Hunted(77)

The Beast was gone.

Yeva could not think, could not move. She had been so certain she was meant to return, so certain that her whole life had been steering her toward this place, this time, this task. She knew that in it she would find everything she’d ever wanted, everything she’d ever imagined she could be. Instead she’d found an empty castle, as cold and dark as the winter in the valley surrounding it.

Yeva stood in the center of the room, shivering, her eyes seeking anything that might ease the blow.

The knife she’d used to slash the Beast’s throat still lay on the floor where she’d dropped it. The smear of blood her leggings had made as she scrambled from him still streaked the stones by the wall. The book whose pages had been spattered by . . .

But wait, where was the book?

Yeva frowned, scanning the room again. That night was so intimately carved into her memory that she could see in her mind’s eye exactly where the book had been: by the daybed, lying open as though the Beast had been reading it. She set her bow down and crossed to the far side of the tower room, where she crouched low and saw the faint outline of a rectangle where the book had lain, shielding the ground beneath it from the Beast’s blood.

The Beast had moved it.

She summoned up that night once more, ignoring the sting of guilt in order to compare the memory to the room where she stood now. There, on the table by the window, illuminated by the pale winter sun slipping through the cracked shutters, lay the volume she sought.

It was closed. She picked it up and found a guinea fowl’s feather between its pages like a bookmark, and she let it fall open there.

The handwriting inside was cramped and slanted, not penned by a scribe like most of the other books. Yeva could not read it. She flipped back a few pages and the writing changed, and then changed again, written by many different people. Past the page the Beast had marked, the vellum was blank. Yeva leafed back to the start and a series of numbers, more easily read than the cramped writing, leaped out at her. They were dates.

The book was a history. And as the occasional word emerged from the tangle of ancient lettering—land, kingdom, tithe, heir, drought—she realized it was the history of the family who’d once lived here and the land they’d ruled.

Yeva hurriedly flipped back to the spot marked with the feather. The language was so archaic that she could barely understand any of it, but she saw enough to know that the writer was describing a royal family. A king, his queen, his three sons, princes all. The feather marked the last entry in the book, with nothing to tell of what had happened to this land all those centuries ago, nor the family that had ruled it.

It was the name of the youngest prince that drew Yeva’s gaze, but a speck of the Beast’s blood had landed on it, making it difficult to read. She leaned close to the page, holding it under a shaft of sunlight.

Eoven, she read.

You may call me Ivan, the Beast had told her once, after she’d told him the story of the Firebird.

Eoven. Ivan.

With trembling fingers, Yeva picked up the feather that had marked the page with the prince’s name. She’d thought it a feather from a guinea fowl, but it was stiffer than that, a tail feather from a bird far better suited to flight. She blew on it, dislodging decades or centuries of dust and grime, and ran a shaking fingertip along its spine to knit the disheveled barbs together. She reached out to hold the feather in the light.

The instant the sunlight touched it the feather seemed to burst into flame. Yeva gasped and almost dropped it, but her fingers felt no heat. She tilted the feather this way and that, watching as the sunlight caught and danced, turning the dull browns into fiery red, gold, and orange. Like the leaves in her dream of kissing Solmir, of kissing the man the Beast had once been, the leaves that had turned into a rain of feathers.

The Beast, before vanishing to wherever he’d gone, had left this book here for her to find. And though he could not tell her the origins of his curse, he could leave her clues to discover it herself. Yeva drew the feather close and heard, very softly, so softly she didn’t dare breathe for fear she would drown out the sound, the tiniest pulse of music as it brushed her skin.

Her Beast was Prince Ivan. And the quarry he needed her to hunt in order to break his curse was the Firebird, the creature from her father’s stories that Yeva had always loved the most.

To save him, she would have to kill the thing she’d longed for all her life.

Yeva picked up her bow.





TWENTY-FIVE


YEVA LET THE MUSIC of the wood wash over her. At first she didn’t try to understand it or separate its pattern into individual threads of song. She stood in the center of the clearing, with snowflakes drifting around her like dust motes in a sunbeam, and listened.

When a familiar rhythm asserted itself, tugging her northward, she opened her eyes again and turned in the direction of the song and followed it. Doe-Eyes trotted next to her. The song was elusive, moving this way and that, and Yeva’s instincts urged her to move more carefully, to stalk her prey as she’d learned to do. But she was not a hunter today—at least, not the kind of hunter she’d been before.

“Lamya,” she said softly, when she sensed the song she’d been tracking was coming from all around her now. “Lamya, I need your help.”

There was no reply, but the rhythm of the song changed, like a heartbeat quickening.

Yeva tried again, licking her lips. “Do you remember me? My name is Yeva. I’ve seen you here, and you’ve seen me.”