The soldiers could no longer stop the men from speaking. Their whispers whirled round me:
“The queen’s fortress.”
“The Dead Tower.”
“Her creatures’ dark hovels.”
“She’ll eat our hearts.”
“Drink our souls.”
“Destroy us.”
“Would that we had never been born.”
The ginger-haired young man sat tall in his saddle, like he was unafraid.
But his hands shook.
And then we rode up to the gate and the soldiers were yanking us from our mounts, shoving us through a gaping doorway, pulling us down a winding stone stair. The air grew colder, colder. It stank of decay, and blood.
The men wept.
My teeth chattered, my fingers and toes wholly numb.
We were taken in different directions, shoved through doorways or dragged further on. I was yanked down into a stone room, my wrists chained to a rough wall. I could sit, but it pulled my shoulders nearly out of their sockets, so I crouched instead, my thighs burning.
This book had turned out to be a huge, huge mistake. I thought about leaving, but I kept hoping Mokosh would eventually appear—last time, she hadn’t come until after the confrontation with the queen. And I was curious about the blond man—I wondered where the soldiers had taken him. So I waited.
After a while, moonlight filtered in through a window slit up near the ceiling, illuminating another prisoner chained to the adjacent wall. He was fiddling with his wrist cuffs, a scrape-scrape-tink of metal against metal, and he lifted his head, andgrinnedat me.
It was the blond man.
“You look uncomfortable,” he said, yawning.
I squinted in the dim light and saw that he was using a dagger to pick the locks on his wrist cuffs. First one, then the other, made an alarming racket as they clattered to the floor. He seemed nonplussed. He stood, stretched, then paced over to me.
“You aren’t in anyrealdanger, of course,” he said as he started on my cuffs. “Readers never are. But it’s good to come prepared.” He gestured significantly with the dagger.
My left cuff fell off, then my right one. I rubbed my sore wrists and sagged gratefully to the ground.
My companion flashed another grin as he sheathed his dagger and pulled a cloak seemingly out of thin air, which he handed to me. I draped it around my shoulders, more than a little bewildered. “Whoareyou?”
He sketched a little bow. “Hal, at your service.”
“Echo,” I told him.
“Pleasure to meet you, Echo. Now, stay close and try not to make any noise. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of sticking around until dawn.”
I gulped, and followed him over to the cell door. The lock seemed to give him more difficulty than the cuffs had. He fiddled with it for a long while, muttering and cursing under his breath.
I studied him as he worked. He looked younger than I’d first thought, just a year or two older than me. He was lanky and tall. His blond hair curled over his ears; his shoulders were strong beneath his white linen shirt. He wore tall black boots and tight pants, and he smelled like rich earth and sun-warmed stones.
“I read a book once about a girl called Echo,” he said, jiggling the lock. “The ordinary kind of book. She was in love with a god who loved only his reflection, and she wasted away into nothing until she was just a voice in the wood, calling his name for all eternity.”
“That’s horrible.”
His lips quirked. “I suppose it is. Ah. There!” The lock sprung free, and Hal creaked the door open. He peered out into the passageway, then beckoned me to follow.
