Echo North

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  It’s just a story, I told myself firmly.

  But it didn’t feel like just a story.

  The ginger-haired young man’s eyes grew hard, the line of his jaw determined. Like he’d expected this. Like he’d prepared for it. Had he come on purpose to infiltrate the queen’s fortress?

  On we rode, on and on. The wood grew darker and colder the deeper we went into it. Glowing eyes watched us from behind the trees. Whispers and high eerie screams flitted around us. The soldiers at the front of the group lit torches, but the bright flames did very little to banish the dark.

  Then all at once we broke past the line of the trees. A black tower rose before us, stretching hundreds of feet into the air—I couldn’t see the top of it. Beyond sprawled a massive city, green lights winking in countless windows.

  The soldiers could no longer stop the men from speaking. Their whispers whirled round me:

  “The queen’s fortress.”

  “The Dead Tower.”

  “Her creatures’ dark hovels.”

  “She’ll eat our hearts.”

  “Drink our souls.”

  “Destroy us.”

  “Would that we had never been born.”

  The ginger-haired young man sat tall in his saddle, like he was unafraid.

  But his hands shook.

  And then we rode up to the gate and the soldiers were yanking us from our mounts, shoving us through a gaping doorway, pulling us down a winding stone stair. The air grew colder, colder. It stank of decay, and blood.

  The men wept.

  My teeth chattered, my fingers and toes wholly numb.

  We were taken in different directions, shoved through doorways or dragged further on. I was yanked down into a stone room, my wrists chained to a rough wall. I could sit, but it pulled my shoulders nearly out of their sockets, so I crouched instead, my thighs burning.

  This book had turned out to be a huge, huge mistake. I thought about leaving, but I kept hoping Mokosh would eventually appear—last time, she hadn’t come until after the confrontation with the queen. And I was curious about the blond man—I wondered where the soldiers had taken him. So I waited.

  After a while, moonlight filtered in through a window slit up near the ceiling, illuminating another prisoner chained to the adjacent wall. He was fiddling with his wrist cuffs, a scrape-scrape-tink of metal against metal, and he lifted his head, and grinned at me.

  It was the blond man.

  “You look uncomfortable,” he said, yawning.

  I squinted in the dim light and saw that he was using a dagger to pick the locks on his wrist cuffs. First one, then the other, made an alarming racket as they clattered to the floor. He seemed nonplussed. He stood, stretched, then paced over to me.

  “You aren’t in any real danger, of course,” he said as he started on my cuffs. “Readers never are. But it’s good to come prepared.” He gestured significantly with the dagger.

  My left cuff fell off, then my right one. I rubbed my sore wrists and sagged gratefully to the ground.

  My companion flashed another grin as he sheathed his dagger and pulled a cloak seemingly out of thin air, which he handed to me. I draped it around my shoulders, more than a little bewildered. “Who are you?”

  He sketched a little bow. “Hal, at your service.”

  “Echo,” I told him.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Echo. Now, stay close and try not to make any noise. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of sticking around until dawn.”

  I gulped, and followed him over to the cell door. The lock seemed to give him more difficulty than the cuffs had. He fiddled with it for a long while, muttering and cursing under his breath.

  I studied him as he worked. He looked younger than I’d first thought, just a year or two older than me. He was lanky and tall. His blond hair curled over his ears; his shoulders were strong beneath his white linen shirt. He wore tall black boots and tight pants, and he smelled like rich earth and sun-warmed stones.

  “I read a book once about a girl called Echo,” he said, jiggling the lock. “The ordinary kind of book. She was in love with a god who loved only his reflection, and she wasted away into nothing until she was just a voice in the wood, calling his name for all eternity.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  His lips quirked. “I suppose it is. Ah. There!” The lock sprung free, and Hal creaked the door open. He peered out into the passageway, then beckoned me to follow.

  We crept out into darkness. Somewhere, water dripped, a man sobbed, another prayed.

  “This way,” Hal whispered. He grabbed my arm and tugged me through a narrow door. The ceiling was so low I had to duck. I felt like a mole, burrowing through the earth. “Not much farther now.” The passage grew too close and tight for any conversation, so I focused on following him, my heart yammering away in my throat.

  And then, just when I didn’t think I could take it anymore, we burst out into cool starlight, whispering trees, freedom.

  Hal pulled me to my feet, his warm hand circling mine an instant longer than necessary before he let go. I shook dirt from my hair and spun in a circle, laughing.

  He grinned. “We should escape from certain death more often.”

  I glanced behind me. “I do feel sorry for the others. Does the queen kill them all, in the morning?”

  “If I knew, would you want me to tell you? I wouldn’t want to spoil your reading experience.” He winked at me.

  I gave him an exasperated glare. “If I’d thought this story wouldn’t have a happy ending, I would have read something else.”

  His blue eyes locked on mine, suddenly serious. “Must you always know a story ends happily before you feel equal to beginning it?”

  I stared at him, my heart pulsing insistently in my neck. I thought of my promise to the wolf in a snowy wood, of knife-sharp crystals and a whirring clock behind an obsidian door. A moth flickered past us in the moonlight, and I wondered what kind of story I was in. “Sometimes the adventure is enough.”

  Hal smiled. “Adventure is all I live for. Come on!” And he grabbed my hand and tugged me out of the path of our escape tunnel, just as the ginger-haired man and two others from the hunting party came wriggling through. A half-dozen of the queen’s soldiers arrived in the clearing, hoofbeats thudding on hard earth. They drew their swords and circled the escaped prisoners. Hal pulled me behind a tree. We crouched there together.

  One of the soldiers hauled the ginger-haired man up by his doublet and spat in his face. “You don’t deserve to live until dawn. The queen is coming for you now.”

  “Let her come! I am a prince of my people, and the moon’s faithful servant. She cannot touch me.”

  “He’s right,” whispered Hal. “But he’s the only one who knows it.”

  I glanced over at him—his grin was back. “You have read this book-mirror before!”

  “It’s one of my favorites,” Hal confessed. “The queen has been terrorizing this kingdom for centuries. If anyone crosses her, she kills them. It’s a very involved process. She slits your throat and then drinks your soul out of your ear—it’s how she stays so young. But the prince has been preparing for this his whole life. He’s drawing her out to meet him here, in the moonlight, where he is more powerful than she is. It’s all very exciting, if rather ridiculous.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You are rather ridiculous.”

  He winked at me again. “Are you ready to run?”

  “What?”

  That’s when one of the soldiers spotted us, his blade flashing toward our hiding spot.

  “Run, Echo!” cried Hal. He grabbed my hand and we dashed into the wood. I gulped mouthfuls of air, giddy and frightened, the soldiers hard on our heels.

  I tripped on a protruding root and tumbled away from Hal, who looked back just as the soldier grabbed him. “It was nice meeting you, Echo!” he called, gleeful as ever. “I hope to see you again!” And then he shouted a word at the sky and winked out of exist
ence.

  The soldier cursed, and turned to me.

  “Library!” I said frantically, “I’d like to stop reading now!”

  The mirror wavered into being, much slower than the soldier. He seized my shoulder, hauled me to my feet.

  I wrenched out of his grasp and threw myself toward the mirror.

  I fell hard on the library floor in a tangle of arms and legs, my lungs still screaming for air after all that running.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LIFE IN THE HOUSE UNDER THE mountain began to settle into a quiet rhythm.

  Each morning I woke to an empty room, ate breakfast alone, and then stepped out into the corridor where the wolf was waiting for me. We paced round the house together, checking bindings, feeding snakes, watering plants. We loosed golden birds with red wings from their cages, allowing them their freedom for the day—we only had to remember to lock them in again at night, or they would turn into dragons and try to burn the house down. (“It’s not their fault,” said the wolf. “I like to give them what happiness I can.”)

  The binding thread in my pouch dwindled rapidly, so the wolf brought me into the spider room, and showed me how to carefully detach the webs, spin them into thread, and wind them onto the spools. We always made sure to bring the spiders a treat, so they wouldn’t get too cross: honey or fruit or little pieces of cheese.

  After the first few weeks or so, the wolf would sometimes not appear, and I tended the house on my own. I enjoyed the work, the needle like a natural extension of my arm, the thread singing between my fingers.

  Often the wolf and I had lunch together in the room behind the waterfall. Or rather, I had lunch while the wolf sat draped in his armchair and woefully watched me.

  “What do you even eat, anyway?” I asked him one afternoon.

  He said vaguely, “I go hunting,” and refused to elaborate further.

  After lunch, we went to the music room, where, slowly, the wolf was teaching me how to play the piano.

  It was curious, learning from him. He clearly knew a great deal (I tried not to think about the last mistress of the house, who he’d learned from), but he was limited by his lupine frame and couldn’t demonstrate anything. He gave me specific verbal instructions, but sometimes I didn’t quite understand what he was after.

  “Curl your hands, Echo, with your fingertips pointed downward and your thumb crooked out to the side. No. No, not like that. It is your fingertips only that are to touch the keys. Yes. Now press the key, feeling the weight fall from your arm and through your wrists and into your fingers.”

  He paced back and forth behind the piano bench when he was talking, occasionally popping his head up to check my hand position.

  He taught me how to read musical notation, which was like a different language, little spots on the page transforming into the heartbeats of living, breathing music. There were more sheafs of music in the piano bench every time I stepped into the room—I suspected the wolf asked the house to supply them.

  We had lessons daily at first, and then gradually spread them out to once a week to allow me time to practice. A few times I saw the wolf listening outside the door as I worked through the exercises he’d given me, but he never stayed, slipping away again just before I finished. Sometimes I stepped into a book-mirror titled The Empress’s Musician and practiced the title character’s harpsichord while she was busy kissing her teacher in the palace gardens. I liked playing in there; it was quiet, sun streaming in through tall windows and dust motes swirling up to dance in the light.

  By the third week of my stay in the wolf’s house I was able to play some simple Behrend pieces. I liked Behrend—he wrote in strict contrapuntal lines, and I appreciated the intellectualism as much as his brilliant, crisscrossing harmonies.

  After that, the wolf began to give me works by Czajka, who wrote gut-wrenching pieces of endless perfection—his melodies soared to the heights and depths of the human condition, grabbing hold and not letting go until the last lingering note. As my fingers began to catch up with my brain and I was able to do Czajka greater justice, I found myself breathless at the end of his pieces, heartbroken, like I had passed through all the sorrows of the world and hadn’t made it out unscathed.

  I think the wolf liked Czajka best, because he parceled out those pieces sparingly, like they were precious drops of sunlight in winter. I preferred Behrend; he didn’t make me ache.

  Every day after my piano practice, the wolf disappeared into the bauble room, and I was left with a handful of hours to fill before dinner.

  I spent those in the library.

  I grew bolder, after my first few excursions. If I didn’t like where a book-mirror was going, I stopped reading, or told the library to skip ahead, or to mark my place so I could come back later. I was still determined to help the wolf, but as the weeks passed, reading became more and more about the adventures themselves; finding a way to free him retreated to the back of my mind. The book-mirrors were exhilarating—I’m not sure I could have stopped reading, even if I’d wanted to.

  I was pleased to stumble upon a collection of nonfiction book-mirrors, and stepped into several about doctors. I watched them operate on patients, help mothers give birth, mend broken bones, stitch wounds—it fascinated me endlessly, and somehow made my dream of attending the university not feel so far away.

  I attempted to familiarize myself with more music history to complement my piano lessons, but the only book on Behrend I could find was a fabricated account of his romance with a painter’s daughter who supposedly inspired many of his later works. It was hard to check references in a book-mirror, but the story was so melodramatic I doubted there was much truth in it.

  Neither Hal nor Mokosh seemed interested in nonfiction. I looked for both of them in every book-mirror I read, but Hal proved especially elusive. I saw Mokosh when I went to a concert where a made-up musician performed actual Pathetique Nocturnes on an absurd but interesting keyboard-type instrument built into the side of a mountain. We waved at each other across a sea of unusual concertgoers—antelope and elephants, an enormous crane, a pair of unicorns, all perched on chairs too small for them and listening attentively. I had to get back to the house for dinner and didn’t have a chance to speak with her.

  Mokosh was also there at the coronation of a young king, who had fought against all odds to win back his country from a powerful darkness. The South Wind crowned him on a hill in the blazing sunshine, and all the people cheered.

  “Echo!” cried Mokosh, moving through the crowd to grasp my sleeve. Her violet eyes sparkled. “I’m so glad I caught you. I’m sorry I haven’t come reading much—my mother has kept me so busy! Come have tea with me?”

  Before I could stammer out a response, she laughed and tugged me away from the hill, where she showed me how to create a doorway from that book-mirror into another one. We stepped through, and found ourselves in a tea parlor high up in the branches of an enormous tree. Stained glass made of butterfly wings winked from the windows and firefly chandeliers spun from the ceiling. The tea party attendees were mostly owls and squirrels. We huddled round a table and sipped tea from acorns, nibbled tiny cakes, and laughed until our sides ached at the ridiculous stories the owls told.

  Every night, before I left the library, I took the hand mirror out of the cupboard in the back room, and asked it to show me my father. He always put a lantern in the window for me before he went to bed. Donia always snuffed it out. Winter spun on, and one night, my father didn’t light the lantern.

  Instead, he wept in front of the fire. “She’s gone, Donia. Gone. She’s not coming back again.”

  Donia stroked his back while he cried and I had never hated her more.

  The next night, there was no lantern. Two nights after, my father smiled at dinner.

  It was small of me, but after that, I didn’t look anymore. I didn’t want to see my father moving on without me. I couldn’t quite bear it.

  Every evening I had dinner while the wolf watched me eat.
We locked up the golden birds on our way to bed, and just before midnight, I climbed under the covers and blew out the lamp, and the wolf clambered up beside me. I had the house make him an oversized shirt, for extra warmth in case the covers weren’t enough.

  Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, I thought I heard him crying.

  But that didn’t make sense.

  Wolves didn’t cry.

  ONE MORNING, I ASKED THE house to take me to the wolf, and it led me out into the garden. Several months had passed, and over the fence and past the meadow the wood was thick with verdant leaves.

  In the village, the arrival of spring saw melted snow and mud everywhere, irises and daffodils bursting bright from the ground, a taste of sunshine and sweet breezes, the ability to shed our winter furs. Villagers were a little freer with their coins, which meant more book sales, and luxuries like butter and sugar and red meat for our table. That year, it also meant the end of Rodya’s apprenticeship—I was terrified that he would take a job in another town while I was with the wolf and I would never see him again.

  I paced into the garden, wandering up the first few steps, and caught the sudden scent of blood tangling acrid with the flowers.

  Around one of the rosebushes, the wolf was bent over a freshly killed rabbit, ripping its throat out.

  I froze, my stomach wrenching.

  Before I could creep away and leave the wolf to his meal, he looked up and saw me watching, his white muzzle drenched in blood.

  For a second, we stared at each other. Then his tail drooped between his legs and he dashed away from me, on up the steps like a blaze of lightning.

  I ran after him.

  I found him huddled in the back of the waterfall room, desperately rubbing his bloodied mouth with his front paws.

  “Wolf.” I approached him slowly, knelt down beside him, took his paw in my hands. “Wolf. Stop. You don’t have to do that.”

  He turned away from me, his ears pinned back.