Hunted(10)

Yeva’s father remained in the doorway, unmoving, watching his family get to work. When Yeva turned toward him he inhaled sharply through his nose, passing his hand over his face. “My girls,” he said hoarsely, pressing his lips together. After a silence he shook himself and cocked his head toward Yeva with a smile. “I will go excavate the tea.” And he left to begin bringing things in from the wagon.

Over the next few days the cabin slowly became habitable. Albe was put to work felling a few nearby trees and hewing rough timber to repair the worst holes and shore up the loft space to make it safe. There was one bedroom at the back of the house and two pallets in the loft. Tvertko and Albe took the beds in the loft, for Asenka could not manage the ladder—she and Lena took the bed at the back of the house, the one that had been their father’s when he still used this as a hunting cabin.

Yeva herself made a pallet by the hearth. In the evenings it was warm from the day’s fire, and as night grew thicker, the dogs curled up on either side, and she was as cozy as any in the house. Her father protested the arrangement, and her sisters too, but when Lena offered to take it in turns with her sleeping on the floor, Yeva turned her down.

“They are my dogs,” she pointed out with a smile, “and you’ll only complain in the mornings of their smell.” Yeva was usually the first in the family to wake anyway, and so it became her habit to stir the fire at dawn so that the water was just beginning to boil for tea when Albe came down the ladder rubbing his eyes.

Yeva’s father began making forays into the surrounding forest, learning the woods again. He’d taught Yeva that the key to being a good hunter was not to track a creature through the forest but to know the forest so well it was like tracking your prey through your own home. He rarely came back with much those early days, but he made imminent plans for trips deeper into the woods.

Yeva begged him to let her come along.

“You’re not a child anymore,” said her father with a sigh. “When I’ve paid my debts we’ll move back to town. By that time, I fear, you’ll have gone so wild that the confines of civilization will break your heart.”

“Please,” was all Yeva could think of to say. She had no argument against it—even years after the last time they had been hunting together, she still longed for the dark, cold cathedral of the wood.

He shook his head. “I won’t be persuaded on this, Yeva.” She still flinched to hear the use of her proper name from her father. “Besides, if you come with me, Doe-Eyes will try to follow, and you know she can’t weather this cold.”

And so he left her behind, traveling deeper and deeper into the forest each time with Pelei at his side. Sometimes he was gone two or three days, leaving Yeva and her sisters, and Albe, alone in the house. Yeva kept to her bed by the fireplace. Doe-Eyes would have whined and cried all night, unable to climb the ladder to the loft, had Yeva taken over her father’s room in his absence.

It was during one of her father’s excursions that they received their first visitor to the cabin, on an afternoon full of pale, cold sunlight. Yeva and Lena were blocking up the gaps in the timbers of the floor and the walls with clay, while Asenka sat by the hearth, mending one of their father’s shirts. Doe-Eyes was executing a circuit around the house, as she did every hour or so, alert for Pelei’s return. But instead of the perk of her ears and frantic lash of her tail that heralded his arrival, she went rigid, nose pointed toward the door and tail unmoving.

Yeva paused, her eyes on the dog. “Albe, is someone outside?”

The servant’s head peeked out from the edge of the loft, where he was tidying. “I don’t hear anyone, miss.”

Yeva put a hand on Doe-Eyes’s shoulder and found the muscles there solid as rock. “Could you please check?”

Albe slid down the ladder to land with a solid thunk on the floor. He opened the door a crack, peering out across the gleaming snow. “There is someone coming, miss,” he said, surprised.

Lena dropped her bowl of mud, sloshing some of it on the floor. “Radak,” she whispered, glancing first at Yeva and then over at Asenka, who had stopped mending and was staring back at her sister. “It has to be. Oh, what if he’s come to break our engagement?”

“He hasn’t,” said Yeva firmly. “He wouldn’t. And if that was his intention, he would hardly travel three days for it, he would just never come at all.”

“It isn’t your young man, miss,” said Albe. Yeva regretted having spoken—now each day that Radak didn’t come, Lena would be more convinced he never would.

Albe stepped into the gap of the door, straightening his shoulders. “Welcome, sir. May I help you?” He spoke to someone Yeva couldn’t see, his form silhouetted by the blinding light off the snow behind him.

“Is this Tvertko’s new house?” asked the visitor. “I’ve come to see him—and his daughter.”

Albe stepped back, allowing the man inside. As soon as the door closed behind him and shut out the daylight, his features became clear. It was a young man, perhaps five or six years Yeva’s senior, with dark hair and an easy smile. He had friendly hazel eyes that cast over the room, going first to Asenka at the fireplace and then to Lena by the wall, and then to Yeva. And there his eyes stayed. There was a gasp from the hearth, and Yeva turned to see that Asenka had gone white, staring at the man in the doorway.