Hunted(85)

In a rush, she blurted, “I would give up a thousand happy endings just to go back with you to your valley, and live as we did. I’d give up every fairy tale I’ve ever known just to hear you say my name again.”

The Beast’s warmth wrapped around her and the wild song of him swelled, and she could hear the ice curtain melting and dripping and saw in her mind’s eye the crystal droplets falling like autumn leaves.

Then a voice whispered, “Beauty,” and the warmth tightened, and she felt lips touch her temple, her cheek, the line of her jaw. She realized there were arms around her, and she broke away, gasping. Tears blurred her vision so that when she looked at the Beast she saw only a shimmer, the same shimmer he had when he saw her smile, or unlocked his room full of books, or lit her a lantern to keep the dark at bay. She blinked and blinked and finally her eyes cleared, and before her was a face, a human face. She’d seen it only once before, and a thousand times in her dreams.

“But,” Yeva said, “how? I failed. I didn’t bring you the Firebird.”

The Beast knelt before her, seemingly unaware of the icemelt soaking into his clothes, which were of a fashion Yeva had never seen, from a time so long ago it predated even the oldest paintings and tapestries.

“Yeva,” said the Beast, and though there wasn’t a hint of a snarl in his voice, it still rumbled, still echoed in her heart and her bones, still warmed her from within. “We were both wrong.”

He reached out and took her hands, folding them between both of his and drawing them up so he could press them against his chest, where the same heartbeat sounded, the same magic that called to her, only it wasn’t magic, for the man before her was real, more real than the ice or the cave or the ancient feather, which she’d dropped somewhere in the slush, and forgotten.

“Don’t you see?” the Beast went on, pulling her close so that she could breathe his scent, feel his hair brush her skin as he pressed his forehead to hers. “You are what I want most in all this world, and you came back to me. Yeva . . . you are the Firebird.”

Yeva felt dizzy, confused not by the strangeness of this man she couldn’t know, but by the fact that he wasn’t strange at all. His touch was as familiar to her, and as certain, as the curve of a bow fitting in her palm. “This is a dream,” she whispered. “Magic. A fairy tale.”

The Beast smiled, and for the first time Yeva saw that he had a dimple, a little crease in his perfect face that made him imperfect, and that his nose was a little crooked, and the gold eyes were more hazel than gold. “Yes,” he agreed. “And it’s real.”

A wolf and a man. A woman and a dragon. Hunter and hunted. Nothing in this world has only one nature.

The Beast’s eyes fell to her lips and he bent his head, but there his movements faltered a little. The sudden uncertainty in the tilt of his mouth toward hers was so completely, so utterly human that Yeva felt she might laugh, or cry, or both. So instead, she leaned forward and kissed him, and he let go of her hands so he could wrap his arms around her and pull her body in against his. He was warm and solid and real, and Yeva felt as insubstantial as smoke that might drift away like the ashes of her bow and her stories.

She gave up trying to understand and just kissed him, there in the Firebird’s cave. And though Yeva knew she would always long for tomorrow, and for what lay in the next valley, and for what colors she would see in the sky in the years to come, the kiss was, for that single instant, everything she wanted.





EOVEN


It is strange, to be whole. To know every thought and want is from my own heart. That every memory and instinct is mine.

Because I do remember another life. And not the life of the wolf, not the hunt nor the kill, nor the endless hunger. I remember a life before that was good, but not the one I wanted. I remember feeling as though nothing and no one in this world could ever understand the way I wanted, that pang that rings deeper than flesh and bone.

My longing for something else, beyond, into magic and dreams and the things everyone else seemed to leave behind as children. For something I knew I could never truly find.

It’s the wanting that brought me here, to her. To another soul as empty as mine, and yet not empty at all, because it’s so full of everything I thought only I ever felt. Her soul against mine feels like music, like a heartbeat, like magic.

Like beauty.





EPILOGUE


EVENTUALLY YEVA WOULD BRING Eoven to the town where she grew up. She would tell her family as best she could what had happened, and they would not understand, but they would welcome Eoven anyway because of the way he looked at Yeva. They’d stay there for a long time together, and Eoven would tell Lena’s daughter stories, and teach Asenka’s twins to hunt when they were old enough. They’d stay sometimes at the baron’s household, and sometimes in Yeva’s old room in Radak and Lena’s house, and sometimes in a little cottage at the edge of town with a garden and a peony tree and shelves full of books.

Her family would ask them eventually when they intended to be wed, and Yeva and Eoven would look at each other and realize that it hadn’t occurred to either of them. Perhaps someday they would marry, and perhaps they would tell their children stories and teach them to hunt, and perhaps they’d live at the edge of town and add room after room onto the little cottage.

Or perhaps they would live in the forest, and never speak to another soul again but the trees and the beasts, and they’d tell their stories only to each other.