Hunted(63)

He groped for the latch and then disappeared, bursting through the house and leaving Yeva to trail after him, feeling strangely like a visitor in her own home, like she ought to wait by the door to be shown into the parlor. As if on cue a servant appeared, someone who had not worked for them before and who Yeva didn’t recognize.

“May I take your cl . . . ,” the maid began, then trailed off as she saw Yeva’s warlike appearance. “Your cloak?” She paused, then hazarded, “Miss?”

Yeva gulped and reached for the clasp at her throat instinctively before thinking to point out that she was as muddy and wet beneath the cloak as on top of it, and it would do little good. But the maid was already gingerly taking the dingy thing into her arms, and rather than hanging it with the much cleaner—and more expensive—garments on the pegs by the door, she vanished into the next room.

She heard Asenka’s voice firing off questions, growing nearer. “What are you saying? She who? Solmir, I don’t understand. . . .”

Yeva turned to see Lena standing in the doorway to the front room, white-faced and frozen, and Asenka following, leaning on Solmir’s arm to steady herself. Before Yeva could speak Lena screamed and fell back, half collapsing against the doorframe so that Solmir had to drop Asenka’s arm or let Lena go crashing to the floor.

Asenka’s eyes met Yeva’s and clung there, round and dark, and, after a few long seconds, filling with tears. “I knew it,” she whispered, so that Yeva could barely hear her over the sounds of Solmir attempting to revive Lena, who was still half senseless at the sight of her dead sister. “I knew you were alive.” Asenka limped forward.

Yeva found she could not speak, could not even move, and it wasn’t until she felt Asenka’s arms go around her that she broke into a storm of weeping. Lena recovered herself and staggered toward them and threw her arms around them both, but her knees were still buckling, and after a moment of unsteadiness all three sisters sank into a heap on the floor, sobbing and hugging one another and all getting so muddy from Yeva’s clothing that it was no longer easy to tell who was who.

By the time they made it to the sitting room before the fire, the rest of the household had heard the commotion, and word had spread that Tvertko’s youngest daughter had returned from the dead. A few of the servants Yeva knew, for they’d been employed by their father and had returned. The cook screeched when she saw Yeva and then, just as loudly, announced she’d have the kettle on for tea. Others were new, and more confused about what was happening, for all they knew was that both the merchant and his youngest daughter had perished during the winter they’d spent at his hunting cabin.

Albe had stayed, too, but he was so bashful of Yeva—or perhaps fearful of her, she could not tell which—that he hovered in the hall, peeking around the open doorframe at her whenever she spoke, and vanishing again whenever she looked his way.

Slowly, very slowly, with pauses for more tears and for explanations, Yeva learned what had befallen her family after she disappeared.

Solmir had faithfully continued to help feed and protect Albe and the sisters, monitoring the perimeter around the house for any sign of Yeva’s return. After a little more than a week Radak, Lena’s fiancé before their father’s financial ruin, had appeared at the cabin, wild-eyed and demanding to see Lena. So flustered and distressed was he that he kept repeating his demand even after Lena stood in front of him repeating, “I am Lena! I am she! Radak, what is it?”

He had heard of her father’s plight while traveling back from a business venture and had left his wagons and hired the fastest horse he could find, and arrived at the house in town to find another family living there, with no clue of Tvertko’s whereabouts, nor his daughters’. Eventually he’d found a hunter who’d worked with the merchant long ago who knew the approximate location of the cabin, and from there he’d found Solmir’s tracks, which led him to the door.

When Lena’s voice brought him out of his cold and exhaustion, he dropped to his knees and asked her to marry him again, there in the open doorway of the cabin, soaked to the knee with melting snow and face chapped raw by wind and travel, and she had cried, and kissed him, and said yes. Radak, in possession of a fine new fortune as a result of his venture, had bought Tvertko’s house back. They were wed immediately, so that he could bring her and her sister both to live with them—but they were unwilling to leave the cabin yet, hoping that Yeva and their father might return.

Yeva could not tell them about finding their father’s body, her voice refusing to form the words—but when Lena’s drawn face lifted and she whispered, “Father?” they could all see Yeva’s answer in her eyes as they fell, in her hands as they twisted together, in the set of her lips as she turned her face away.

It was from that vantage point that she saw Solmir’s hand twitch, a gesture she recognized as the urge to help, to touch, to comfort. And when she looked up, his eyes weren’t on her, and her grief—they were on Asenka, who sat still as silent tears dripped from her chin and onto her folded hands.

Yeva was so caught by this that she was almost distracted from the reversal of her family’s fortunes—but then Radak appeared in the doorway, having been fetched by one of the servants to come home and see Lena’s long-lost sister.

“By God,” he exclaimed in the doorway. He was a tall, thin man with terrible hay fever and a perpetually reddened nose that got chapped and flaky from the constant rubbing of his handkerchief. But he’d always been very kind, and after the story she’d heard of his devotion to her sister and to her family, Yeva thought that his face was perhaps one of the most handsome she’d ever seen. He joined them by the fire and kissed her cheek and then took Lena into his arms, wrapping them around her from behind, and it was only then that Yeva noticed with a jolt the curve of her sister’s stomach.