Hunted(62)

They were in the kitchen, and they were baking bread. Lena was humming—though Yeva could not hear it through the warped and rippled window glass, she could see from the rhythmic tilt of her head to and fro that she was hearing music as she worked. Asenka was with her, her shoulder brushing Lena’s from time to time as they worked. She had flour in her hair.

Lena reached for the mix of herbs to roll the dough in and Yeva’s eyes swam with unexpected tears. Crusting the loaf with herbs had been Yeva’s job since childhood, and to see her role in the family so neatly eliminated—she fought for breath and dashed her arm across her eyes, her cloak so heavily weighted with rain that she nearly sank to her knees.

They’d had no choice but to try to carry on. They believed she was dead. Yeva knew this. But here they were, happy and settled in the house they loved, clearly the recipients of some immensely good fortune. Perhaps Yeva should not walk back into their lives—perhaps it would be better if they simply went on as they were.

She stood, indecisive, the image of her sisters side by side rippling with tears and distorted glass.

Then a voice behind her demanded harshly, “Don’t move.” It was a man’s voice, and Yeva froze. She was still so unused to hearing any voice but the Beast’s that she felt a thrill of fear. “What are you doing there?”

“I’m sorry.” She lifted her hands to show they were empty of weapons. Doe-Eyes was still on the other side of the house, sniffing at the trees and plantings. “I . . . I know this house and I was only trying to—I mean them no harm,” she said, lamely repeating what she’d told Galina.

“A woman?” The man sounded surprised as he identified her gender from her voice. “Turn around.”

Yeva swallowed and obeyed—and then stared. It was Solmir.

His hard gaze didn’t flinch, and he eyed her suspiciously. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, madam, you don’t look like someone acquainted with the ladies of this house.”

Yeva’s tongue wouldn’t work. When she’d found that a year had passed while she was with the Beast, she’d assumed Solmir had long gone. He’d agreed to look after her family in exchange for her hand in marriage when she returned, and Yeva had taken it as certain that when she was given up for dead, Solmir would have politely and quietly withdrawn to search elsewhere for a wife.

But here he stood, a year later, clad in fine leathers outside Tvertko’s home, protecting the sisters from the mud-soaked madwoman staring at them through the window.

When Yeva didn’t speak, Solmir took a step toward her, then stopped. The tension left his body, arms falling to hang limp at his side. His brows lifted and his eyes grew round, and an expression strangely suspended between horror and hope touched his features. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered, face draining of color.

Unlike Galina, Solmir had seen through the dirt and the blood and the leanness of limb and face. He knew her at a glance, even as she was.

“Hello, Solmir,” Yeva said weakly.





BEAST


Despair. Despair. Cannot. Must go. Cliff. Water. Bleeding. Ending.

The animal does not understand, cannot understand the need to end our existence but I am here now, I control us. I have let it take me for so many years, so very many long years, but she has brought me back.

And I cannot descend again into that madness, the in-betweenness of animal and man, the combination of which leaves us less than the sum of us, less than who and what we once were. I cannot lose myself to instinct now I remember . . . now I remember . . .

End, our heart cries. Stop. Empty. Please.

Let us die human. Let us die remembering Beauty.





NINETEEN


SOLMIR DIDN’T MOVE, RECOGNITION petrifying him to the spot. He stared at Yeva as though she were the Firebird itself, myth turned real, magic become mundane and standing in someone’s front garden. When it became clear he would not speak again, Yeva tried to clear her throat, and the sound interrupted whatever spell held Solmir and made him gulp for air.

“I’m alive,” Yeva said, aware that this was a rather silly thing to say given that she was standing there before him.

But it seemed to hearten Solmir, who took a step forward, and then another, and another until he could reach out. His hand seemed uncertain where to rest, though, and after hovering by her shoulder, by her cheek, tracing the outside edge of a muddy lock of hair, it fell to his side again. “Yeva,” he breathed finally. And there, at the edges of his eyes, Yeva saw something unexpected: sorrow. “I don’t . . . I thought . . .”

Surely she must be imagining the sadness there—it was his confusion trying to steer him one way or the other. Yeva took the first of what she felt would be many long, steadying breaths. “I will tell you what’s happened, and where I’ve been,” she said. “And I will want to hear what has happened to you. But—but I would like to see my sisters first. And I’d like to tell you all at once.”

She didn’t think she could tell the story twice.

Solmir started, and the way he shoved his hand through his hair in sudden chagrin was abruptly so familiar to Yeva, and so completely human, that she felt a smile tug insistently at her cheeks. “Of course,” he said, backing toward the door, as if loath to turn away from Yeva for fear she might vanish again. His face was so changed, so marked by emotions that Yeva could not interpret them all. Joy, disbelief, confusion, relief . . . and again, that conflicted flash of torment she could not place.