Echo North(14)

We climbed a set of stairs, turned a corner. Someone sobbed in the dark.

“I heard a story once, about a girl with that name.”

My breath caught hard in my throat. “How did her story end?”

“I do not remember.”

“What is your name?” I asked.

“I do not have a name.”

“Then what am I to call you?”

“Whatever you like.”

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.