Hunted(46)

“It is the same sound I heard,” the Beast said as he passed her, “when I first saw you.”





BEAST


We remember a time of such clarity. We were Beast, we ran with wolves and hunted prey, we lived on the wind and breathed the forest. We wanted nothing but to be, to run, to endure. Want didn’t exist.

And we remember another time, too, a time of longing and desire, where we existed as nothing but want . . . always the next unattainable thing. There was no joy in what we had, only in what might come.

And now these two selves, these two minds cursed to exist as one, every day grow more at odds. We return to our den to pace and end up railing against the darkness and the dirt—we lie before the fire in our room and itch at the confines of stone and mortar.

Only she frees both of us. She moves like beauty, she whispers to us of wind and forest—and she tells us stories, such stories that we wake in the night, dreaming dreams of a life long past. She reminds us of what we used to be.

She whispers to us of what we could be.





FOURTEEN


YEVA AND THE BEAST fell into a pattern as the weeks began to stretch. Though she still could not track him through the forest, even as she developed an ear for magic, she discovered other wonders living in the Beast’s valley. Trees that had faces, voices, peeping at her one instant and gone the next. Lights dancing in the distance, riding the storm winds, laughter calling her to join them. A fox that stopped and smiled at her. Birds that flocked together this way and that on the wind, painting shapes in the sky over the meadow: a face, a cresting wave, a herd of running deer.

She asked the Beast about them all. Sometimes he had names for them, and sometimes he did not. Sometimes, very, very rarely, she’d tell him of a creature even he had never seen. Yeva thought, privately, that those moments seemed to delight him. She asked him each time, at each new wonder, whether that was what she was meant to hunt. Each time he said no.

It was nearly two months after moving into the castle, by her charcoal tally on the kitchen wall, that she woke to find the Beast crouched in the corner of her room.

At first she didn’t see him, and rose half sleeping from her nest of blankets to add a few logs to the fire so the room would heat while she woke the rest of the way. Doe-Eyes never bothered to wake when she did, grumbling happily from her part of the pallet until the fire drew her out to bask in its heat. Yeva wrapped herself back up in her blankets and jiggled her knees up and down to bring the blood back to her toes, and waited for warmth.

The shadows in the far corner moved, and Yeva let out a shriek before she could stop herself. She’d seen dark, frightening things in the musical wood, and her dreams had been more troubled since she’d begun to see this other world. She reached for the fire poker before she could think.

The Beast stepped forward into the light and blinked his round eyes at her. “We did not mean to frighten you.”

Yeva gulped back her panic, her pounding heart starting to calm as she saw it was only the Beast and not some monster from her dreams.

It was only the Beast? When did that happen?

“You can’t come in here like that, while I’m asleep,” she gasped, lingering fears prompting irritation to sharpen her voice.

The Beast’s brows lowered. “Why not?”

“It’s not polite,” Yeva retorted, then took a breath as the ridiculousness of that sank in. What were manners to a Beast?

But as she struggled for a reason he would understand, the Beast merely tilted his head a fraction to the side. “Very well. Do you wish us to leave?”

Yeva’s voice sputtered to a halt. Yes, she thought. Or else let me kill you and end all of this. But aloud, she said only, “What do you want?”

“Polite,” the Beast echoed, murmuring the word as if to himself. But there was a wicked gleam in his eyes that made Yeva stop short, a realization snapping into her mind like a spark from chafing wool.

He was teasing her.

“It is time for training.”

Yeva’s head ached. She was weary, but more than that, she was frustrated. The more she understood of this world the Beast had shown her, the more she saw how little hope she had of avenging her father unless she could discover a weakness, some secret that would give her the upper hand.

But it was clear she would not find the Beast’s weakness by ordinary means, and she could not afford to keep growing complacent, to let the days slip by unmarked. She would track these creatures in the wood, the ones she’d learned to see with the Beast’s help. One of them had to know something, anything, that would help her kill the Beast. And she’d hunt down every last one of them if it came to that.

Quickly, she rose to her feet and crossed the room to splash frigid water from the basin onto her face. “Beast,” she said, earning herself a faint grunt in response. “I want to go into the forest on my own today.”

The Beast’s brows lifted, but he said nothing, clearly waiting for an explanation.

“I need to be able to navigate this world of yours alone, without your guidance.” Yeva could see the Beast shift his weight from one side to the other, see him start to reply. “And,” she added quickly, “whatever quarry I’m meant to find, we haven’t found it yet. Perhaps it won’t reveal itself to you. But maybe it will to me if I’m alone.”