Hunted(52)
Perhaps instead he’d once been an animal, cursed now with human traits. Either state must be a torment. For an animal to be haunted by human conscience, human guilt, human loneliness and fear and desire, would be maddening. And for a man to have his humanity stripped away by the endless onslaught of animal instincts and predatory impulses would be heartbreaking.
The mystery of the castle was the mystery of the Beast, and she roamed for days on end with Doe-Eyes’s toenails clicking on the cracked marble at their feet.
Though it was nowhere near as large as the castles depicted in illuminated stories and fantastical tapestries, Yeva kept discovering new rooms that she had somehow missed in her previous wanderings.
She found the remains of an old workroom, full of spools of faded thread and a loom and spinning wheel draped in cobwebs. A single gray thread still ran from the rim of the wheel through the spindle, but when Yeva reached out to run her finger along it, it crumbled into dust at her touch.
She found a vast suite of rooms clearly meant for the master and mistress of the castle, with a bed so large she could have lain down crosswise upon it and not reached the edges even if she stretched her fingertips over her head. The bathing chambers held a tub sunk into the marble floor and a chute in which to dump coals to keep the water warm for hours on end. Yeva had never had such luxury—even at the height of her father’s wealth, she and her sisters would draw straws as to who would get the tub first, and get the hot, fresh water all to herself. Yeva almost never drew the longest straw, and often shivered her way through her bath. Without servants to draw water, it would take her hours, if not days, to bring enough water to fill this tub—but the thought of it made Yeva smile. She’d been bathing with cloth and buckets of water, and the idea of submerging in warmth, of being entirely, utterly, totally clean . . . she sighed and moved on.
It was on her third or fourth survey of the castle that she stumbled across the library.
She stopped dead and lifted her lantern high to illuminate every shadowy corner. Yeva and her sisters all knew how to read, and though Asenka was certainly the most learned of the three sisters, Yeva had always loved to be read to. Most of her father’s books were scholarly texts, but one of them held some of the old stories he’d told her when she was a child, and though she could read the words herself, there was a magic to having them spoken aloud to her, so she could close her eyes and simply listen, and weave images in her mind as the stories unfurled.
Her father had owned over a dozen books, the most of anyone in the town including the baron himself. And as Yeva scanned the walls, each one lined with shelves and each one full of leather-bound books, at least a hundred books, more than she knew existed in one place, she felt her heart might simply burst.
The room itself was dank and cold. It was an interior room with no outside windows, but leaks in the ceiling had allowed moisture to drip onto the floor, and Yeva’s nose filled with the smell of rot and mildew. But even that couldn’t dim the flare of excitement as she hurried across the room to set the lantern down on one of the end tables in order to reach out and pull one of the books from the shelf.
Its spine crumbled at her touch, and she lifted the cover gingerly. It broke apart in her hands, and the page beneath was so stained with rot that she could not make out any of the text. She set it aside and reached for another, and another—but each one had been so tainted with age and damp as to be unreadable. Yeva was so unprepared for the swell of anguish at the thought of the knowledge lost in this room that she sat down hard on the floor, gasping for air. Doe-Eyes pressed in against her—though she didn’t know why, she knew her mistress was upset, and gave her ear a tentative lick.
“You are unhappy.” The somber voice came from behind her, but Yeva had grown so accustomed to the Beast’s abrupt appearances that she felt only a flicker of surprise.
She turned to see him filling the doorway, a large shadow with gleaming eyes. She wiped at her face and cleared her throat. “I’d hoped to be able to read these,” she said quietly. “I used to love hearing my father—” Her voice stuck, and as she gazed back at the Beast, a dull flicker of that angry despair rose up. She’d never hear her father read to her again.
The Beast let the silence stretch, the only sound the gentle scrape of his paw on the stone as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Come,” he said, and without waiting for her to answer, turned and vanished from the doorway.
Yeva considered ignoring the order out of spite, but she’d begun to sense differences in the Beast’s voice. Sometimes his orders were heavy and sharp and designed to make her feel small and helpless. But at other times, like this one, there was a plea evident in the tone, and though he never said “please” or “will you” or “might I suggest,” there was nonetheless room in his voice for her to refuse.
So she rose to her feet, one hand on Doe-Eyes’s back to steady herself, and followed the Beast out into the corridor.
He led her clear to the other side of the castle, walking in silence. Yeva’s lantern didn’t cast its light far enough to illuminate his path, but the darkness didn’t seem to bother him. He never put a foot wrong or hesitated or clipped a wall.
He padded into the master suite of chambers, which had no other exit as far as Yeva was aware. But instead of coming to a halt, he crossed toward one of the tapestries. An instant before he reached for it, Yeva saw that it was brighter and cleaner than the others, having collected less dust—and when the Beast lifted it aside, she realized why. It concealed a thick ironbound door that swung soundlessly inward at the Beast’s paw.