She didn’t think she could tell the story twice.
Solmir started, and the way he shoved his hand through his hair in sudden chagrin was abruptly so familiar to Yeva, and so completely human, that she felt a smile tug insistently at her cheeks. “Of course,” he said, backing toward the door, as if loath to turn away from Yeva for fear she might vanish again. His face was so changed, so marked by emotions that Yeva could not interpret them all. Joy, disbelief, confusion, relief . . . and again, that conflicted flash of torment she could not place.
He groped for the latch and then disappeared, bursting through the house and leaving Yeva to trail after him, feeling strangely like a visitor in her own home, like she ought to wait by the door to be shown into the parlor. As if on cue a servant appeared, someone who had not worked for them before and who Yeva didn’t recognize.
“May I take your cl . . . ,” the maid began, then trailed off as she saw Yeva’s warlike appearance. “Your cloak?” She paused, then hazarded, “Miss?”
Yeva gulped and reached for the clasp at her throat instinctively before thinking to point out that she was as muddy and wet beneath the cloak as on top of it, and it would do little good. But the maid was already gingerly taking the dingy thing into her arms, and rather than hanging it with the much cleaner—and more expensive—garments on the pegs by the door, she vanished into the next room.
She heard Asenka’s voice firing off questions, growing nearer. “What are you saying? She who? Solmir, I don’t understand. . . .”
Yeva turned to see Lena standing in the doorway to the front room, white-faced and frozen, and Asenka following, leaning on Solmir’s arm to steady herself. Before Yeva could speak Lena screamed and fell back, half collapsing against the doorframe so that Solmir had to drop Asenka’s arm or let Lena go crashing to the floor.
Asenka’s eyes met Yeva’s and clung there, round and dark, and, after a few long seconds, filling with tears. “I knew it,” she whispered, so that Yeva could barely hear her over the sounds of Solmir attempting to revive Lena, who was still half senseless at the sight of her dead sister. “I knew you were alive.” Asenka limped forward.
Yeva found she could not speak, could not even move, and it wasn’t until she felt Asenka’s arms go around her that she broke into a storm of weeping. Lena recovered herself and staggered toward them and threw her arms around them both, but her knees were still buckling, and after a moment of unsteadiness all three sisters sank into a heap on the floor, sobbing and hugging one another and all getting so muddy from Yeva’s clothing that it was no longer easy to tell who was who.
By the time they made it to the sitting room before the fire, the rest of the household had heard the commotion, and word had spread that Tvertko’s youngest daughter had returned from the dead. A few of the servants Yeva knew, for they’d been employed by their father and had returned. The cook screeched when she saw Yeva and then, just as loudly, announced she’d have the kettle on for tea. Others were new, and more confused about what was happening, for all they knew was that both the merchant and his youngest daughter had perished during the winter they’d spent at his hunting cabin.
Albe had stayed, too, but he was so bashful of Yeva—or perhaps fearful of her, she could not tell which—that he hovered in the hall, peeking around the open doorframe at her whenever she spoke, and vanishing again whenever she looked his way.
Slowly, very slowly, with pauses for more tears and for explanations, Yeva learned what had befallen her family after she disappeared.
Solmir had faithfully continued to help feed and protect Albe and the sisters, monitoring the perimeter around the house for any sign of Yeva’s return. After a little more than a week Radak, Lena’s fiancé before their father’s financial ruin, had appeared at the cabin, wild-eyed and demanding to see Lena. So flustered and distressed was he that he kept repeating his demand even after Lena stood in front of him repeating, “I am Lena! I am she! Radak, what is it?”
He had heard of her father’s plight while traveling back from a business venture and had left his wagons and hired the fastest horse he could find, and arrived at the house in town to find another family living there, with no clue of Tvertko’s whereabouts, nor his daughters’. Eventually he’d found a hunter who’d worked with the merchant long ago who knew the approximate location of the cabin, and from there he’d found Solmir’s tracks, which led him to the door.
When Lena’s voice brought him out of his cold and exhaustion, he dropped to his knees and asked her to marry him again, there in the open doorway of the cabin, soaked to the knee with melting snow and face chapped raw by wind and travel, and she had cried, and kissed him, and said yes. Radak, in possession of a fine new fortune as a result of his venture, had bought Tvertko’s house back. They were wed immediately, so that he could bring her and her sister both to live with them—but they were unwilling to leave the cabin yet, hoping that Yeva and their father might return.
Yeva could not tell them about finding their father’s body, her voice refusing to form the words—but when Lena’s drawn face lifted and she whispered, “Father?” they could all see Yeva’s answer in her eyes as they fell, in her hands as they twisted together, in the set of her lips as she turned her face away.
It was from that vantage point that she saw Solmir’s hand twitch, a gesture she recognized as the urge to help, to touch, to comfort. And when she looked up, his eyes weren’t on her, and her grief—they were on Asenka, who sat still as silent tears dripped from her chin and onto her folded hands.
Yeva was so caught by this that she was almost distracted from the reversal of her family’s fortunes—but then Radak appeared in the doorway, having been fetched by one of the servants to come home and see Lena’s long-lost sister.
“By God,” he exclaimed in the doorway. He was a tall, thin man with terrible hay fever and a perpetually reddened nose that got chapped and flaky from the constant rubbing of his handkerchief. But he’d always been very kind, and after the story she’d heard of his devotion to her sister and to her family, Yeva thought that his face was perhaps one of the most handsome she’d ever seen. He joined them by the fire and kissed her cheek and then took Lena into his arms, wrapping them around her from behind, and it was only then that Yeva noticed with a jolt the curve of her sister’s stomach.
She gasped wordlessly, and Lena, seeing Yeva’s eyes go to her belly, grinned. “I did always like things to be prompt,” Lena said, making Radak laugh softly in her ear. “The baby’s no exception. He should be along in another four months.”
Yeva gaped. She was still getting used to being a sister again, and now she would have to learn to be an aunt. “I’ve missed so much,” she said, passing a hand over her eyes.
“Where were you?” Solmir burst out. He’d been quiet through most of the story, contributing only to dismiss the sisters’ descriptions of his devotion to them during Yeva’s absence with shakes of his head and flicks of his hand. He wouldn’t look at Yeva directly, not if she was looking at him—he’d drop his eyes like a guilty man, as though his care and protection of her sisters was an act he ought to be ashamed of.
Yeva was slow to answer, at first because she was distracted by Solmir, and then because she could not think how to start. Each minute that she spent in her house, with her sisters, surrounded by the trappings of home, of wealth and security and all that had been stripped from her over the last year, made her life in the Beast’s valley seem more and more distant.
Like it was no more than a fairy story, to be read in an old leather-bound book, from the safety and comfort of a warm bed.
Yeva accepted a cup of tea from the cook and blew on its steaming surface to buy herself time to order her thoughts. She took a sip to wet her throat, and began. “Do you remember the Beast Father spoke of, before he vanished?”
As the afternoon passed into evening and evening into night, Solmir left to return to the baron’s household, where he was staying. As an eligible bachelor, it was hardly prop
er for him to stay too late in a household with two unmarried girls. The baron had been ailing from a chill caught over the last winter, and as his heir apparent, Solmir was a great comfort to him.
The servants brought dinner, and then tea, and then sweetmeats, and then cordial and brandy, all the while lingering a little too long in the sitting room as Yeva told her story. She imagined them gathering in the kitchen, each contributing what they’d overheard as they tried to patch together, thread by thread, the tapestry of Yeva’s time with the Beast.
“I heard he was no Beast at all, but a man under a curse . . . ,” one would say, while another would interrupt, “But I heard her say he had fangs and claws, and a roar so loud it shook the very earth beneath her feet.”
At first her sisters, and Radak and Solmir as well, interrupted her with questions. But after Solmir was forced to depart, the questions grew fewer and fewer, and her sisters and her brother-in-law fell quiet, listening to the story. After its end they sat together there in front of the fire, digesting what Yeva had told them, and watching her with an even deeper, more profound disbelief and awe than when they’d first seen her, risen from the grave.
When it had been some hours since the last servant had appeared to eavesdrop, Yeva cleared her raw throat and stood in order to put another log on the fire, which was burning low in its grate. Radak had fallen asleep on the love seat beside his wife, head thrown back, breathing audibly through his mouth in deference to his hay fever. Lena threw him a fond look from where she sat curled in the now-limp circle of his arm, and nudged him gently until he settled to the side and his snoring ceased.
“He works too hard,” she murmured into the quiet, the first anyone had spoken in some time.
Yeva sank down onto the rug before the fire, turning so that the coals warmed her back, and hugged her knees to her chest. “I knew he loved you for more than Father’s wealth.”
Lena’s smile widened, and she sneaked another glance at the man sleeping next to her. “I had hoped. But that time was so awful, so full of unhappiness, it seemed all our luck had fled and everything that could go sour would.”
“Our father died,” Asenka said softly. “And with him, our little sister.”
Yeva had always been closer to Asenka than Lena, in spirit as well as age. And it had always been Asenka to whom Yeva had confessed her heart. From the time Yeva could talk, Asenka had always been the one to listen to her when her little soul could no longer bear the weight of everything she wanted, the adventure and magic and the wide, wide wood, and all the things she could not name, that no one else seemed to understand.
Yeva’s eyes stung, but she’d shed so many tears that day that none fell now, the well inside her dry. “If I could have sent word I was alive, I would have. I didn’t think I would ever see any of you again.”
“We waited as long as we could,” Lena said, smile fading now. “But after summer ended, we knew we could not spend another winter in the cabin, not when Radak had this place for us again. And not with your new nephew on the way.”
Yeva knew Lena was hoping for a boy, but she could hear a sound beneath everything else, a tiny, pulsing rhythm like the one she’d heard in the Beast’s valley, and when she closed her eyes her sister’s afterimage seemed to glow against her eyelids. And in that glow Yeva could see that the child would be a girl, though she could not have explained how she saw it. It was magic, and it frightened Yeva that she could see it even here, in town, as removed from the Beast’s valley as it was from the far eastern sea.
Yeva watched her sister, and her unborn niece, and said nothing.
The quiet broke as Radak’s breath caught and he harrumphed in his sleep, half waking. Lena took his hand and kissed his cheek and sent him off to bed and he went, only after she promised she would come soon.
“Yeva, this story . . .” Lena shook her head, her brows drawn in. “If it were anyone but you I would call her a liar.”
“It’s the truth,” Yeva said. And yet there were pieces of the story she hadn’t told them, fragments she kept to herself without knowing why: the way the Beast’s voice changed when he said I instead of we; the way he smelled of spice and wind, except when snowmelt dampened his fur, when he smelled a little like a wet dog; how familiar the soft whisper of his paws on the stone floors had become; his eyes, as they met hers, right before she cut his throat.
She told herself it was because they would not believe those details, but in her heart she knew that wasn’t the reason. Though she could not put the real reason into words.
“I believe you.” Asenka slid from her chair onto the rug next to Yeva with a sigh, and stretched her feet out toward the fire. “But it will take some time before any of us understand.”
“I know.” Yeva’s lips twitched. “I don’t even understand yet. I just know that seeing you, and knowing you’re here and safe . . . when I saw the empty cabin I feared something terrible had befallen you.”
Lena had been avoiding Yeva’s eyes—watching her, but looking away whenever her youngest sister glanced up. She finally let her breath out in a rush and bent over, face in her hands. “Oh, Yeva. I’m so sorry.” She burst into tears.
Alarmed, Yeva glanced at Asenka, but she wouldn’t meet her eyes either. “It’s all right,” Yeva said, sliding forward on the rug toward the love seat until she could take Lena’s hands. “I’m fine. None of this was your fault.”
Lena lifted her head, eyes brimming and face starting to redden and swell. “No, no—Yeva, I w-wanted to leave the cabin when spring came. I believed you were dead and I wanted to come home, and I was the one who told Solmir to stop. . . .” Her voice petered out, and she shook her head, unable to continue.
“You were the one who told him to stop looking for me,” Yeva finished for her, gently.
Lena glanced at Asenka, then nodded.
“You did right.” Yeva squeezed her hands. “You couldn’t know I was alive.”
“Asenka did!” Lena blurted through her tears. “She begged us to stay through the summer. She refused to believe you had died.”
Yeva squeezed Lena’s hands again and looked across the rug to Asenka, whose eyes were on the fire. Yeva bent her head and kissed her sister’s hands. “None of that matters,” she said firmly. “I don’t think anyone can find the Beast’s valley unless he wants them to—Solmir would not have found me if he had searched for a thousand years. Lena, you did the right thing. I’m so happy to find you all here.”
Lena mumbled something and wrapped her arms around Yeva’s neck, and they stayed that way for a time until Yeva told her to go join her husband, and sleep. She did so reluctantly, pausing on the third step to look back toward the fire, and the sister she’d thought she’d lost, before vanishing upstairs.
Yeva crawled back over by the hearth until she was near enough to Asenka to curl up as she used to do when she was a child, head in her older sister’s lap, fingers grasping at her skirts as though they were a comforting blanket. Asenka bent her head and kissed Yeva’s temple, and Yeva felt a tremble in her lips. She felt the patter of a tear hitting her cheek, and then another, but before she could look up, Asenka’s hand began to stroke the dirty, muddy hair back from Yeva’s face, and Yeva did not want to move for fear she would stop.
She fell asleep like that, and her last thought was of waiting to feel the next tear fall from Asenka’s face to hers.
BEAST
I cannot continue.
The wolf is too strong. With her I could . . . I was . . . but the animal within is angry and his anger makes him strong. He wants us to hunt, and feed, and run through the wood. He wants us to exist as instinct and whim, quick and brutal as winter. My thoughts drive his mind as mad as his instinct poisons mine. But I remember what I was, and it makes me weak. My despair is mine alone, and I am so tired.
Can’t keep . . . no point. Curl up. Let him. I’ll fade.
Disappear.
TWENTY
YEVA ASSUMED SHE’D FEEL the itch to hunt, after
it had become such a habit. That the town would seem crowded and dirty and loud, that the house would feel small after having lived in a castle. Instead it surprised her how easy it was to come back from the dead.
News spread through the town like the howling winter wind, so quickly that Yeva did not have to tell her story to anyone, because they already knew. Most of them had heard it entirely wrong, for the stranger the story, the more elaborate it became in the retelling—but she felt no urge to correct them.
And while her body was used to far more exercise than she could get strolling around town, it soon understood it was not being called upon to prowl through snow-covered forests or sprint after wild beasts, and settled.
She was not invited to rejoin the baronessa’s circle of ladies, no doubt because no one quite knew what to make of her, whether she had spent the winter with an unmarried man under a curse or if she’d spent it in the bed of a wicked monster. Though neither was true, Yeva was hardly surprised that such doubts would prevent her from reentering high society. And since the baronessa’s solarium was the one aspect of her life at home that she hadn’t missed at all, that suited her perfectly.
After all, it didn’t matter if the townsfolk were unsure about Yeva’s honor, or whether her fantastical tale was the truth. She wasn’t anticipating marriage proposals from any of them.
And then there was Solmir.
He visited daily, and though Yeva felt as fond of him as she’d been before her father’s death, she also couldn’t deny there was an odd gulf between them now. They’d grown close during their afternoon walks through the forest, checking Yeva’s traps and talking about hunting, but he seemed stiffer around her, uncertain of himself. At first she thought it might be her new reputation making him ill at ease, and after a week she finally found the courage to ask him about it.
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