Echo North(19)

“The winds,” said Mokosh with a disgusted glare at the storyteller, “always inserting themselves into the narrative somehow.”

She found us a seat in a relatively quiet corner and ordered beer and cakes. “In any case, I’m glad to have a friend in the books now—it gets ever so lonely at home. You’ll come reading often, I hope? You never did tell me about your library.”

Glancing down the length of the room, I found one of the patrons watching me. He was seated several tables away and had a thatch of shockingly light hair, neatly trimmed, a handsome, pleasing face, and eyes the color of a midsummer sky. His jaw was clean shaven, and he wore a red surcoat with dark embroidery around the edges.

His eyes locked on mine, and it seemed like the whole tavern grew still. Then he glanced down, and the moment was lost.

“Or your name,” Mokosh was saying.

I jerked my attention back to her. “I’m Echo. And my library is in an enchanted house. I’m still trying to figure it out—the house.” I considered. “And the library. The only reason I found it is because I got lost.” I glanced over to the blond man’s table again, but he had vanished.

Mokosh nodded sagely. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Echo. And I’m sure your house and your library have rules, like anything else. You’ll begin to understand them and become an expert in no time!”

“I don’t even know how to leave this book-mirror,” I confessed.

Mokosh laughed. “Why, that’s the easiest thing in the world! You must only make a request to your library.” She stood and addressed the dirty tavern wall in a language I had never heard before. It sounded like water falling on stones. A mirror shimmered into being, suspended on nothing. “I step through, and I’m home. Now you try.”

I chewed on my lip, wondering why the serving boy who had just delivered our beer and cake wasn’t gaping at the appearance of a magical doorway. I stood and looked at the stones of the fireplace, right beside Mokosh’s glimmering door. “Library, I’d like to stop reading, please.”

Another mirror appeared, its surface wavering like water before growing still. I stepped up to it, but didn’t reach out my hand. I stared at my reflection, stared and stared.

Both sides of my face were smooth, the skin perfect, unscarred, as if that day with the wolf and the trap had never happened.

I touched the left side of my face—it felt just as smooth as it looked. I thought I would be sick.

“Do you look different than at home, Echo?” said Mokosh softly.

I turned to her, blinked back tears, nodded.

“The worlds in these books are not real, you know. Readers project their preferred versions of themselves inside them, whether they’re aware of it or not.”

I looked back at the mirror. This was my preferred self, something I could never be in real life. Bitterness coiled hard in the pit of my stomach.

I didn’t want to be there anymore. I couldn’t bear it.

I stretched my hand out to the mirror, and that sensation of coolness once more rushed through me.

Then I was back in the library, my hand just drawing away from the glass.





CHAPTER NINE

“MY LADY.”

I yelped and wheeled. The wolf stood behind me, his amber eyes flashing.

I scrabbled away from him, my shoulders bumping up against another book-mirror.

The wolf didn’t move. “I mean you no harm. Please.” He sat back on his haunches, ears tilted forward. “Forgive me. The room—the room behind the black door … it helps me remember. If I don’t go there, I forget myself, and the wildness creeps in. But it is dangerous, the most dangerous room in the house. It will hurt you—it already has. Please don’t go back. I’m begging you.”

Pain pulsed anew through my shoulders and palms—something else the book-mirror had erased. I swallowed, feeling my scars stretch tight along my jaw, and tried to push away my sense of loss. “I won’t go back.”

He dipped his white muzzle. “Thank you.”

I balled my hands into fists. “But I’m not going anywhere else with you until you explain—properly—what’s going on. And until I know for sure my father made it safely home.”

He made a soft whuffing noise, which I realized after a moment was his version of laughter. “We are in the right room for that, my lady. Follow me.” And he stepped through the second blue door into the storeroom.

I followed him down several aisles between the shelves of book-mirrors, to a little locked cupboard on one wall. It was made of a smooth dark wood, carved with whorls.

“There’s a key underneath,” he told me.

I reached below the cupboard and fished out the small brass key hidden there, then fitted it into the lock and pulled the door open. Inside lay a small hand mirror encased in ivory. I took it out, glancing to the wolf for instructions.

“It will show you anything you wish to see, anything in this world, at least. You must only give two pieces of yourself to make it work.”

I sank quietly to the floor, my skirt pooling out around me, and laid the mirror in my lap.

“It need not be something big, so long as it is part of you.”

I plucked out a strand of hair, and unfastening the broach from my collar, I pricked the first finger of my right hand. A spot of blood welled up, and I pressed my finger and the hair together against the surface of the mirror.