Hunted(42)

“I am not your servant,” the Beast replied, glaring at her over his shoulder.

“No,” Yeva agreed. “But I have no knife, nothing with which to carve meat from these bones. I cannot simply rip off chunks with my teeth as you would do.”

The Beast was frowning still, but his aggravation turned to consternation. “If I give you a knife, you will try to kill me.”

Yeva’s stomach growled again, and she could not help but roll her eyes. Just now, killing the Beast was not foremost in her mind. “I won’t try to kill you when I’m hungry.”

The Beast stared at her. She stared back at him. Doe-Eyes looked between them, still ill at ease in the Beast’s presence and pressing close to her mistress. In the end, the Beast grumbled low in his throat and led Yeva outside, lugging the deer with him, dropping it in the snow some distance from the door. He vanished and then reappeared some time later with her pack, in which Yeva found everything she’d brought with her. Though the food stores were nearly gone now, and the willow bark too, the other medicines were there, and her wire for snares, and the fletching knife as well.

Dressing squirrel and rabbit was one thing—butchering the carcass of a deer was another. It was always her father who’d done this work when she was a child, and by the time she had its innards in a pile beside the carcass, she found she wasn’t hungry anymore after all. Her bloody hands shook, and she wiped at her brow with her sleeve to buy time. She would not show weakness in front of the Beast, who stood some distance apart, watching her carve up his offering.

Doe-Eyes, who’d been snatching up various organs and then hobbling away to gulp them down with one wary eye on the Beast, finished eating the deer’s liver and skipped back to press against Yeva. She paused before reaching to scratch at the dog’s ears, her eyes on her blood-coated hands.

The Beast gave a low rumble. “You are inefficient.”

“Yes, with you staring at me,” Yeva mumbled back, too worn out and drained by the task to worry about angering him.

“Return indoors,” the Beast ordered.

“I need to finish—”

“Return!” the Beast’s voice rose, and he drew himself up taller, looming so that Doe-Eyes wheezed an inaudible whine against Yeva’s arm.

Yeva fought the instinct to flee. “I have to eat!”

The Beast drew one deep breath, then two, and Yeva realized she had too. Patience, she thought. That’s what I’m reaching for with each breath—could he be doing the same?

Finally, the Beast dropped his head. “I will finish your task,” he said slowly. “That is what I meant.”

“Then say that. Don’t command me as if I were your property.”

The Beast growled low and dangerous. “You are mine.”

“You may have me captive,” Yeva said. “You may control when I can leave and what I eat and how long I’m allowed to live. But you don’t own me.” She paused, then added with irritation, “And don’t call me girl, like I have no name.”

The Beast’s tail flicked aside, twitching with anger. “You call me Beast.”

“That is what you are. Have you given me reason to call you anything else?”

The Beast hesitated, scowling across the blood-soaked snow at her. “I will call you Beauty then,” he said. “For that is what you are.”

Yeva remembered her stories, and her decision to call her invisible friend Ivan, and her thoughts could not reconcile that name with the monstrous visage a few paces away. Her father’s nickname for her sounded strange from this creature, this thing that had murdered him. And yet she could imagine him calling her nothing else. From someone else it would be flattery, but there was no falsehood in the Beast’s face. Yeva wouldn’t have been surprised if he were incapable of lying, if his animal nature kept him to the truth at all times.

The compliment caught her so off guard that her response came before she could stop it. “Thank you,” she mumbled, dropping the knife to wipe the blood from her hands against the snow.





BEAST


She calls you Beast, for that is what you are.

And Beauty.

The surprise is not the compliment, not the truth, that she is beautiful. The surprise is not that we wish to help her. The surprise is not even the electric warmth that rises at the sound of her voice, even when she is shouting.

The surprise is how much I long to hear her call me, just once more, Ivan.





THIRTEEN


FROM THEN ON THE Beast brought her meat that had been dressed and carved. She didn’t know how he managed such delicate work with only claws and teeth, because he never let her watch. Sometimes she killed the game herself, as he continued to take her into the wood to practice her skills. Other times, when her game was scarce, he’d go out on his own. He never failed to bring something home.

She cleared a space of dust and cobwebs in the vast kitchen, and cleaned out one of the four hearths so she could use the roasting spit. A few of the pots and pans she scrubbed clean, and a few plates and bowls as well. One of the sitting rooms she took as her own, and the Beast did not object when she began to sleep there instead of in his lair below. She imagined she was carving off a piece of the lifeless castle itself for her own use—or else bringing that tiny piece to life again. All around her was the dead, decaying carcass of whatever court had once existed here, and she was only living in a tiny corner of its shell.