Page 54 of Echo North
THE DAYS SPUN AWAY,GRAINSof 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 asubplot!” 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!”