Hunted(25)

Why?





SIX


HER RIBS HEALED SLOWLY, in large part due to her inability to sit still. Yeva tested the confines of her cell, able to reach the hatch in the corner only by stretching as far as the chain would let her go. She could barely touch the edge of the door, fingertips grazing the iron bindings. When her meals arrived she never heard the sound of a lock turning. The chain kept her here—the door itself was unlocked. Which explained how it was that her ally could come and go.

Yeva asked questions of the darkness, hoping for the voice’s return. Though its tone had offered nothing of kindness or sympathy, the invisible ally had brought food, medicine, light. It didn’t speak again, but now and then Yeva’s requests were granted. She was given bandages for her wrist, which had gone raw and bloody within its manacle. The fuel in her lamp was replaced. The hinges on the door were oiled and no longer shrieked. And after one particularly cold and fitful stretch of sleep, she woke to find that a blanket had been deposited at her side.

But the voice never spoke.

She understood that if she wished her requests to be granted, she had to turn out her light and wait. The darkness then was so heavy, so stifling, she’d speak to fill the empty blackness.

Yeva had always preferred silence to the chatter of others, daydreaming of the forest quiet while the baronessa’s ladies laughed and gossiped. Her thoughts came to life in the stillness of the wood, nurtured by the air and the scent and the vividness of it. But as the days crept by in her cell, she discovered that she had never known silence—not true silence. In the forest the air was alive with smells of wood and wet, the sounds of her steps echoing in the vastness. Always there was the possibility of movement and life, a rabbit flashing out of a burrow or the briefest glimpse of a fox’s tail as it disappeared from sight.

The silence of her cell was small and stagnant. Heavy air pressed in on all sides, and any sounds she made were swallowed up by the weight of the earth overhead. She longed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was her own.

She took to speaking of anything and everything that came to mind, to fill the hungry silence. She described her featureless cell: the way the gray stone fitted together so seamlessly she could not see the mortar, the aching chill of the rock beneath her, the musical clatter of the tray, the frigid brush of her fingertips against the iron bindings on the door. She spoke of her lamp, gazing at its flame for hours, breathing in the faint burning scent and making it flicker with the breath of her words.

She imagined that the owner of that deep, rumbling voice was listening to her, and that when she spoke she was in some small way offering an exchange. His help, for her words.

When she ran out of things to describe she spoke instead of her family. Though she could not bring herself to remember her father, she talked about her sisters. She described Asenka’s twisted foot and explained how five minutes with her smile and her laugh made anyone forget her disability. She recalled Lena’s silly moodiness with a smile, though there was no one to see it. She even spoke of Albe and his clumsiness, and how his desire to please more than made up for his bumbling attempts to help.

“I left them,” she confessed to the shadows. “They begged me to stay, and I promised I’d return. I promised.” Her eyes burned. If only she had listened. She had not been able to help their father, and now . . . now it seemed likely she would never see any of them again. What is it you’re looking for out there? Asenka had asked her. Yeva’s throat closed.

Not this.

When she could no longer talk about her family without crying, her mind wandered to the stories her father used to tell her of the creatures that lived in the heart of the black wood. At first the stories were disjointed. It had been so long since she’d heard them, and the silence edging in on her was a distraction. Her cell was always cold, and the chill had weakened her, a gradual decay of strength that she had no way of preventing.

She told of the poor working boy who made the princess laugh and stole her heart, and of the girl who was polite enough to Father Winter to be rewarded with a chest of treasures. She told of Vasilisa the Beautiful, and how in one tale she bested her wicked stepsisters with Baba Yaga’s magic light; and in another, how she fooled a king who wanted to marry her into believing she was a boy by riding and hunting better than any man.

It was one of her favorite stories. Her voice had a tendency to go hoarse after she’d been speaking into the darkness for more than a few hours. She was half whispering by the time she neared the end of this last story, with her lamp turned low to conserve the oil. She sat leaning against the wall, eyes closed.

“And so finally the king commanded that the ‘young man’ take a bath with him,” she whispered. “But Vasilisa—” Her voice caught in her throat and turned into a cough, and she reached for the water skin to soothe it.

From the corridor beyond the door came a sound that she’d come to recognize: that lightest of scrapes signifying the step of bare feet or soft leather. Yeva froze, listening over the sound of her pounding heart. The invisible ally was outside.

The silence stretched until, so quietly Yeva felt it in the stones more than heard it, the voice said, “Go on.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Yeva’s mouth. She swallowed a mouthful of water and then whispered, “But Vasilisa was too quick for him. She changed and bathed and left before the king had finished taking off all his finery. She left a note for him, saying that for all his wealth and power he was not as quick or as smart as she, for she was not Vasili but Vasilisa, and he’d been fooled by a girl.”