Echo North(33)

He brought me to the Temple of the Winds, which was empty and echoing, dust swirling up from the floor.

We paced together over to the back window, which looked out into wheeling starlight, and I sank down onto the wide sill, hugging my knees to my chest. The wolf sat opposite me, and the strange stars cast fragments of green and violet light over his white fur. “I am not of your kind, Echo Alkaev. I do not belong to your world, or your time. I am just another piece of … her … collection. But my life has been stretched past what it was ever meant to endure. At the end of the year, I will die—but I will be free. I have no wish to escape that.”

I chewed on my lip, peering out into the never-ending light. It danced in my vision, sang in my ears, whispered like dew on my skin.

“Once, I had something precious. I should have held it tight, should have guarded it with my last breath, but instead I let it go. I will regret that until the end.”

He let out a long breath, and I tore my gaze from the stars to look at him. Sorrow weighed heavier on him than I’d ever realized.

A little wind rushed past us. It was warm and smelled of lilies. I closed my eyes and drank it in. “You said you were going to tell me a story,” I murmured.

He did. “The North Wind was despised by his brothers. He was the favorite of their mother the Moon, and his powers were stronger than theirs. He commanded death, and time, and could bend others’ wills to his own.”

I thought of the dark, angry force beneath the mountain. “What happened to him?”

“He traded his power for the oldest of magics.”

“What is the oldest magic?”

“Love. That is what created the universe, and that is what will destroy it, in the end. Threads of old magic, binding the world together.”

I watched him in the shifting light, his eyes fixed on some faraway point I couldn’t see.

“The North Wind gave away his power to be with a human. That is how it began.”

“How what began?”

A low growl came from the wolf’s throat. “All of this,” he said heavily.

I blinked back out into hurtling stars. “Then it’s his fault.”

“Fault? No. He held on to the thing he loved. It is more than I ever did.”

“Wolf.” I stretched out a hand to touch the scruff of fur on his neck, and he didn’t pull away. I tugged the ribbon on the hat, thinking he hadn’t quite answered my question. “What did you lose? Who did you love?”

“Nothing. No one.”

But his eyes said Everything. Someone.

He sighed, a long huff of air.

“I wish you would let me help you.”

He buried his muzzle in the crook of my arm. “My lady, you cannot help me.”

But I didn’t believe him.



“WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT the old magic?” I asked Mokosh.

We stood in a castle’s high tower that was open to the air, while dwarves sailed above us in ships that somehow flew, painting the sky with swathes of swirling light. That book world had no moon or stars; without the dwarves’ brushes, the darkness would be complete.

In the castle below, a centaur-king was having a party, and the whisper and rush of cymbals and strings drifted up to us.

“Magic is in everything,” said Mokosh matter-of-factly. She finished the painting she’d been working on with one last flourish of her brush—it was a view from the tower, dwarves and flying ships and all. I stood before an easel as well, but I wasn’t a painter, and had given up after only a few brushstrokes, alternating watching Mokosh and the sky instead. She glowered at her canvas. “My mother would hate this.”

“I think it’s beautiful.”

Mokosh waved my comment away. “Shall we go down and join the party?”

“I’m not much of a dancer,” I confessed, trying not to think about my father and Donia’s wedding, or the various village holidays I spent lurking in the background, because no one wanted to dance with a girl marked by the Devil.

“Oh, then I’ll teach you! It’s the easiest thing in the world. Here.” She grabbed my arms and moved me to the center of the tower, just as the white underbelly of a dwarf ship sailed overhead. It gleamed like it was made out of pearls. “All you have to do is listen to the music and move your feet, you see?”

She steered me around while I tripped over her spectacularly, until I began to learn, little by little, what to do.

“Step back,” she said. “To the side, then forward. That’s it! You’re not entirely hopeless, you see?”

I let the music sink into me, and after a while the movements became more natural. High up in the tower, it seemed like everything was dancing, the flying ships and the dwarves’ paintbrushes and Mokosh and I, all part of the same intricate pattern.

“Is there magic where you come from?” I asked Mokosh, when we’d grown tired of dancing and sank to the floor opposite each other. The stones beneath us hummed with music.

“Certainly there is. My mother couldn’t rule without it.”

“And the old magic,” I pressed. “The magic that governs the world—do you have that kind?”

Mokosh frowned. “My mother has the most magic of anyone. Of course she has the old magic, too.”

I shrugged, uncertain why that had offended her. In my mind I saw the bauble room, the spidery clock and the spinning crystals, the blood on the wolf’s white fur. I knew there were answers to be found there, but I was still too afraid to seek them out. “What about enchantments?”