d convalesced and told her stories was empty, and the hearth cold.

  She told herself she was searching for his new lair so she’d be able to keep an eye on him, monitor him, perhaps even catch him unawares while he was asleep. But as she turned each corner, stepped through each doorway, it was curiosity that drove her. And while it was a softer, gentler flame than fury, it burned far more slowly and never guttered out.

  Yeva knew that the Beast was cursed in some way, and that the answer to his curse involved capturing or killing some creature that lived in the magic world of the wood. Though she imagined that he’d once been human, sometimes her certainty faltered. The ferocity in his gaze when he’d drag home the day’s dinner, the alien stare of his eyes as he surveyed the wilds, the moments of utter abandon when he ran through the trees.

  Perhaps instead he’d once been an animal, cursed now with human traits. Either state must be a torment. For an animal to be haunted by human conscience, human guilt, human loneliness and fear and desire, would be maddening. And for a man to have his humanity stripped away by the endless onslaught of animal instincts and predatory impulses would be heartbreaking.

  The mystery of the castle was the mystery of the Beast, and she roamed for days on end with Doe-Eyes’s toenails clicking on the cracked marble at their feet.

  Though it was nowhere near as large as the castles depicted in illuminated stories and fantastical tapestries, Yeva kept discovering new rooms that she had somehow missed in her previous wanderings.

  She found the remains of an old workroom, full of spools of faded thread and a loom and spinning wheel draped in cobwebs. A single gray thread still ran from the rim of the wheel through the spindle, but when Yeva reached out to run her finger along it, it crumbled into dust at her touch.

  She found a vast suite of rooms clearly meant for the master and mistress of the castle, with a bed so large she could have lain down crosswise upon it and not reached the edges even if she stretched her fingertips over her head. The bathing chambers held a tub sunk into the marble floor and a chute in which to dump coals to keep the water warm for hours on end. Yeva had never had such luxury—even at the height of her father’s wealth, she and her sisters would draw straws as to who would get the tub first, and get the hot, fresh water all to herself. Yeva almost never drew the longest straw, and often shivered her way through her bath. Without servants to draw water, it would take her hours, if not days, to bring enough water to fill this tub—but the thought of it made Yeva smile. She’d been bathing with cloth and buckets of water, and the idea of submerging in warmth, of being entirely, utterly, totally clean . . . she sighed and moved on.

  It was on her third or fourth survey of the castle that she stumbled across the library.

  She stopped dead and lifted her lantern high to illuminate every shadowy corner. Yeva and her sisters all knew how to read, and though Asenka was certainly the most learned of the three sisters, Yeva had always loved to be read to. Most of her father’s books were scholarly texts, but one of them held some of the old stories he’d told her when she was a child, and though she could read the words herself, there was a magic to having them spoken aloud to her, so she could close her eyes and simply listen, and weave images in her mind as the stories unfurled.

  Her father had owned over a dozen books, the most of anyone in the town including the baron himself. And as Yeva scanned the walls, each one lined with shelves and each one full of leather-bound books, at least a hundred books, more than she knew existed in one place, she felt her heart might simply burst.

  The room itself was dank and cold. It was an interior room with no outside windows, but leaks in the ceiling had allowed moisture to drip onto the floor, and Yeva’s nose filled with the smell of rot and mildew. But even that couldn’t dim the flare of excitement as she hurried across the room to set the lantern down on one of the end tables in order to reach out and pull one of the books from the shelf.

  Its spine crumbled at her touch, and she lifted the cover gingerly. It broke apart in her hands, and the page beneath was so stained with rot that she could not make out any of the text. She set it aside and reached for another, and another—but each one had been so tainted with age and damp as to be unreadable. Yeva was so unprepared for the swell of anguish at the thought of the knowledge lost in this room that she sat down hard on the floor, gasping for air. Doe-Eyes pressed in against her—though she didn’t know why, she knew her mistress was upset, and gave her ear a tentative lick.

  “You are unhappy.” The somber voice came from behind her, but Yeva had grown so accustomed to the Beast’s abrupt appearances that she felt only a flicker of surprise.

  She turned to see him filling the doorway, a large shadow with gleaming eyes. She wiped at her face and cleared her throat. “I’d hoped to be able to read these,” she said quietly. “I used to love hearing my father—” Her voice stuck, and as she gazed back at the Beast, a dull flicker of that angry despair rose up. She’d never hear her father read to her again.

  The Beast let the silence st
retch, the only sound the gentle scrape of his paw on the stone as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Come,” he said, and without waiting for her to answer, turned and vanished from the doorway.

  Yeva considered ignoring the order out of spite, but she’d begun to sense differences in the Beast’s voice. Sometimes his orders were heavy and sharp and designed to make her feel small and helpless. But at other times, like this one, there was a plea evident in the tone, and though he never said “please” or “will you” or “might I suggest,” there was nonetheless room in his voice for her to refuse.

  So she rose to her feet, one hand on Doe-Eyes’s back to steady herself, and followed the Beast out into the corridor.

  He led her clear to the other side of the castle, walking in silence. Yeva’s lantern didn’t cast its light far enough to illuminate his path, but the darkness didn’t seem to bother him. He never put a foot wrong or hesitated or clipped a wall.

  He padded into the master suite of chambers, which had no other exit as far as Yeva was aware. But instead of coming to a halt, he crossed toward one of the tapestries. An instant before he reached for it, Yeva saw that it was brighter and cleaner than the others, having collected less dust—and when the Beast lifted it aside, she realized why. It concealed a thick ironbound door that swung soundlessly inward at the Beast’s paw.

  The secret door led to another stair, and as Yeva transposed her mental image of the castle as seen from the ridge above the valley onto the corridors she’d begun to learn, she thought they must be ascending into one of the thick round turrets. The Beast climbed the stair ahead of her, always just vanishing around the curve of the wall as she glimpsed him, but she saw enough to discover that he was climbing the staircase on two legs, not four, and her heart began to slam against her rib cage. Though the joints of his legs were all wrong, and his tail still swept after him, and his fur still caught the lantern light, to see him walking like a man caused all her questions to surge up again until she almost forgot the lost library below.