Solmir let out a frustrated, wordless sound, and Yeva heard his boots clomping first one way, then the other. “Asenka,” he said, more quietly now. “Asenka, please. We must tell her the truth. If we don’t, you’ll be miserable, I’ll be miserable—no one will be happy if we go through with this.”
“Yeva will be,” Asenka whispered.
“Asenka—”
“Go.”
“No, I won’t—”
“I said go.” Asenka’s voice held such steel as Yeva never knew she possessed, and Yeva ended up gawking at the empty landing ahead of her. It wasn’t until she heard Solmir’s slow, leaden footsteps heading for the stairs that she started and hurried away as quietly as she could.
That night Yeva waited until the household grew silent, and all the servants had retired and Radak and Lena were asleep. She crept out of bed, shivering as she pulled on a pair of woolen stockings, and then took up the quilt on her bed to wrap around her shoulders before slipping into the hall. She padded down to Asenka’s room, where the door was open a crack as it always had been when Yeva was a child, and crept inside.
When she was young Yeva would crawl into Asenka’s bed to tell her about her dreams of fairy-tale monsters and wicked spells, as thrilled and excited as she was frightened. Tonight her heart quickened as it used to, and for a moment she thought her throat wouldn’t work until her whisper burst out: “Asenka?”
Her sister mumbled unintelligibly, then sat up. “Yeva, what is it?”
“Can I come in?”
“Always.” Asenka slid sideways to make room for Yeva on the bed.
Yeva darted over and under the covers, warmed by Asenka’s body heat. She turned on her side and wrapped her arms around her sister, pressing her forehead against her shoulder. “I need advice,” Yeva said.
“About what?” Asenka tilted her head to the side until her temple rested against Yeva’s hair.
“Solmir.”
Asenka’s body stiffened—so close, it was impossible for her to hide it from Yeva, and she knew it. “Please,” she said eventually, sounding tired. “I can’t.”
Yeva’s arms tightened, and she reminded herself that she needed to know what was happening, even if asking made her sister unhappy. “Something is wrong. I want him to be happy, but he’s not, and he won’t tell me why.”
“Why would you think I could answer, when you can’t?” Asenka’s words were careful. She was never able to lie well, and certainly not to her own family.
“Because,” Yeva said. “Because I think you’re still in love with him.”
Asenka’s breath tangled in her throat, audible with Yeva so close to her. For the first time Yeva could remember, her sister pulled away from her and sat up, retreating to the corner of the bed and drawing up her knees. “Yeva,” she gasped, anger tinting her voice. “He’s your fiancé. I would never—it was a girlish whim, a childish fancy I set aside long ago.”
Yeva’s heart ached, because she could see the lie even in the dark, shining from Asenka’s eyes more brightly than the moonlight from the window. “Asenka—has he fallen in love with you, too?”
Asenka’s eyes flashed. “Of course not,” she spluttered. “He loves you, he’s marrying you. He wants to spend the rest of his life with you, he always has, since he met you.”
“Even when he thought I was dead?” Yeva asked gently.
“It doesn’t matter!” Asenka’s voice was suddenly fierce. “I never believed you were gone. I knew you were alive. I knew you would come back, and I knew he must be here, waiting for you, when you did.”
“Oh, Asenka.” Yeva reached out, groping until she found her sister’s hand. “If you love him, and he loves you, you must accept that. I won’t be the one who comes between you.”
“No,” Asenka snapped, her voice as steely as when she’d sent Solmir from the leech’s shop. “He was meant for you.”
“I don’t want him.” Yeva spoke as gently as she could. “Oh, I care for him—I care for him very much. I can never repay all that he did for us. But Asenka, I’ve realized . . . he wasn’t doing all of it for me. He was doing it for you.”
Asenka had begun to cry, and was shaking her head again and again. “No,” she said, voice thick. “Yeva, you are my sister. I love you. I love you more than anything. You and Lena are the most important things in all the world.” She finally squeezed Yeva’s hand back, swallowing audibly. “I would give up a thousand Solmirs for you.”
Yeva crawled forward and slid her arms around Asenka’s waist. “I know. But I’m not in love with him. Not the way you are. Asenka, I want you to be with him. I want it for you both.”
Asenka’s tears overflowed and she gave a wordless sob. A memory hit Yeva, the force of it robbing her of breath: a single sob, lost in the darkness in the back of the hunting cabin, the night Solmir had come to propose to Yeva and Asenka had seen where his heart lay. Yeva pulled her sister close, and they sat that way, rocking together, bound and twisted up in the bedclothes and murmuring to each other.
Finally Asenka’s tears slowed, and she lifted her head. Yeva brushed her hair from her eyes and touched the tears from her cheeks, just as Asenka used to do for her when Yeva would come crying to her for comfort.
“But you must marry Solmir,” Asenka whispered, her eyes intent.
“Why?” Yeva shook her head, unable to think why her sister was so insistent.
“Because if he doesn’t hold you here, you will go back.” Asenka reached up to lay her hand against Yeva’s cheek. “Back to the Beast.”
Yeva’s heart twitched and leaped, and she caught her breath. “What? Don’t—don’t be absurd. Why would I go back?”
But as they sat there together, and Yeva held Asenka until she drifted off to sleep, her sister’s words echoed in her mind over and over, until they settled into place, like a missing piece that filled the exact shape of the hollow in her heart she’d been trying to ignore.
Back to the Beast.
BEAST
We run. We hunt. We feed.
We are of the forest and of magic, and we have always been. We glory in the kill.
We are the Beast,
and we will always be.
TWENTY-TWO
THAT NIGHT YEVA’S VISION of the Beast was a nightmare. She dreamed she was the deer, and that the Beast was stalking her through the wood. She could not see or hear or smell him, but some deep-rooted instinct knew he was there. She knew she was prey.
But when she woke gasping, it was not the thought of being caught and consumed that echoed in her fear-muddled mind. All she could see were the Beast’s eyes, red and fixated on her, full of bloodlust and nothing more. They held no humanity, no sense—not even the careful cunning of a predator. The eyes were simply mad, like those of a rabid animal. They were not the eyes of the creature, man or Beast, she’d come to know in the castle.
She rose before any of the servants and stoked the fires in the sitting room and the kitchen, and put a kettle of water on to boil for tea. The tasks reminded her of her life in the hunting cabin with her family, and she felt a twinge of loss as she stood warming her fingers and toes before the flames. She knew her sisters would remember those few months as a time of terrible hardship and fear, but Yeva couldn’t help but see them as the start of a journey that would change her forever.
For she was changed. Yeva knew that to live here, among her family and the townsfolk and the bricks and mortar and steel and bustle, would require diligence and focus. She could not think of the forest, of Lamya and the music and the things she’d seen deep in the castle valley, of the thrill of that other world. She would not remember how alive she’d been when she was the animal, focused on nothing but the hunt.
Because Asenka was right. Without Solmir, without the knowledge that she must keep her promise, that she must make him happy to repay him for all he’d done, that she must make herself happy and pretend that this life still held a place shaped for her to slip into . . . without all that, what her
heart most wanted was to return. Her nightmare needled her, a gnawing worry for the Beast himself. Though it was only a dream, she could not shake the fear that there was some truth in it—that without her, the Beast’s humanity was slipping away.
She could not banish the thought that the Beast needed her.
By the time the rest of the household had woken, Yeva had packed a few meager possessions into a bag. Her father’s bow, which had been unstrung since the day she’d returned, stood next to it, string dangling from one notched end as if in invitation. She’d brought her fletching knife, some day-old bread and apples and dried meat, flint and tinder, a new cloak to replace the torn and muddy one Lena had insisted on burning. She brought only what she thought she’d need on the journey back to the Beast’s castle.
Except for one thing, which served no practical purpose: she’d brought a book, one of the few volumes her sisters had managed to track down and buy back from the townsfolk who’d purchased Tvertko’s possessions before the family departed a year ago. It was the book of fairy tales that her father had read to her when she was very small, so small that it was his voice telling her stories that colored her very earliest memory. She remembered perching on the sill of her bedroom window with the pane opened a crack so she could let the winter in, and she remembered letting it sting her nose and wash over her until she was shivering and blue.
“Ah, my little Beauty!” her father had cried when he lowered the book and saw her. “You’ll be frozen to the core! Come away. What are you doing?”
“I’m listening for the Firebird,” little Beauty had replied, voice shaking with cold. “Can’t you hear it, Daddy?”
Her father set the book aside and strode to the window beside her. He wrapped her up in his warm arms, but rather than close the window and bring her back to bed, he stood listening too. And after a moment, she felt his whiskers scrape at her cheek as he nodded. “Aye,” he said gravely. “I hear it.”
“How sad it sounds,” little Beauty said.
“Why is it sad?” her father asked.
“Because it is lonely.”
Her father stayed quiet for a while, then sighed. “Perhaps we will give it some company. When spring comes, how would you like to come with me to my cabin? I used to live there, before I met your mother and we were given you girls. It lies deep in the forest, and I can teach you all about the things that dwell there.”
“Does the Firebird live there?” Beauty had asked, brimming with sudden excitement.
“The Firebird, aye, and many other wonders. Would you like that, my little Beauty?”
Beauty had squealed and turned from the window and thrown her arms around her father’s neck, making him laugh and fall back as though she’d been a wild beast whose weight had driven him to the floor. She was five years old.
Now, Yeva shivered despite the fire surging back to life before her. How sad it sounds, she thought, remembering the Beast’s low, somber voice. How lonely.
Pelei, while overjoyed to see Yeva again, had nonetheless developed a quick and surprising preference for Radak. Lena said it was because of everyone, Radak had been the least generous with his affections for the dog, which seemed to make Pelei work all the harder to win him over. Though Radak protested he cared nothing for the creature, Lena privately confessed that most nights it was Radak who covertly invited the big shaggy scent hound up on their bed, to fold himself up in the hollow behind Radak’s knees.
Doe-Eyes, however, still rarely left Yeva’s side. It was Doe-Eyes who woke with her when Yeva bolted upright out of her dreams, and it was Doe-Eyes who padded downstairs with her when she woke early or wandered the back garden aimlessly.
And it was Doe-Eyes who lay across the front door now, trying to look easy and relaxed, but watching Yeva’s every movement with an intensity that betrayed her. Even as servants stirred and began the morning’s tasks, Doe-Eyes didn’t move. Yeva wondered how she could possibly know this morning was different from any others, how she could possibly read Yeva’s heart, but her time with the Beast had taught her how a creature could shout its intentions to the sky without ever making a sound. She knew Doe-Eyes could see Yeva meant to leave.
“If you wish to come,” Yeva whispered, crouching down by Doe-Eyes and laying her cheek against the top of the dog’s warm head, “then I will be glad for the company. But here you’ll be warm and fed, and there I can’t guarantee what we’ll find. He might be—we might be on our own.”
Doe-Eyes heaved a great sigh, blowing hot, wet air across Yeva’s neck, and didn’t shift from her spot guarding Yeva’s belongings by the door.
“What are you doing up?” Lena stood at the bottom of the staircase, rubbing at her eyes. She was wearing a dressing gown over her nightclothes, and her hair was flattened on one side from her pillow.
Yeva searched for the words to tell her sister that she was leaving, that she was afraid for the Beast, but could find none. But after a few breaths Lena’s sleepy eyes widened, traveling from Yeva, to Doe-Eyes skittering urgently from side to side, to the pack at Yeva’s feet.
The sleep left Lena’s face and she stumbled down the last few steps toward her sister. “Yeva! Where are you going?”
Yeva shook her head mutely, and gathered the cloak in her arms more tightly against her chest.
“No.” Horror colored Lena’s voice. “No, you can’t. He’s a monster.”
Yeva closed her eyes. “I know,” she murmured. When she opened her eyes again Asenka had emerged, drawn by the sharpness of Lena’s tone, and stood on the stairs watching them. “He is a monster. But I believe he’s a monster because of something that was done to him. I believe I can save him.”
“You don’t owe him anything!” Lena cried. “He’s done nothing but hurt you!”
Yeva shook her head. “He let me go. And if I return to him now, we’ll be on equal terms. I won’t be hunting him, and he won’t be hunting me.”
“Why would you want to go back?”
“I . . . I can’t explain it.” Yeva sighed. “But . . . the Beast is not the monster. The monster is what he’s become. He took me because he thought I could free him, and I mean to find out why.”
“You mustn’t.” Lena, stubborn as always, stalked across the floor and snatched up Yeva’s pack, as if she might prevent her sister from leaving if she could take away her supplies. “This makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does.” Asenka’s voice came quietly from where she’d sunk down to sit on one of the steps leading to the upstairs. Her eyes never left Yeva’s. “She’s going to rescue him.”
Lena stared from Asenka to Yeva, spluttering. “R-rescue? Yeva! You’re no knight from an old story, and he’s certainly no maiden in distress.”
“No,” agreed Yeva, fighting back the irrational urge to smile. “But I mean to try, nevertheless.”
Lena’s expression clouded. “You left us once before,” she said intently, well aware that she was resorting to unfair tactics. “If it weren’t for Radak and Solmir . . .”
Her sister’s words cut. She had abandoned them in pursuit of revenge. But it was different this time. “But you have them now, for always,” Yeva said gently. Her eyes flicked toward Asenka, whose face flushed, guilt and longing mingling in her features. “Solmir was never for me, Lena.”
Lena, too, glanced over her shoulder at Asenka. Yeva knew from the look on Lena’s face that she’d been right to release her fiancé from his promise.
Lena drew a shaky breath. “At least stay one more night,” she begged. “One more dinner, one more evening before the fire. Please?”
Yeva hesitated, but even Asenka’s expression was pleading, and her resolve crumbled. “One more night,” she agreed, then turned for the door.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“I must speak to Solmir.” Yeva didn’t have to look at Asenka to know what she’d find on her sister’s face. “I promise, I’ll come back. Here,” she added, when Lena didn’t look convinced. “Take Father’s bow. I wo
uldn’t leave it behind.”
Lena took the long, curved staff of the unstrung bow in hands that were unused to holding weapons of any kind, and cast Yeva an uncertain look. “One more night,” she repeated.
“I promise.”
The baron’s manor house stood on a rise on the other end of town, and Yeva took the long path that circumnavigated the busier streets. Though she often preferred to avoid the crowds who still looked at her like she was half spirit, half saint, today she simply wanted the time to gather her thoughts.
The Beast had been waiting hundreds, if not thousands, of years to break his curse. One more day would not be the end of him. And yet Yeva’s heart felt tight and uncomfortable, and her feet itched for the soft give of the forest’s carpet of leaf mold instead of the hard-packed mud of the town streets.
The gates of the baron’s estate stood open, as they almost always did, and Yeva was not stopped until she reached the manor itself. The doorman showed her inside; Solmir must have given the staff instructions in advance. She was brought to a sitting room hung with tapestries—one of the baron’s rooms, and not one she frequented as part of the baronessa’s retinue—and left to wait.
She couldn’t help but compare this room to those of the castle in the valley. Though this room had no hint of mildew or age, nothing worn or cracked or shabby, there was an obvious grandeur that Yeva found off-putting. The pieces in the room had been selected to show off the baron’s wealth, and whoever had done the selecting lacked the taste of the castle’s decorator, whoever he’d been, all those centuries ago.
She was inspecting the books displayed prominently on one of the shelves when Solmir appeared in the doorway. Last year, whenever he arrived to accompany Yeva on her walks through the forest, he’d appear disheveled and out of breath, eagerness flushing his face and quickening his steps. Now, she couldn’t help but notice his face was grave, his steps unhurried.
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