Echo North Page 5

  We passed a row of doors that smelled of smoke, and a little ways beyond another row that smelled of rain. Currents of light began to swirl in the air, like colorful fireflies with long tails. I reached out to touch one. It was warm, and soft as a willow. “What are they?”

  “The lamps. They are the last things to become unbound. Hurry.”

  He quickened his pace and I nearly had to run to keep up with him. Something spiny wound around my ankle and I yelped, falling against the wolf.

  But then I looked up and saw the carved red door, the very normal lantern on the wall beside it glowing steadily.

  “Just in time,” said the wolf, and he stepped inside.

  I scrambled to my feet and followed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE ROOM BEYOND THE RED DOOR was comfortingly ordinary.

  It boasted a grand four-poster bed rather too big for it, a dressing table, and a tall wardrobe. A small circular window was set high on the back wall—the first window I’d seen, I realized, since entering the wolf’s house.

  The wolf eyed me strangely, tension in his frame that hadn’t been there a moment before. “My lady, there is a … stipulation … to your stay here.”

  Ice flooded my veins, and once more I grabbed the compass-watch, taking comfort in its constant ticking. “What stipulation?”

  He paced in front of the door, immense power evident in his huge frame, the specks of blood on his fur darkened and dried. I was safe from the house in here, but was I safe from him?

  He stared at me, and I was transfixed by him, neither willing nor able to look away. “You must allow me to stay in this room with you every night,” he said. “And—and there is something you must swear you will never do.”

  I could barely breathe, my heart overloud in my ears. “What is that, Lord Wolf?”

  For some reason, he flinched at the address. His voice dropped into an even lower growl. “You must swear that you will never light a lamp and look at me during the night. Not once. Not ever. And if you do not agree to this—” His eyes narrowed to slits. “If you do not agree, I will even now thrust you from the room and leave you to the mercy of the house, and the wood. Will you swear?”

  The wolf loomed large in my sight line. I wouldn’t last half a moment outside of that door, and he must have known that. But how cruel to offer me a choice when I really had no choice at all.

  “My lady.” His voice was softer somehow. “I will not harm you. You are safe with me. I hope you know that.”

  I didn’t know that—and I had the scars to prove it—but I also didn’t have the luxury to deny him. Slowly, I dropped to my knees so I could look the wolf in the eye. I bowed my head to him as if he were a king. “I swear, Lord Wolf, that I will never light a lamp and look at you in the night.”

  He dipped his white muzzle. “Thank you, my lady.” He broke my gaze and loped away from me. “I shall turn my back while you dress for bed. Then you may blow out the light.”

  As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. As if my promise was a matter of course. For a moment more I stayed on my knees, anger threatening to swallow me, and then I got up and began fumbling with the ties of my blouse. I had no nightgown, and so I stripped off my boots and skirt and blouse as quickly as I could and crawled into the huge bed in nothing but my shift.

  “Are you dressed?” asked the wolf.

  I drew the bedclothes up to my chin, the anger dissolved into misery. “Yes.”

  He came around to the other side of the bed and curled up on the floor in front of the wardrobe, one eye open, staring up at me. “You will not forget your promise?”

  Our earlier conversation echoed in my mind:

  “What happens at midnight?”

  “The magic ceases to function, and the house is unbound.”

  Did that mean he would become unbound, too? What would happen when I blew out the lamp—what would happen if I lit it again?

  “I will not forget.” I blew out the light before I lost my nerve.

  Darkness flooded the bedchamber. I lay there with my eyes wide open, acutely conscious of the wolf on the floor; I was blind in the dark, but I could hear him breathing, the rustling scrape of fur against carpet as he adjusted his position.

  “It is like any wild thing that has been tamed. It is sometimes safe, and sometimes not.”

  My scars twinged with remembered pain, and I shifted uneasily. What was to keep the wolf from leaping into the bed and devouring me in the dark?

  “Remember that it is wild, and be on your guard.”

  Or perhaps it was the darkness itself keeping the wolf at bay, some lingering remnants of magic that kept him tame in the night, but only if he stayed in this room, and only if the lamp remained unlit.

  Down below me, his breathing evened out: He was asleep.

  But sleep didn’t come as easily for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about my father, about the hatred in Donia’s eyes, and my university letter crumbling to ash. About that moment in the wood when the wolf first spoke to me. Everything that had happened afterward was impossible—maybe I really was freezing to death in a snowbank.

  And yet the pillow was smooth against my cheek, the quilt soft and warm. The sound of the slumbering wolf somehow comforting.

  Was my father all right? Had he made it home?

  Part of me ached for him, but I wept into my pillow, hating myself, because the other part of me—the largest part of me—wasn’t even really sorry. I’d left him, but I’d left Donia and the villagers and the stifling constraints of my old life, too. It gave me a strange sense of freedom.

  Somehow, I fell asleep.

  I JERKED AWAKE IN THE dark, skin drenched in sweat. Something was pounding on the bedroom door, trying to get in. No, something was roaring outside the door. Heat radiated toward me. Instinctively, I reached for the lamp, then remembered what I’d sworn and yanked my hand back.

  “Wolf,” I stammered, straining to see him down below the bed in the blackness. “WOLF!”

  He drew a sharp, gasping breath. “Echo?” His voice was strange and slurred with sleep.

  “Something’s out there.”

  There came a thud on the door, the sound of a rushing wind and high eerie laughter. The whole room seemed to shake.

  “Wolf?”

  “It is all right, Echo. Nothing can harm us in here.” What I’d thought was the strangeness of sleep I realized was an accent, a weird emphasis on his i’s and a’s.

  Harsh, insistent knocking sounded on the door, growing louder and louder, mixed with the roar of some unknown beast.

  “Do nothing,” said the wolf. “Do nothing. It shall pass.”

  I shuddered and shuddered, sitting straight against the headboard and drawing the covers up to my chin. The compass-watch ticked steadily underneath my shift—I hadn’t taken it off.

  Laughter echoed in the hallway, whispers in an unfamiliar language. Fear crawled through me. I wished it wasn’t so dark, and my mind jerked once more to the lamp on the end table.

  “It will get in,” I whispered. “It will destroy us.”

  “We are protected. As long as we don’t open the door. As long as—as long as you don’t light the lamp. She is … she is tempting you. She is testing your strength.”

  “Who is?”

  “The force in the wood. The force … binding the house.”

  The room trembled as something hit the door with an earth-shattering bang, like it had been rammed with a tree trunk.

  “You must get your mind off of it. The fire cannot harm you. She cannot harm you.”

  I twisted my fingers together, tangling them in the blankets.

  Another bang at the door. The wood creaked and splintered. A deafening crack, heat pulsing on my skin. I was shaking so hard I thought I would burst apart.

  “Tell me about your father,” said the wolf.

  “What?”

  CRAAAACCKKKKK.

  “Your father!” He had to shout above a sudden roaring wind. �
�Tell me about him.”

  I dug my fingers into the mattress. “He’s good and kind. Even to me. Especially to me.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be kind to you?”

  “Because of what I am!”

  “And what are you?”

  “I’M A MONSTER!”

  “You are no monster!”

  The wind shrieked and screamed and twisted around us. I gripped the bed frame, shuddering.

  “Tell me more about your father!”

  I grasped for words behind my fear. “He loves my stepmother, but I don’t know why. He never—he never laughed at me. He never signed the cross to ward off my Devil’s face.”

  “Your face was not carved by the Devil.” The wind died all at once, the roaring shrank away, and the wolf’s next words echoed overloud in the sudden silence: “IT WAS CARVED BY ME!”

  The room stretched between us. The heat seeped away, as if conducting a strange slithering retreat back under the door.

  “Then it was you, that day with the trap.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “I was watching you.”

  “Why?”

  “I have always been drawn to you, Echo Alkaev. Even when I couldn’t remember why.”

  It wasn’t a proper answer, and yet his words pulsed strangely in my heart, like their meaning lay just beyond my grasp. If he hadn’t been there that day, my face would be soft and smooth. The village would have accepted me. Donia wouldn’t despise me. I would have a future. But somehow, somehow, I didn’t hate him for it.

  I chewed on my lip, slipping back down into the bed and laying my head on the pillow. “Is it over?”

  “I do not know. But I will guard the door till the morning. Nothing will harm you.”

  And I believed him.

  I fell into twisted dreams, trapped in a winter wood, the wolf running one way, my father in Tinker’s sled hurtling the other. Everything was burning, and blood poured fresh from the scars on my face. Donia’s eyes gleamed in the dark, and she laughed as she shoved me into the fire. “It is all a monster like you deserves,” she cackled. “The Devil made you, and the Devil can take you back again.”

  I wept in the snow and crumbled to ash, for I was only pages in a book, burned and lost and gone forever.

  When I woke it was morning, gray light flooding through the window.

  The wolf was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WOLF?”

  I stepped from the safety of the bedchamber, but the hallway was empty. It stretched ordinarily, innocuously, to the left and right, the lamp flickering steadfastly from the wall. There was no hint of last night’s fire, of anything magical whatsoever.

  “Wolf?”

  Fear weighed me down like sodden clothes in a river. He’d said he would guard the door—how long had he been gone? How long had he left me to the mercy of the house?

  “Wolf!”

  I ran, left toward the dining room, down carved ivory stairs and up narrow, creaky ones, round corners and through passageways I swore I’d never seen before. I passed door after door shimmering in bright shades of blue or green or violet. One door seemed to be made of grass; another, flowers. I ran past fiery doors and snowy doors, through a corridor of rain, down a spiral staircase that chimed a different bell-like note with every step. “Wolf!”

  But I couldn’t find him.

  I collapsed, gasping for breath, against a gem-studded wall. Emeralds dug into my back and a whispering breeze tangled warm around my ankles. Somewhere in the distance a woman laughed, and a sighing harp filled the spaces between. I was lost in a labyrinth, searching for the monster at the end of the maze.

  And then I looked up and saw a black door at the end of a dim, narrow corridor. I’d had no desire to open any of the other doors, but this one beckoned me. It was smooth, and hard as obsidian.

  It opened soundlessly at my touch. I stepped into an inky black chamber that seemed to stretch forever into darkness, baubles of multicolored crystal in all shapes and sizes hanging from some unseen ceiling. There were birds and bears, abstract coils, globes that pulsed with light—it was like a field of curious stars suspended in the moment of their falling.

  The baubles brushed my shoulders as I passed through, some warm and some icy cold, some so sharp they sliced through my blouse and left hot lines of pain in my skin.

  I reached the back of the room where I wasn’t even expecting there to be a back and found a tall, whirring object that had a glass face and a thousand spindly spider arms grinding and clicking. I recognized the object, for all its strange otherworldliness, as a clock. The glass face held something inside of it, and peering closer I saw it was a lock of pale hair, tied with ribbon, and a dark smear of dried liquid that could only be blood.

  Horror crawled down my spine, and I turned to find the wolf at my back, his fur standing on end, fresh crimson spots marring the white.

  A growl tore from his throat. He lunged at me.

  I yelped and scrabbled sideways, grabbing one of the swinging crystals to keep from falling. But it was knife-sharp and I let it go, gasping. Blood seeped from both palms.

  “Get out,” snarled the wolf. “GET OUT!”

  He lunged again and I leapt past him, ducking under the baubles, stumbling in my haste. The crystals tangled in my hair and I had to claw myself free.

  And then I was back out in the corridor with the wolf hard on my heels, the black door slamming behind us.

  I cringed away from him but he just stood there, sides heaving, ears pinned back against his head. “You must not go there,” he spat. “Swear you will never go back. Swear it.”

  I trembled, but faced him. “What is this place?”

  “Swear it!”

  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.

  I RAN BACK DOWN THE corridor, 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 famil
iar 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 Him and The Doorway to All Things: In Which a Magical Hat Causes Much Havoc and The Soldier’s Gift: In Which Heaven Fights for the Emperor, a Firsthand Account.

  Were these mirrors books? Had I stumbled into a library? Wild house and unpredictable wolf aside, I didn’t care where I’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.