With every step, Yeva felt lighter. Each league she closed between her and the Beast made his pull all the stronger, as if she were a needle drawn to a lodestone. Her heart had grown so used to hating him that she couldn’t make sense of how her feelings for him had changed, but she knew that just now, in this instant, this crossroads of her life, she was meant to find him. She could not tell what would come after, but she hadn’t felt such certainty since the very first time she’d held her own bow in her hands.
She would find him. She would free him.
The snow that had sent her out into the night stopped later that first day, and the pale autumn sun was enough to melt it on the roads. But once she left the road for the forest, the snow lay beneath the trees in cool white swaths that marked out intricate patterns of shadow where the sun never penetrated the branches above. Each one seemed to point onward, north, illuminating her path.
Her sleep, when she paused in the pitch-blackness of night long enough to get some rest, was dreamless. The days flew as though the magic was pulling her onward, summoning her home.
The air shifted when she reached the river where it passed out of the southern border of the Beast’s valley. She stopped at the water’s edge, gazing down the glittering expanse. The river glittered in the afternoon sun, burbling against the rocks a few paces from her boots, and Doe-Eyes pranced over to lap at it noisily. Here the water was lively and dancing swiftly through its carven course, but a league upstream Yeva could see that it was frozen. The deep winter that froze time itself in the Beast’s valley hadn’t changed.
Yeva ran, throwing wisdom and endurance to the wind in her haste. Doe-Eyes let out an uncharacteristic, joyous bark and sprinted after her, falling into step at her side and breathing noisily. The air once again singed her lungs with cold.
The castle burst into view, looking as it had always looked, nestled in a cradle of ice and snow where it straddled the river that flowed beneath it. The sound of Yeva’s pounding footfalls changed as she hit the stone of the bridge, which she’d once crossed so gingerly. She went first to the den, veering from the castle doors and sliding in her haste down the trodden path to the cave. Despite the violence of her nightmares, she felt no fear—she knew that if the Beast could see her, if he could only know she’d come back for him, the wolf would release him.
The den was empty. Gnawed bones littered the shadowy recesses of the cave, and she could smell him, but his scent was faint and seemed fainter with every breath. Yeva took a step back and looked down, and saw that her tracks were fresh and new but that they were the only ones that had broken the crust of an old snow. No one else had come this way in weeks.
Yeva whirled and made for the castle doors. One of them stood slightly ajar, as if in invitation. She hurried across the dusty marble of the great hall, past the room full of shattered windows, and into the one with the blue velvet divan and the table with books propping it up and tapestries covering the high windows to keep out the drafts.
It was dark and cold, and empty. Her heart ached at the sight of the hearth, which had always been burning bright or glowing with hot coals—she’d never realized how often the Beast must have laid the fire for her until now. She’d taken that warmth for granted, as though the fire had simply lit itself for her each day by magic.
Her legs refused to run anymore, and the ache in her heart began to spread. For the first time an icy trickle of fear lifted the hairs at the back of her neck.
Where is the Beast?
She moved back out into the great hall. Doe-Eyes, panting from the headlong flight through the valley, took one look at the stairs and dropped onto her belly before them. She cast Yeva a baleful look, and Yeva told her to stay before heading up the wide curving stair.
The library was empty, and the master bedroom too—but she’d expected that. It was the tower room she sought, the tower room where she knew she’d find the Beast. She pulled back the tapestry to find the secret door unlocked.
You may come here any time you wish, the Beast had told her. But Yeva’s memory of his offer could not quite touch the rising fear in her heart that she refused to look at directly.
She climbed the steps two at a time, calling breathlessly, “Beast? Beast, it’s me. Your Beauty.” There was no reply, and Yeva imagined him so shocked that she’d return that he could not speak.
But when she burst through the second door at the top of the spiral stair the tower room was empty. The fire in the hearth was unlit, and when Yeva drew nearer and put her hand out to the ashes, she found them ice cold. The carpet crumbled and stank under her feet, and she saw that nothing had been cleaned, dried blood still staining the floor.
The Beast was gone.
Yeva could not think, could not move. She had been so certain she was meant to return, so certain that her whole life had been steering her toward this place, this time, this task. She knew that in it she would find everything she’d ever wanted, everything she’d ever imagined she could be. Instead she’d found an empty castle, as cold and dark as the winter in the valley surrounding it.
Yeva stood in the center of the room, shivering, her eyes seeking anything that might ease the blow.
The knife she’d used to slash the Beast’s throat still lay on the floor where she’d dropped it. The smear of blood her leggings had made as she scrambled from him still streaked the stones by the wall. The book whose pages had been spattered by . . .
But wait, where was the book?
Yeva frowned, scanning the room again. That night was so intimately carved into her memory that she could see in her mind’s eye exactly where the book had been: by the daybed, lying open as though the Beast had been reading it. She set her bow down and crossed to the far side of the tower room, where she crouched low and saw the faint outline of a rectangle where the book had lain, shielding the ground beneath it from the Beast’s blood.
The Beast had moved it.
She summoned up that night once more, ignoring the sting of guilt in order to compare the memory to the room where she stood now. There, on the table by the window, illuminated by the pale winter sun slipping through the cracked shutters, lay the volume she sought.
It was closed. She picked it up and found a guinea fowl’s feather between its pages like a bookmark, and she let it fall open there.
The handwriting inside was cramped and slanted, not penned by a scribe like most of the other books. Yeva could not read it. She flipped back a few pages and the writing changed, and then changed again, written by many different people. Past the page the Beast had marked, the vellum was blank. Yeva leafed back to the start and a series of numbers, more easily read than the cramped writing, leaped out at her. They were dates.
The book was a history. And as the occasional word emerged from the tangle of ancient lettering—land, kingdom, tithe, heir, drought—she realized it was the history of the family who’d once lived here and the land they’d ruled.
Yeva hurriedly flipped back to the spot marked with the feather. The language was so archaic that she could barely understand any of it, but she saw enough to know that the writer was describing a royal family. A king, his queen, his three sons, princes all. The feather marked the last entry in the book, with nothing to tell of what had happened to this land all those centuries ago, nor the family that had ruled it.
It was the name of the youngest prince that drew Yeva’s gaze, but a speck of the Beast’s blood had landed on it, making it difficult to read. She leaned close to the page, holding it under a shaft of sunlight.
Eoven, she read.
You may call me Ivan, the Beast had told her once, after she’d told him the story of the Firebird.
Eoven. Ivan.
With trembling fingers, Yeva picked up the feather that had marked the page with the prince’s name. She’d thought it a feather from a guinea fowl, but it was stiffer than that, a tail feather from a bird far better suited to flight. She blew on it, dislodging decades or centuries of dust and grime, and ran a shaking
fingertip along its spine to knit the disheveled barbs together. She reached out to hold the feather in the light.
The instant the sunlight touched it the feather seemed to burst into flame. Yeva gasped and almost dropped it, but her fingers felt no heat. She tilted the feather this way and that, watching as the sunlight caught and danced, turning the dull browns into fiery red, gold, and orange. Like the leaves in her dream of kissing Solmir, of kissing the man the Beast had once been, the leaves that had turned into a rain of feathers.
The Beast, before vanishing to wherever he’d gone, had left this book here for her to find. And though he could not tell her the origins of his curse, he could leave her clues to discover it herself. Yeva drew the feather close and heard, very softly, so softly she didn’t dare breathe for fear she would drown out the sound, the tiniest pulse of music as it brushed her skin.
Her Beast was Prince Ivan. And the quarry he needed her to hunt in order to break his curse was the Firebird, the creature from her father’s stories that Yeva had always loved the most.
To save him, she would have to kill the thing she’d longed for all her life.
Yeva picked up her bow.
TWENTY-FIVE
YEVA LET THE MUSIC of the wood wash over her. At first she didn’t try to understand it or separate its pattern into individual threads of song. She stood in the center of the clearing, with snowflakes drifting around her like dust motes in a sunbeam, and listened.
When a familiar rhythm asserted itself, tugging her northward, she opened her eyes again and turned in the direction of the song and followed it. Doe-Eyes trotted next to her. The song was elusive, moving this way and that, and Yeva’s instincts urged her to move more carefully, to stalk her prey as she’d learned to do. But she was not a hunter today—at least, not the kind of hunter she’d been before.
“Lamya,” she said softly, when she sensed the song she’d been tracking was coming from all around her now. “Lamya, I need your help.”
There was no reply, but the rhythm of the song changed, like a heartbeat quickening.
Yeva tried again, licking her lips. “Do you remember me? My name is Yeva. I’ve seen you here, and you’ve seen me.”
Again there was no response, and Yeva’s heart tightened. Without the help of one of the strange creatures that lived in this place, she’d have no idea where to start, no clue as to where to find the Firebird in the wood that stretched on forever to the north, to the edge of the world.
“It’s for the Beast,” Yeva burst out, voice ringing loud in the cold air. “It’s for Eoven.”
A gust of air nearly knocked her from her feet, the sound of massive wings shattering the quiet and blinding her with snow flung up by the wind. When Yeva had wiped the melting snow from her eyes there was nothing there—but then Lamya emerged from behind a birchling far too slender to have concealed her. She wore nothing but her long, black hair, which fell over her shoulders. “For Eoven?” she asked, her voice velvet.
“He told me he asked you to help him once before.”
“He wanted to die,” Lamya said dreamily, moving through the snow without stirring a flake, her bare feet perfect and white and showing not a hint of cold. “I have helped many that way.”
“He said you couldn’t kill him.”
Lamya’s black eyes swung round to meet Yeva’s, and Yeva had to fight the need to shiver with all her might. “The Beast cannot be killed.”
“I know,” Yeva said, trying not to show her impatience. “I need to—”
“But Eoven can die,” Lamya went on as though Yeva had not spoken.
Yeva froze, chilled as though she were as naked as Lamya. “What do you mean?”
“The world of men,” Lamya murmured, “is so strange.” She rubbed her body against a rough-barked tree with a little sigh of pleasure. A normal woman would have been left scratched and bleeding, but Lamya’s skin only shone all the brighter. When she continued moving, inscribing a wide, lazy circle around the clearing, Yeva saw a glimmer of scales left behind on the tree’s bark.
Lamya continued. “For you all things have one nature. Winter is cold. Death is a tragedy. But even in the world of men, this is not true. Your warmest memories are of winter, and the times spent near hearth and home. For the sick and the old death can be a gift. And yet you insist on seeing only the faces of things. I am a woman. I am a dragon. I am these things all the time, and I am never one but not the other.”
Yeva’s impatience grew. She couldn’t afford to alienate Lamya, but the urgency in her heart made it almost impossible to stand and listen. “Please. Tell me what this has to do with Eoven. I’ve had dreams that he’s lost himself, that the animal within him has taken over, and I need to—I need to know that he’s all right.”
“The Beast was a man and a wolf,” Lamya said. “As I am a woman and a dragon. But the day I saw you with him in the wood, he was no longer those things. He was a man only. The face of him still spoke of the wolf, but his nature—the truth of him—was Eoven and not the Beast. You did that to him.”
Yeva blinked. “How can that be? He was the Beast when I first came upon him in the woods. He was cursed long before I was even born.”
“The Firebird made him a being of two natures,” Lamya went on. “You changed him into two beings grappling for a single heart.”
A little trickle of horror shivered down the back of Yeva’s neck. “You’re saying I . . . I caused the wolf to take over?”
“You let the man take over,” Lamya corrected her, “and give his heart to you.” She lifted a languorous hand and combed her fingers through the long length of her hair so that it fell slowly, carving out the shape of a dragon’s wing in the air. “Now, without it, Eoven has no more strength to exist alongside the wolf.”
Yeva’s eyes burned. She slipped her hand into the pocket at her waist so she could curl her fingers around the feather there. “It was the Firebird that cursed him. And it’s the Firebird that can free him. I must find it.”
Lamya paused, surprise halting her sinuous movements for the first time since she appeared. “The Firebird?” she echoed. “No one has seen her for many years.”
“You must have some idea where to find her,” Yeva pleaded, desperation rising. “If I’m the one who did this to the Beast then it’s all the more important that I fix it.”
Lamya’s brows drew together, and her eyes caught Yeva’s. All at once their blackness called to Yeva, becoming not an empty abyss but the warmth of a soft, velvet bed. Yeva wanted nothing more than to stagger to Lamya’s side and drown in those eyes. “I can help you,” Lamya whispered, and her lips were as soft as her eyes. “I can free you from the pain in your heart. Winter does not have to be cold. I can show you heat. . . .”
Yeva found herself aching, found the sharp edges of her thoughts fraying. She was so tired, after all—tired of fairy tales and magic and empty castles, tired of wanting so intensely that she didn’t know what she wanted.
Perhaps Lamya could be what she wanted. It would be so easy. . . .
“The Firebird, Lamya.” Yeva held up the feather in her hand, her face flushed despite the cold. “Please.”
Lamya’s lashes fell, and as soon as her gaze left Yeva’s, the spell vanished like smoke. “North,” she said softly. “I have never seen the Firebird and I have wandered here since the first time the sun ever rose.” Her soft voice held a deep sorrow, a longing that touched Yeva so deeply her eyes stung with tears. Yeva was not the only one for whom the Firebird was a symbol of wanting. “You will not find her here. Go north into the next valley, and the one beyond. What you seek can only be north.”
Now that Lamya’s heat had left her Yeva’s body ached with sudden cold. She wrapped her cloak more tightly about her body. She discovered that Doe-Eyes was some distance behind her, belly low to the ground and ears back, her large round eyes fixed fearfully on the dragon-woman. Yeva backed up until she felt her dog’s warmth press against her calves.
“Thank you, Lamya,
” she whispered. Then she ran.
Yeva had barely traveled a few leagues into the next valley before her exhaustion began to catch up with her. She’d slept so little in her haste to return to the Beast, her body now ached, and her eyes burned and itched in the dry, icy air.
She touched the feather in her pocket again. A fortifying warmth began at her fingertips and trickled slowly up her arm, spreading through her body and letting her blink away the exhaustion weighing her down. She could not be sure whether the feather’s warmth was magic, or if it was hope that surged through her, urging her to push aside her desire to rest.
When she passed for the second time a gnarled tree, blackened by a strike of lightning, Yeva realized she was walking in circles. The innate sense of direction that had guided her this far had left her, and when she stopped, confused, Doe-Eyes halted too. The dog cocked her head, puzzled by her mistress’s sudden lack of direction, then turned and trotted off through the trees.
Yeva called out for her, but for the first time since she’d been a puppy, Doe-Eyes didn’t come running at the sound of her voice. Letting out a weary oath, Yeva dragged herself after her pup.
She broke out through a dense, icy thicket and found herself at the river’s edge, the same river that passed through the Beast’s valley below. Doe-Eyes was drinking from a hole in the ice, lapping at the water greedily. The sun briefly broke through the thick gray clouds and its glare on the river ice jolted Yeva from her weary confusion. Her eyes traveled upriver, and she saw that its course led through a pass between the mountains surrounding the valley she was in. The sun beamed down on Yeva’s right cheek before vanishing behind the clouds again, and Yeva realized that the river flowed north to south.
Hunted Page 24