Hunted(80)

Yeva stared at the fox. “The Beast?” she asked slowly, stupidly, her mind full of dancing ribbons of red and gold and a song she’d first heard one winter when she was five years old, sitting by a window and listening to her father read her a story.

“Has her song gotten to you already?” the fox asked, sounding surprised. “I would have thought you’d last longer.”

“The Beast,” Yeva echoed again. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the word beast meant something to her beyond bears and boars and other dangers of the wood her memory conjured. Her hand crept into her pocket by itself, and her fingers touched the soft, worn barbs of a feather. “The Beast!” she cried, remembering. “Yes. I need to find the Firebird for the Beast.”

“Go north,” said the fox.

“I’ve been going north,” Yeva protested, aware that at any moment her exhaustion would catch up with her and she’d be able to travel no farther. “I’ve been going north for years.”

“That’s because the Firebird is always north of you,” the fox replied. “No matter how far you go.”

Yeva stumbled on through the forest, and only by reaching out and finding Doe-Eyes’s warm fur with her fingers could she remind herself that she was real, that this was real, that it was no tale from the book tucked close by her breast.

There would be a third, she knew. First Lamya the dragon-woman, then Borovoi the leshy, and now there would be one more. In stories there was always a third sign, a third test, a third bit of wisdom to urge the hero onward. Three wishes, three princes, three feathers, three hearts, three . . .

But Yeva walked, and walked, and found only the next valley, and the one beyond, and the one beyond, and the river she followed grew narrower and narrower until it was nothing more than a stream. She staggered up hills and climbed rock faces and eventually found herself beside a frozen waterfall that emerged like a crystalline blossom from a hidden spring in the rocks. The river’s source. The end of her north road.

She saw pale green and peach reflected in the waterfall’s frozen folds, and when she blinked and looked harder, she saw red-gold and fire.

She stepped out onto the frozen river, ignoring how it cracked and groaned under her weight. Dimly the sound made her think of some half-lost memory, another time she stepped onto ice that had not held her, but she could not quite remember what it was. Doe-Eyes stood on the bank and watched, and though she whined and cried and paced this way and that, it seemed she could not follow her mistress. And so Yeva walked on alone until she reached the waterfall.

The ice moved, the frozen sheets curling and parting like Lamya’s hair, like falling snow before the wind, like autumn leaves from the peony tree. The curtains of ice opened for her like the massive doors of a castle she once knew, revealing that behind the waterfall lay a hidden cave. Yeva would have hesitated to go inside, but the cave was unlike any she’d ever seen, for the inside of the cave was brighter than the daylight where Yeva stood, as though it contained its own tiny sun.

Yeva stepped inside, and the moment her boots touched the cave’s stone floor, the ice folded back into place behind her. She could not be afraid, however—in fact, she barely noticed she’d been sealed inside at all.

For before her, asleep with its wings wrapped round its body like a cloak, was the Firebird.





TWENTY-SIX


YEVA FELL TO HER knees. The sound of her body hitting the stone floor woke the Firebird, who lifted its golden head and looked at her. It looked at her like nothing in her life had ever looked at her—it looked at all of her, every inch of her heart, every shadow that had ever darkened her soul, every wrong thing she’d ever said or done or felt. It looked at her and bowed its head.

“Welcome, Beauty,” it sang.

Yeva was crying, and not from grief or even joy, but simply because she was too full to contain herself. “I have been looking for you,” she said.

“I know.” The Firebird unwrapped its wings and stretched them, and Yeva saw they were like a falcon’s wings, wide and broad and made for soaring, and their tips brushed each end of the cave though Yeva could have lain down across it many times over.

“I’ve been looking for you my whole life.” But even as Yeva said it, something tiny and quiet stirred deep inside her. Something that, for the first time since she’d picked up the feather in the tower room of the castle, shook her certainty.

“Everyone is,” the Firebird said. “But most stop searching. Most tell themselves they have found me in their mates, in their children, in their fields and in their gods.”

Yeva’s eyes blurred. “The fox,” she whispered, trying to sort out memory from dreams, reality from story. “The fox told me you were always north of me, that you’d always be north of me.”

“The fox has never found me,” the Firebird said. “And he is jealous.”

“What are you?” Yeva felt the Firebird’s song in that hollow space in her heart, the space that had always known she wanted more than what her mundane life could offer her. “Desire?”

The Firebird spread its wings again, throwing back its head and showing its fiery, breathtaking plumage in a display that dazzled Yeva’s half-blinded eyes. “I am the goal. The reward at the end of the quest. The end of the story.”

Yeva put her hand into her pocket and touched the feather. Only then did she see that one of the Firebird’s tail feathers was missing, and she started. “Eoven,” she breathed, struggling to remember. “I’m here for Eoven.”