Hunted(38)

The only light inside came from a row of grime-coated windows high above, centuries of cobwebs and dust turning the pale winter sunlight the color of dusk. The Beast kept moving without pause, able to see in the dark with those animal eyes, but Yeva stumbled when her feet encountered a broken stone in the floor. She gasped and nearly dropped Doe-Eyes, who yelped as Yeva’s grip shifted and she jostled the injured leg.

Yeva heard the Beast stop, no more than a change in the way the air moved. She couldn’t see him, only a shift in the shadows ahead. “Wait here,” he said, and before Yeva could answer, he was gone.

Yeva dropped to her knees on the cold stone floor, uncertain what the Beast meant her to wait for, but grateful for the rest. Doe-Eyes settled beside her and laid her head in her lap, and though it was too dark, Yeva saw in her mind the look the dog was giving her: eyes rolled up, seeking Yeva’s face, tail thumping in the dust. She stroked Doe-Eyes’s ears, and stared up toward the thin gray light trickling down from the windows high above.

The castle was not large—or rather, it was far larger than any building Yeva had ever seen, including the baron’s estate, but it was far smaller than the castles Yeva had seen depicted in paintings and tapestries. The castles of old stories were vast and sprawling, with fantastical turrets and buttresses that stretched toward the sky. This one was more compact, lacking the ornamentation and fancy of the ones in pictures. This was the sort of castle that could have been defended in a siege, she thought.

The Beast was gone so long that Yeva considered lying down right there on the stones to sleep. But just as she started to lean over, the shadows ahead of her moved abruptly. A flame sprang to life—a lantern, unshielded. Yeva could not quite see how the Beast managed it without fingers, and yet there he stood, sitting on his haunches, the lantern hanging from one massive paw.

“Here,” he said, blank-faced.

Yeva pulled herself up, getting to her feet with some difficulty, as her abused muscles had stiffened. She reached out for the lantern, willing her arm to steady despite its desire to tremble, so close to the Beast’s claws.

The Beast turned again without speaking, and led Yeva across what must have once been a grand foyer. The lantern only cast enough light for Yeva to see the floor beneath her feet and the barest hint of the room around her, but she spied a great stone staircase off to the right, so wide she could have lain down across each step many times over. She got the impression of vast tapestries against the wall, and she veered off in that direction a little, keeping one eye on the Beast as she lifted the lantern higher.

She saw only faded cloth and dust, too old and too dirty to reveal any images underneath, and a twinge of disappointment took the place of her curiosity.

“This way,” said the Beast, voice quickening in that way it did when he was annoyed.

Yeva saw that he was standing before a smaller door that stood ajar, opening onto a narrow staircase leading down. Yeva knew what lay in the dark under-places of castles. She drew back, and Doe-Eyes, hobbling at her side, dropped to her haunches.

The Beast halted when she did, and Yeva saw the gleam of his eyes catching the lamplight.

“Don’t make me go back to that cell,” Yeva blurted, before she had even fully resolved to speak. “You bring me out, you make me hunt for you, but you keep me locked away where I cannot see the sky, cannot tell what weather has come and gone in the night—how can I know how old a set of tracks is if I don’t know when the last snow fell, or whether the wind has been strong enough to stir snow from the tree branches? How can I learn the forest well enough to track its creatures if I never know where I am, or where I’m going?”

The words came out in a rush, her voice rising with the strength of her plea. She could not live out the rest of this existence, however long it took before the Beast was done with her, in a locked room of stone.

“I’ll die in there—the part of me that hunts will die, anyway—and I’ll be useless to you. And Doe-Eyes—she wasn’t built for cold. Her leg will ache in there, with no warmth, and she’ll never heal properly if I can’t see her to treat her and make her well. I—”

“The dungeons,” said the Beast calmly, interrupting her, “are through the door on the other side of the hall.”

The rest of Yeva’s breath fell out in a stuttering gasp, punctuated by the wavering light of the lamp dangling from her hand.

“My home,” the Beast went on, “when I choose to live there, is down here.”

Yeva swallowed. Here, where the Beast had been leading her. She shifted her weight, her tired muscles trembling and making the flame dance and shiver. “All right, then.”

The narrow stairway curled around and around, and as they descended farther into the depths beneath the castle, the air grew colder and heavier. Yeva began to shiver in earnest—not from exhaustion or fear, but from a cold more penetrating than the bitter wind outside. This cold crept in from everywhere, chilling all of her, even her bones, despite her cloak and thick wool undergarments. Doe-Eyes managed the stairs with great difficulty, but it was too narrow for Yeva to carry her, and even if she could, she needed her hands to keep from slipping. The steps were worn low in their centers, bowing inward by centuries of feet carving smooth hollows in the stone that threatened to send Yeva’s boots sliding.

The staircase ended in a narrow hallway with doors on either side. Yeva guessed that this area must have once housed the castle’s servants, and she wondered again how the Beast came to live here; whether the castle was in ruins when he found it, or whether—and this made her shiver all the more—he was the reason the castle had been abandoned.