When the sun began to set, Hal and I followed the old man to the very top of the lighthouse where windows ringed all around, freshly cleaned and sparklingly clear. Out over the sea, the last glow of the sun was visible, a line of fire across the water. It disappeared all at once, and the twilight grew swiftly dark.
The keeper lit the lamp in the center of the room. Light flared up, refracted by glass lenses that were directed out to sea. Hal and I watched as he wound the weights and adjusted the lenses, coughing all the while. Spots of blood flecked his beard. His body shook.
A storm rose over the sea. It raged for hours, lashing the lighthouse with all its fury, while the old man struggled to keep the lamps lit. Hal held me close, his arm around my waist, my arm around his. I didn’t want to watch the lighthouse keeper’s tragedy unfold, but I also didn’t want to leave the story, for fear I wouldn’t be able to find Hal again.
When dawn broke, the old man climbed down the stairs to his little bedroom for the last time.
We sat with him, Hal and I, while he was dying. I held his hand, tears streaming down my cheeks. Hal held mine.
Sorrow filled me up. I couldn’t help but think of Hal, trapped in the book worlds, like the keeper was in the lighthouse. Is this how Hal would end? Dying alone, a character in a story?
When the old man was gone, Hal pulled me gently to my feet. We left the lighthouse, striding out onto the sand, the salt-drenched air fanning cold across our skin. I told him about the library, how it was nearly unbound.
“Thank you for saving it,” he said. “Thank you for saving me.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “I haven’t saved you yet.”
His lips moved against my hair. “Yes you have.”
I think that’s when I decided. If, God forbid, I couldn’t find a way to help the wolf and he failed or died or was lost to the wood at the end of the year, I would stay on as caretaker of the house. I would come and have tea with Hal every day, while the worlds of the books smoothed away any hint of age. Perhaps, with the last hint of life, I would step into the book mirrors to be with Hal forever, and we would fade together, little by little, until the library crumbled and we were lost to the whims of time, nothing more than ink between pages, turned to dust.
No matter what, I would never leave him to die alone.
THE DAYS SPUN AWAY, GRAINS of precious sand slipping through my fingers. The trees in the wood turned from gold to brown. Autumn was here in earnest; winter was not far away.
I was running out of time.
The house shed a new room every week. The bear room, the treasury, the laundry, countless others—all vanished. We lost the spider room, and I hoarded the remaining thread, using it to make a single binding stitch, every day, around the library’s door frame, to keep it from going the way of the others. I selfishly wished that the bauble room would be unbound next. Something inside me pulled me to go back there, but my ever-sharpening fear of it kept me away. Fear tangled with guilt, and I continued to tell myself I was just honoring my promise to the wolf.
I went reading more and more. I wanted to spend every moment with Hal that I possibly could, and I was more determined than ever to find a way to help him—and the wolf. The answers had to be somewhere in the book-mirrors—I just hadn’t found them yet.
But Hal seemed less concerned with finding answers than he was in having adventures.
He came with me when I sought out a caravan going on an epic journey to retrieve a magical object—he was so distracting I had to abandon the quest after an hour. We wound up playing pranks on the caravan for the remainder of the journey. (“The magical object wasn’t bound to be anything useful,” Hal assured me, avoiding my eyes when I asked if he’d remembered anything more.)
I stepped into a book about a wise man who lived on top of a remote mountain, hoping he might know something about the old magic. Just as I was saddling a quiet mare to ride up the mountain, Hal burst into the stable with a grin. “There’s a dragon wreaking havoc on the kingdom!” he announced, leaping the few steps to my side and taking my hand in his own. “You know what that means!”
“What does it mean, Hal?” I asked him, laughing.
He raised our joined hands dramatically into the air. “It means, my fierce warrior, that we must go and slay the beast!”
“Hal, that’s a subplot!” I objected, but he just tugged me into the tack room and managed to unearth a suit of armor just my size.
He was there when I attempted to help a princess defeat her sorcerous uncle from seizing the throne—Hal threw food in the sorcerer’s face at a banquet, laughing himself silly as the sorcerer frowned thunderously and turned all the diners into snakes and rabbits. (This would have happened anyway, Hal assured me—he’d read ahead. Wouldn’t I like to go dancing at the village festival under the stars?)
He was there when I went to visit a queen who was rumored to be an enchantress—or at the very least have an impressive library. The three of us took tea together in the garden—me the enchantress-queen, and Hal, who looked ridiculous in skin-tight trousers and a pointy cap with a feather. “I was just hanging around some outlaws,” Hal explained his regalia. “Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. That sort of thing.”
“I beg your pardon!” exclaimed the queen, and we were subsequently thrown in prison, so I didn’t get to ask her about her books or her enchantments.
And he came with me when I harnessed a chariot to a comet and rode it up to the Palace of the Sun, where the East and West and South Winds dwelled with their father in a great bronze house filled with light. The Winds themselves came to greet us, and they were tall and grim, with jewels bound bright on their foreheads: East, whose skin shone the same burnished bronze as his father’s house; West, who gleamed gold and had a pair of wings folded against his back; South, who was a bright copper red and carried a spear made of mountains.
We dined with the Winds in a hall looking out over the world, and the colors tasted bright and the wine smelled of music.
“Where is the North Wind?” Hal asked.
East frowned. West looked stern. South, sorrowful. “His power was greater than ours,” said East, “but he was a fool. He traded it away for the love of a woman.”
I thought of the wolf, who had told me that same story in the temple. I wondered if the West Wind remembered healing me, after I’d been caught by the wood. But these couldn’t be the same Winds, could they? This was a story, and that had been real.
“It’s the oldest of magics,” I said.
The three Winds turned to me, and I didn’t think I imagined the shrewdness in West’s eyes. “What is?”
“Love.” The word burned through me, and I suddenly couldn’t look at Hal.
But he stood near enough that I could feel the heat of him. “That’s something you must never let go of,” he said softly.
West nodded, his wings rustling in a cool current of air. “It could break the strongest curse. The bitterest of enchantments.”
My heart stilled. “What did you say?”
The West Wind’s eyes blazed with all the light and depth of the universe itself. He brushed his fingers across my temple. “You will understand, in time.”
“If you know something—if you know how to help him—”
It was East who spoke next, the jewel bound to his forehead flashing scarlet and orange. “When you have found the oldest of magics, you must not let it go, not even for an instant. Then, and only then, will you be free. Free of all of this.”
“I’m not the one who’s trapped,” I objected.
East just smiled, and he and his two brothers turned away from us.
“Wait,” I said. “Please wait!”
But the East and South and West Winds stepped off their terrace into empty air. I blinked, and they were gone.
I turned to Hal. “I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know how to help you.”
He looked after them, his body taut and still. “It doesn’t matter, Echo.
”
“Of course it does!”
He seemed to shrink before me, and to my horror, tears dripped down his cheeks.
“You’ve remembered something else, haven’t you?”
His shoulders shook.
“Hal?”
He pulled away from me, spoke a sharp word to the air and vanished from sight.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WINTER DESCENDED OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, ICE encasing the roses in the garden, frost tracing lacy patterns on the windows.
My remaining time in the house under the mountain had dwindled to a mere two weeks, and I was no closer to helping the wolf—or Hal—than I was at the beginning.
Nearly every day another room came unbound. We lost the rain room, the sunroom, the room with the snakes. Even the dining room fell into the void one evening, a mountain of food tumbling with it. I took my meals in the conservatory or the room behind the waterfall instead.
The house shrank and shrank; it seemed to hum with sorrow. I tended the remaining rooms with as much care as I knew how. The wolf rarely accompanied me—he spent more time in the bauble room than he spent out of it. One day, my guilt at last propelled me to approach the obsidian door, and I stood outside of it for a long while, battling my fear. The door seemed to whisper, to scream. I had almost worked up the courage to open it when the wolf stepped out of the room, covered in blood from nose to tail. I sucked in a breath, catching a glimpse of the sharp spinning crystals before the door shut behind him. He didn’t look at me, just padded off down the hall. Terror twisted through me. I ran away from the bauble room. I didn’t go back.
I practiced the piano. I went reading, searching desperately for answers that evaded me. Hal seemed to be avoiding me; Mokosh was nowhere to be found. So I took to wandering listlessly around the house. It was dying, just as the wolf was. It would take all the binding thread in the world to keep it together, and there was barely any left. I would never become its caretaker.
What, then? Why had the wolf really brought me here?
And what would I do when he was gone? What would I do when I ran out of binding thread, and the library was lost to me, too? Would I just go home?
I thought about that, examined my future like a painted egg: first, studying its colors and intricate design. Then, slowly peeling the shell away to see what lay hidden inside.
I found uncertainty. Hope. As much as I missed my father and Rodya, I had no desire to go back, to return to Donia and the villagers’ derision and a lifetime of lurking in the shadows to hide my face. But all the same, I was seized with a sudden longing to see them again.
I went to the library’s storeroom, took the ivory hand mirror from its cupboard. I settled with it on the floor, pricked my finger, plucked a hair, like I had done so many times at the beginning of my stay in the wolf’s house. “Show me my family,” I whispered.
The mirror swirled white.
And then I was looking down the street of my village, following my father as he strode up to the bookshop, his hands in his pockets, whistling.
He fished out a key and unlocked the door, then stepped inside and went about the business of opening the shop: dusting the register, drawing the curtains, sweeping the already-spotless floor.
A man came in when he was only partially finished with this ritual and requested a book, which my father found quickly. The customer laid silver in my father’s hands before stepping back outside, tipping his hat as he went. This scene repeated several times, with various men and women, and my heart twinged—my father’s business was successful, for the first time in years. I wondered what had changed. Maybe Donia was right—maybe my face had cursed him.
The mirror shifted.
I saw Donia sitting on the couch in front of the fire, her fingers flashing with needle and thread. Her belly was round and tight beneath her dress, and she hummed as she sewed. Snow clung white to the window.
And then the scene changed again. I saw Rodya receiving his tradesman’s sigil from his master, saw him stride out into the street where a girl waited for him, nut-brown hair curling from under her kerchief. She had soft eyes and a shy smile, and she fingered his sigil and kissed his cheek.
Rodya laughed and laughed, and kissed the girl properly, holding her close and safe against him. He murmured quiet words into her ear: “We’ll be wed before spring, if you’ll still have me.”
And then it was the girl’s turn to laugh.
The mirror wavered a third time, and went blank.
I raised my head from the mirror and found the wolf beside me, his amber eyes very bright. “Echo, why are you crying?”
“They are so happy. Oh, Wolf, they are so happy without me.” And I wrapped my arms around his white neck and sobbed into his fur.
THE WOLF AND I WENT to the garden, and settled on the step near the lily pond. The wind was cold but the sun was warm; the air smelled of honey.
I told the wolf everything I’d seen in the mirror, words tumbling out of me until I was emptied of them. I hugged my knees to my chest and wiped away the remnants of my tears.
He watched me, passive and sad, and for a while didn’t say anything. Over the iron fence, the wood was heavy with snow.
“I did this to you,” the wolf said at last, his voice low and more gruff than usual. “I scarred your face. I made your life into something it never should have been.”
It wasn’t at all what I expected. “Wolf, I’ve never blamed you.”
“Then why do you blame yourself?”
That was something I had no answer for.
“What others see in you reflects upon them, not you. Your stepmother treated you poorly—your whole village did—but that is not your fault. It never was. It never could be.”
I picked up a pebble and threw it into the lily pond, but it only made a pathetic little plash before disappearing beneath the surface. “I have always been powerless.” I fought to keep control of my voice.
The wolf shook his white head. “Just because you have always thought that does not make it true. Do you think your brother and your father were kind to you out of pity? Or because they saw the trueness of your heart, your goodness and your worth?”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “What is my worth?”
“Deeper than you know.”
Everything felt sharp and cold, though the sunlight poured warmth into the garden. I didn’t want to think about my scars anymore. I didn’t want to think about my father and Rodya, or be afraid they were happier with me gone.
“If others cannot see your true self, if they refuse to see it—that is a flaw in their own character. Not in yours.”
“Have you seen my true self?”
He looked at me. “I’m beginning to.”
“Have I seen your true self?”
For a long, long moment, he gave no reply. We stared at each other, while the wind blew dead leaves into the water. “In part.”
“Will I ever see the whole?”
“I do not know, Echo Alkaev.”
I thought of the bauble room, the clock and the curl of silver hair. The wood, the wood, the wood. Puzzle pieces, waiting for me to fit them together, if I was brave enough to try.
“Wolf, why did you really bring me here?”
His sorrow was palpable. His eyes over-bright. “Because you are the opposite of her. You are full of life and kindness. You are not brimming with malice and hate, or waiting to twist others’ goodness to your own cruel purposes.”
“What has she done to you? What is she going to do?”
But he shook his white head. “There is a … bond … on me. I … cannot …”
“I know.”
He nuzzled my knee and I wrapped my arms around him and held him close.
We sat there like that until the sun sank and the air bit cold, then went back inside to our dinner.
I SETTLED THE NEXT MORNING on the piano bench and opened the Czajka piece I’d been working on. Outside the window, sunlight refracted off the snow
, I started playing, easing into the notes after fumbling a bit in the beginning.
The music swallowed me and I lost myself for a while in the soaring melodies and fairy-bright ornamental passages. I thundered into the last passionate crescendo and let the remaining few notes whisper out into the room, wavering with sorrow before they died away.
I took a breath. Laid my hands in my lap. And looked over to see the wolf, who had padded in at some point while I was playing. He stared at me, a strange light in his eyes. “I have never heard you play it so well,” he said gruffly.
I soared with pride. The wolf wasn’t generous in his praise.
Light streamed in through the window; dust motes swirled. The wolf leaned his head against my knee. “I do not deserve you. Your kindness. Your goodness. Your beauty.”
“Wolf, I’m not beautiful.”
He lifted his head and peered straight into my eyes. “You are wrong, Echo. You are the most beautiful person I have ever seen.”
Something inside of me cracked. Tears leaked from my eyes.
The wolf tugged gently on my skirt and I knelt on the floor and wrapped my arms around his neck. “Do not cry. My beautiful, beautiful girl. Please do not cry.”
I held him like the world had spun away beneath me, and I was left to dance with the stars, not mortal any longer but a creature made of moonlight and magic.
No one had ever called me beautiful before.
The room began to shake. I jerked my head up. A crack was splintering through the floor. “No! Not this room! Please not this room!”
But the wolf was already grabbing my skirt in his jaw, pulling me to the doorway.
The piano shuddered and groaned and fell into the widening crack.
“No! NO!” I dropped to my knees in the corridor, scrabbling for the needle and binding thread on my belt.
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