Echo North(27)

A woman rode through the soldiers in her own plate armor, a blue cloak fastened around her shoulders, a silver crown pressed into her black hair. She looked young, no more than twenty or so, but there was a hardness in her eyes that made me tremble. The hunting party recoiled from her, some of them swearing, some of them begging.

The woman just swept them all with her cold gaze and waved one hand at her soldiers. The blades withdrew, but only an inch. “The punishment for hunting in the queen’s wood is death.” Her voice was as brittle as wind rattling icicles.

“We were nowhere near the wood, your majesty!” cried one of the young men. He had ginger hair and a scruff of a beard; blood dribbled down his neck to stain his blue doublet. I wondered if he was the book’s main character.

The queen didn’t acknowledge him. “Tomorrow at dawn, your lives will be mine.” And to her soldiers: “Take them.”

A sword hilt jabbed into my back, and my horse lurched forward along with the other members of the hunt. The queen’s soldiers ringed us tightly and herded us toward the dark line of a wood. Trees marched like soldiers, their trunks stark against the susurration of the wind in their deep green leaves. I shuddered at the memory of clawing branches, of smothering dark. But this wood was just a story. The queen was just a story. They couldn’t hurt me.

Still, fear coiled tight and sank its claws in.

The wood loomed near. The blond man glanced back once or twice, like he wanted to talk to me, but the soldiers didn’t abide conversation. If any of the men spoke, the soldiers knocked them in the head with their sword hilts or, in one case, sliced off the offending speaker’s ear. I gaped in horror as blood gushed down his neck, wondering how on earth I’d thought this book-mirror innocuous.

We rode into the wood, where dark leaves and darker branches shut out the sunlight and the sky. The men wept. The man who’d had his ear cut off passed out from blood loss, slumping in his saddle—I doubted he would make it to morning. Maybe the soldiers would let me look at the wound. Maybe I could do something for him.

It’s just a story, I told myself firmly.

But it didn’t feel like just a story.

The ginger-haired young man’s eyes grew hard, the line of his jaw determined. Like he’d expected this. Like he’d prepared for it. Had he come on purpose to infiltrate the queen’s fortress?

On we rode, on and on. The wood grew darker and colder the deeper we went into it. Glowing eyes watched us from behind the trees. Whispers and high eerie screams flitted around us. The soldiers at the front of the group lit torches, but the bright flames did very little to banish the dark.

Then all at once we broke past the line of the trees. A black tower rose before us, stretching hundreds of feet into the air—I couldn’t see the top of it. Beyond sprawled a massive city, green lights winking in countless windows.

The soldiers could no longer stop the men from speaking. Their whispers whirled round me:

“The queen’s fortress.”

“The Dead Tower.”

“Her creatures’ dark hovels.”

“She’ll eat our hearts.”

“Drink our souls.”

“Destroy us.”

“Would that we had never been born.”

The ginger-haired young man sat tall in his saddle, like he was unafraid.

But his hands shook.

And then we rode up to the gate and the soldiers were yanking us from our mounts, shoving us through a gaping doorway, pulling us down a winding stone stair. The air grew colder, colder. It stank of decay, and blood.

The men wept.

My teeth chattered, my fingers and toes wholly numb.

We were taken in different directions, shoved through doorways or dragged further on. I was yanked down into a stone room, my wrists chained to a rough wall. I could sit, but it pulled my shoulders nearly out of their sockets, so I crouched instead, my thighs burning.

This book had turned out to be a huge, huge mistake. I thought about leaving, but I kept hoping Mokosh would eventually appear—last time, she hadn’t come until after the confrontation with the queen. And I was curious about the blond man—I wondered where the soldiers had taken him. So I waited.

After a while, moonlight filtered in through a window slit up near the ceiling, illuminating another prisoner chained to the adjacent wall. He was fiddling with his wrist cuffs, a scrape-scrape-tink of metal against metal, and he lifted his head, and grinned at me.

It was the blond man.

“You look uncomfortable,” he said, yawning.

I squinted in the dim light and saw that he was using a dagger to pick the locks on his wrist cuffs. First one, then the other, made an alarming racket as they clattered to the floor. He seemed nonplussed. He stood, stretched, then paced over to me.

“You aren’t in any real danger, of course,” he said as he started on my cuffs. “Readers never are. But it’s good to come prepared.” He gestured significantly with the dagger.

My left cuff fell off, then my right one. I rubbed my sore wrists and sagged gratefully to the ground.

My companion flashed another grin as he sheathed his dagger and pulled a cloak seemingly out of thin air, which he handed to me. I draped it around my shoulders, more than a little bewildered. “Who are you?”

He sketched a little bow. “Hal, at your service.”

“Echo,” I told him.