Hunted(32)

“I said again.” The Beast’s voice rose, and though there was no anger in it, Yeva could sense the quickening, the intensity of it. “Your aim today is worse.”

“I cannot,” Yeva said, dropping both bow and arrow into the well-trodden slurry of ice and snow at her feet. “My shoulders ache—I’ve had no rest, no time for my muscles to repair themselves.”

The Beast—sitting, as it always did, just far enough away that she could not lunge for it—rose up from its haunches and narrowed its red-gold eyes. “The need for rest is a human weakness.”

“And I’m human,” Yeva snapped, exhaustion robbing her of good sense. For the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care if she angered her captor. For the moment, she forgot about the cabin nestled at the fork of the river, her sisters and her friend, her dogs, the lives she had to protect. For this moment she could only think of the bone-deep ache in her body and the certainty that she could not aim even one more arrow.

“An illusion,” the Beast snarled. “You only imagine you need rest.”

“Is it an illusion that my arrows cannot strike their target today?” Yeva braced her feet against the ground, determined not to give in to their desire to buckle beneath her and send her sprawling in the slush. “Is it imagination that yesterday I missed the tree entirely and lost one of my arrows?”

The Beast was silent, continuing only to stare at Yeva with that unnerving, unblinking animal gaze. She stood her ground, willing herself not to shiver. Days, maybe weeks, had passed and she still could not reconcile the animal eyes with the fact that its fanged mouth formed speech, that its lips could purse and flatten and curl around words like a man’s.

Yeva drew her cloak around herself, stepping back from the bow. “You tell me I am training, but you do not tell me what I’m meant to be training for.”

“Because you do not need to know yet.”

Yeva clenched her jaw. “You insist I shoot at a dead tree, but unless it is some archery competition in some distant kingdom, this training is worthless. No target stands there, waiting to be shot at again and again.”

The Beast didn’t answer immediately, and if it were a man, Yeva would think him hesitant. But it only looked at her. Unblinking. Unmoved. Then, ponderously, it replied, “We have need of a hunter.”

Yeva’s skin prickled, and she suppressed the surge of anticipation threatening to show itself in her features. It was the first hint of an answer she’d ever received from the creature. “Why?”

“There is a certain quarry we require captured.” The Beast’s bass rumble of a voice was as unruffled as ever.

Yeva scanned the Beast’s face for some time before realizing she was searching for some hint of its thoughts in its expression—some human hint. But this was no human. She swallowed hard on the white-hot anger that had sustained her since she learned the identity of her captor. “Capture your quarry yourself. You lay traps as efficiently as any hunter.”

“We cannot.” The Beast’s face rippled for the space of a heartbeat. In the lupine features, the glint of teeth, the red-gold eyes—for the tiniest instant, Yeva recognized it. Frustration. Anger.

Helplessness.

“Why not?” Yeva whispered.

“Because we—” The Beast’s words halted as suddenly as if its lungs had no air. Its brows drew in, brows Yeva hadn’t noticed before. It shook its head, the movement traveling down the creature’s body like a shiver until it hunkered low, belly nearly resting in the snow.

Perhaps, if she had not spent so much time in the cell telling stories, bringing to the surface the tales she’d heard as a child, or if she had not spent these last weeks the captive of a creature that could only exist in such tales, Yeva would not have had the thought that came next: He cannot tell me, for he is under a spell.

In every fairy tale there were rules. Even the monsters could not break them.

And where, except in fairy tales, did there exist talking beasts?





BEAST


We thought hatred would make it easier. That if she continued to believe we were her father’s death, her fear and her fury would free us from our human side. We thought she would become no more than a tool, a weapon to be wielded, an arrow to be loosed from a bow.

We thought . . .

We thought too much.

Because while hatred is a fire only man feels, he does not hate the beast that comes in the night. Mankind fears it, fights it, drives it off, but he does not hate it. No one hates the bear, the wolf. They don’t hate the wind or the snow. They don’t hate death.

They hate each other.





NINE


YEVA HUDDLED IN THE corner of her cell, cloak drawn tightly about her as she sank into a half doze. The cold seeped from the stones into her body like poison, making her curl more against herself, despite the protests of her muscles. The strain of drawing her father’s heavy bow day after day was tearing at the joints in her shoulders, ripping at a knot of tension between her shoulder blades that re-formed tighter and tighter each night she spent in the cold.

She knew she ought to stand, ought to pace the room and stretch and remain as limber as she could. And at first, she had done so each night. But she couldn’t bring herself to move anymore. Perhaps if she tore a muscle so she could not draw the bow at all, the Beast would let her rest.