Some part of the shadows moved, and she saw his eyes, gleaming briefly with reflected sunlight—then he moved again and the glimpse was gone. “Will you give your word to return someday?” the Beast said, so softly Yeva could not be certain she hadn’t imagined it.
Yeva’s mouth opened, but all she could think of was the echo of the conversation they’d had long ago, when they first stood face-to-face. “I will give you my word I won’t try to kill you again.”
“You did not promise to come back,” the Beast said, and his voice was a lament, so shattered that Yeva almost began to weep again.
“No,” she whispered instead. “I didn’t.”
She closed her eyes and listened with her soul, and from deep within the hollow of the cave she heard the Beast’s song, the pulse of magic he’d taught her to hear. It was low and sweet, heavy with pain and age and the blurring of time. It held hints of things long forgotten, of stories and words and dreams and, most of all, desires.
The song wanted. It wanted in the way Yeva had always wanted, wanted not so much a thing as everything, something beyond naming, something more than, different, deeper. It was the want that kept her from saying yes to Solmir, though he offered her everything she could have named aloud; it was the want that brought her to the woods each day, the want that filled her dreams of some other life, something beyond what others desired; it was the want that screamed to the sky that she’d give everything, all of herself and all she’d ever be, to live one moment of that other life, the one she could not explain, not even to herself.
She closed her eyes and listened to the Beast’s heart.
And before she could begin to weep again, she turned and she ran.
BEAST
Beauty. We feel her running, the spark of her life in our senses speeding southward, but growing no less dim for distance. We feel her like a star in the thick darkness of our valley, but she draws near its edge.
We thought we would have more time.
We should not have let her go.
We had to let her go.
Beauty. Beauty.
Hunter, hunted. We no longer know which she is, which we want her to be, which we need her to be. We know only that we need her. We must bring her back.
You must bring her back. You desire her. You want her.
Yes. But she is Beauty. She will be free. I wish her to be free.
The spark of her teeters on the edge of our senses, the edge of the valley, and then twinkles out. In every direction there is only the long, dark cold of winter.
Beauty.
Beauty.
Beauty.
EIGHTEEN
FOR A LONG TIME Yeva was only aware of the pounding of her feet and the soles of her boots and the crunch of the snow, and the icy air cutting deep into her lungs with every breath, and Doe-Eyes’s joyful panting as the dog ran at her side. If she had not been training with the Beast almost every day she would not have been able to breathe the frigid air so easily, but she’d hardened her lungs against the cold and she ran like a deer, like a wolf, like Beauty.
Eventually the ache in her thighs and the tightening of her lungs slowed her, until she walked, numb, her muscles crackling with energy and pinging like red-hot metal cooling slowly after being pulled from the blacksmith’s forge. Then, abruptly, she stopped.
She was sweating. The sun was warm on the top of her head, through the dappled leaves—leaves?—and she was no longer wading through snow.
There was no snow. Anywhere.
There were leaves on the trees.
It was spring.
No—she blinked, then blinked again, then stared upward, uncomprehending. The leaves overhead were golden and red, and fire orange, and her feet crunched as she walked, but not from snow. The toes of her boots disturbed piles of fallen leaves, and through the long arcs of the trees she saw a shimmer of gold here and a flash of red there as individual leaves tumbled and fell here and there in the still, autumn air.
Autumn.
Yeva’s heart shrank.
She realized that time, like so many things in the Beast’s valley, did not work there as it did in the outside world. But what she didn’t know, what she could have no way of knowing, was how much time had passed. Had she missed only one summer? Or had a thousand years slipped away, so that her sisters’ children, and their children’s children, had all long since crumbled to dust?
Doe-Eyes, heedless of the strangeness of winter becoming autumn on the other side of the mountains, was leaping from leaf pile to leaf pile, sinking up to her shoulders and then bounding free, tongue flying from her gap-jawed grin.
But none of that could lift Yeva’s heart, which felt small and tight and cold in her chest.
It took her days to find a familiar landmark, and it was no more than the proximity of a rabbit’s den to a particular evergreen that triggered her memory. She’d seen that burrow before, many months—or perhaps many centuries—ago. She knew the forest in the Beast’s valley now better than she’d ever known the one surrounding her father’s cabin, but as she stood, turning slowly in a circle, she felt her instincts click a sense of her surroundings into place.
Home is that way.
Another two days, and she and Doe-Eyes found the stream that ran to a fork around the clearing. And as the sun set, they emerged into the clearing and saw the cabin.
It was empty.
Yeva’s breath caught and for a while she merely stood there, blank, her thoughts coming in strange fragments. She was too tired to put them together with sense. But as Doe-Eyes began to sniff around the cabin, then sniff more urgently, then paw at the door with enthusiasm, a few things began to settle.
The clearing was still clear, and bigger than it had been, with only a few leaf-covered lumps to tell of the trees that had been hewn down for firewood. The wagon was gone, and as Yeva opened the door, she saw that much of the furniture was as well. And the floor, but for a few cobwebs in the corners, was tidy and clear.
The cabin might be empty, but it was emptied recently. Yeva strode back out into the clearing, scanning the ground for any sign of the wagon, or of horse tracks. But while the tidiness meant that the cabin had not lain abandoned for more than a few months, it would have taken only a few weeks, or even days if there was rain, for all trace of her family’s path to vanish.
Yeva spent that night in the cabin, shivering in front of a small fire not because the air was cold, but because her heart was, and she could not warm it up. She resolved to return to the town, and ask if anyone there had heard from Tvertko’s daughters, or knew in what direction they’d traveled, or of anything that had become of them.
For all she knew she had been gone centuries, and it was some other family, some other wagon, some other life that had moved away from this cabin and given her hope.
Hope, the Beast had said.
Yeva clenched her jaw and refused to think of him, and of the great sadness in his eyes, and of the way he’d simply let her go, because he had nothing else with which to hold her.
But while she could control her thoughts to some degree, she could not control her dreams once she fell asleep, and while her guard was down every thought was of the Beast, and her ears rang with the song of magic, and the beat of wings, and she woke sandy-eyed and weary at dawn.
She stopped at the first farmstead she reached and traded a brace of rabbits for some brown bread and apples and a mug of cider, and though the farmer’s wife stared at her and surreptitiously made a sign to ward off evil, Yeva asked them nonetheless what year it was, and found that only one year had passed since her father’s ruin, and that she hadn’t spent a century in the Beast’s company.
She moved on, and paid for a night in an inn with a handful of quail’s eggs and an archery lesson for the innkeeper’s son, and was so thrown by the feel of sheets and linens against her skin that she ended up sleeping on the rug before the fire with Doe-Eyes.
She reached the outskirts of town on a gray afternoon, fits of rain b
ursting from the sodden clouds to wet Yeva’s hair and weight her cloak. She was aching to find someone who might know of where her family went, or what had befallen them, but after the farmer’s wife’s reaction, she did not want to start rumors of a crazy madwoman associated with them—for on the chance that her family was alive and well, she wanted them to stay that way.
It wasn’t until she spotted a familiar face that she darted out from the alley into the street. “Galina!” Yeva exclaimed, shocked by her old friend’s face. She looked so young, her skin so light and clean, not a hair out of place. Even the line of mud edging her skirt from the street was orderly, and civilized—everything Yeva had lost over the past year.
Galina jumped, startled, and then stumbled backward upon seeing Yeva. Yeva knew she must look alarming: muddy, scratched, weatherworn, and wet. Her arms and legs were lean with muscle now, and her hair was coarse with its own oils and dust from leaves and wind. Her clothes were still the bloodstained ones she’d worn when she’d tried to slay the Beast, and though the stains were old and brown, they were not hard to identify. The dog at her side was as wet and muddy as she was, and stiff with the tension she was picking up from her mistress.
“I—I carry no money,” Galina said, fear written clearly across her face. “Please, I am with child—for his sake, don’t . . .”
Yeva blinked and lifted a hand, freezing when the movement seemed to frighten Galina more. “Galina—” She stopped, registering the utter blankness with which her old friend regarded her. She didn’t recognize Yeva at all. She swallowed. “You’re married?”
Galina nodded, wide-eyed, arms hugging herself. “This past spring. Who—”
“I mean you no harm,” Yeva said. She wondered who Galina had married, tried to think if she’d ever mentioned a passing fancy. With a pang, Yeva realized she knew very little about her friend, and almost nothing about the secret desires of her heart. She’d always been so eager to get away from the baronessa’s entourage that she’d never truly gotten to know Galina. She tried to stifle the sting of regret and softened her voice. “I only want information.”
Galina’s fear had subsided only enough for her to breathe. “How do you know my name?”
“I . . . I asked someone.” Yeva thought quickly. “You look about the age of the people I seek, and I thought you might have heard of them. Do you remember the merchant Tvertko, who lived here until last fall?”
“Of course,” Galina said, the fear ebbing and leaving room for sympathy. “But I am sorry to tell you that he is dead.”
Yeva’s heart flinched. “I know. I wanted to ask if you knew where his daughters went. After the cabin. They went to the cabin, Tvertko’s hunting cabin, and then . . . ?”
Galina’s brow furrowed as she inspected Yeva, this dirty, bloody, wild thing that had stepped from the shadows and onto the bustling street, and who was attracting stares and oaths from passersby. “Two of his daughters live here, in town. They live in Tvertko’s old house, up on the rise.” Galina swallowed, face flickering with an old, remembered pain. “The other, his youngest—she is dead, too.”
Yeva stared, too numb and dumbfounded to answer or to conceal how much Galina’s words had affected her. So her sisters believed her dead. Not surprising, given Yeva’s disappearance in the middle of winter with no sign of her for nearly a year. But to learn that they were alive and well, and living in their old house again, was beyond what Yeva could have hoped for them. She felt her eyes filling, a little of that tight, cold, hard thing in her chest easing.
When she saw the tears, Galina leaned forward, her breath catching. “Why do you ask me these questions? Who . . .” She trailed off, her brow still furrowed. A spark, the tiniest flicker, of recognition ignited behind her blank gaze.
“Thank you,” Yeva mumbled, and hurried away with Doe-Eyes at her heels before Galina could have a chance to see through the months of wilderness and cold stone floors to find the girl beneath. She didn’t know why she ran—except that it would be hard enough to face her sisters, who believed her dead and had been mourning for her and her father both all these long months, and she did not want to run through it first with Galina.
Walking up the rise to their old house left Yeva with the most curious quiver in her heart, a mix of fear and anticipation that made her hands jittery. She wanted to reach for her bow—her hands kept twitching with the desire to pull her weapon off her shoulder—but there was no enemy to fight other than her own nervousness. Doe-Eyes seemed to remember the way, her steps growing lighter with excitement.
Yeva halted several paces from the door, her eyes sweeping the house as Doe-Eyes investigated the shrubbery lining the path. Her father’s home looked exactly as it had a year ago, spent peonies littering the ground cover by the kitchen door, vines climbing up the trellis by her old bedroom window. Instead of reaching for the door knocker she stepped off the path and peeked in a window. There was the furniture they’d brought from the cabin, though some of it had been replaced with newer, nicer pieces. She saw someone move from one room to the next—a servant, she thought, but could not tell who. She circled the house, peeking through window after window until, without warning, her sisters were there.
They were in the kitchen, and they were baking bread. Lena was humming—though Yeva could not hear it through the warped and rippled window glass, she could see from the rhythmic tilt of her head to and fro that she was hearing music as she worked. Asenka was with her, her shoulder brushing Lena’s from time to time as they worked. She had flour in her hair.
Lena reached for the mix of herbs to roll the dough in and Yeva’s eyes swam with unexpected tears. Crusting the loaf with herbs had been Yeva’s job since childhood, and to see her role in the family so neatly eliminated—she fought for breath and dashed her arm across her eyes, her cloak so heavily weighted with rain that she nearly sank to her knees.
They’d had no choice but to try to carry on. They believed she was dead. Yeva knew this. But here they were, happy and settled in the house they loved, clearly the recipients of some immensely good fortune. Perhaps Yeva should not walk back into their lives—perhaps it would be better if they simply went on as they were.
She stood, indecisive, the image of her sisters side by side rippling with tears and distorted glass.
Then a voice behind her demanded harshly, “Don’t move.” It was a man’s voice, and Yeva froze. She was still so unused to hearing any voice but the Beast’s that she felt a thrill of fear. “What are you doing there?”
“I’m sorry.” She lifted her hands to show they were empty of weapons. Doe-Eyes was still on the other side of the house, sniffing at the trees and plantings. “I . . . I know this house and I was only trying to—I mean them no harm,” she said, lamely repeating what she’d told Galina.
“A woman?” The man sounded surprised as he identified her gender from her voice. “Turn around.”
Yeva swallowed and obeyed—and then stared. It was Solmir.
His hard gaze didn’t flinch, and he eyed her suspiciously. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, madam, you don’t look like someone acquainted with the ladies of this house.”
Yeva’s tongue wouldn’t work. When she’d found that a year had passed while she was with the Beast, she’d assumed Solmir had long gone. He’d agreed to look after her family in exchange for her hand in marriage when she returned, and Yeva had taken it as certain that when she was given up for dead, Solmir would have politely and quietly withdrawn to search elsewhere for a wife.
But here he stood, a year later, clad in fine leathers outside Tvertko’s home, protecting the sisters from the mud-soaked madwoman staring at them through the window.
When Yeva didn’t speak, Solmir took a step toward her, then stopped. The tension left his body, arms falling to hang limp at his side. His brows lifted and his eyes grew round, and an expression strangely suspended between horror and hope touched his features. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered, face draining of color.
> Unlike Galina, Solmir had seen through the dirt and the blood and the leanness of limb and face. He knew her at a glance, even as she was.
“Hello, Solmir,” Yeva said weakly.
BEAST
Despair. Despair. Cannot. Must go. Cliff. Water. Bleeding. Ending.
The animal does not understand, cannot understand the need to end our existence but I am here now, I control us. I have let it take me for so many years, so very many long years, but she has brought me back.
And I cannot descend again into that madness, the in-betweenness of animal and man, the combination of which leaves us less than the sum of us, less than who and what we once were. I cannot lose myself to instinct now I remember . . . now I remember . . .
End, our heart cries. Stop. Empty. Please.
Let us die human. Let us die remembering Beauty.
NINETEEN
SOLMIR DIDN’T MOVE, RECOGNITION petrifying him to the spot. He stared at Yeva as though she were the Firebird itself, myth turned real, magic become mundane and standing in someone’s front garden. When it became clear he would not speak again, Yeva tried to clear her throat, and the sound interrupted whatever spell held Solmir and made him gulp for air.
“I’m alive,” Yeva said, aware that this was a rather silly thing to say given that she was standing there before him.
But it seemed to hearten Solmir, who took a step forward, and then another, and another until he could reach out. His hand seemed uncertain where to rest, though, and after hovering by her shoulder, by her cheek, tracing the outside edge of a muddy lock of hair, it fell to his side again. “Yeva,” he breathed finally. And there, at the edges of his eyes, Yeva saw something unexpected: sorrow. “I don’t . . . I thought . . .”
Surely she must be imagining the sadness there—it was his confusion trying to steer him one way or the other. Yeva took the first of what she felt would be many long, steadying breaths. “I will tell you what’s happened, and where I’ve been,” she said. “And I will want to hear what has happened to you. But—but I would like to see my sisters first. And I’d like to tell you all at once.”
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