Echo North

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  We walk awhile, to give the ponies some relief, leading them behind us in the white crust of yesterday’s snow. The sky ahead begins to redden, and Ivan calls back to me that we should make camp for the night.

  We have made it almost to the shadow of the mountain range, and Ivan unfolds the tent from its bundle. I help him set it up, holding the poles while he adjusts the skins and drives stakes into the hard ground. Then he makes a fire, a little away from the tent, and I unpack salted meat, traveler’s bread, and tea.

  The fire crackles red, warming our faces as we sit and eat in companionable silence. The ponies eat nosebags of grain. I feel weary and anxious, but glad I am finally on my way to Hal, on my way to atone for my mistake.

  “It won’t be as easy, from here.” Ivan sips tea from a tin cup. “It is a long, hard road. I want to be sure you are ready to face it. I would not speak so in front of Isidor, but no mortal who has traveled more than a day or two north of the village has ever returned. Are you certain you want to walk this road?”

  I don’t even have to shut my eyes to see Hal standing in the snow, his face tight with terror. “I am certain.”

  Ivan doesn’t ask me again.

  We sleep in the tent, on either side of the center pole. I wear my coat, and burrow beneath the other furs. I dream of Hal sobbing in the dark, of Mokosh with a crown in her hair. Of a forest of thorns, growing up around the reindeer tent, trapping Satu and Isidor inside. The Wolf Queen laughs. “I told you to turn back, but you did not listen.”

  Hal marries Mokosh in the wood. They sit together on silver thrones, and the trees bend to their will.

  But his eyes are empty.

  WE REACH THE MOUNTAINS, AND climb them. The trails we blaze through rocks and ice and snow are too steep for the ponies to navigate with us on their backs. So we lead them, Ivan first with his pony, me after with mine. The wind bites sharp, spitting ice into our faces, and it’s only the climb that keeps me warm.

  Ivan sings as he ascends the mountain, and snatches of his music come back to me with the ice on the wind. It’s a beautiful melody, haunting and sad, and I wonder that he has the breath to spare for it. I don’t want him to ever stop—it drowns out the sound of the Wolf Queen’s ever-present laughter.

  We camp at the top of the peak in a little half-cave formed of jumbled rocks. There is enough space to light a fire, the smoke curling through a crack at the top, and we do not have to set up our tent.

  The ponies graze outside, nosing bits of scrub out from under the snow. I unpack today’s rations while Ivan hangs a kettle over the fire for tea. It is only our second evening, but already there is a rhythm to it: the kettle starts to boil as I lay out salted meat on tin plates; Ivan puts another log on the fire and then settles across from me. I hand him his food and he chews, thoughtfully, as if he’s in another world.

  “There is another story-thread about the Wolf Queen that perhaps you ought to hear,” says Ivan.

  I’m chewing on my own meat, and I nod for him to tell me.

  His voice takes on the cadence of a song, like his melody climbing the mountain today. “In the Wolf Queen’s court time passes differently. There are many tales of men and women coming into the Queen’s realm, spending what they think is an evening there, and returning to the outside world to find a hundred years have passed. Their families are dead and gone. Everything they knew crumbled away into dust. Once you enter, Echo, even if you can save both of you and be free of that place—it could cost you everything.”

  His words make my eyes sting, but I tell myself it’s just the smoke from the fire.

  My mind crowds with images of my father in his shop, Rodya bent over his work table, Donia with her swollen belly, laughing in the firelight. But there’s Hal, too, fast asleep in the bed, running with me down the hill, plunging into battle at the ball. Standing in the snow as the wolves close in, staring at me, stricken, because of what I’d done.

  I turn away so Ivan can’t see that I’m crying.

  When I sleep, I dream of my father. His face sags with wrinkles. Spidery veins show blue behind papery skin. He settles at the roots of a huge old tree and slowly turns to dust. The wind blows him away. There is nothing left.

  And then the Wolf Queen is there, blood dripping from her teeth. “This is what you wish for. This is what you seek—your father’s death, your family’s hurt. Turn back. I will not warn you again.”

  I am raw with aching. “I’m coming to save Hal. You can’t stop me.”

  “The way is long and treacherous. You will be sorry.”

  “But still I will come.”

  She hisses at me. I am left to watch Hal, sitting on his silver throne. Vines grow up, twist around him. They cover all his body, twine into his mouth and nose and ears. They leave only his eyes, blue as the sky and just as empty, staring forever into nothing.

  I know he is already dead.

  In the morning, we scatter the ashes of our fire and start down the mountain.

  Still no snow, but the trail is even more treacherous winding down. I slip on loose gravel and bits of ice and scree more than once. I tear a hole in my jacket, but Ivan says he’s packed a sewing kit, so I’ll be able to stitch it shut. The ponies stumble, too, but somehow they keep their footing. Ivan sings again, his voice rich and thick as honey, banishing the Wolf Queen’s laughter to the back of my mind.

  At the bottom of the mountain lies a giant, wild forest, snow heavy on the boughs of the trees. Ivan is surprised to find it here but grateful, too, for our stock of wood already dwindles.

  Night is falling fast as we erect our tent in the shadow of the trees, and then all at once a third day is gone, and we’ve eaten our dinner and crawled to our separate furs. I’m afraid to sleep—I don’t want to dream. The forest makes strange noises, creaks and snaps and whistles. Wolves howl in the distance, and I’m seized with a wild hope. Could we be closer to the Wolf Queen than Ivan has imagined?

  But I hear his voice from the other side of the tent: “It’s just the wind, lass, filling the gaps. Sleep now.”

  And at last I do.

  THE BLIZZARD STARTS IN THE morning, and it doesn’t stop. We travel through the forest for two days, sheltered somewhat by the giant trees, their branches catching the brunt of the snow.

  Misfortune dogs us. The first day, a branch snaps without warning and comes crashing down. I leap out of the way in time, but Ivan is knocked flat on his back, pinned underneath it. His face creases with pain. The branch is too heavy for me to drag off of him, so I dig desperately in the snow and the dirt, until I’ve made a big enough gap for him to squirm free. Ivan doesn’t say as much, but I think he’s broken one or more of his ribs.

  The second day, I catch my foot in an unseen hole under the snow and wrench my ankle. I gasp, collapsing to the ground, just as a huge brown bear comes thundering through the trees and takes a vicious swipe at Ivan’s side. The ponies rear and scream. The wind shrieks with laughter.

  But Ivan stands calm. He reaches out a hand to touch the bear. “You are far from home, my friend. It is winter. Go. Sleep. Wake in the springtime no more of hers.”

  To my astonishment, the bear bows its head and lumbers away.

  Ivan soothes the ponies next, then sags down beside me. Red leaks from jagged tears in his coat drip out onto the snow. “She’s watching us.”

  The Wolf Queen’s voice coils through me: The way is long and treacherous. You will be sorry.

  Fear seizes me. “You don’t think we should turn back?”

  “No. But we must be more careful.”

  I stitch up Ivan’s side and he wraps my ankle, and we hobble onward.

  I’m not sorry to leave the wood behind.

  Ivan speaks less and less as the days spin on, but I don’t mind his silence. I have little breath for conversation anyway, trudging after him and his pony through the endless snow. We don’t ride the ponies anymore—we’ve laden them with bundles of firewood, and they have enough to carry without us. Their progres
s would be even slower with our added weight.

  The land stretches out before us in an endless frozen tundra, the eternal white broken only by the occasional low scrub poking through the snow. We walk and walk and walk, for hours every day, and stop just before nightfall to make our camp. We only put up the tent if it’s snowing—it is too much effort, otherwise. I fall asleep on one side of the fire, bundled up in furs, and Ivan on the other. Dreams haunt me. We wake always to a world of blurry whiteness.

  I lose count of the days, after a while. There is nothing but the weariness of walking, the weight of my pack, the tired fog of the ponies’ breath and Ivan’s singing. He sings more than he talks, his music constant, tangled with the icy wind.

  The tundra stretches on and on. Our rations and firewood dwindle; there is no more tea at night, just snow melted in a pot over the fire.

  “We may have to eat the ponies,” says Ivan one evening, as we sit chewing on tiny scraps of meat. “If it comes to it.”

  I don’t want to eat the ponies, but I know he’s right. There’s hardly any food for us, and less for them, and our faithful pack beasts are more likely to die of starvation than not before we reach our destination.

  “We may not,” Ivan assures me, seeing my stricken expression. “I was just thinking aloud.”

  I nod over my mug of melted snow.

  “Two weeks,” he adds. “Since we left Isidor and Satu.”

  “It feels like an age.”

  Ivan smiles. “Or three.”

  It’s the most we’ve spoken since our first couple of nights, and the sound of his speech comforts me.

  “Have you heard the tale of the Four Winds?” His voice catches up the thread of a story.

  “Part of it,” I answer, thinking of the wolf’s words to me in the temple, of visiting the Palace of the Sun in the books with Hal. “But I want to hear it all.”

  “They were brothers, the only children of the Sun and the Moon. East was the eldest, and he favored his father the Sun, with bronze skin and hair the color of fire. He was a hunter, and roamed far and wide slaying terrifying beasts and winning great renown.

  “West and South were the second and third born, and they too favored the Sun, though not with such magnificence as East. They were always quarreling, trying to outdo each other with feats of strength so that they might rise in their father’s eyes to the status of East. But North was the youngest, and favored his mother the Moon, with eyes like stars and hair of silver and skin pale as snow. He was lonely, for his brothers scarcely regarded him, and when they did take notice, mocked him for his quiet voice and meek spirit, which they mistook for weakness.

  “But North had within him great power: to stop time, to still hearts, to turn warmth to coldness and light to dark. He could have killed his brothers if he chose, but he didn’t. Instead he allied himself with the Wolf Queen.”

  I peer at Ivan across the fire. That wasn’t quite what the wolf and the Winds in the book-mirror had told me. “Allied himself?”

  His voice picks up an odd note. “She tricked him. Stole his power for her own. It’s why she can bend time to her will.”

  My heart tugs and I shut my eyes and see Hal. “I thought the North Wind traded his power for the love of a woman.”

  “That is why he went to the Wolf Queen in the first place.”

  I think of the gatekeeper in the wolf’s house, all malice and power. “Do you know what became of them?”

  Ivan’s eyes glint orange in the light of the fire. “The stories do not say.”

  In the morning, the landscape begins, at long, long last, to change. Glaciers jut out of the ground, jagged formations of ice skewering the sky. We wander into a maze of them and have to wend our way through, our snowshoes leaving crisscrossed patterns behind us. The wind whistles between the splintered walls of ice, ringing loud with the Wolf Queen’s laughter, and the weary ponies droop their heads and drag their hooves.

  “There must be a body of water,” says Ivan ahead of me. “Somewhere near.”

  The glaciers stretch on and on, growing larger and more magnificent as we walk. They soar over our heads, sending ice-blue shadows across the snow. Hunger gnaws tight in my belly.

  All day we wander through the ice maze, no end in sight. When we make camp, we shelter beneath one of the glaciers and eat the last of our food.

  Ivan builds a fire. “The North Wind himself would be hard pressed to go any farther,” he says. He seems to be making a joke, but I don’t understand and he doesn’t explain.

  I am weary and sick of heart, and Ivan can sense it. He tells me a nonsensical story about an old lady and a magical spoon, and I fall into my dreams with a smile on my lips.

  The next day, Ivan kills the ponies.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE FIELD OF GLACIERS LEADS US to the edge of a frozen lake, so vast it might as well be the ocean. But Ivan is equipped with small spikes to attach to the bottoms of our boots so we’ll have purchase over the ice.

  I cried about the ponies—Ivan did, too, and he wasn’t ashamed. “They served us well, lass. Now they help us one last time. But I am sorry they must end this way.”

  We start off across the lake, the spikes on our boots digging into the ice, crunching with every step. It hasn’t snowed for days, but the sky is hazy and little sunlight shows through. The cold bites deep, and yet I see beauty spread out all around, and it humbles me.

  The ice is strong and impossibly thick, surface cracks splintering out like the threads of some giant spiderweb. We hear it shifting sometimes, great thundering groans as, far beneath our feet, it cracks or moves or shudders.

  “The ice is singing to us,” says Ivan, and he lets the ice sing instead of him.

  I grow used to it after a while and it ceases to frighten me, the ancient music of this strange scarred land.

  The ice seems endless. We camp on the frozen lake as the sun slips to its rest behind the clouds, and I can see nothing but ice in every direction. The clouds are knitting tighter, the wind whipping wild.

  Ivan studies the sky. “Storm coming.”

  We put up the tent.

  The ice is thick enough to build a fire on top of so we do, Ivan using a few scraps of our precious wood to roast strips of meat in the coals. We eat, and I try not to remember that the meat is pony.

  It’s then that I notice the absence of the compass-watch’s steady ticking. I peer at it in the firelight—the clock has stopped once more, but the compass, when I check it, still points steadily north.

  We shelter in the tent as the snow starts. The wind slams hard against the canvas, seeking, seeking, seeking to get in, to rip us away from the lake and fling us into the sky. The Wolf Queen’s voice echoes all around, a shrieking, eerie song. I shudder where I lie.

  Ivan hears it, too. “The land feels her power. She wields winter like a sword—it should not have as strong a grip here as it does.”

  “Do you think Hal is still alive?” I whisper. I can’t shake away the image of his dead eyes.

  “If he wasn’t, she wouldn’t bother with us.”

  I hold on to those words, try to take the comfort in them.

  Sleep is a long time coming, but at last it finds me.

  I dream again of the hall in the wood, and the stars burning fierce above it. Mokosh paces, her silver hair bound in tight braids. She’s dressed as if for battle, in plates of leather armor, with knives strapped across her back. The Wolf Queen watches her, passive, amused. I realize with a jolt why it isn’t strange for Mokosh to be there: the similarities between her and the Wolf Queen are striking, startling, in a way only parent and child could be. I wonder how I didn’t see it before.

  “What worries you, my daughter?” asks the Queen.

  Mokosh keeps pacing, restless, uneasy. “You underestimate her, Mother. She is coming. She will not stop, and you should take care.”

  The Wolf Queen laughs. “You are just afraid she will see your face—your real face, and revile you.”

>   Mokosh snarls, drawing one of her knives. But the Wolf Queen gives a flick of her clawed hand and the knife falls to the ground.

  “Time grows short. I fear you will not honor your promise.”

  “Peace, Mokosh. You shall have your reward before two moons’ ending, and another besides: a Wolf Prince, for the daughter of the Wolf Queen.”

  But Mokosh isn’t convinced. “The girl is stronger than you know. She has the power to defeat you.”

  The Wolf Queen smiles, her teeth curling white past silver lips. “Let me worry about the girl.”

  Hal is chained in the dark, clawing at his skin, screaming. Nettles grow up from the ground, piercing every part of him. “Why did you look?” he sobs. “Echo, why did you have to look?”

  When I wake, a lamp is burning. It’s morning, but our tent is buried in snow. Ivan catches my eye. “We’ll have to dig ourselves out.”

  It takes hours, and we rip the tent in the process. We’ll need to stitch it up before we can use it again.

  We’re already weary before we even start for the day.

  It’s hard going. Ice seeps under my collar and I can barely see for the wind blearing my vision. Ivan helps me tie a scarf around my mouth and nose, almost up to my eyes, and that helps a little.

  The ice seems angry, shifting and groaning and thundering all around us. It no longer sounds like music. Ivan walks quickly; I can see the tension in his shoulders, and his fear scares me more than my own. The Wolf Queen’s reach is long, and if we fall through the ice, there will be no saving us.

  On and on we go, leaning into the wind as the snow skitters across the surface of the frozen lake. Sometimes the wind sweeps the ice clean, and I can see once more the strong webbed cracks spidering out in all directions.

  We come, sometime in the mid-afternoon, to a place on the lake where lumps of ice lie in furrows like a farmer’s field. They shine beneath the snow a brilliant, impossible turquoise. I stop to examine them and Ivan stops, too. My breath catches in my throat. “Beautiful.”