Hunted(79)

Now that Lamya’s heat had left her Yeva’s body ached with sudden cold. She wrapped her cloak more tightly about her body. She discovered that Doe-Eyes was some distance behind her, belly low to the ground and ears back, her large round eyes fixed fearfully on the dragon-woman. Yeva backed up until she felt her dog’s warmth press against her calves.

“Thank you, Lamya,” she whispered. Then she ran.

Yeva had barely traveled a few leagues into the next valley before her exhaustion began to catch up with her. She’d slept so little in her haste to return to the Beast, her body now ached, and her eyes burned and itched in the dry, icy air.

She touched the feather in her pocket again. A fortifying warmth began at her fingertips and trickled slowly up her arm, spreading through her body and letting her blink away the exhaustion weighing her down. She could not be sure whether the feather’s warmth was magic, or if it was hope that surged through her, urging her to push aside her desire to rest.

When she passed for the second time a gnarled tree, blackened by a strike of lightning, Yeva realized she was walking in circles. The innate sense of direction that had guided her this far had left her, and when she stopped, confused, Doe-Eyes halted too. The dog cocked her head, puzzled by her mistress’s sudden lack of direction, then turned and trotted off through the trees.

Yeva called out for her, but for the first time since she’d been a puppy, Doe-Eyes didn’t come running at the sound of her voice. Letting out a weary oath, Yeva dragged herself after her pup.

She broke out through a dense, icy thicket and found herself at the river’s edge, the same river that passed through the Beast’s valley below. Doe-Eyes was drinking from a hole in the ice, lapping at the water greedily. The sun briefly broke through the thick gray clouds and its glare on the river ice jolted Yeva from her weary confusion. Her eyes traveled upriver, and she saw that its course led through a pass between the mountains surrounding the valley she was in. The sun beamed down on Yeva’s right cheek before vanishing behind the clouds again, and Yeva realized that the river flowed north to south.

“Thank you, Doe-Eyes,” Yeva whispered. She’d found her road north.

Yeva discovered as she walked that she no longer had to listen for the magic of the wood—in fact, she began to feel deafened by it. Though the forest was silent, lacking even the little noises of a hibernating wilderness, her ears rang with music. When darkness fell she made a little camp, and huddled close to the fire with Doe-Eyes sharing her warmth under her cloak.

The magic swelled, and when Yeva looked up, she saw the song for the first time with her eyes. The clouds had cleared, and the sky was dancing. Ribbons of pale green and peach shimmered above her, robbing her of breath until her very heart seemed to beat in time with the magic. She leaned back against a tree so she could fall asleep looking up, and the dancing sky grew brighter and brighter until it burned red and gold and spread wings of flame and sang the Firebird’s song.

Yeva woke with a longing in her heart so strong that she leaped to her feet and kept moving north without banking the fire or packing up her belongings. She left behind her food, her flint and tinder, the goose fat she’d been using to protect her lips and cheeks from the icy chapping of the wind. All she brought was what she’d fallen asleep holding: the feather in her pocket, the book of fairy tales tucked inside her cloak, and the bow in her hands with a single arrow to its string.

The sun was high and pale in the vast crystal-blue sky when a flash of brilliant rust red made Yeva skid to a halt. It had been days since she’d last seen even a set of tracks that wasn’t hers, much less an animal to leave them. And now a fox appeared ahead of her, sitting primly in the snow with its tail wrapped around its haunches.

“Borovoi?” she asked, her voice hoarse from disuse.

The fox grinned at her, showing a row of pointy little teeth, and inclined its angular head. “That’s one question spent.”

Yeva drew a breath to retort, but paused, and instead inspected the little fox. Almost as she’d seen the ribbons of magic dancing overhead, she could see in the fox’s face the grizzled, mossy beard, the hollow cheeks etched in bark, the ancient eyes of the leshy spirit she’d glimpsed that first day alone in the wood, before she met the rusalka. “You tried to kill me.”

“I gave you what you asked for,” said Borovoi the fox, the leshy. “I do not lie. Ask what you will.”

Yeva could not take her eyes from the creature, caught by its dual nature, the eyes of the ancient forest spirit in the frame of its sharp-cheeked fox face. “I came here to . . .” But the song of magic and the roaring in her ears made it hard to concentrate. Yeva swallowed. “I seek the Firebird.”

Borovoi grinned again. “Don’t we all?”

“I must find it,” Yeva said, throwing all her feeling behind her voice. “It’s the key to everything I’ve ever wanted.”

The fox’s head tilted the other way. “What will you do if you find it?”

Yeva stared at the fox, exhaustion and confusion and magic tangling her mind so that she couldn’t think straight. “I . . . I just want it. It is my destiny.”

“The Beast can never find the Firebird himself, you know.” The fox lifted one paw and chewed a bit of ice from between its toes. “The bird must come to him. That is why he believed he needed a hunter—someone to trap the Firebird and bring it to him.”