Echo North

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

“Wolf.” I tugged a handkerchief from my skirt pocket, and gently, gently, wiped the blood from his muzzle.

  His amber eyes couldn’t meet mine.

  “It doesn’t bother me, Wolf. Really. I know you can’t have much of a taste for soup or noodles. I understand.”

  He paced to the waterfall, staring out into the spray. “I did not want you to see me like that.”

  I sat beside him, put one tentative hand on his back. The water danced and sparkled, catching in his fur, clinging to my eyelashes and framing the world with diamonds. “I don’t mind.”

  “I mind,” he said.

  My free hand went unconsciously to my scars; I traced their bumps and ridges. I understood. But it made me sorrier for him than I had been before—I thought of the clock in the bauble room, ticking down the rest of his life, and felt guilty I hadn’t been trying harder to find a way to save him.

  “You should come reading with me,” I said. “There’s a few hours yet, before dinner. We can go to a fancy party and put frogs in the soup bowls, frighten all the guests.”

  He let out a little huff that was some mix of a sigh and a laugh. “I fear I do not care for reading.”

  “Oh, but you’ve been to the library here, haven’t you? It’s very peculiar. Not like a normal library at all.”

  He whuffed with real, wolfish laughter. “I have, but the library has nothing for me.”

  “You must not have found the right story yet. I can help you!” I wrapped my arms around his neck as if to tug him to the library that moment.

  But he shook me off, suddenly cold. “I do not wish to go reading, my lady. I will see you at dinner.” He barked, “Rain room!” at the house, and disappeared through a door that appeared in the wall of the cave.

  I sat alone as the sun set beyond the waterfall, unaccountably dejected.

  The wolf didn’t come to dinner. I ate by myself and took the long way back to the bedroom, locking the gold birds in their cages, letting them eat seeds from my hands.

  It wasn’t until I had climbed into bed and turned out the lamp that the wolf joined me; the door creaked open and shut, his nails clicked across the floor, the bed hinges sagged.

  Minutes ticked by in the dark, and at last I said, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  He didn’t answer for so long I thought he wasn’t going to. But then: “You did not offend me.”

  “Wolf?”

  “Yes, Echo?”

  I crumpled the covers in my hand. I listened to the sound of his breathing. “I wish you would let me help you.”

  “You are helping. The house is in better spirits than it has been in years.”

  “No, I mean help you. Help this year not be your last.”

  He rustled in the bed; his fur scraped the sheets. “You cannot help me, Echo. You never could.”

  “But—”

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  I shut my eyes.

  But sleep was a long time coming.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  OUTSIDE THE ODD HUMOR OF THE house under the mountain, spring had turned to summer, and summer was deepening. Already, the year wended away. It would be autumn again soon, then winter, and my year would be fulfilled. I didn’t like to think about that—I wasn’t ready to think about it, so I pushed it to the back of my mind, and focused on music lessons, reading, and tending the house.

  I was practicing one day on the Empress’s harpsichord when I looked up to see Hal leaning in the doorway.

  He jumped a little, caught staring, and for a moment we blinked at each other and didn’t say anything. He was dressed simply: gray trousers and a loose-fitting white shirt, with embroidery about the neckline.

  I’d been struggling to make my fingers understand my first ever three-part Behrend contrivance after semi-mastering the two-part ones. As delighted as I was to see Hal again, I was embarrassed he’d been listening.

  Hal recovered his nonchalance before I had a chance to collect myself. “There are much better instruments than this to be found,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and walking over to the harpsichord. “I could recommend hundreds of titles with gorgeous pianos shut up in back rooms.”

  I sat a little straighter on the bench, offended into speech. “I quite prefer the harpsichord, thank you.”

  His lips quirked up. He leaned over me and played a few careless notes in the upper register. “If you say you prefer it because you read somewhere that Behrend originally composed his pieces for harpsichord, you clearly haven’t thoroughly pondered the topic.”

  “Beg pardon!” I yanked the key cover down, forcing Hal to jerk his hands out of the way to keep them from getting crushed.

  He grinned, unabashed.

  I stood from the bench and paced over to the window. The music room looked out over one of the Empress’s many gardens. I glimpsed the edge of her gown peeking out behind a hedge, along with the elegant shoe I knew belonged to her wretched musician. I was so glad I’d never followed the book along its intended path.

  Hal came over and plopped himself down in the window seat, yawning as he languorously stretched out his legs. “While it is true that Behrend composed for harpsichord, the piano had barely been invented when he was alive, and the quality of pianos built in those days was severely lacking. They hadn’t perfected the instrument yet. Many scholars believe that if Behrend were alive today, he would eschew the harpsichord immediately in favor of the piano.”

  I gaped at him, fumbling for a scathing retort and coming up empty. All I knew about Behrend was what the wolf had told me, the brief biographies printed on the back of his sheet music, and that ridiculous book-mirror about the painter’s daughter. If I’d had an ordinary library at my disposal I could read up on my music history and refute him, but as it was …

  I shrugged, attempting indifference. “I like how it sounds.”

  He smiled. “Fair enough.”

  I studied him, wondering how I could be so glad to see him and so irritated with him at the same time. “You haven’t been reading lately.” My words came out more accusatory than I actually meant them.

  “Yes, I have. You’re just a hard person to find.”

  I tapped my finger against my breastbone. “You’ve been looking for me?”

  “Of course I have! Books are very dull without someone to share them with.”

  Heat flooded up my neck.

  He winked at me, unfolding himself from the window seat and standing in one smooth motion. He bowed with a flourish. “Fancy a walk, Echo?”

  I glanced once more out the window. “As long as we avoid that awful Empress.”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  We left the music room by way of the rose garden, passing through the hedgerows and out onto a wide hill, where tall grass rustled in the wind. The air was alive with honeybees and the scent of wildflowers, and huge white clouds scudded through the sky; their shadows stretched long over us.

  “Where are you from?” I asked Hal, trailing my hand over the tops of the grass. It was feather soft, but it itched.

  “From?” He raised an eyebrow at me, as if that was a difficult question.

  “Where are you when you’re not reading?” I clarified.

  “Oh, I’m always reading.” He dashed ahead of me and I ran after him, half tripping the rest of the way down the hill.

  Ahead of us, a wide lake sparkled in the sun, and beyond it was a wood.

  It seemed there was always a wood.

  “You can’t always be reading. You have to be from somewhere.”

  Hal walked up to the edge of the lake and pulled his boots off. The water lapped over his toes.

  I watched him for a moment, then followed suit. I yelped at the icy touch of the water and Hal waggled his eyebrows at me.

  “Well, where are you from?” he said.

  “The village. Although right now I live in the house under the mountain.”

  “Sounds very pretentious.”

&
nbsp; I gave him a little shove and he nearly toppled over. “You’re the pretentious one, with all your opinions about harpsichords.”

  “They’re not opinions, they’re facts.”

  I shoved him harder, laughing, and that time he lost his footing, grabbing my arm before I could leap out of the way and yanking me down with him. We tumbled into the lake with an enormous splash. I surfaced first, sputtering, and pulled Hal up after me. We couldn’t stop laughing.

  “I’m not sure,” said Hal a while later. “Where I’m from, I mean.”

  We were stretched out on our backs in the grass, still damp, but warm from the sun. Overhead the clouds knotted together and grew dark, the wind blowing colder than before. It smelled like rain.

  “How long has it been since we met on the hunt?” he asked.

  “A few months at least.”

  He folded his hands behind his head and I found myself staring at his eyelashes, which were long and light. “For me, it seems like yesterday.”

  “You haven’t … been anywhere since then?”

  “I’ve just been reading. There was the book about the hunt, and then one about a boy and a glacier, and then something about sea monsters. Definitely a few wars. A handful of dragons. And—” His brow creased in concentration. “I think there was a woman made of clouds. Or cats. I don’t quite remember, it was very peculiar. And then this one.”

  “So you just go from book to book.”

  “It seems so.”

  He rolled on his side, propping himself up on one elbow. There was a light dusting of freckles across his nose.

  “You must have a family,” I said.

  “There’s always just been … this.” He gestured at the sky. “For as long as I can remember.”

  I studied him, thinking about the nature of the house under the mountain. Was Hal trapped in the book-mirrors somehow? Enchanted between their pages like a rose left to press and then forgotten? The library had been collected with the rest of the house. Maybe Hal had accidentally been collected with it. Although he could just as easily be stuck in Mokosh’s library, or another library entirely—there was no reason it had to be mine.

  He sighed, so suddenly sad that my heart wrenched. “What about you, Echo? Tell me about your family.”

  And I shut my eyes and told him about my father and Rodya and even Donia, while the wind whipped up wilder and wilder and the clouds blotted out the sun.

  It was only when the rain broke, all at once, that we leapt up from the ground and bolted to the wood for shelter, slipping and sliding in the mud all around the lake.

  Under the canopy of the trees, the rain barely reached us. We stood and watched it fall, turning the lake and the hillside all to mist.

  A mirror shimmered into being behind me, the library alerting me, as I’d instructed, that it was time for dinner back in the house under the mountain. I didn’t want to leave Hal, but I stepped toward the mirror anyway.

  From Hal’s long look, he didn’t want me to leave either.

  “I’ll see you again,” I told him.

  His smile was laced with sadness. “Goodbye, Echo.”

  “Goodbye, Hal.”

  I touched the mirror, and the library came into view around me. Stricken, I stepped into The Empress’s Musician again, but back in the dripping wood, Hal was already gone.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I went out into the corridor after breakfast and found it empty. It wasn’t the first time the wolf had left me on my own, of course, so I went about tending the house as usual. I’d checked the bindings on all the dangerous doors and was halfway through watering the plants in the conservatory when I spotted a woman’s hat abandoned on the window seat. I picked it up, smoothing my hands over the faded ribbons, and tried it on. It fit perfectly.

  I still saw evidence of the wolf’s mysterious former mistress everywhere, though the wolf tried to distract me from noticing dropped fans and torn gowns, jewels and shoes and half-finished embroidery, scattered about in nearly every room.

  Was the woman the same as the force in the wood? The powerful enchantress who had collected all the rooms of the house and bound them together? It seemed likely. But I couldn’t quite reconcile the idea of her with someone who loved music, and had caused the wolf to love it, too.

  Still, the mystery of the wolf was clearly wrapped up in her, and if I were to help him—as I’d determined to, no matter what he said—perhaps she was somewhere to start.

  I left the conservatory, still wearing the hat.

  And there was the wolf in a corridor made of flashing rubies, waiting for me.

  It was too late to hide the hat, so I just fiddled with one of the ribbons, studying the wolf. “Why are you bound to the house? Where did you come from? And … and who is she?” I pointed at the hat.

  The wolf let out a long sigh. His whole body seemed to sag. “Come with me. I need to tell you a story.”

  He brought me to the Temple of the Winds, which was empty and echoing, dust swirling up from the floor.

  We paced together over to the back window, which looked out into wheeling starlight, and I sank down onto the wide sill, hugging my knees to my chest. The wolf sat opposite me, and the strange stars cast fragments of green and violet light over his white fur. “I am not of your kind, Echo Alkaev. I do not belong to your world, or your time. I am just another piece of … her … collection. But my life has been stretched past what it was ever meant to endure. At the end of the year, I will die—but I will be free. I have no wish to escape that.”

  I chewed on my lip, peering out into the never-ending light. It danced in my vision, sang in my ears, whispered like dew on my skin.

  “Once, I had something precious. I should have held it tight, should have guarded it with my last breath, but instead I let it go. I will regret that until the end.”

  He let out a long breath, and I tore my gaze from the stars to look at him. Sorrow weighed heavier on him than I’d ever realized.

  A little wind rushed past us. It was warm and smelled of lilies. I closed my eyes and drank it in. “You said you were going to tell me a story,” I murmured.

  He did. “The North Wind was despised by his brothers. He was the favorite of their mother the Moon, and his powers were stronger than theirs. He commanded death, and time, and could bend others’ wills to his own.”

  I thought of the dark, angry force beneath the mountain. “What happened to him?”

  “He traded his power for the oldest of magics.”

  “What is the oldest magic?”

  “Love. That is what created the universe, and that is what will destroy it, in the end. Threads of old magic, binding the world together.”

  I watched him in the shifting light, his eyes fixed on some faraway point I couldn’t see.

  “The North Wind gave away his power to be with a human. That is how it began.”

  “How what began?”

  A low growl came from the wolf’s throat. “All of this,” he said heavily.

  I blinked back out into hurtling stars. “Then it’s his fault.”

  “Fault? No. He held on to the thing he loved. It is more than I ever did.”

  “Wolf.” I stretched out a hand to touch the scruff of fur on his neck, and he didn’t pull away. I tugged the ribbon on the hat, thinking he hadn’t quite answered my question. “What did you lose? Who did you love?”

  “Nothing. No one.”

  But his eyes said Everything. Someone.

  He sighed, a long huff of air.

  “I wish you would let me help you.”

  He buried his muzzle in the crook of my arm. “My lady, you cannot help me.”

  But I didn’t believe him.

  “WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT the old magic?” I asked Mokosh.

  We stood in a castle’s high tower that was open to the air, while dwarves sailed above us in ships that somehow flew, painting the sky with swathes of swirling light. That book world had no moon or stars; without the dwarves’ brushes, the darkness woul
d be complete.

  In the castle below, a centaur-king was having a party, and the whisper and rush of cymbals and strings drifted up to us.

  “Magic is in everything,” said Mokosh matter-of-factly. She finished the painting she’d been working on with one last flourish of her brush—it was a view from the tower, dwarves and flying ships and all. I stood before an easel as well, but I wasn’t a painter, and had given up after only a few brushstrokes, alternating watching Mokosh and the sky instead. She glowered at her canvas. “My mother would hate this.”

  “I think it’s beautiful.”

  Mokosh waved my comment away. “Shall we go down and join the party?”

  “I’m not much of a dancer,” I confessed, trying not to think about my father and Donia’s wedding, or the various village holidays I spent lurking in the background, because no one wanted to dance with a girl marked by the Devil.

  “Oh, then I’ll teach you! It’s the easiest thing in the world. Here.” She grabbed my arms and moved me to the center of the tower, just as the white underbelly of a dwarf ship sailed overhead. It gleamed like it was made out of pearls. “All you have to do is listen to the music and move your feet, you see?”

  She steered me around while I tripped over her spectacularly, until I began to learn, little by little, what to do.

  “Step back,” she said. “To the side, then forward. That’s it! You’re not entirely hopeless, you see?”

  I let the music sink into me, and after a while the movements became more natural. High up in the tower, it seemed like everything was dancing, the flying ships and the dwarves’ paintbrushes and Mokosh and I, all part of the same intricate pattern.

  “Is there magic where you come from?” I asked Mokosh, when we’d grown tired of dancing and sank to the floor opposite each other. The stones beneath us hummed with music.

  “Certainly there is. My mother couldn’t rule without it.”

  “And the old magic,” I pressed. “The magic that governs the world—do you have that kind?”

  Mokosh frowned. “My mother has the most magic of anyone. Of course she has the old magic, too.”

  I shrugged, uncertain why that had offended her. In my mind I saw the bauble room, the spidery clock and the spinning crystals, the blood on the wolf’s white fur. I knew there were answers to be found there, but I was still too afraid to seek them out. “What about enchantments?”