Hunted(26)

Again there was silence, and then a melancholy sigh from beyond the door.

Yeva swallowed, crawling forward until she was as close to the door as her chain would allow. “Will you not help me escape?” she pleaded, voice cracking again into a whisper. “I don’t even know where I am, or who has captured me, or for what purpose.”

She heard him shifting his weight on the other side of the door. “I cannot.”

“Why risk helping me then?”

Silence. Then: “Why has no one come for you?”

“For me?”

“To rescue you. A brother or a mate. There is a trail to find you if they look.”

Yeva swallowed. “I don’t think they know I’m caught. They believe I’m looking for my father.” Her throat tightened at the mention of him.

“That is not how it should be.” The hint of a growl was back in his voice, the sound of barely controlled anger. “Someone should have come.”

Yeva stretched her hand toward the door, her fingertips touching the iron. “No one will come for me. You are all I have. Please, help me?”

There was no answer but the sound of footsteps fading down the corridor again.

The next time Yeva woke from her troubled dreams, she found by her head a plate full of tubers, roasted in their skins with oil and salt. They were still hot, steaming gently in the lantern light.

Her lungs and throat worsened over the next few days until speaking prompted a rattling cough that forced her to brace herself against the stone wall. The unrelenting chill of her cell had settled into her bones, and not even the blanket was enough to shield her from it. Her ally provided her with more of the willow bark from her supplies, but before long the store of medicine gave out, and no more bark turned up on her tray.

She knew she was showing signs of fever, but there was little she could do. She stopped telling stories, for they required more energy than she had, and she could not speak without coughing. Her head throbbed when she put it down to sleep, and ached when she sat up again.

“I am sick,” she whispered, stubbornly sticking to her father’s advice to be honest with herself about her predicament. It had been several days since she’d heard from the voice, and only the fact that food still appeared in her cell told her he was even there anymore. She strained to hear the sound of his footsteps in the corridor beyond, but heard only silence punctuated by the throbbing of her head.

She sipped at the water skin until the rawness of her throat triggered more coughing, and then put her head down. The lamp burned at her eyes even closed, so she put out the light, bathing her eyelids in blessed darkness. Yeva rolled onto her back, lungs rattling with the effort of breathing.

“Can you walk?”

She had not heard the door open. Since her ally had oiled the hinges the door was quieter, but not silent; it was the labored sound of her own breathing that had masked it. Her eyes flew open, struggling to peer through the gloom. She could see nothing in the complete blackness, but she could sense him there nonetheless, no more than a few feet away.

“I think so,” she whispered.

Something soft fell against her ribs where she lay. “Put this on.” The voice held no emotion, though it was far from flat—full of richness and depth. There was no disobeying it.

Yeva sat up with difficulty, reaching for the object to discover that it was a strip of cloth, finer than any she’d felt in months. Silk, folded many times over. Her fingers closed around it.

“Over your eyes,” the voice clarified, impatience emerging in the barest hint of a snarl.

She hurried to comply, fingers shaking. Was he going to take her out of the cell? Was the blindfold so that she could not see him, and implicate him later if she were to be caught again?

The manacle around her wrist clanked open, and for the first time in weeks Yeva was able to press her naked arm against her body without the chafe of iron. She felt like collapsing with relief. But the voice commanded her to rise, and she did so by holding on to the wall and standing on quavering legs. How had she lost so much strength so quickly? And after she’d fought so hard to win it back again. Behind the blindfold she shut her eyes more tightly.

“Follow me,” ordered the voice, before the sound of his footsteps whispered against the stone.

“Wait.” Yeva turned her head this way and that in the doubled darkness of cell and blindfold. “How can I follow if I cannot see?”

“Can you not track by sound and smell?” There was a brief silence, and then his footsteps again. “Put your hand against my shoulder and I will lead you.”

Yeva stretched out a trembling hand until her fingertips found fur. What she wouldn’t give for her rich fur cloak, now gracing the shoulders of an opportunistic buyer’s wife. She dug her cold fingers deep into her invisible ally’s coat and moved away from the wall.

He led her out of the cell and turned left, down what Yeva guessed was a corridor. They turned again, and again, until she lost all sense of direction. She tried to count their steps, but her head spun from fever and cold, and she gave up tracking their route.

From fever and cold—and from the scent. She smelled something musky and wild, something familiar that she could not place. His fur coat, she thought, but as soon as she thought it she knew it was not true. This was no dead pelt. Perhaps my captor owns dogs. But that could not explain it either, for Yeva knew the smell of dogs well enough to know this was not the same. The hairs rose along her arms, and she was grateful for the solid warmth under her hand, the slow movement of his body beneath his coat.