Page 19 of Echo North
Beyond the black door came a faint tinkling music; my shoulders and hands pulsed with pain.
I stared at him, at the blood in his fur, the flash of his teeth, the coiled tension in his body.
“SWEAR IT!”
But I’d had enough of making promises I didn’t understand.
I turned and fled.
IRAN BACK DOWN THEcorridor, my heels pounding into the floor. The gem-studded wall had vanished, and I bolted instead into a tunnel of twisted branches and leaves, spongy moss beneath my feet, swirling red and gold as if it were patterned carpet.
The wolf came hard behind me, anything he might have been shouting lost in his guttural barks and my thundering heart.
“Somewhere safe,” I pleaded as I barreled out into a glass passageway, veins of blue and silver liquid tracing intricate patterns under the transparent floor. “Somewhere safe.”
I half fell down a nearly invisible glass staircase and into a blue wood door inlaid with bits of colored glass. It swung soundlessly inward and snicked shut again when I’d tumbled through. Three heartbeats, ten, thirty.
The door stayed closed, and the wolf didn’t follow. I scrambled to my feet and took a steadying breath—had the house somehow answered my plea for sanctuary? A sense of calm settled over me.
I stood in a huge, airy room. High paneled ceilings stretched twenty feet or more above my head, illuminated by a dozen sparkling chandeliers. Several elegant couches were arranged in the center of the chamber on a blue-and-gold carpet emblazoned with birds. Set into the back wall was a second blue door.
It might have been a drawing room in some grand house, except for the dozens and dozens of mirrors that obscured every inch of the walls. Some were rectangular, some oval, some oblong, most of them as tall as me. They refracted the light from the chandeliers, making it hard to look directly at them, and giving the whole place a glistening, dizzying quality. Silence reigned so complete my ears rang with it.
I had no desire to leave the serenity of the room and face the wolf—or the house—so I moved left away from the door, brushing my fingers along the mirrors as I passed. All of the frames were made, unusually, of leather, some soft and supple, some old and cracked. I couldn’t place why they seemed familiar until I noticed that every mirror had a little gold description plate, many at the top, a few at the bottom or tilted sideways along either edge. Book spines—they reminded me of book spines.
I peered at a few of the description plates, which said things like:The Monster of Montahue: In Which a Prince Slays a Beast Only to Find it Within HimandThe Doorway to All Things: In Which a Magical Hat Causes Much HavocandThe Soldier’s Gift: In Which Heaven Fights for the Emperor, a Firsthand Account.
Werethese mirrors books? Had I stumbled into a library? Wild house and unpredictable wolf aside, I didn’t carewhereI’d promised to stay for a whole year, as long as there was something to read.
Beyond the blue door at the back of the hall was an even bigger chamber. This one was lined with a maze of ebony shelves stretching out of my sight line, all chock-full of mirror-books, hundreds upon hundreds, maybe even thousands of them.
I stared, my mouth hanging open, and retreated into the first room, overwhelmed.
How did one read a mirror-book? It seemed foolish not to try—if I left the library I might never be able to find it again in the seemingly infinite, ever-changing house. And I still didn’t want to face the wolf. The library was a welcome distraction.
I selected a mirror at random and stepped up to it. The nameplate read:The Hidden Wood: In Which a Princess Confronts the Queen of Fairies.
I thought perhaps the story would parade magically in front of my eyes as I watched, but nothing happened. My reflection stared back at me, my scars stark in the light from the chandeliers. I wished I could scrub them away, leave them like so much dirt in the bottom of my washbasin. My jaw hardened, and I stretched my hand out to touch the mirror.
The glass—if it was glass—wavered, rippling out like water in a pond, and a sensation of coolness washed through me.
The next instant I was standing at the edge of a tangled, overgrown wood, briars curling up tree trunks and cutting into rough bark. Horrid black blossoms peered at me from between the thorns, and they reeked of death. A cold wind soughed through the trees; a bird with black wings squawked overhead.
A pale-haired girl came along the forest path, a basket mounded with mushrooms swinging from her arm. The bird flew down and settled on her shoulder. She ran one finger along its glossy head, singing a note that the bird echoed back to her. She laughed and fed it a mushroom.
The girl passed out of sight among the trees, and without even thinking about it, I stepped into the wood and followed her.
The forest enveloped me, the scent of moss and sap and a hint of those horrible black flowers cloying and sticky in the air. Leaves crunched under my feet. The wind coiled icy around my neck.
The girl walked quickly—I nearly had to run to keep up with her. She followed a deer path through the wood, singing and feeding the bird mushrooms as she went. After a while she came into a clearing, where a little stone cottage nestled among the trees, wind flapping cheerily through bright, flowered curtains. To the side of the house a garden marched in neat green rows; a hedgehog sat in the midst of it, munching noisily through the lettuce.
I blinked, and was suddenly inside the cottage, watching the girl make tea and sit down to drink it at a tiny, narrow table. The bird never left her shoulder, and I thought its eyes flashed green, though I couldn’t be sure.
“Where … am I?” I asked carefully, not wanting to startle the girl but needing answers.
She smiled at me, not startled in the least. “The House in the Midst of the Wood, of course. My mother left it to me, after she died.” A shadow of sadness crossed her face. “I’m a Guardian, just as she was.”
I squeezed into a tiny chair across from her. “What do you guard?”
