Page 55 of Echo North
But the East and South and West Winds stepped off their terrace into empty air. I blinked, and they were gone.
I turned to Hal. “I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know how to help you.”
He looked after them, his body taut and still. “It doesn’t matter, Echo.”
“Of course it does!”
He seemed to shrink before me, and to my horror, tears dripped down his cheeks.
“You’ve remembered something else, haven’t you?”
His shoulders shook.
“Hal?”
He pulled away from me, spoke a sharp word to the air and vanished from sight.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WINTER DESCENDED OUTSIDE THE HOUSE,ICEencasing the roses in the garden, frost tracing lacy patterns on the windows.
My remaining time in the house under the mountain had dwindled to a mere two weeks, and I was no closer to helping the wolf—or Hal—than I was at the beginning.
Nearly every day another room came unbound. We lost the rain room, the sunroom, the room with the snakes. Even the dining room fell into the void one evening, a mountain of food tumbling with it. I took my meals in the conservatory or the room behind the waterfall instead.
The house shrank and shrank; it seemed to hum with sorrow. I tended the remaining rooms with as much care as I knew how. The wolf rarely accompanied me—he spent more time in the bauble room than he spent out of it. One day, my guilt at last propelled me to approach the obsidian door, and I stood outside of it for a long while, battling my fear. The door seemed to whisper, to scream. I had almost worked up the courage to open it when the wolf stepped out of the room, covered in blood from nose to tail. I sucked in a breath, catching a glimpse of the sharp spinning crystals before the door shut behind him. He didn’t look at me, just padded off down the hall. Terror twisted through me. I ran away from the bauble room. I didn’t go back.
I practiced the piano. I went reading, searching desperately for answers that evaded me. Hal seemed to be avoiding me; Mokosh was nowhere to be found. So I took to wandering listlessly around the house. It was dying, just as the wolf was. It would take all the binding thread in the world to keep it together, and there was barely any left. I would never become its caretaker.
What, then? Why had the wolf really brought me here?
And what would I do when he was gone? What would I do when I ran out of binding thread, and the library was lost to me, too? Would I just go home?
I thought about that, examined my future like a painted egg: first, studying its colors and intricate design. Then, slowly peeling the shell away to see what lay hidden inside.
I found uncertainty. Hope. As much as I missed my father and Rodya, I had no desire to go back, to return to Donia and the villagers’ derision and a lifetime of lurking in the shadows to hide my face. But all the same, I was seized with a sudden longing to see them again.
I went to the library’s storeroom, took the ivory hand mirror from its cupboard. I settled with it on the floor, pricked my finger, plucked a hair, like I had done so many times at the beginning of my stay in the wolf’s house. “Show me my family,” I whispered.
The mirror swirled white.
And then I was looking down the street of my village, following my father as he strode up to the bookshop, his hands in his pockets, whistling.
He fished out a key and unlocked the door, then stepped inside and went about the business of opening the shop: dusting the register, drawing the curtains, sweeping the already-spotless floor.
A man came in when he was only partially finished with this ritual and requested a book, which my father found quickly. The customer laid silver in my father’s hands before stepping back outside, tipping his hat as he went. This scene repeated several times, with various men and women, and my heart twinged—my father’s business was successful, for the first time in years. I wondered what had changed. Maybe Donia was right—maybe my facehadcursed him.
The mirror shifted.
I saw Donia sitting on the couch in front of the fire, her fingers flashing with needle and thread. Her belly was round and tight beneath her dress, and she hummed as she sewed. Snow clung white to the window.
And then the scene changed again. I saw Rodya receiving his tradesman’s sigil from his master, saw him stride out into the street where a girl waited for him, nut-brown hair curling from under her kerchief. She had soft eyes and a shy smile, and she fingered his sigil and kissed his cheek.
Rodya laughed and laughed, and kissed the girl properly, holding her close and safe against him. He murmured quiet words into her ear: “We’ll be wed before spring, if you’ll still have me.”
And then it was the girl’s turn to laugh.
The mirror wavered a third time, and went blank.
