Hunted(6)

“Go, Yeva.” His voice was no louder than it had been, but so firm that it brooked no opposition.

Her sisters were on their feet, Lena clinging to Asenka as much as the other way around. Yeva leaned down to lay a hand on each of the dogs, murmuring to them to go upstairs. Sensing her urgency, they obeyed, slinking up the stairs with their tails low. As Lena guided Asenka to the first step, Yeva ducked into the kitchen.

She found all four of the servants there, wide-eyed and midgossip. Albe was still in disarray from having opened the door to the storm, his hair standing up roughly in every direction.

“Tea,” said Yeva. “For my father and his guest.” She was not usually so abrupt, but something cold had seized her belly and she couldn’t find it in her to soften the order. Pechta merely nodded, forgetting to curtsy, and hurried to the fireplace and the kettle.

Yeva took the long way back around to the stairs, passing through the hallway instead of the living room where her father still sat, listening to his visitor. Halfway up she paused; some acoustical anomaly in the building of the house conspired to throw their voices so clearly she could hear what they were saying.

“. . . and every man of them dead,” the visitor was saying, his voice rough with exhaustion. “Barbarian swords in their guts, heads piled in the wagons and burned. All the goods stolen or destroyed.”

“No one was left alive?” Her father’s voice was full of quiet grief. Yeva could imagine his head bowed, eyes closed as he listened. “Not even the boys?”

“No one,” repeated the visitor. “Are you hearing me, Tvertko? It’s all gone. You’re ruined.”

Ruined. Yeva’s ears rang with the word in the ensuing silence.

“Yeva!” a voice hissed. Yeva blinked, finding her eyes watering in the stillness, and looked up. Lena was at the top of the stairs, beckoning to her. “Come.”

Yeva joined her sisters, not wishing to hear any more than she already had. They all piled into Asenka’s bed, the three of them and the dogs too, and for once Lena didn’t push them away. Doe-Eyes lay with her head trembling in Yeva’s lap, keeping as still as possible in the hope that no one would notice her and make her leave. Pelei kept licking and licking at the hem of Yeva’s skirt, scenting the nervousness in the air and trying to make sense of it.

They waited, none of them talking, although Asenka moved now and then to shift her weight and ease her twisted foot. It wasn’t until they heard the front door open again, a brief gust of air howling through the house and tossing their hair back, that Yeva lifted her head. The door slammed again, leaving them in utter silence.

Lena spoke first. “Should we—?”

Yeva drew in a breath, trying to still the shaking in her legs as she slipped out from underneath Doe-Eyes’s head. “I’ll go.” Both of her sisters relaxed a fraction—they had been waiting for her to offer. She was their father’s favorite, though it was no source of angst or friction among them. It was part of her family duty to be her father’s daughter.

She told the dogs to stay, although Doe-Eyes scrambled off the bed and followed her as far as the doorway of the room. Bare feet tingling against the chill of the floorboards, Yeva made her way back down the stairs.

She found her father still sitting in his chair, though he was leaning forward, feet braced against the ground. He looked somehow smaller, elbows propped on his knees, forehead resting on his balled fists. The firelight granted false color to what she could see of his pale face, the lines etched there throwing ghastly shadows. Yeva had never realized that her father’s face was wrinkled.

Yeva swallowed and crept forward. Her father gave no sign that he was aware of her presence, but when she reached out and touched his shoulder with the tips of her fingers, he didn’t jump or cry out.

He merely sighed, the breath leaving his body in a low groan. “Oh, Beauty,” he said, without lifting his head. He raised one of his hands to grasp at hers, fingers wrapping around her hand with the strength of a drowning man. Saying nothing else, he only sat there clasping her hand against his shoulder, head pressed against his fist.

“Oh, Beauty.”





BEAST


We are uncertain how many years it has been, or how many centuries. To half of us the passage of time is tiny and measured, and with no measuring devices it is impossible to track. To the other it is infinite, immeasurable, a stream in which all things drown in the end. We are at odds because of this and so many things, and when the sun fades and the dark returns we mark it only as a change in the light.

The storm that comes tonight is not the change we felt coming. But in the howl of the night wind and the blinding violet of the snow, there is nothing else to be sensed. And so we retreat, to pace inside our den, to remember sleep, to wait for another change in the light.





TWO


YEVA’S FATHER ASKED FOR the night to think of a plan, so Yeva did not share with her sisters what she had overheard, nor participate in their whispered speculation after they had blown out the candle in the room they shared. She lay awake after her sisters had drifted off to sleep, watching the ceiling and listening to the wind beyond the window.

At dawn she rose sandy-eyed and stiff and crept down to the kitchen, carrying her shoes so as not to wake her sisters. The kitchen was cold and empty—Pechta had declined to make an appearance yet, unsurprising after the previous evening’s excitement. Yeva stirred the fire back up, checked on the bread rising in its nook in the hearth, and put the kettle on over the flames. Then she slipped her icy feet into her shoes, shivering and standing with her back to the kitchen fire.