Echo North

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  But there wasn’t enough thread, and it was too late.

  The room spun away into darkness. The door vanished into the wall. I beat my fists against it.

  The wolf was quiet beside me, waiting until I’d grown a little calmer before he spoke. “I am sorry, Echo.”

  “The piano,” I whimpered.

  “You are more important than a piano,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THERE WERE ONLY FIVE ROOMS LEFT. The house under the mountain had dwindled to the garden with its waterfall cave, the bedroom, the library, the bauble room, and, for some reason, the conservatory. It almost would have seemed like a proper house, if its hallways weren’t forever changing. But even those were beginning to crumble. I went looking once or twice for the Temple of the Winds. I couldn’t find it, and remembered that the wolf had told me it didn’t really belong to the house at all.

  There were only three days left. My mind pulled at the mystery of the wolf like the frayed ends of a knot, but I was no closer to a solution than before. I sewed a binding stitch around the library’s door frame with the last length of golden thread, and stepped into a book-mirror titled The Queen’s Company.

  Hal was waiting for me, lounging against the western tower with a sword strapped to his hip, my sword resting beside him.

  I couldn’t help but stare—I hadn’t seen him in weeks.

  He grinned, but there was something haunted in his eyes. He tossed me my sword. “We’ve work to do, Echo—can’t let you get out of practice!”

  I barely had time to draw the blade before he lunged at me with his own outstretched.

  We fenced for a long while in the grassy space in front of the western tower. Hal didn’t speak. There was a hard set to his jaw, a crease in his forehead. He fought like he was trying to escape something. Like he was trying to forget.

  We caught our breath in a pavilion set up for a visiting prince, where iced wine and sweet-spicy tarts were being served. I sat cross-legged on a velvet-lined bench (how extravagant was this queen, that she could afford to line her guests’ benches with velvet?), while Hal slouched in a carved ivory chair, eating sugared oranges.

  “You remembered more, didn’t you?”

  He wouldn’t look at me, his eyes shifting away to the queen and her visitor, a dark-skinned prince with silk robes so thin and white I got the idea they were made of spider webs.

  I took a bite of tart. Its initial overpowering sweetness shifted strangely to strong spices burning in the back of my throat. “What did you remember?”

  Hal brushed his finger along another orange slice but didn’t eat it. Sugar spilled onto his lap. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Hal. Let me help you.”

  The earth shook with sudden thunder, and I slid off the bench to the ground. An arrow whizzed past my shoulder. It stuck quivering in the queen’s sleeve, pinning her to her chair. The spider-silk prince smiled.

  Hal cursed, and hauled me to my feet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The story is changing again. Those two are allies. They get married and fight off an army of fire demons. They bring peace to the continent.”

  But as I watched, the prince drew a dagger and slit the queen’s throat. Her head slumped forward, blood running down her neck and soaking her gown. Drops of red touched her tart.

  Hal grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the pavilion. We ran until we’d left the castle far behind and pain made my side catch. And then Hal let go of me and I wished he hadn’t. I wheeled on him. “What is going on?”

  “The books don’t change. They never change. Those are the rules. You can’t break the rules.”

  My fingers felt colder apart from his. Behind us, the castle was burning. “Someone did.”

  He cursed again; his hands shook. “You need to get away from me. You need to leave.”

  “What?”

  At last, at last, he jerked his face to mine. His eyes were hard as flint. “I’m going to hurt you, Echo. That’s what I remembered. I was always going to hurt you. You have to leave while you still can.”

  His gaze burned.

  I didn’t move. Smoke drifted toward us, the air grew thick with it. My thoughts were tangled threads, an impossible knot. “The books are enchantments. The only way they could change is if an enchanter changed them.” My eyes teared as the smoke came closer. I teased one of the threads loose. “Why is it that people who are … who are enchanted, can never talk about it?”

  “I’m not enchanted, Echo.” He practically spat the words.

  “How else could you be trapped in the books?”

  Danger lingered in his eyes. He caught my hand, and drew me so close I could feel his breath on my lips, see the specks of silver in his irises. Awareness of him trembled through me. I couldn’t stop staring at the curve of his mouth, and I wanted badly, badly, to trace it with my own.

  He put one palm on my heart. “You have to stay away from me.”

  “Hal.”

  “You have to stay away.”

  And then he turned, and vanished.

  Something rumbled through the earth; heat pulsed toward me. A craaaaaaaaack fractured the stillness, fissures opening in the ground. Within them, fire raged.

  A shape curled up from the fire, the outline of a woman sketched in smoke.

  “He isn’t honest with you.” Her voice was like crackling flame tangled with the screech of an out-of-tune violin. “He hides things from you. He does not trust you.” She circled me, brushing fiery fingers across my shoulders. My dress smoked but I felt no pain.

  “Are you a fire demon?” I asked her.

  She laughed. “That is not the right question.”

  “What is the right question?”

  “You are wasting time. He will die without you. You know he will.”

  The heat grew worse, and away in the distance I heard steel ringing on steel, the clash and cries of battle. “How do I help him?” My lips cracked, the words coming out brittle and dry.

  She smiled, a thin curl of smoky lips. “Find me, and I will tell you how.”

  “You’re right there,” I said crossly.

  “May I give you a piece of advice, Echo Alkaev?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  The smoke-woman ignored me. “Everyone is searching for their true selves. But everyone hides their true selves from each other. Look for the truth. If you find it, you will see through the enchantment.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Ask the right questions,” the smoke-woman interrupted. “Come find me in the place you do not wish to look.” She smiled and uncoiled back into a wisp of white, melting away into the wind.

  The fissure she had risen from shuddered and cracked wider. I tried to leap over it but my foot caught in a crevice and I fell and fell and fell, down into the fire.

  Flame seethed all around me, scorching my hair, licking all the moisture from my skin. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t breathe in the bone-scorched air, couldn’t speak the words that would bring me safely back to the library.

  I was burning and burning. Pain seared white behind my sightless eyes.

  And then.

  Release.

  I GREW AWARE, SLOWLY, OF icy cold, sharp as a knife, harsh as deep winter. I forced my eyes open.

  I was kneeling in a shadowy corridor that stretched forever both ahead and behind. I could breathe again. The sensation of heat was gone. I touched my arms, my hair. I was once more whole.

  “You died,” came a voice behind me. “In a manner of speaking.”

  I jerked around to see Hal, his hands in his pockets, his brows drawn tight together.

  “Where are we?”

  He shrugged. “The place I am when I am nowhere else. It’s how I find you—light pulses around a book-mirror when you’re reading it.”

  I rose slowly to my feet and went over to him, hesitant from our last encounter, but desperate to be near him, all the same.

  Without
a word, he folded me into his arms, and I lay my head on his shoulder, listening to the quiet beat of his heart until I’d grown calm again.

  And then he took my hand and we paced forward.

  The corridor was lined with shifting dark mirrors, shadow versions of the ones in the library. If they had description plates, I couldn’t read them.

  “I’ve been remembering.” Hal’s words floated to me as if from a great distance. “More and more. And there is—there is one story here that I think is mine.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Just a little further.”

  It felt like we walked for an eternity. The cold gnawed down to bone, and I thought longingly of my winter furs.

  “Here,” came Hal’s far-away voice.

  We had come to the very end of the corridor, where a tall mirror hung. It was less shadowy than the others. The frame was silver, engraved with trees, a metal forest marching around the glass.

  We stepped into the mirror. I felt the weight of magic, heavy as a waterfall, pounding on my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe.

  And then I blinked and I stood with Hal in a sunny room. Windows stretched up to the ceiling. Bookshelves lined the walls. A blond-haired man with graying temples sat behind a desk, a pair of silver spectacles perched on his nose. He was alternately sipping wine and writing in a thick ledger book.

  I glanced at Hal, who looked suddenly stricken, as if he’d taken a punch to the gut. He let go of my hand and stepped up to the desk, but the man didn’t lift his head. Like he didn’t know Hal was there.

  The similarities between the two men were striking, younger and older versions of each other.

  “Is he your father?” I asked Hal.

  The man still didn’t seem to hear us. He kept writing in his book.

  “Yes.” Hal’s voice was tight. Choked. He reached out to touch his father, but his hand passed through nothing—his father wasn’t really there.

  This wasn’t like the other book-mirrors. This wasn’t a story, invented by a sorcerer. This was a memory.

  Hal’s memory.

  I folded Hal’s hand in mine. “Let’s see what else is here.”

  Hal allowed himself to be drawn from the room, dazed.

  A small boy ran down the corridor, clutching a wriggling orange kitten in one hand, and a blue paper pennant in the other. “Mama!” he shouted. “Mama, I found her!”

  Hal froze in his tracks. “One of the kittens wandered away. We thought a wolf had got her, but she was curled up asleep in the toy chest. She used to sleep on my shoulders. Even when she got big. I called her Lion.”

  We went on, down the hall and into a drawing room. A woman sat on an elegant sofa, braiding her long pale hair. A slightly older boy-Hal scowled at her feet. “But I want to go with Illia! I’m big enough.”

  “When you’re older, dear one.”

  “I’m twelve.”

  “Papa will get you a horse, Halvarad.”

  “I don’t want a horse. I want Illia!”

  “We can’t always have what we want.”

  Beyond the wide windows of the drawing room loomed a wood, dark and green.

  There was always a wood.

  I blinked, and boy-Hal and his mother were gone, the room empty.

  Hal shook beside me. “Illia was my closest sister. Six years older than me. She went away to be married. I never saw her again.”

  “You were alone,” I said softly. “For much of your childhood.”

  “I was always alone.” He paced up to the window, and I went with him.

  A blond boy on a chestnut horse thundered toward the wood. Even from this distance, I recognized Hal, not much younger than he was standing beside me.

  Why was there always a wood?

  His eyes were wet, staring at his other self. “The wood was forbidden. I was taught to fear it, all my life. But I couldn’t resist. I went anyway.”

  “Hal?”

  His face grew hard. He jerked away from the window. “I don’t want to remember any more.”

  “What’s wrong? What happened here?”

  I glanced once more to the rider, swallowed up by the trees. “What happened there?”

  But Hal shouted a sharp word, and the whole scene crumpled around us, melting back into the shadowy corridor.

  “Leave me,” he said. He fell to his knees. He dropped his head into his hands.

  “Hal, tell me what’s wrong.”

  His eyes flashed hot. His body was tight with anger. “Leave me!”

  I obeyed.

  I stepped into one of the shadow-mirrors, and the corridor faded around me.

  I FOUND MYSELF IN AN ordinary book-world, standing under a tree on a hill. To my utter astonishment Mokosh was there, wearing a gauzy purple gown that matched her eyes.

  “Echo! Where have you been? It’s ages since I saw you last. Are you going to tell me about him this time? Your mysterious other reader?” She winked at me.

  I felt like a battered toy, ready to rattle apart in the barest wind. I realized I did want to tell her about Hal. I needed to talk to someone, and the wolf didn’t seem at all like the right choice.

  So I told her everything, back in her palace room on her floating island, stars winking outside the window. She listened at first with a teasing interest, which morphed into a disapproving severity by the time I was finished. “I feel I should put you on your guard,” she said. She touched my knee, her brows creased with concern. “You don’t know what he wants from you.”

  Her tone irked me. “He doesn’t want anything. He’s my friend.”

  “Then why isn’t he honest with you? How did he get trapped in the books in the first place? Maybe he’s dangerous. Maybe the books are his prison.”

  I jerked to my feet and paced to the window, buzzing with nervous energy.

  “He said he was going to hurt you. He warned you himself to stay away.”

  “He would never hurt me.”

  “Echo, you don’t know that. You need to be careful.”

  I studied her in the starlight, her beautiful eyes and shining hair, her flawless perfection, even in her own world. I was sorry I had come.

  I made an excuse and left as quickly as I could, not easy again until I was safely back in the library.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I DIDN’T EXPECT TO SEE HAL again, not after he was so adamant I should leave him. But he was waiting in the first book-mirror I stepped into the next day, standing alone on a mountaintop, his eyes and face stricken. A cold wind tore through his hair. Below us rambled a wide green wood.

  There was always a wood.

  “Will you meet me in Shadow of Stars?” said Hal quietly. “I want to show you something.”

  I nodded, and he gave me a tight smile. “There’s an old concert hall, abandoned during a war. I’ll be waiting for you there.” And then he vanished.

  I commanded the library and a mirror wavered into existence. I stepped through, onto a hill under fierce stars, the shattered ruins of a war-torn city stretching into the night.

  I wandered through the winding streets, stepping over rubble and dark stains I didn’t care to examine very closely. A boy with a bloody rag tied around his head pointed me to the concert hall, a huge domed building near the center of the city. Somewhere not too far off I heard shouting. Weeping. A piercing scream. I shuddered and picked my way to the hall as quickly as I could. I climbed a broken stair, stepped through the splintered remains of a door.

  The ceiling soared high above me, broken glass showing slivers of stars. Four tiers of balconies leaned over a wide wooden stage, like ornately dressed eavesdroppers peering through a keyhole. Hal sat at a piano in the middle of the stage, wearing ill-fitting black trousers and a loose blue shirt that pooled silk over his wrists. His feet were bare. I suddenly remembered the careless notes he’d played on the harpsichord in The Empress’s Musician, the offhanded way he’d talked so knowledgeably about Behrend.

  I walked toward the stage a
nd settled into a seat in the very front row. Hal didn’t look at me, but he must have known I was there.

  He started playing, a low octave with his left hand, his right spinning out a melody that sounded like liquid stars, beautiful and impossible and haunting. The left hand slowly climbed up to meet the right, and a fascinating counterpoint emerged out of nothing, spiraling into a wall of raging chords punctuated by a low repeated note, erratic as a fading heartbeat. The music rose and fell. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life, but the sorrow woven into every phrase was almost too much to bear.

  It ended before I was ready, but not before my cheeks grew damp with tears. I blinked up at Hal, who leaned his elbows on the keys and put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook and I jerked up from my seat and scrambled onto the stage. I sat next to him on the piano bench, slid my arm around his waist. He felt heavy beside me, his grief a solid thing.

  “I wanted—I wanted you to know one thing about me,” he said. “One true thing. It was all I could think of to give you.” His voice was raw, ragged.

  Ask the right questions, whispered the smoke-woman, unbidden, in my mind. “Where did you learn to play like that?”

  “I learned from my friend. She wrote that piece—it was her gift to me.”

  The words tore at my heart, and I tried to push away my jealousy. “What happened to her?”

  “I lost her. A long time ago.” He stood from the bench in one stiff motion.

  “How long ago?”

  He looked at me, his eyes wet. “A moment. And an eternity.”

  I rose and slipped over to him. “If there was a way to—to get everything back … to make everything right again … would you let me help you?”

  “You cannot help me, Echo. You never could.”

  I stared at him, my pulse overloud in my ears. “Hal—”

  He stepped back, his whole body trembling.

  The stage began to shake beneath our feet. Stars exploded beyond the domed ceiling, the world fractured white. I got the feeling from Hal’s sudden sharp breath that this wasn’t supposed to happen—another change in the story.

  He flashed one more look in my direction, and winked out of existence.