Hunted(60)

We thought we would have more time.

We should not have let her go.

We had to let her go.

Beauty. Beauty.

Hunter, hunted. We no longer know which she is, which we want her to be, which we need her to be. We know only that we need her. We must bring her back.

You must bring her back. You desire her. You want her.

Yes. But she is Beauty. She will be free. I wish her to be free.

The spark of her teeters on the edge of our senses, the edge of the valley, and then twinkles out. In every direction there is only the long, dark cold of winter.

Beauty.

Beauty.

Beauty.





EIGHTEEN


FOR A LONG TIME Yeva was only aware of the pounding of her feet and the soles of her boots and the crunch of the snow, and the icy air cutting deep into her lungs with every breath, and Doe-Eyes’s joyful panting as the dog ran at her side. If she had not been training with the Beast almost every day she would not have been able to breathe the frigid air so easily, but she’d hardened her lungs against the cold and she ran like a deer, like a wolf, like Beauty.

Eventually the ache in her thighs and the tightening of her lungs slowed her, until she walked, numb, her muscles crackling with energy and pinging like red-hot metal cooling slowly after being pulled from the blacksmith’s forge. Then, abruptly, she stopped.

She was sweating. The sun was warm on the top of her head, through the dappled leaves—leaves?—and she was no longer wading through snow.

There was no snow. Anywhere.

There were leaves on the trees.

It was spring.

No—she blinked, then blinked again, then stared upward, uncomprehending. The leaves overhead were golden and red, and fire orange, and her feet crunched as she walked, but not from snow. The toes of her boots disturbed piles of fallen leaves, and through the long arcs of the trees she saw a shimmer of gold here and a flash of red there as individual leaves tumbled and fell here and there in the still, autumn air.

Autumn.

Yeva’s heart shrank.

She realized that time, like so many things in the Beast’s valley, did not work there as it did in the outside world. But what she didn’t know, what she could have no way of knowing, was how much time had passed. Had she missed only one summer? Or had a thousand years slipped away, so that her sisters’ children, and their children’s children, had all long since crumbled to dust?

Doe-Eyes, heedless of the strangeness of winter becoming autumn on the other side of the mountains, was leaping from leaf pile to leaf pile, sinking up to her shoulders and then bounding free, tongue flying from her gap-jawed grin.

But none of that could lift Yeva’s heart, which felt small and tight and cold in her chest.

It took her days to find a familiar landmark, and it was no more than the proximity of a rabbit’s den to a particular evergreen that triggered her memory. She’d seen that burrow before, many months—or perhaps many centuries—ago. She knew the forest in the Beast’s valley now better than she’d ever known the one surrounding her father’s cabin, but as she stood, turning slowly in a circle, she felt her instincts click a sense of her surroundings into place.

Home is that way.

Another two days, and she and Doe-Eyes found the stream that ran to a fork around the clearing. And as the sun set, they emerged into the clearing and saw the cabin.

It was empty.

Yeva’s breath caught and for a while she merely stood there, blank, her thoughts coming in strange fragments. She was too tired to put them together with sense. But as Doe-Eyes began to sniff around the cabin, then sniff more urgently, then paw at the door with enthusiasm, a few things began to settle.

The clearing was still clear, and bigger than it had been, with only a few leaf-covered lumps to tell of the trees that had been hewn down for firewood. The wagon was gone, and as Yeva opened the door, she saw that much of the furniture was as well. And the floor, but for a few cobwebs in the corners, was tidy and clear.

The cabin might be empty, but it was emptied recently. Yeva strode back out into the clearing, scanning the ground for any sign of the wagon, or of horse tracks. But while the tidiness meant that the cabin had not lain abandoned for more than a few months, it would have taken only a few weeks, or even days if there was rain, for all trace of her family’s path to vanish.

Yeva spent that night in the cabin, shivering in front of a small fire not because the air was cold, but because her heart was, and she could not warm it up. She resolved to return to the town, and ask if anyone there had heard from Tvertko’s daughters, or knew in what direction they’d traveled, or of anything that had become of them.

For all she knew she had been gone centuries, and it was some other family, some other wagon, some other life that had moved away from this cabin and given her hope.

Hope, the Beast had said.

Yeva clenched her jaw and refused to think of him, and of the great sadness in his eyes, and of the way he’d simply let her go, because he had nothing else with which to hold her.

But while she could control her thoughts to some degree, she could not control her dreams once she fell asleep, and while her guard was down every thought was of the Beast, and her ears rang with the song of magic, and the beat of wings, and she woke sandy-eyed and weary at dawn.

She stopped at the first farmstead she reached and traded a brace of rabbits for some brown bread and apples and a mug of cider, and though the farmer’s wife stared at her and surreptitiously made a sign to ward off evil, Yeva asked them nonetheless what year it was, and found that only one year had passed since her father’s ruin, and that she hadn’t spent a century in the Beast’s company.