Hunted(40)

It made his death murder.

A rabid animal, a man-eater, deserves nothing more than a swift death to spare anyone else the fate her father had suffered. But a murderer?

That deserved a kind of vengeance that turned Yeva’s heart to ice.

Behind her closed eyes, images played like light through colored glass. Fragmented, flashing so quickly from one to the other that her thoughts became as scattered as the light itself. The Beast’s snarling maw, inches from her. The calm with which he spoke of her family’s torture and death if she betrayed him. The anguish in his eyes when the blindfold fell away and she saw his face. The swath of trampled snow carving a path for her to carry her wounded dog with greater ease.

At some point the still images became moving scenes of things remembered and things imagined, and soon the scenes became dreams, and Yeva slept.

Yeva was awakened the next morning by Doe-Eyes’s urgent whining and a cold nose digging into the crook of her elbow. Though she could not tell in the windowless room whether it was morning, she felt like she’d been asleep for days. But as she rubbed at her eyes, she saw that her bow was missing, and her quiver of arrows. He’d taken her weapons. Even the fletching knife that had lain on the floor ever since she’d stabbed him was gone, leaving only a spatter of old blood where it had been.

Doe-Eyes whined again and Yeva slipped off the divan and into a crouch, assuming she’d see her favoring the injured leg. Instead Doe-Eyes gave an awkward, urgent sideways hobble, which, after a moment of confusion, Yeva recognized with a burst of clarity.

“You’ll have to hold on,” Yeva told the dog, thinking with dread of the long flight of stairs required to reach the outdoors. “And promise not to wet my tunic if I carry you, because I only have the one.”

The Beast had not forbidden her to leave the room, only to flee the castle entirely, but her hand trembled anyway as she reached for the latch. It gave under her touch, and the door swung outward. Doe-Eyes hobbled past her, galloping in a stiff-legged, slipping way up the staircase ahead of Yeva. At least she would not have to try to carry her and the lantern.

Yeva felt as wobbly as her dog as she followed in Doe-Eyes’s wake. She found that the staircase was not as long as she’d remembered from the day before, that exhaustion had stretched the distance out in her memory. Doe-Eyes remembered the way, and as soon as Yeva opened the door at the top of the staircase, Doe-Eyes scrambled forth, making for the massive front doors.

They still stood open, and a faint spray of snow blown in by the wind glistened in the sunlight cast upon the floor. She had not noticed yesterday that the floor was a polished marble, smooth except for the places where the stone had cracked after centuries of the castle settling and shifting. Doe-Eyes bolted toward the sunlight, and Yeva trailed after her.

The clouds had cleared in the night, and the glare of the sun on the snow was so blinding Yeva had to stand just inside the doors, holding her arm across her eyes to shade them and squint to track her dog’s progress. Doe-Eyes went only a few paces down the outer wall of the castle before dropping into a crouch to relieve herself.

Yeva turned her face toward the brilliant morning. The sun was only a few handspans above the far mountains, but it was still bright enough reflected on the snow to make her eyes water and nose itch with the urge to sneeze. She wiped at her eyes and scanned the valley, tracking the river from where it passed under the bridge before her, on toward where it vanished in the trees to the west.

There was no sign of the Beast. No new tracks led from the door except those Doe-Eyes had just made, and though it was difficult to tell new tracks from old, Yeva didn’t think any of the churned frozen slush leading down to the cave was fresh. So where had the Beast spent the night?

Somewhere in the castle, Yeva knew, she’d find whatever she needed to survive. Kitchens, latrines, perhaps even some room not too badly decayed for her to sleep in. The Beast might prefer to live deep underground, but Yeva could not bear the thought of spending one more night with the weight of all that stone over her head. And if nothing else, it would be impractical to bring Doe-Eyes up and down those stairs every time she needed to go out.

Yeva decided to explore. A part of her shrank from the idea, uncertain what horrors she might uncover in a castle prowled by a cursed Beast. But the rest of her thrilled to the thought, curiosity settling in and overwhelming her fear.

Because there was another reason to search the corners of this crumbling, ancient castle. Somewhere, somehow, she would find the key to destroying this Beast. He was too fast and too strong for axes or bows, but she would find a way. She would discover the secret to killing him.

Now that her urgency had eased, Doe-Eyes was moving much more stiffly on her wounded leg. But Yeva could not order the dog to stay put. Whenever she tried, Doe-Eyes would drop down onto her haunches, tail wagging furiously—and then, as soon as Yeva turned her back to leave the great foyer, she’d hear Doe-Eyes’s toenails click-clicking against the marble and then feel her hot breath on the backs of her calves.

“Fine,” Yeva told her finally, in fond exasperation. “You can come along. But don’t complain to me when your leg hurts tonight.”

Doe-Eyes only grinned at her, hobbling along, lolling tongue jouncing with every step. In truth, Yeva was glad for the company.

She kept her explorations to the ground floor for Doe-Eyes’s sake. She found room after room of faded tapestries and grand marble floors. One room held piles of rusted, ancient armor scattered at regular intervals—a display room, a decorative armory. Another room held a dining table so long Yeva could not have thrown a butter dish from one end to the other. Some of the chairs were missing—others were broken into pieces, or rent apart, their cushions spilling stuffing like entrails onto the floor.