A pale-haired girl came along the forest path, a basket mounded with mushrooms swinging from her arm. The bird flew down and settled on her shoulder. She ran one finger along its glossy head, singing a note that the bird echoed back to her. She laughed and fed it a mushroom.
The girl passed out of sight among the trees, and without even thinking about it, I stepped into the wood and followed her.
The forest enveloped me, the scent of moss and sap and a hint of those horrible black flowers cloying and sticky in the air. Leaves crunched under my feet. The wind coiled icy around my neck.
The girl walked quickly—I nearly had to run to keep up with her. She followed a deer path through the wood, singing and feeding the bird mushrooms as she went. After a while she came into a clearing, where a little stone cottage nestled among the trees, wind flapping cheerily through bright, flowered curtains. To the side of the house a garden marched in neat green rows; a hedgehog sat in the midst of it, munching noisily through the lettuce.
I blinked, and was suddenly inside the cottage, watching the girl make tea and sit down to drink it at a tiny, narrow table. The bird never left her shoulder, and I thought its eyes flashed green, though I couldn’t be sure.
“Where … am I?” I asked carefully, not wanting to startle the girl but needing answers.
She smiled at me, not startled in the least. “The House in the Midst of the Wood, of course. My mother left it to me, after she died.” A shadow of sadness crossed her face. “I’m a Guardian, just as she was.”
I squeezed into a tiny chair across from her. “What do you guard?”
“The wood. It was made as a prison for the queen, you know, but she’s powerful. She can find cracks. I can’t let her loose—she would devour the world.” The girl ran her finger around the rim of her mug and offered the bird a handful of cake crumbs. “So I tend the forest. I cut down the blossoms that grow from her poison, and care for her creatures who managed to escape. And I plan how I might defeat her, when the wood can no longer keep her at bay.”
“And how—how do you plan to defeat her?”
The girl’s eyes caught mine, a fathomless sea-green. She shook her head, sorrow weighing heavy on her thin shoulders. “The only thing that can stand against her is the old magic, and it’s all gone. I gather what ragged bits of it I can—the wood sheds it, here and there. But the weavers of old magic left this world long ago. They imprisoned her here. They didn’t think she could ever get free.”
The bird squawked and flapped suddenly to the window. The girl flung her head up. “She’s here. She’s coming.”
“But—”
And then the world changed around me. I stood with the girl in an ink-black forest, the wind whipping her hair about her shoulders. She held a torch in front of her, outstretched like a sword, and a tall spiny creature that looked like the black-flowered briar come to life shrank back from the light, hissing through thorny teeth.
“A sentinel!” cried the girl. “A vanguard! The queen is coming. We stand against her now.”
The bird flapped its wings and grew in front of my eyes, until it stood as tall as a man. It wrapped one wing around the girl like armor, and its feathers glinted iron silver in the torchlight.
But then the spiny creature plunged its arms into the earth, and a hundred creatures in its exact image sprang up to stand beside it. They dripped black petals onto the ground like blood. I choked at the stench.
The girl hurled the torch into the air and somehow it ignited, sending a wall of flame toward the thorny creatures. She dropped to her knees while the enormous bird stood guard, his iron wings shielding her. From her pocket she drew a spool of shimmering thread, which she began to unwind. Using only her hands and one of the bird’s metal feathers, she wove a glittering net that grew and grew and grew, until it was large enough to encompass the queen’s army. The spool ran empty of thread, and the girl stood to her feet with a great cry. She cast the net at the creatures.
But it wasn’t enough. The thorny army broke the threads, shredding the net. They surrounded the girl and the bird, they tore the bird’s wings from its shoulders, and wrapped the girl in briars. The bird stood stiff as any soldier, blood dripping down its iron feathers, but the girl wept. The thorny creatures dragged her away in briar chains.
I blinked and saw the girl, bowed and bleeding before the Queen of Fairies. The queen was tall, and formed of the same stuff as her army: her limbs were thorns, her gown black flower petals, her hair decaying leaves. Her eyes glittered red-orange, embers of fire in her brambly face. “You thought to defeat me!” she mocked the girl. “And see what has become of you—you will die, and the world will be mine, and all you’ve done and fought and lived for will be for nothing.”
The girl wept in the dirt, clutching one last iron feather as if it were a knife.
But the queen saw, and plucked it out of her hands. “Your precious bird cannot help you now.” And she plunged the feather into the girl’s heart.
I gasped as the girl’s eyes grew wide with shock and pain and she collapsed on the ground. Blood spread crimson beneath her body.
The queen threw the feather down and strode past the girl with obvious disgust, whistling for her army.
I couldn’t stop shaking—whatever this was, however I had come here, if this were a story, I didn’t want to read it anymore.
But I didn’t know how to break free. I ran away from the girl into the wood, leaves slapping moldy and wet against my face. The forest lightened slowly to the silver hue of dawn, and I stumbled at last into the clearing where the girl’s cottage stood. The hedgehog was curled up tight and sleeping amongst the radishes.
I collapsed on the front stoop, hugging my knees to my chest as tears leaked down my face. The girl was dead, the queen had won, and I was trapped here more completely than I had been in the wolf’s horrible house.
“Are you all right?” came a sudden voice just above me.
I jerked my head up to see a young woman standing by the garden, the hedgehog cradled in her hands. Beautiful didn’t begin to describe her. She was luminous—willowy and tall, with straight silver hair that hung nearly to her knees and an enormous pair of eyes the color of summer violets. She wore a diaphanous blue gown, and her feet were bare. I got the feeling she didn’t belong here any more than I did.
“Are you all right?” she repeated.
I nodded dully, at a loss for words, and she let the hedgehog loose in the garden again and came to sit beside me. “I haven’t seen you in the books before—is this your first one? I’m Mokosh.”
Her words took a moment to sink in. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged, her lips quirking. “Not many people have access to book-mirrors—there used to be scores of readers like us, but there are hardly any left. I’ve only met one or two others my whole life, and I read a lot. Where is your library? Mine’s in my mother’s palace. You must be a princess, too—or at least a duchess?”
I blinked at her loquaciousness. “I’m not—I’m not anyone important.”
“Of course you are. Ordinary people don’t have access to magical libraries.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
She leapt to her feet and pulled me up as well. “You do know the rules, don’t you?”
“What rules?”
“There are rules for reading ordinary books, aren’t there? Start at the beginning, read in order, no skipping around, and certainly don’t read the last page until you get there.”
“Well, yes.”
She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and propelled me away from the cottage, down a winding path that cut quickly through the wood and spilled out onto the cobbled streets of a tiny village.
“It’s the same thing in the book-mirrors,” Mokosh explained. “You can’t change the course of events—the story always follows its intended path, and it’s impossible for readers like you and me to die here, so you don’t have to worry about battle scenes or the plague.”
“The plague?”
“But you don’t have to follow the story—you can explore the world around it, instead. Just walk away from the main character—as you must have, or we wouldn’t have met—and you’re free to do as you please. There are limits, of course—you can’t go anywhere the author never imagined, but if the book is even somewhat well written, there are layers of places to visit barely touched upon in the story.” She gestured at the street in front of us. “For example, this place has an excellent pub. Come on.”
And then she was tugging me forward again, past the village square, where a fountain shaped like the iron-winged bird spilled water into a stone basin. Thorns coiled up between the cracks in the stone.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Mokosh, noticing my terrified stare, “The story will reset after it gets to the end, and everything will go back to normal. And besides—it can’t hurt us. Ah, here we are.”
She pulled me through a low doorway, into a small, square room, that was lit with flickering candles and smelled of roast chicken. Patrons sat close together at long wooden tables, drinking beer or eating bits of greasy meat with their fingers. At one end of the room stood a makeshift stage where a storyteller sat in multicolored robes, waving his hands in the air and causing little silver sparks to appear above him.
“The winds,” said Mokosh with a disgusted glare at the storyteller, “always inserting themselves into the narrative somehow.”
She found us a seat in a relatively quiet corner and ordered beer and cakes. “In any case, I’m glad to have a friend in the books now—it gets ever so lonely at home. You’ll come reading often, I hope? You never did tell me about your library.”
Glancing down the length of the room, I found one of the patrons watching me. He was seated several tables away and had a thatch of shockingly light hair, neatly trimmed, a handsome, pleasing face, and eyes the color of a midsummer sky. His jaw was clean shaven, and he wore a red surcoat with dark embroidery around the edges.
His eyes locked on mine, and it seemed like the whole tavern grew still. Then he glanced down, and the moment was lost.
“Or your name,” Mokosh was saying.
I jerked my attention back to her. “I’m Echo. And my library is in an enchanted house. I’m still trying to figure it out—the house.” I considered. “And the library. The only reason I found it is because I got lost.” I glanced over to the blond man’s table again, but he had vanished.
Mokosh nodded sagely. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Echo. And I’m sure your house and your library have rules, like anything else. You’ll begin to understand them and become an expert in no time!”
“I don’t even know how to leave this book-mirror,” I confessed.
Mokosh laughed. “Why, that’s the easiest thing in the world! You must only make a request to your library.” She stood and addressed the dirty tavern wall in a language I had never heard before. It sounded like water falling on stones. A mirror shimmered into being, suspended on nothing. “I step through, and I’m home. Now you try.”
I chewed on my lip, wondering why the serving boy who had just delivered our beer and cake wasn’t gaping at the appearance of a magical doorway. I stood and looked at the stones of the fireplace, right beside Mokosh’s glimmering door. “Library, I’d like to stop reading, please.”
Another mirror appeared, its surface wavering like water before growing still. I stepped up to it, but didn’t reach out my hand. I stared at my reflection, stared and stared.
Both sides of my face were smooth, the skin perfect, unscarred, as if that day with the wolf and the trap had never happened.
I touched the left side of my face—it felt just as smooth as it looked. I thought I would be sick.
“Do you look different than at home, Echo?” said Mokosh softly.
I turned to her, blinked back tears, nodded.
“The worlds in these books are not real, you know. Readers project their preferred versions of themselves inside them, whether they’re aware of it or not.”
I looked back at the mirror. This was my preferred self, something I could never be in real life. Bitterness coiled hard in the pit of my stomach.
I didn’t want to be there anymore. I couldn’t bear it.
I stretched my hand out to the mirror, and that sensation of coolness once more rushed through me.
Then I was back in the library, my hand just drawing away from the glass.
CHAPTER NINE
“MY LADY.”
I yelped and wheeled. The wolf stood behind me, his amber eyes flashing.
I scrabbled away from him, my shoulders bumping up against another book-mirror.
The wolf didn’t move. “I mean you no harm. Please.” He sat back on his haunches, ears tilted forward. “Forgive me. The room—the room behind the black door … it helps me remember. If I don’t go there, I forget myself, and the wildness creeps in. But it is dangerous, the most dangerous room in the house. It will hurt you—it already has. Please don’t go back. I’m begging you.”
Pain pulsed anew through my shoulders and palms—something else the book-mirror had erased. I swallowed, feeling my scars stretch tight along my jaw, and tried to push away my sense of loss. “I won’t go back.”
He dipped his white muzzle. “Thank you.”
I balled my hands into fists. “But I’m not going anywhere else with you until you explain—properly—what’s going on. And until I know for sure my father made it safely home.”
He made a soft whuffing noise, which I realized after a moment was his version of laughter. “We are in the right room for that, my lady. Follow me.” And he stepped through the second blue door into the storeroom.
I followed him down several aisles between the shelves of book-mirrors, to a little locked cupboard on one wall. It was made of a smooth dark wood, carved with whorls.
“There’s a key underneath,” he told me.
I reached below the cupboard and fished out the small brass key hidden there, then fitted it into the lock and pulled the door open. Inside lay a small hand mirror encased in ivory. I took it out, glancing to the wolf for instructions.
“It will show you anything you wish to see, anything in this world, at least. You must only give two pieces of yourself to make it work.”
I sank quietly to the floor, my skirt pooling out around me, and laid the mirror in my lap.
“It need not be something big, so long as it is part of you.”
I plucked out a strand of hair, and unfastening the broach from my collar, I pricked the first finger of my right hand. A spot of blood welled up, and I pressed my finger and the hair together against the surface of the mirror.
“Tell the mirror what you wish to see,” said the wolf.
I swallowed. “Show me my father, please.”
The mirror’s surface wavered and went milky white, the blood and hair swirling inside until both were lost.
A dark forest came into view, a lantern bobbing on a pole. My father was trudging through the snowy wood, holding the lantern pole, Rodya and Tinker with their own lights just behind him. “Echo!” they called into the darkness, “Echo!” But the howling wind spat their words back at them.
The mirror shifted, showing my father and Rodya climbing the steps to the house, shaking the snow from their boots. My father wept into Rodya’s shoulder. Donia appeared at the door, her face drawn and tight. “Foolish girl, to go out into the wood in the snow and the dark!”
But Rodya squeezed his hand. “We’ll find her, Papa. Don’t worry.”
“I saw her,” my father whispered. “She was there in the wood, just before Tinker came with his sled. I know I saw her.”
Rodya’s lips thinned, worry in his eyes. He didn’t believe him. “You need rest, Papa. Come upstairs.”
Tears leaked down my father’s face. “Leave a lamp in the window for her—so she can find her way back to us in the dark.”
Rodya lit it himself, settled it on the wind
owsill.
Only then did my father allow himself to be taken up to bed.
Donia lingered, waiting until Rodya had fallen asleep on the couch all bundled in blankets before she blew out the lamp.
“Good riddance,” she said to the dark. But her hand shook.
I jerked to my feet and flung the mirror away like it was a snake; it bounced and skidded across the floor. My heart screamed inside of me.
“My lady, is all well?”
“I have to go home.”
His eyes peered into mine. “Is your father not safe?”
I dug my nails into my palms, fighting bitter tears. “He doesn’t know where I am. He thinks I’m lost in the wood.”
“But you are not.”
“He doesn’t know that. Let me go back. Let me tell him I am safe.”
The wolf’s fur stood on end. “You must stay here, my lady. You cannot go home—I am sorry.”
“At least let me write him a letter.”
“There is no way to send it.”
“You could bring it to him.” I was getting desperate. “I swear to you I’ll stay however long you wish, if you just bring him a letter.”
The wolf seemed all at once to loom large, his voice grating and firm. “I cannot get back through the wood, and neither can you. It is impossible. Your father is safe, my lady. You must let it go.”
“But—”
“Enough. There can be no letter. Now come. We have business with the house—your first lesson on how to care for it.”
He turned and trotted out of the library, as if I should forget all about my father. I ground my jaw. I didn’t care what the wolf said—I would find a way out of the house, somehow. Wait until he was occupied. Slip away. I refused to let my father fear the worst.
The wolf peered back through the library doorway. “Come. The house needs us.”
I took a deep, steadying breath and followed.
The glass staircase and corridor had vanished, replaced by a dark passageway that smelled of earth and worms. Bare dirt ran hard beneath our feet; crude torches flickered eerily from the walls.
The wolf barked a harsh word into the air, and the passage turned a corner, ending at an open door that yawned into a chasm of darkness. There were scorch marks around the frame, streaks of soot on the floor. The air reeked of smoke, and amidst the darkness, specks of ash danced like snowflakes.
Echo North Page 6
