Page 22 of Echo North
“MY LADY.”
I yelped and wheeled. The wolf stood behind me, his amber eyes flashing.
I scrabbled away from him, my shoulders bumping up against another book-mirror.
The wolf didn’t move. “I mean you no harm. Please.” He sat back on his haunches, ears tilted forward. “Forgive me. The room—the room behind the black door … it helps me remember. If I don’t go there, I forget myself, and the wildness creeps in. But it is dangerous, the most dangerous room in the house. It will hurt you—it already has. Please don’t go back. I’m begging you.”
Pain pulsed anew through my shoulders and palms—something else the book-mirror had erased. I swallowed, feeling my scars stretch tight along my jaw, and tried to push away my sense of loss. “I won’t go back.”
He dipped his white muzzle. “Thank you.”
I balled my hands into fists. “But I’m not going anywhere else with you until you explain—properly—what’s going on. And until I know for sure my father made it safely home.”
He made a softwhuffingnoise, which I realized after a moment was his version of laughter. “We are in the right room for that, my lady. Follow me.” And he stepped through the second blue door into the storeroom.
I followed him down several aisles between the shelves of book-mirrors, to a little locked cupboard on one wall. It was made of a smooth dark wood, carved with whorls.
“There’s a key underneath,” he told me.
I reached below the cupboard and fished out the small brass key hidden there, then fitted it into the lock and pulled the door open. Inside lay a small hand mirror encased in ivory. I took it out, glancing to the wolf for instructions.
“It will show you anything you wish to see, anything in this world, at least. You must only give two pieces of yourself to make it work.”
I sank quietly to the floor, my skirt pooling out around me, and laid the mirror in my lap.
“It need not be something big, so long as it is part of you.”
I plucked out a strand of hair, and unfastening the broach from my collar, I pricked the first finger of my right hand. A spot of blood welled up, and I pressed my finger and the hair together against the surface of the mirror.
“Tell the mirror what you wish to see,” said the wolf.
I swallowed. “Show me my father, please.”
The mirror’s surface wavered and went milky white, the blood and hair swirling inside until both were lost.
A dark forest came into view, a lantern bobbing on a pole. My father was trudging through the snowy wood, holding the lantern pole, Rodya and Tinker with their own lights just behind him. “Echo!” they called into the darkness,“Echo!”But the howling wind spat their words back at them.
The mirror shifted, showing my father and Rodya climbing the steps to the house, shaking the snow from their boots. My father wept into Rodya’s shoulder. Donia appeared at the door, her face drawn and tight. “Foolish girl, to go out into the wood in the snow and the dark!”
But Rodya squeezed his hand. “We’ll find her, Papa. Don’t worry.”
“I saw her,” my father whispered. “She was there in the wood, just before Tinker came with his sled. I know I saw her.”
Rodya’s lips thinned, worry in his eyes. He didn’t believe him. “You need rest, Papa. Come upstairs.”
Tears leaked down my father’s face. “Leave a lamp in the window for her—so she can find her way back to us in the dark.”
Rodya lit it himself, settled it on the windowsill.
Only then did my father allow himself to be taken up to bed.
Donia lingered, waiting until Rodya had fallen asleep on the couch all bundled in blankets before she blew out the lamp.
“Good riddance,” she said to the dark. But her hand shook.
I jerked to my feet and flung the mirror away like it was a snake; it bounced and skidded across the floor. My heart screamed inside of me.
“My lady, is all well?”
