Hunted(49)
Yeva tried to scream, but all that came was a torrent of bubbles. The spell broken, her longing for the Firebird gone, Yeva’s body struggled for survival. Her lungs were burning even before she’d wasted air trying to scream, and she struggled to pull one of her arms free from the thing’s grip. When she’d hit the cold water her muscles had seized, and in her hand was still the knife she’d been using to chip at the ice. Yeva’s mind felt slow and sluggish, and every second they sank deeper made it harder to think.
She lifted her head and saw the distant glimmer of the pale winter sun, and with a wrenching effort that drove another flood of bubbles from her lungs, she tore her arm free of the dead thing’s grasp. She stabbed the knife down as hard as she could, driving it into the thing’s shoulder until it grated against bone. It howled, a cry as much of grief and despair as of pain, but its grip only tightened. Yeva stabbed again, her vision growing blurry, and again, and again—finally the knife crunched through the thing’s skull, and abruptly its arms fell away. Yeva tried to swim upward, her own body barely responding to her mind’s commands. When she looked down, all she saw was a ghostly pale form sinking slowly, quietly, into the black depths.
She clawed her way up, the glimmer of light above her seeming farther with every stroke—but eventually her arms remembered how to swim, and just as her lungs readied to breathe water if she could not find air, she broke the surface with a gurgling cry.
The pool itself was small, and though the ice was too thin for her to climb on top of it, she could make her way to shore, the ice shattering around her. She fell into the snow, dizzy and shivering, sobbing for air. The roaring in her ears began to fade, replaced by Doe-Eyes’s frenzied barking; Yeva opened ice-crusted eyelashes to find her dog dancing above and around her, nudging her from all sides. She couldn’t even feel it when Doe-Eyes began licking the water from her hands.
All she wanted was to lie there in the snow and breathe and stare at the sky, which was turning gray with clouds. Some distant part of her mind knew, though, that this was wrong. She must move, or die from the cold. With a moan, she rolled over onto her side and drew her knees in close to her body, then slipped her pack from her shoulders. Most of her supplies were wet, including her tinder for starting a fire, but she had no firewood or kindling anyway, and that wasn’t what she was after. She kept her sleeping-roll blanket at the bottom of the pack, and the pack’s leather and the layers of supplies had protected it somewhat. It was damp, but far drier than anything else.
She peeled off the sopping outer layers of her clothes, moving as quickly as her numb, shaking fingers would allow. Her shivering began to slow, but rather than making movement easier, it seemed harder and harder to move. She knew that was bad—that all of this was bad—that she would die of exposure. She wondered what would happen to her family, whether the Beast would kill them for her failure, or if they’d simply go on living in that cabin forever. She imagined Lena learning to hunt, then found herself laughing at the thought of her prim sister trying squeamishly to retrieve an arrow from a deer.
It was a sharp bark from Doe-Eyes in her ear that brought her back to herself, wrenching her thoughts from home with an effort. A surge of fear that she was losing her ability to think got her the rest of the way out of her cloak and clothes until she was only in her wool undershift—that she kept on, for even wet the wool would help her somewhat. Then she tried to call Doe-Eyes, her voice cracking and whispery thin. The dog tucked her body in close and Yeva wrapped herself around her, and the blanket around them both, and tried to think.
Her tinder was soaked but if she could make it to the forest perhaps the thicket she’d fallen into on her way to the clearing would have wood dry enough to ignite from sparks. If she could get her hands working she could shave curls from it with her knife. If she had a lantern she could warm some water to drink . . . she ought to ask her invisible friend to bring her one, to unlock her manacle, to let her out of the chilly cell and into the room with the blue divan, and the hearth. She curled more tightly around the warm body alongside hers and mumbled, “Asenka, your toes are so cold. . . .”
Doe-Eyes’s barking roused her and she groaned, “Hush, it isn’t dawn yet!” But there was light against her eyelids, and a shadow moving across them. She tried to open her eyes but her lids wouldn’t listen; she tried to lift a hand to pry them open but couldn’t tell if her arm was moving. “Where’s my arm—I need that to shoot. . . .”
“Hush,” said a voice in her ear, tense and deep. Not her father’s voice. But familiar somehow. Warm like velvet. “I will carry you on my back. But you must hold on or you will fall off.”
“I’m not a child,” Yeva protested. The voice ignored her, and she expected to feel a pair of arms lifting her. Instead something clamped onto her shoulder, a firm pressure, and dragged her back and halfway up onto a soft slope.
“Climb,” the voice ordered.
Yeva grabbed automatically, fingers closing around handfuls of fur. Her muscles seemed weak for some reason as she dragged herself upward, a task that should’ve been easy. The soft thing beneath her moved, staggering to the side and half knocking her upward. Then it rose, making her stomach lurch.
“Hold on.” This time the voice came from beneath her, rumbling against her chest and cheek like a house cat’s purr, or the stirring of distant thunder. The thing began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster until Yeva pressed her face in against the spicy fur so the wind would not sting her cheeks.