Hunted

by Meagan Spooner

  “Thank you, Doe-Eyes,” Yeva whispered. She’d found her road north.

  Yeva discovered as she walked that she no longer had to listen for the magic of the wood—in fact, she began to feel deafened by it. Though the forest was silent, lacking even the little noises of a hibernating wilderness, her ears rang with music. When darkness fell she made a little camp, and huddled close to the fire with Doe-Eyes sharing her warmth under her cloak.

  The magic swelled, and when Yeva looked up, she saw the song for the first time with her eyes. The clouds had cleared, and the sky was dancing. Ribbons of pale green and peach shimmered above her, robbing her of breath until her very heart seemed to beat in time with the magic. She leaned back against a tree so she could fall asleep looking up, and the dancing sky grew brighter and brighter until it burned red and gold and spread wings of flame and sang the Firebird’s song.

  Yeva woke with a longing in her heart so strong that she leaped to her feet and kept moving north without banking the fire or packing up her belongings. She left behind her food, her flint and tinder, the goose fat she’d been using to protect her lips and cheeks from the icy chapping of the wind. All she brought was what she’d fallen asleep holding: the feather in her pocket, the book of fairy tales tucked inside her cloak, and the bow in her hands with a single arrow to its string.

  The sun was high and pale in the vast crystal-blue sky when a flash of brilliant rust red made Yeva skid to a halt. It had been days since she’d last seen even a set of tracks that wasn’t hers, much less an animal to leave them. And now a fox appeared ahead of her, sitting primly in the snow with its tail wrapped around its haunches.

  “Borovoi?” she asked, her voice hoarse from disuse.

  The fox grinned at her, showing a row of pointy little teeth, and inclined its angular head. “That’s one question spent.”

  Yeva drew a breath to retort, but paused, and instead inspected the little fox. Almost as she’d seen the ribbons of magic dancing overhead, she could see in the fox’s face the grizzled, mossy beard, the hollow cheeks etched in bark, the ancient eyes of the leshy spirit she’d glimpsed that first day alone in the wood, before she met the rusalka. “You tried to kill me.”

  “I gave you what you asked for,” said Borovoi the fox, the leshy. “I do not lie. Ask what you will.”

  Yeva could not take her eyes from the creature, caught by its dual nature, the eyes of the ancient forest spirit in the frame of its sharp-cheeked fox face. “I came here to . . .” But the song of magic and the roaring in her ears made it hard to concentrate. Yeva swallowed. “I seek the Firebird.”

  Borovoi grinned again. “Don’t we all?”

  “I must find it,” Yeva said, throwing all her feeling behind her voice. “It’s the key to everything I’ve ever wanted.”

  The fox’s head tilted the other way. “What will you do if you find it?”

  Yeva stared at the fox, exhaustion and confusion and magic tangling her mind so that she couldn’t think straight. “I . . . I just want it. It is my destiny.”

  “The Beast can never find the Firebird himself, you know.” The fox lifted one paw and chewed a bit of ice from between its toes. “The bird must come to him. That is why he believed he needed a hunter—someone to trap the Firebird and bring it to him.”

  Yeva stared at the fox. “The Beast?” she asked slowly, stupidly, her mind full of dancing ribbons of red and gold and a song she’d first heard one winter when she was five years old, sitting by a window and listening to her father read her a story.

  “Has her song gotten to you already?” the fox asked, sounding surprised. “I would have thought you’d last longer.”

  “The Beast,” Yeva echoed again. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the word beast meant something to her beyond bears and boars and other dangers of the wood her memory conjured. Her hand crept into her pocket by itself, and her fingers touched the soft, worn barbs of a feather. “The Beast!” she cried, remembering. “Yes. I need to find the Firebird for the Beast.”

  “Go north,” said the fox.

  “I’ve been going north,” Yeva protested, aware that at any moment her exhaustion would catch up with her and she’d be able to travel no farther. “I’ve been going north for years.”

  “That’s because the Firebird is always north of you,” the fox replied. “No matter how far you go.”

  Yeva stumbled on through the forest, and only by reaching out and finding Doe-Eyes’s warm fur with her fingers could she remind herself that she was real, that this was real, that it was no tale from the book tucked close by her breast.

  There would be a third, she knew. First Lamya the dragon-woman, then Borovoi the leshy, and now there would be one more. In stories there was always a third sign, a third test, a third bit of wisdom to urge the hero onward. Three wishes, three princes, three feathers, three hearts, three . . .

  But Yeva walked, and walked, and found only the next valley, and the one beyond, and the one beyond, and the river she followed grew narrower and narrower until it was nothing more than a stream. She staggered up hills and climbed rock faces and eventually found herself beside a frozen waterfall that emerged like a crystalline blossom from a hidden spring in the rocks. The river’s source. The end of her north road.

  She saw pale green and peach reflected in the waterfall’s frozen folds, and when she blinked and looked harder, she saw red-gold and fire.

  She stepped out onto the frozen river, ignoring how it cracked and groaned under her weight. Dimly the sound made her think of some half-lost memory, another time she stepped onto ice that had not held her, but she could not quite remember what it was. Doe-Eyes stood on the bank and watched, and though she whined and cried and paced this way and that, it seemed she could not follow her mistress. And so Yeva walked on alone until she reached the waterfall.

  The ice moved, the frozen sheets curling and parting like Lamya’s hair, like falling snow before the wind, like autumn leaves from the peony tree. The curtains of ice opened for her like the massive doors of a castle she once knew, revealing that behind the waterfall lay a hidden cave. Yeva would have hesitated to go inside, but the cave was unlike any she’d ever seen, for the inside of the cave was brighter than the daylight where Yeva stood, as though it contained its own tiny sun.

  Yeva stepped inside, and the moment her boots touched the cave’s stone floor, the ice folded back into place behind her. She could not be afraid, however—in fact, she barely noticed she’d been sealed inside at all.

  For before her, asleep with its wings wrapped round its body like a cloak, was the Firebird.

  TWENTY-SIX

  YEVA FELL TO HER knees. The sound of her body hitting the stone floor woke the Firebird, who lifted its golden head and looked at her. It looked at her like nothing in her life had ever looked at her—it looked at all of her, every inch of her heart, every shadow that had ever darkened her soul, every wrong thing she’d ever said or done or felt. It looked at her and bowed its head.

  “Welcome, Beauty,” it sang.

  Yeva was crying, and not from grief or even joy, but simply because she was too full to contain herself. “I have been looking for you,” she said.

  “I know.” The Firebird unwrapped its wings and stretched them, and Yeva saw they were like a falcon’s wings, wide and broad and made for soaring, and their tips brushed each end of the cave though Yeva could have lain down across it many times over.

  “I’ve been looking for you my whole life.” But even as Yeva said it, something tiny and quiet stirred deep inside her. Something that, for the first time since she’d picked up the feather in the tower room of the castle, shook her certainty.

  “Everyone is,” the Firebird said. “But most stop searching. Most tell themselves they have found me in their mates, in their children, in their fields and in their gods.”

  Yeva’s eyes blurred. “The fox,” she whispered, trying to sort out memory from dreams, reality from story. “The fox told me you were always north of m
e, that you’d always be north of me.”

  “The fox has never found me,” the Firebird said. “And he is jealous.”

  “What are you?” Yeva felt the Firebird’s song in that hollow space in her heart, the space that had always known she wanted more than what her mundane life could offer her. “Desire?”

  The Firebird spread its wings again, throwing back its head and showing its fiery, breathtaking plumage in a display that dazzled Yeva’s half-blinded eyes. “I am the goal. The reward at the end of the quest. The end of the story.”

  Yeva put her hand into her pocket and touched the feather. Only then did she see that one of the Firebird’s tail feathers was missing, and she started. “Eoven,” she breathed, struggling to remember. “I’m here for Eoven.”

  “Who is Eoven?” the Firebird asked.

  “I . . .” Yeva stared, bewitched, into the Firebird’s knowing eyes. “I don’t remember.”

  “I am what you seek,” the Firebird said. “I am the conclusion of your journey. All you’ve ever wanted. Magic. The music of the forest. Forever. You are home, Beauty.”

  Yeva’s eyes had begun to close, the Firebird’s sweet voice warming parts of her she’d long ago forgotten. But her name, the word beauty, it rang in her thoughts and her eyes flew open. For a moment she saw not the Firebird, nor its crystal cave or the sky ribbons dancing at the edges of her vision, but a pair of gold eyes, and the rumble of a warm voice, and the feel of a blue velvet divan beneath her cheek.

  She saw her Beast, and felt the lonely weight of his gaze, and heard the soft sound of his paws by her door, and smelled spices and wind and, just a little, the smell of wet dog—she remembered.

  “You are not real,” Yeva said, gasping. “It’s as Lamya said. Nothing is in itself only one thing. You can’t be all I’ve ever wanted because I’ve never wanted only one thing.”

  The Firebird’s eyes narrowed, then softened. They held such acceptance, such knowledge of her. “I am everything,” it said.

  Yeva forced her hands to tighten, intending to drive her own fingernails into her palms to jolt herself from the Firebird’s spell. Instead she found one of her hands was full, and when she looked down she remembered she was still holding her father’s bow.

  “You’re right,” Yeva whispered. “You are everything I want. Because you are what will save my Beast. You are the third test.”

  She raised the bow and fitted the arrow to the string and drew in one motion, so practiced and swift from her months of training with the Beast that it happened all in the quiet between one heartbeat and the next. The Firebird’s chest swelled, its wings still outstretched as if daring her to shoot, as if certain she could not.

  Yeva’s fingers trembled.

  I will call you Beauty, said the Beast. For that is what you are.

  She loosened her fingers and let the arrow fly.

  BEAST

  fire

  snow

  beauty

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE FIREBIRD’S LIGHT WENT out the instant the arrow would have struck it, and Yeva found herself in darkness so complete and solid that she cried out, dropping to the ground so she’d have something to touch, something to tell her she was alive and real. She groped around ahead of her, expecting to touch blood and feathers and the still-warm carcass of the creature, but all she found was a single feather it had left behind, like the one the Beast had left for her to find.

  It glimmered at the touch of her fingers, just enough for her to make out the outlines of the cave. The ice curtain had sealed her in, and this time when she approached it, it did not part. It was as solid and as cold as stone. Her arrow had struck the far wall and sunk halfway up its haft into the rock. She couldn’t pull it free, and without the sharp edge of the arrowhead, she had nothing with which to chip at the ice sealing the cave’s entrance.

  Fear surged through her like a winter wind, and like a winter wind, it left her teeth chattering. She was cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life, as though she’d been exposed for weeks but was only noticing it now. Her stomach ached with hunger, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She felt dizzy, weak, lost in the dark.

  I’m alone, she thought. Her father had taught her that she should never try to comfort herself by lying about her situation. No heat, no food, and no way out. She wedged herself in between ice and stone, trying to trap what little body heat she had left, instincts still fighting for survival despite what her senses told her: that she would die here in this cave of ice and darkness. Yeva couldn’t help but cry, and it was only some time later, when they began to freeze against her cheeks, that her tears ceased.

  If only the Beast were here, Yeva thought, her numb heart warming just enough to ache. I would tell him I don’t care that he’s the Beast. I would tell him the Firebird doesn’t matter, that he doesn’t need to be cured. I would tell him my choice, that I would stay with him forever, and teach him how to find Eoven again, and keep him safe for as long as I live.

  She’d been so sure she was destined to save him that she’d left him to fade away.

  The only warmth she could feel came from the feather clutched in her hands, and she lifted it up so she could see its pale light. A lick of flame danced along its edge and then whispered out, too tiny to generate any lasting heat, but Yeva could not stop staring at the afterimages before her eyes. The cave was empty, but with a jolt, Yeva remembered the bow in her hands and the book nestled against her breast.

  She had fire. She had wood. And she had kindling.

  Her hands began to work before her thoughts had caught up, before she could think twice, before she could stop herself. Who was she without stories, without the promise of the wood she hunted in and the gift her father had given her, to see the quiet, hidden tales the forest held? What was she without the restless wanting that drove her?

  She ripped the pages from the book of fairy tales without hesitation, then tore them into smaller pieces. She took her father’s bow and wedged one end into a fissure in the stone wall, and then heaved with all her might, crying again even before the great splintering crack rent the silence of the cave.

  She set the torn fairy tales and the pieces of her father’s bow at the foot of the ice wall, and then picked up the Firebird’s feather. She held it in her cupped palms, feeling its light bathe her face one more time. Then she settled it down in the nest of kindling and wood, and let it burn.

  Yeva dozed, huddled close to the tiny fire, waking now and then to blow on a failing coal here or tuck a splinter of her father’s bow back into the flames there. The fire’s heat was melting the ice, but slowly, far too slowly. Yeva wiped at the trickles of frigid water with the edge of her cloak so the moisture wouldn’t swamp the fire, and rocked, and waited, and hoped.

  She could not be sure how much time had passed when a change woke her with an urgent sense of dread. She automatically leaned for the fire to check it, and found it had dwindled to little more than a few faint coals, coated with thick white ash. She grabbed for the book of stories but all its pages were gone now, and the fire was too low and cold to burn the leather binding.

  Yeva staggered to her feet and slammed her shoulder into the ice curtain with all her weight behind it, straining to hear some groan or crack or sign that her fire had thinned the door of her prison even a little—but even her imagination heard nothing. Stifling a sob of panic, she began ripping strips from the bottom of her cloak, finding the driest sections to add to the fire.

  No, her thoughts screamed, as she tried again to budge the ice, throwing every ounce of strength she had left against the unyielding wall until her body ached with bruises. The story doesn’t end this way.

  But if her experience with the Firebird had taught her anything, it was that even here, at the edge of the world, life wasn’t a story. If she died here no one would tell about it. She’d be one more soul lost to the wilderness, and the Beast would be left forever to run through the trees and hunt and feed wit
hout ever looking up, without ever seeing the dancing sky. Yeva slammed against the wall one more time and then stayed there, the side of her face against the wet, too-slowly-melting ice, its cold so shocking that it made her gasp.

  And then, with her ear against the ice, she heard a sound. At first she thought it was the ice settling, but when it came a second time, and more loudly, she recognized with a new jolt of terror the roar of a wild beast.

  The wall beneath her cheek shuddered, and Yeva lurched back. A chunk of ice fell from the other side of the wall, casting dim, pale-blue light into the cave. The creature roared again, and suddenly Yeva’s heart filled. She knew that voice, would know it anywhere, whether it was whispering her name or roaring in fury.

  “Beast!” she cried, renewing her efforts and slamming into the wall again—this time her efforts rewarded her with the faintest of splintering sounds. “I’m here!”

  There came a great screeching as the Beast raked his claws down the wall outside, then another shudder as his whole body weight came crashing in against the wall. Yeva staggered back, sense reasserting itself and reminding her that he outweighed her many times over, and that trying to help him break down the barrier would most likely end with her crushed under an avalanche of shattered ice.

  The growls and roars grew louder as the Beast carved away more and more of the wall. Beauty could see his shape behind the ice, silhouetted by the sun. It took only moments for the entire frozen curtain to fall in a shower of crystal fragments. The Beast burst into the cave in a brilliant glare of sun, blinding Yeva and making her throw up both arms to shield her eyes.

  “Beast,” she gasped, struggling for breath through her relief. “How did you find me? How did you know to look?”

  But when there was no reply, Yeva lowered her arms and squinted through the sudden glare and saw the hulking shape of the Beast circling, head low, each step meticulous and calculating. His lips were drawn back in a snarl, and when she met his red, red gaze she saw no hint of the man she’d come to save.