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  Yeva smiled, turning away before Lena noticed her mistake. Yeva had been Beauty all through her childhood. Her father had named her on the day she was born after the old goddess of beauty, as he’d named her sisters after light and grace. Every few years, the holy men from the west came through to perform weddings and naming ceremonies, and the townsfolk would hide their heathen accoutrements, as the priests called them, and hang up their crosses.

  The merchant’s youngest daughter was renamed Yeva, after the temptress in the garden. She would have preferred Beauty, for at least there is beauty in all things, not only temptation, but Yeva she was to be. Her mother enforced the name as strictly as a warden minding his charges, but she died when Yeva was only five years old, so there was no one after that to insist her father use her proper name.

  She had always been Beauty when they hunted together, always Beauty when he tucked her in at night. He called her Yeva now, because she was to be a fine lady someday, and her proper name was the one society knew. And yet there was always a half second’s pause before he said that name, a tiny catch in his voice that was all that remained of who she’d been before.

  Though the servants were responsible for preparing dinner, Yeva and her sisters often helped. The three spent their days apart—Yeva with the baronessa, Asenka at the leech’s shop tending the sick, and Lena managing the household and spending time with her fiancé, Radak, whenever he was in town. He was a merchant like their father, and was both very much interested in merging empires and very much in love with Lena.

  The evening was their time to be together, in the brief hour before their father returned, and they had little taste for sewing and gossiping as ladies were meant to do. Preparation of fresh bread to accompany the meal was tradition.

  Yeva busied herself fetching herbs down from the racks, crumbling them between her fingers and breathing in the scent. Seasoning had been her job when she was too little to knead the bread, and so it remained even now she was old enough. Asenka shaped the dough, and Yeva rolled it in the crumbled herbs until there was a light crust coating the loaf. Then Lena wrapped it all in a cloth and tucked it close to the hearth to rise. She pulled out the risen loaf prepared the night before and slid it carefully into the oven, then she and Asenka washed their hands in the basin, pulling their aprons off, chattering.

  Yeva drifted into the next room, preferring to leave the aroma of herbs on her skin. She took up her spot on the floor by her father’s chair, crossing her arms on the footstool and resting her chin on her hands. The smell of herbs mingled with the smell of the bread as it warmed in the oven, and she closed her eyes. At some point her sisters joined her, still chatting and laughing. Lena helped Asenka into her chair before taking her own. It wasn’t until a name caught Yeva’s attention that she opened her eyes and lifted her head.

  “Do you think there’s any truth to it?” Asenka’s voice was low, with the strange wobble in it that showed she was thinking intensely about whatever she was saying.

  “It’s everywhere. I can’t see that there wouldn’t be at least a grain of truth in the telling, if everyone is telling it. Yeva, have you heard anything at the baronessa’s?”

  Yeva swallowed. She’d heard the name, but not the context. “About what? I had my eyes closed.”

  They were used to her tuning out their chatter—Yeva was the quiet sister. Lena leaned forward, her face shining with interest. “There is a rumor that Solmir is going to speak for one of Tvertko’s daughters.” Her eyes sparkled as she spoke their father’s name.

  Yeva’s heart seized. But before she could answer, Lena turned back to gaze at Asenka, whose own face carried a delicate pink flush. “Oh, it must be true. You’ve admired him for years, Ashka. And if he asks—why, then we can be married together! Think of it, a double wedding in the spring when the snows melt.”

  Asenka bowed her head, covering her face with her hands. “Stop that!” she protested. “My face will fall apart from the smiling. It’s a rumor, nothing more. Leave it be, will you?”

  Yeva kept silent, her stomach roiling. She prayed they wouldn’t ask her again what she knew, for she couldn’t lie to them. But how could she tell them that it was the youngest sister, not the eldest, who had caught Solmir’s eye? How could Asenka bear to see her sisters spoken for, when no one had cast an eye in her direction?

  Asenka always sat so that her twisted foot would be covered by the hem of her skirts, but Yeva found her eyes going there anyway. Her sister walked with difficulty and great pain, but managed everything else with such ease that most people tended to forget the malady she was born with. At the leech’s office she was admired for her compassion, and for the long hours she spent limping along the beds, fetching down tinctures and salves without a word of complaint.

  Yeva’s fists clenched around handfuls of her skirt, fury replacing the uneasy roiling in her stomach. Why should it always be beauty? Why could her sister not be sought after for her kindness, her empathy, her strength? Why could she not be loved for that, instead of passed over because of one misfortune of birth that supposedly marred her?

  Anger prompted her to rise, mouth opening to burst out with the truth, the injustice of it. Her sisters looked up at her, mouths forming identical Os of surprise. But before she could speak, the sound of the door opening in the hall interrupted her.

  “Father’s home!” cried Lena. “Yeva, how do you always know?” She helped Asenka to her feet, and the two sisters made their way to the hall. Someone outside the family might speak of the cruelty of naming a baby with a twisted foot after grace. But in everything but her step, Asenka was the most graceful girl Yeva had ever seen. Gentle of smile, long-fingered, slender and lovely. Her voice was always soft, her laugh never too loud in a quiet room. Even as she leaned on Lena, the way she walked was careful and smooth with deliberation.

  Yeva stood clenching her jaw, tongue pressed against her teeth to still it. Let them believe she had leaped to her feet to greet their father. How could she break Asenka’s heart with the truth?

  “I was thinking of spending next summer in the city,” her father was saying as he mopped up the last of the gravy on his plate with some of the fresh bread.

  Yeva lifted her head, torn from the thoughts swirling around Solmir and Asenka. Her father had taken Yeva and her sisters with him to the city on business once years ago, and while they had lit up at the flood of new sights and experiences, Yeva had found it overwhelming. The streets stank and every face was strange, and she could not follow any paths or trails through the churned-up streets or across the uneven cobbles. She had spent every moment clinging to her father’s hand.

  Now, his glance passed between his older daughters before coming to rest on his youngest. “I have some business with the cartographers there, and it’ll take some time to get my affairs settled. So I’ll be required to take a house in the area for a few months. It’ll be quiet there all by myself, so I was thinking of bringing you three to live with me.”

  The older girls exploded with glee, chattering and laughing, celebrating their good fortune. While none of the sisters was solely fixated upon fashions and society and standing the way the baronessa was, the prospect of being surrounded by so much of it for three months of the summer was a delight.

  Yeva alone was quiet, watching her father. She knew how much it cost him to move away from the wilderness; it cost her the same. But she knew why her father wanted to go. None of the men here had spoken for Asenka. Perhaps somewhere new, her loveliness would catch a man’s eye the way it hadn’t here. Her father raised eyebrows peppered with gray, watching Yeva in return. She took a deep breath and summoned a smile. He nodded and leaned back in his chair.

  “Of course,” he said, speaking now primarily to his older girls, “you’ll be required to bring along any husbands or fiancés you may have acquired in the meantime.” This pronouncement brought on further shouting and laughing, and even Yeva’s smile grew less stiff in the face of her sisters’ glee.

 
“Pechta!” called her father, summoning the cook into the doorway. “I believe the girls would like some sweets to celebrate.” The cook bobbed a curtsy and vanished back into the kitchen.

  The dogs had crept in during the merriment, as if hoping they wouldn’t be noticed. Lena, as lady of the household, objected to them in the rooms where people ate and slept, but for right now even she could not be distracted. Pelei stood watch beside her father’s chair, and Doe-Eyes slunk over to Yeva, nose nudging up under her elbow and into her lap. Doe-Eyes had been purchased during that trip to the city all those years ago. Yeva sat stroking her absently, watching her sisters’ excitement.

  Outside, the wind had picked up, beginning to beat against the sturdy frame of the house. The servants had shuttered the windows already to prepare for the storm, but Yeva felt a flicker of the uneasiness she’d experienced at the baronessa’s, a restlessness she could not name.

  Suddenly, over the howl of the rising storm, a heavy pounding against the front door broke through the sounds of chatter and laughter. The sisters exchanged glances as their father leaned to the side to look around the edge of his chair toward the hall.

  “Is it Radak?” wondered Asenka, glancing at her younger sister. It was unlike Lena’s fiancé to come calling without first having made an appointment with their father.

  “He is away on business. Maybe it’s Solmir,” whispered Lena before dissolving into quiet laughter again at the blush that crept over Asenka’s face.

  Yeva volunteered no guesses. She could hear the howling of the wind, and could imagine no one who would venture out in such weather except due to some terrible emergency.

  The pounding came again, this time so urgently that the smiles faded from the older girls’ faces. Albe had finally arrived at the door and was nearly thrown back as he opened it by the force of the wind on the other side. Yeva couldn’t recognize the man who stumbled through it, covered head to toe in winter gear. Only the tip of his nose was visible over his muffler, red and shiny from cold. He pawed at his face to free his mouth, gasping their father’s name.

  “Tvertko,” he said, choking in the sudden heat of the house as Albe struggled to close the door again. “I need to see Tvertko. Where is he, I must see him immediately.”

  Albe gaped at him, stammering his usual greeting. The man glanced past him to see Yeva’s father in his chair and shoved his way into the room.

  “Tvertko,” he said, throwing himself forward. “It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

  Her father’s face became very still, brows lowered. “What’s gone, Pietr? Speak clearly, man.”

  “All of it,” the man moaned again, dropping to his knees. He was exhausted, that much was clear. And he was not a local, or Yeva would have recognized him the moment he pulled the muffler from his face. And yet, her father knew him. One of his contacts in the city, perhaps?

  Her father was silent, watching the man gasping for breath and dripping melted snow onto Lena’s immaculate floorboards. Then he lifted his head, addressing his daughters. “Girls, please go upstairs. Take the dogs. And please tell Pechta to boil some tea.”

  “But Father—” Yeva began, startled. He had never excluded them from his business discussions before.

  “Go, Yeva.” His voice was no louder than it had been, but so firm that it brooked no opposition.

  Her sisters were on their feet, Lena clinging to Asenka as much as the other way around. Yeva leaned down to lay a hand on each of the dogs, murmuring to them to go upstairs. Sensing her urgency, they obeyed, slinking up the stairs with their tails low. As Lena guided Asenka to the first step, Yeva ducked into the kitchen.

  She found all four of the servants there, wide-eyed and midgossip. Albe was still in disarray from having opened the door to the storm, his hair standing up roughly in every direction.

  “Tea,” said Yeva. “For my father and his guest.” She was not usually so abrupt, but something cold had seized her belly and she couldn’t find it in her to soften the order. Pechta merely nodded, forgetting to curtsy, and hurried to the fireplace and the kettle.

  Yeva took the long way back around to the stairs, passing through the hallway instead of the living room where her father still sat, listening to his visitor. Halfway up she paused; some acoustical anomaly in the building of the house conspired to throw their voices so clearly she could hear what they were saying.

  “. . . and every man of them dead,” the visitor was saying, his voice rough with exhaustion. “Barbarian swords in their guts, heads piled in the wagons and burned. All the goods stolen or destroyed.”

  “No one was left alive?” Her father’s voice was full of quiet grief. Yeva could imagine his head bowed, eyes closed as he listened. “Not even the boys?”

  “No one,” repeated the visitor. “Are you hearing me, Tvertko? It’s all gone. You’re ruined.”

  Ruined. Yeva’s ears rang with the word in the ensuing silence.

  “Yeva!” a voice hissed. Yeva blinked, finding her eyes watering in the stillness, and looked up. Lena was at the top of the stairs, beckoning to her. “Come.”

  Yeva joined her sisters, not wishing to hear any more than she already had. They all piled into Asenka’s bed, the three of them and the dogs too, and for once Lena didn’t push them away. Doe-Eyes lay with her head trembling in Yeva’s lap, keeping as still as possible in the hope that no one would notice her and make her leave. Pelei kept licking and licking at the hem of Yeva’s skirt, scenting the nervousness in the air and trying to make sense of it.

  They waited, none of them talking, although Asenka moved now and then to shift her weight and ease her twisted foot. It wasn’t until they heard the front door open again, a brief gust of air howling through the house and tossing their hair back, that Yeva lifted her head. The door slammed again, leaving them in utter silence.

  Lena spoke first. “Should we—?”

  Yeva drew in a breath, trying to still the shaking in her legs as she slipped out from underneath Doe-Eyes’s head. “I’ll go.” Both of her sisters relaxed a fraction—they had been waiting for her to offer. She was their father’s favorite, though it was no source of angst or friction among them. It was part of her family duty to be her father’s daughter.

  She told the dogs to stay, although Doe-Eyes scrambled off the bed and followed her as far as the doorway of the room. Bare feet tingling against the chill of the floorboards, Yeva made her way back down the stairs.

  She found her father still sitting in his chair, though he was leaning forward, feet braced against the ground. He looked somehow smaller, elbows propped on his knees, forehead resting on his balled fists. The firelight granted false color to what she could see of his pale face, the lines etched there throwing ghastly shadows. Yeva had never realized that her father’s face was wrinkled.

  Yeva swallowed and crept forward. Her father gave no sign that he was aware of her presence, but when she reached out and touched his shoulder with the tips of her fingers, he didn’t jump or cry out.

  He merely sighed, the breath leaving his body in a low groan. “Oh, Beauty,” he said, without lifting his head. He raised one of his hands to grasp at hers, fingers wrapping around her hand with the strength of a drowning man. Saying nothing else, he only sat there clasping her hand against his shoulder, head pressed against his fist.

  “Oh, Beauty.”

  BEAST

  We are uncertain how many years it has been, or how many centuries. To half of us the passage of time is tiny and measured, and with no measuring devices it is impossible to track. To the other it is infinite, immeasurable, a stream in which all things drown in the end. We are at odds because of this and so many things, and when the sun fades and the dark returns we mark it only as a change in the light.

  The storm that comes tonight is not the change we felt coming. But in the howl of the night wind and the blinding violet of the snow, there is nothing else to be sensed. And so we retreat, to pace inside our den, to remember sleep, to wait for another change in t
he light.

  TWO

  YEVA’S FATHER ASKED FOR the night to think of a plan, so Yeva did not share with her sisters what she had overheard, nor participate in their whispered speculation after they had blown out the candle in the room they shared. She lay awake after her sisters had drifted off to sleep, watching the ceiling and listening to the wind beyond the window.

  At dawn she rose sandy-eyed and stiff and crept down to the kitchen, carrying her shoes so as not to wake her sisters. The kitchen was cold and empty—Pechta had declined to make an appearance yet, unsurprising after the previous evening’s excitement. Yeva stirred the fire back up, checked on the bread rising in its nook in the hearth, and put the kettle on over the flames. Then she slipped her icy feet into her shoes, shivering and standing with her back to the kitchen fire.

  After a time the household drifted to life again, the servants waking and accepting mugs of tea, her sisters joining them once the sunlight reached the edge of the window. The wind had tossed around the snow but the storm had not brought much more of it, leaving the world newly coated in a thin layer of white, with dark patches of frozen slush all up and down the sides of the buildings and the windowpanes. The ice shattered the light as it entered the house, sending it in knives and sunbursts across the rugs and floorboards.

  No one spoke of the previous night, neither the sisters nor the servants. And yet there was an air of uneasy expectance, as if everyone were waiting, but too fearful to ask what they were waiting for.

  Eventually Yeva’s father appeared in the entryway to the kitchen. His eyes were red-rimmed and tired, his face drooping and mouth tight. He looked as if he’d gotten no more sleep than Yeva had.

  “Girls,” he said, the sharp-cut sunlight outlining his form in the doorway. “Staff. Would you all please come join me in the parlor?”

  Yeva poured a mug of tea, then followed the rest of the assemblage out into the living room. Her father had relit the fire there, but only moments before. The room was still freezing, and she pressed the mug of tea into her father’s hand before huddling close to her sisters by the fireplace.