Echo North(49)

I glanced at Hal, who looked suddenly stricken, as if he’d taken a punch to the gut. He let go of my hand and stepped up to the desk, but the man didn’t lift his head. Like he didn’t know Hal was there.

The similarities between the two men were striking, younger and older versions of each other.

“Is he your father?” I asked Hal.

The man still didn’t seem to hear us. He kept writing in his book.

“Yes.” Hal’s voice was tight. Choked. He reached out to touch his father, but his hand passed through nothing—his father wasn’t really there.

This wasn’t like the other book-mirrors. This wasn’t a story, invented by a sorcerer. This was a memory.

Hal’s memory.

I folded Hal’s hand in mine. “Let’s see what else is here.”

Hal allowed himself to be drawn from the room, dazed.

A small boy ran down the corridor, clutching a wriggling orange kitten in one hand, and a blue paper pennant in the other. “Mama!” he shouted. “Mama, I found her!”

Hal froze in his tracks. “One of the kittens wandered away. We thought a wolf had got her, but she was curled up asleep in the toy chest. She used to sleep on my shoulders. Even when she got big. I called her Lion.”

We went on, down the hall and into a drawing room. A woman sat on an elegant sofa, braiding her long pale hair. A slightly older boy-Hal scowled at her feet. “But I want to go with Illia! I’m big enough.”

“When you’re older, dear one.”

“I’m twelve.”

“Papa will get you a horse, Halvarad.”

“I don’t want a horse. I want Illia!”

“We can’t always have what we want.”

Beyond the wide windows of the drawing room loomed a wood, dark and green.

There was always a wood.

I blinked, and boy-Hal and his mother were gone, the room empty.

Hal shook beside me. “Illia was my closest sister. Six years older than me. She went away to be married. I never saw her again.”

“You were alone,” I said softly. “For much of your childhood.”

“I was always alone.” He paced up to the window, and I went with him.

A blond boy on a chestnut horse thundered toward the wood. Even from this distance, I recognized Hal, not much younger than he was standing beside me.

Why was there always a wood?

His eyes were wet, staring at his other self. “The wood was forbidden. I was taught to fear it, all my life. But I couldn’t resist. I went anyway.”

“Hal?”

His face grew hard. He jerked away from the window. “I don’t want to remember any more.”

“What’s wrong? What happened here?”

I glanced once more to the rider, swallowed up by the trees. “What happened there?”

But Hal shouted a sharp word, and the whole scene crumpled around us, melting back into the shadowy corridor.

“Leave me,” he said. He fell to his knees. He dropped his head into his hands.

“Hal, tell me what’s wrong.”

His eyes flashed hot. His body was tight with anger. “Leave me!”

I obeyed.

I stepped into one of the shadow-mirrors, and the corridor faded around me.



I FOUND MYSELF IN AN ordinary book-world, standing under a tree on a hill. To my utter astonishment Mokosh was there, wearing a gauzy purple gown that matched her eyes.

“Echo! Where have you been? It’s ages since I saw you last. Are you going to tell me about him this time? Your mysterious other reader?” She winked at me.

I felt like a battered toy, ready to rattle apart in the barest wind. I realized I did want to tell her about Hal. I needed to talk to someone, and the wolf didn’t seem at all like the right choice.

So I told her everything, back in her palace room on her floating island, stars winking outside the window. She listened at first with a teasing interest, which morphed into a disapproving severity by the time I was finished. “I feel I should put you on your guard,” she said. She touched my knee, her brows creased with concern. “You don’t know what he wants from you.”

Her tone irked me. “He doesn’t want anything. He’s my friend.”

“Then why isn’t he honest with you? How did he get trapped in the books in the first place? Maybe he’s dangerous. Maybe the books are his prison.”

I jerked to my feet and paced to the window, buzzing with nervous energy.

“He said he was going to hurt you. He warned you himself to stay away.”

“He would never hurt me.”

“Echo, you don’t know that. You need to be careful.”

I studied her in the starlight, her beautiful eyes and shining hair, her flawless perfection, even in her own world. I was sorry I had come.

I made an excuse and left as quickly as I could, not easy again until I was safely back in the library.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I DIDN’T EXPECT TO SEE HAL again, not after he was so adamant I should leave him. But he was waiting in the first book-mirror I stepped into the next day, standing alone on a mountaintop, his eyes and face stricken. A cold wind tore through his hair. Below us rambled a wide green wood.

There was always a wood.