I turned to see Mokosh standing in the midst of the hall, a pale green dress blowing about her knees in some invisible wind.
“All he does is lie to you,” she said. “Why can’t you see that?”
“Why do you only show up after he’s gone?” I snapped, unaccountably irritated with her. “Are you following me? Library, I want to stop reading.”
“Echo, I’m only watching out for you—”
But I was already stepping through the mirror. The hall faded around me. Hal’s music coiled fragile and tight around my heart.
I DREAMED I WAS DANCING with Hal in the glittering ballroom. Soldiers burst in with their rifles and bayonets, and they slit Hal’s throat in a sweep of jagged silver. He stared at me as he crumpled and fell. “You cannot help me, Echo,” he whispered. “You never could.”
And then I was kneeling in the snow and it was Rodya who lay there, red blood staining the white ground. He gasped for air and couldn’t breathe and I turned and saw my father’s bookshop, burning, burning. My father was trapped behind the window.
“Papa!” I screamed and ran toward him.
Then everything turned dark, and I stood in the room behind the black door. The baubles dropped from their strings, slicing me to pieces as they slid past. I pushed through the falling stars to the strange whirring clock, and there behind the glass was Hal’s face, his eyes wide with horror.
I WOKE WITH A GASP to the sound of someone crying. The darkness was sharp and cold around me, and I was shaky from the grip of my dreams. But I knew, as I had not wholly known before, that it wasn’t the wolf making that noise.
It couldn’t be.
Fear bit sharp. I reached out to feel for the wolf in the blankets.
But my hand touched skin, my fingers brushed against a very human arm. I gasped.
The owner of the arm woke; there was a sudden frozen stillness, the sharp intake of breath.
“Don’t touch me,” came a hoarse, desperate whisper. “You’re not supposed to touch me.”
But I didn’t pull away. My pulse raged, strong enough, wild enough, to make me burst apart.
I knew that voice. How could I know that voice?
“Please, Echo. Please.”
I let go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I DIDN’T MEAN TO FALL ASLEEP.
But I woke with a start early in the morning to find the other side of the bed empty, sheets mussed where he’d lain, his shirt a shapeless linen puddle just on top.
I could still feel the warmth of his arm, the smoothness of his skin, the strength beneath it.
“Wolf?” I said into the cool gray light.
But there was no answer.
I got out of bed and dressed quickly, shivering. The room was cold, the house still, like it was holding its breath, waiting to see what I would do.
I paced through a corridor made of dying roses into the conservatory, and tucked myself into a window seat hidden by a large feathery fern. I stared through the glass at the winter wood, snow tracing the black branches with white.
The year was nearly up. There was only today and tomorrow, and then time would be gone.
I had failed to help the wolf.
And yet.
The arm I’d touched.
The voice I knew.
I knew, I knew, I knew.
“You cannot help me, Echo. You never could.”
The wolf’s words, the night I’d found him hunting in the garden. And yet Hal had spoken them, too, right after he’d played for me in the abandoned concert hall.
“Ask the right questions,” the smoke-woman had told me.
I picked away at the knot in my mind, pulled out the threads, examined them.
I asked myself:
Why was I not allowed to look at the wolf in the night? What would happen to him, really, when the year was ended? Who was the collector, and what did she want with him?
I leaned my forehead against the window, watched as my breath fogged up the pane.
I asked myself:
Why was Hal trapped in the books? Why were his memories bound behind glass? What had happened to him in the wood?
Why was there always a wood?
Outside, snow began to fall, turning the world into a blur of white. The wood was lost from view. I shut my eyes and let myself consider the thing I had come here to consider.
I let myself ask the question that terrified me:
What if Hal and the wolf were one and the same?
The room began to shake, a horrific crack splintered through the floor. I bid my fern a sad farewell, and left the conservatory just before it tumbled into the void.
“LOOK FOR THE TRUTH,” the smoke-woman had told me. “If you find it, you will see through the enchantment.”
There was one room in the house I had never properly explored, and it was finally time to face my fear and go back there.
My feet brought me to the obsidian door, glossy and opaque as a pool of ink.
I brushed my fingers over the cold metal of the compass-watch Rodya had given me, hanging as always around my neck. It continued ticking steadily, a second heartbeat against mine. It gave me courage.
Adrenaline pounded through me as I touched the black door. It swung open, the field of hanging crystals shimmering just beyond. I stepped inside.
The world seemed to grow very still, a hush in a snowstorm. The baubles spun on invisible threads, tiny birds and beasts, globes of pulsing fire, stars brought down to earth. They were beautiful, but they terrified me.
I walked slowly, the hanging crystals brushing across my shoulders, slicing through my dress. A few grazed the unscarred half of my face, and it troubled me so much I kept one hand cupped around my right cheek for the remainder of my walk.
The room was deeper than I remembered, the darkness only punctuated by those spinning, vicious globes. I stared up at the strings they hung on, twisted, shadowy versions of the golden binding threads. I felt lost, or rather, that I was becoming lost, my soul unwinding in the dark, erasing itself from mortal thought.
And then suddenly I reached the back of the room and found myself staring up at the strange clock. I let my hand fall from my face. It was streaked crimson.
The clock whirred and clicked, its spidery arms moving so quickly they blurred before my eyes. Each arm was attached to a thin silver thread that spun out into the room, connecting to one of the baubles and crisscrossing the other threads in a complex web before stretching up into infinite darkness. The clock face was just as before: a curl of pale hair tied with ribbon, a smear of what could only be blood. Was it … Hal’s hair? Hal’s blood?
I felt all around the clock face, looking for some way to open it, and found a silver latch halfway down one side. I lifted it, nerves buzzing with a sense of wrongness and danger.
To my surprise, an entire bottom section of the clock swung open, and I found myself staring straight into a mirror.
A book-mirror.
It was damaged, the leather frame scored with claw marks, half a dozen hairline fractures in the glass. The label was torn, the description obliterated, but I could still make out the title: The Queen of the Wood.
The sense of wrongness was overwhelming; everything in me recoiled.
There was always a wood.
I took a deep, shuddery breath, and touched the surface of the mirror.
The world wrenched sideways and a bone-rending cold poured through me. Stars exploded in my vision and pain crawled up my body like I was being pierced with a thousand fiery needles. If I had any breath at all I would have screamed.
Then I was standing on the border of a huge, ancient forest, and the pain and the cold were gone. Trees stretched above me into a brilliant, starry sky, and music sparked bright in my ears, a tangle of wind and moonlight and the soughing of the wood. Everything felt strong and good and steeped in magic. The very ground hummed with it. I could feel it buzzing in my fingers.
I caught a flash of movement in the corn
er of my eye and turned just in time to see a deer—or was it a dark-haired boy? It seemed to be both at once—running through the trees. I sprinted after him, straining to keep his heels—his hooves?—in sight. Starlight dappled across his body like bright leaves in a river.
He burst into a clearing and melted into a thousand other shifting shadows as beautiful and strange as he was. I stopped and stared, trying to make sense of the whirling scene before my eyes.
They were fairies, I think, or something like fairies: wispy creatures as tall as trees that seemed to be made of rain, or flowers; willowy spiders with mossy hair; bears with long fingers and masques instead of faces; hundreds of others harder to describe. They all danced together in the center of the clearing, a mass of strangeness and swirling color. In their midst sat a woman on a writhing throne, her hair the same shade as the moonlight. She peered through the horde of dancers straight into my eyes, and lifting one long pale hand, beckoned me closer.
I went as if drawn on a string, slipping through the fairies who laughed as they danced until I came to the woman on the throne. I knelt in the grass before her.
“I have been waiting for you, Echo Alkaev.” Her voice was slow and slippery as fine-spun gold.
I knew that voice. “You are the smoke-woman,” I said, lifting my face. And thinking even further back, “The thorny queen.”
“I became them for a time. But they are not who I am, even as this form is not.”
I studied her, her skin mottled like stone. Her eyes seemed to have no color at all. “Then who are you?”
She spread her hands wide as she smiled at me. “Who is anyone? The truth of who you are is not represented here. Is it, Echo?”
I flushed with shame as I reached up to touch my face, smooth on both sides only within the pages of these impossible book-mirrors. I didn’t answer.
“I’ve been watching you. Waiting to see what you would do. Have you figured it out?”
Danger crawled along my skin. The noise of the fairies’ laughter grew harsh in my ears. “Figured out what?”
She smiled again, and her eyes sparked orange as flame.
Realization wrenched through me like an earthquake. I took a step backward, the sense of danger sharpening into fear. “You. You’re the ‘she’ the wolf spoke of. The one who controls the wood. The one who gathered the pieces of the house. The one who trapped him there—maybe even the one who enchanted him in the first place.”
She watched me with amusement. Fire crawled hot just beneath her skin, and I felt the sudden, awful heat of her.
She was the roaring fire behind the bedroom door. The wood that had tried to devour me.
I took another step back.
“Poor scarred girl. Lost and broken and unwanted. Marked by the Devil for his pleasure alone. No thought to how to change your fate. You haven’t figured it out at all. I am surprised.”
“Figured out what?”
She lifted a finger, and flame burst bright from the tip, a tiny flare of yellow that vanished again the next moment. “How to break the enchantment.”
The whole world stilled around me. My throat felt ragged and raw. Horror and hope warred within me, a lion raging against a bear. “Tell me. Tell me how to break it.”
She laid her hands back in her lap. “There is one thing that you must not do, one rule you must not break. You must break it.” Her eyes were dangerous, specs of blackness from the heart of the earth. Flames seeped from between her lips. “That will nullify the enchantment. That will free him.”
I thought of the lamp, a spark of light in the dark. “I don’t believe you.”
Fire danced around the ends of her hair. “You are thinking it is too simple an answer.”
Her heat bit into my skin, and I took yet another step back.
“You were looking for the truth. The truth is always simple, but that does not make it easy.”
Anger burned. “Who are you? Why have you trapped him?”
“My dear, Echo.” She rose from the throne, sparks raining down from her hair and searing black spots in the grass. “It is not of my doing. He chose this. He chose me. They always do, in the end. He came to me, in the wood. He loved me. And so I saved him. Preserved him. So he could live forever.” She held out a hand, flames curling through her skin. “What about you, Echo Alkaev? Would you like to live forever?”
The fairies surged around me like a sudden ocean tide, drawing me into their swirling, tangled mass. Stars wheeled bright above my head, close enough to touch. I moved with the dancers, straining to understand the words in the fairies’ voices, sweet as honey, sweet as rain. They folded over me, and I thought it would not be so bad to stay with them, forever, forever.
Heat pulsed behind me, and I turned to see the Queen of the Wood wreathed all in flame. She smiled as she stared straight into my eyes. “Make your choice, Echo Alkaev. Won’t you stay with me?”
I opened my mouth to answer her, to say Yes, let me stay.
“No!” came a sudden voice at my ear, “No, she will not!” A hand closed around my wrist and I turned to see Hal, wild-eyed and dirty. “Run,” he breathed.
He jerked me forward. For half a heartbeat I stumbled and thought I would fall, but Hal held tight to my hand, and the next moment I’d found my feet and was running with him.
We ran and ran and ran, twisting through the ranks of the dancers, fleeing from the queen of the wood. I could hear her roaring behind us, sense the heat of her unquenchable fire. She did not want to let us out.
But we broke through the last of the fairies and dashed across the border of the forest, a wide meadow stretching forever beyond. The sun shone brightly here, though it seemed pale compared to the starlight we had left behind.
I gasped for breath, still clinging to Hal, whose jaw was tight and hard. His eyes burned with fury. “What were you thinking?” he cried, grasping both my shoulders and shaking me, hard.
I cringed away from him and he let go, swiping one hand across his eyes and cursing vehemently.
“I’m sorry, Hal,” I gasped. “I’m so sorry. Please—”
He turned back to me, his face twisting with a sadness that seemed even stronger than his anger had been. “It’s not your fault, Echo. It’s not your fault.”
“I wanted to help you. I was only trying to—”
“I know,” he said. “I know.” He wrapped his arms around me and held me tight against his chest. I breathed in the scent of him: leaves and sun, wind and stars. And then he said: “I will miss you, dearest Echo, when you leave me.”
I drew back to look up into his face. “I’m not going to leave you. Not ever.”
“Oh, Echo,” he said as if his heart were breaking. “My dear Echo.” He wrapped his fingers around my chin, gently, gently.
And then he kissed me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HAL’S LIPS WERE SOFT AND WARM, a little salty and a little wild. I wanted to sink into him but he pulled away from me, his face wracked with emotion, his eyes filled with secrets I didn’t understand.
“She lies,” he said. “She always lies. Whatever she told you—don’t listen. Promise me.”
“I promise.” In that moment, I meant it.
He smoothed my cheek with his thumb. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d touch my scarred face in the real world like that.
“I miss you,” I whispered, “In that other world far away.”
He tilted his forehead against mine. “I am always there.”
“I know.” A stillness settled inside of me.
He drew back again, his fingers light on my arms. “I have to go now, Echo. I am sorry.”
I bit my lip to keep from crying, but I nodded. “Thank you for—thank you for saving me.”
“You are the one saving me.” He sighed, and turned, and vanished.
I told the library to take me home, and stepped through the mirror that wavered into existence.
I was back in the bauble room, knife-edged crystals brushing my s
houlders, blood dried and sticky on the hand I was just drawing back from the mirror.
I stood there shuddering, staring at the fractures in the glass, the shredded leather frame, the barely-legible title.
The wolf had tried to destroy it. He’d obviously failed. Maybe that was the answer: destroy the mirror, destroy the queen—whoever she was—break the curse.
“She always lies,” said Hal in my head.
She’d tried to trap me. It had almost worked. Whatever hold she had over the wolf—and, I was now certain, over Hal—I was going to break it if I could.
I straightened up, ignoring the pain in my shoulders and my face and my hand. Ignoring my fear.
I could still feel Hal’s hand closing around my wrist, yanking me away from the dancers and the fire. I could still feel the echo of his lips against mine.
“House,” I commanded, “Bring me my sword.”
It appeared in midair and I caught it by the sheath before it hit the ground: the sword Hal had given me when we first started our fencing lessons. I wrapped my hand around the hilt and drew it out. Above me the wicked baubles began to hiss and spin on their silver threads, like a gust of wind had torn suddenly through the room.
I turned to the book-mirror, feeling stronger than I ever had before. I swung my sword as hard as I could and it crashed into the mirror, the reverberation shooting up though my fingers and into my skull. But it made no mark. I tightened my grip and swung again, throwing my whole body into it.
This time the impact knocked me backward, and I landed hard on my left side. I leapt up and attacked again, hacking at the mirror with everything in me. Over my head the knife-edged crystals started shrieking like children in pain. But I didn’t stop. I struck the mirror again and again, until a spider-web crack appeared in the glass. Triumph surged through me. I could do this. I was doing this.
And then a blur of white crashed into me, hurtling me away from the book-mirror and onto the floor in a tangle of limbs. Blinding pain seared into my shoulder. I saw teeth and eyes and spots of red. I screamed, scrabbling desperately backward.
Echo North Page 16
