Echo North(29)

The binding thread in my pouch dwindled rapidly, so the wolf brought me into the spider room, and showed me how to carefully detach the webs, spin them into thread, and wind them onto the spools. We always made sure to bring the spiders a treat, so they wouldn’t get too cross: honey or fruit or little pieces of cheese.

After the first few weeks or so, the wolf would sometimes not appear, and I tended the house on my own. I enjoyed the work, the needle like a natural extension of my arm, the thread singing between my fingers.

Often the wolf and I had lunch together in the room behind the waterfall. Or rather, I had lunch while the wolf sat draped in his armchair and woefully watched me.

“What do you even eat, anyway?” I asked him one afternoon.

He said vaguely, “I go hunting,” and refused to elaborate further.

After lunch, we went to the music room, where, slowly, the wolf was teaching me how to play the piano.

It was curious, learning from him. He clearly knew a great deal (I tried not to think about the last mistress of the house, who he’d learned from), but he was limited by his lupine frame and couldn’t demonstrate anything. He gave me specific verbal instructions, but sometimes I didn’t quite understand what he was after.

“Curl your hands, Echo, with your fingertips pointed downward and your thumb crooked out to the side. No. No, not like that. It is your fingertips only that are to touch the keys. Yes. Now press the key, feeling the weight fall from your arm and through your wrists and into your fingers.”

He paced back and forth behind the piano bench when he was talking, occasionally popping his head up to check my hand position.

He taught me how to read musical notation, which was like a different language, little spots on the page transforming into the heartbeats of living, breathing music. There were more sheafs of music in the piano bench every time I stepped into the room—I suspected the wolf asked the house to supply them.

We had lessons daily at first, and then gradually spread them out to once a week to allow me time to practice. A few times I saw the wolf listening outside the door as I worked through the exercises he’d given me, but he never stayed, slipping away again just before I finished. Sometimes I stepped into a book-mirror titled The Empress’s Musician and practiced the title character’s harpsichord while she was busy kissing her teacher in the palace gardens. I liked playing in there; it was quiet, sun streaming in through tall windows and dust motes swirling up to dance in the light.

By the third week of my stay in the wolf’s house I was able to play some simple Behrend pieces. I liked Behrend—he wrote in strict contrapuntal lines, and I appreciated the intellectualism as much as his brilliant, crisscrossing harmonies.

After that, the wolf began to give me works by Czajka, who wrote gut-wrenching pieces of endless perfection—his melodies soared to the heights and depths of the human condition, grabbing hold and not letting go until the last lingering note. As my fingers began to catch up with my brain and I was able to do Czajka greater justice, I found myself breathless at the end of his pieces, heartbroken, like I had passed through all the sorrows of the world and hadn’t made it out unscathed.

I think the wolf liked Czajka best, because he parceled out those pieces sparingly, like they were precious drops of sunlight in winter. I preferred Behrend; he didn’t make me ache.

Every day after my piano practice, the wolf disappeared into the bauble room, and I was left with a handful of hours to fill before dinner.

I spent those in the library.

I grew bolder, after my first few excursions. If I didn’t like where a book-mirror was going, I stopped reading, or told the library to skip ahead, or to mark my place so I could come back later. I was still determined to help the wolf, but as the weeks passed, reading became more and more about the adventures themselves; finding a way to free him retreated to the back of my mind. The book-mirrors were exhilarating—I’m not sure I could have stopped reading, even if I’d wanted to.

I was pleased to stumble upon a collection of nonfiction book-mirrors, and stepped into several about doctors. I watched them operate on patients, help mothers give birth, mend broken bones, stitch wounds—it fascinated me endlessly, and somehow made my dream of attending the university not feel so far away.

I attempted to familiarize myself with more music history to complement my piano lessons, but the only book on Behrend I could find was a fabricated account of his romance with a painter’s daughter who supposedly inspired many of his later works. It was hard to check references in a book-mirror, but the story was so melodramatic I doubted there was much truth in it.

Neither Hal nor Mokosh seemed interested in nonfiction. I looked for both of them in every book-mirror I read, but Hal proved especially elusive. I saw Mokosh when I went to a concert where a made-up musician performed actual Pathetique Nocturnes on an absurd but interesting keyboard-type instrument built into the side of a mountain. We waved at each other across a sea of unusual concertgoers—antelope and elephants, an enormous crane, a pair of unicorns, all perched on chairs too small for them and listening attentively. I had to get back to the house for dinner and didn’t have a chance to speak with her.

Mokosh was also there at the coronation of a young king, who had fought against all odds to win back his country from a powerful darkness. The South Wind crowned him on a hill in the blazing sunshine, and all the people cheered.

“Echo!” cried Mokosh, moving through the crowd to grasp my sleeve. Her violet eyes sparkled. “I’m so glad I caught you. I’m sorry I haven’t come reading much—my mother has kept me so busy! Come have tea with me?”