Echo North(18)

But it wasn’t enough. The thorny army broke the threads, shredding the net. They surrounded the girl and the bird, they tore the bird’s wings from its shoulders, and wrapped the girl in briars. The bird stood stiff as any soldier, blood dripping down its iron feathers, but the girl wept. The thorny creatures dragged her away in briar chains.

I blinked and saw the girl, bowed and bleeding before the Queen of Fairies. The queen was tall, and formed of the same stuff as her army: her limbs were thorns, her gown black flower petals, her hair decaying leaves. Her eyes glittered red-orange, embers of fire in her brambly face. “You thought to defeat me!” she mocked the girl. “And see what has become of you—you will die, and the world will be mine, and all you’ve done and fought and lived for will be for nothing.”

The girl wept in the dirt, clutching one last iron feather as if it were a knife.

But the queen saw, and plucked it out of her hands. “Your precious bird cannot help you now.” And she plunged the feather into the girl’s heart.

I gasped as the girl’s eyes grew wide with shock and pain and she collapsed on the ground. Blood spread crimson beneath her body.

The queen threw the feather down and strode past the girl with obvious disgust, whistling for her army.

I couldn’t stop shaking—whatever this was, however I had come here, if this were a story, I didn’t want to read it anymore.

But I didn’t know how to break free. I ran away from the girl into the wood, leaves slapping moldy and wet against my face. The forest lightened slowly to the silver hue of dawn, and I stumbled at last into the clearing where the girl’s cottage stood. The hedgehog was curled up tight and sleeping amongst the radishes.

I collapsed on the front stoop, hugging my knees to my chest as tears leaked down my face. The girl was dead, the queen had won, and I was trapped here more completely than I had been in the wolf’s horrible house.

“Are you all right?” came a sudden voice just above me.

I jerked my head up to see a young woman standing by the garden, the hedgehog cradled in her hands. Beautiful didn’t begin to describe her. She was luminous—willowy and tall, with straight silver hair that hung nearly to her knees and an enormous pair of eyes the color of summer violets. She wore a diaphanous blue gown, and her feet were bare. I got the feeling she didn’t belong here any more than I did.

“Are you all right?” she repeated.

I nodded dully, at a loss for words, and she let the hedgehog loose in the garden again and came to sit beside me. “I haven’t seen you in the books before—is this your first one? I’m Mokosh.”

Her words took a moment to sink in. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged, her lips quirking. “Not many people have access to book-mirrors—there used to be scores of readers like us, but there are hardly any left. I’ve only met one or two others my whole life, and I read a lot. Where is your library? Mine’s in my mother’s palace. You must be a princess, too—or at least a duchess?”

I blinked at her loquaciousness. “I’m not—I’m not anyone important.”

“Of course you are. Ordinary people don’t have access to magical libraries.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

She leapt to her feet and pulled me up as well. “You do know the rules, don’t you?”

“What rules?”

“There are rules for reading ordinary books, aren’t there? Start at the beginning, read in order, no skipping around, and certainly don’t read the last page until you get there.”

“Well, yes.”

She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and propelled me away from the cottage, down a winding path that cut quickly through the wood and spilled out onto the cobbled streets of a tiny village.

“It’s the same thing in the book-mirrors,” Mokosh explained. “You can’t change the course of events—the story always follows its intended path, and it’s impossible for readers like you and me to die here, so you don’t have to worry about battle scenes or the plague.”

“The plague?”

“But you don’t have to follow the story—you can explore the world around it, instead. Just walk away from the main character—as you must have, or we wouldn’t have met—and you’re free to do as you please. There are limits, of course—you can’t go anywhere the author never imagined, but if the book is even somewhat well written, there are layers of places to visit barely touched upon in the story.” She gestured at the street in front of us. “For example, this place has an excellent pub. Come on.”

And then she was tugging me forward again, past the village square, where a fountain shaped like the iron-winged bird spilled water into a stone basin. Thorns coiled up between the cracks in the stone.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Mokosh, noticing my terrified stare, “The story will reset after it gets to the end, and everything will go back to normal. And besides—it can’t hurt us. Ah, here we are.”

She pulled me through a low doorway, into a small, square room, that was lit with flickering candles and smelled of roast chicken. Patrons sat close together at long wooden tables, drinking beer or eating bits of greasy meat with their fingers. At one end of the room stood a makeshift stage where a storyteller sat in multicolored robes, waving his hands in the air and causing little silver sparks to appear above him.