Echo North(52)

There was always a wood.

I took a deep, shuddery breath, and touched the surface of the mirror.

The world wrenched sideways and a bone-rending cold poured through me. Stars exploded in my vision and pain crawled up my body like I was being pierced with a thousand fiery needles. If I had any breath at all I would have screamed.

Then I was standing on the border of a huge, ancient forest, and the pain and the cold were gone. Trees stretched above me into a brilliant, starry sky, and music sparked bright in my ears, a tangle of wind and moonlight and the soughing of the wood. Everything felt strong and good and steeped in magic. The very ground hummed with it. I could feel it buzzing in my fingers.

I caught a flash of movement in the corner of my eye and turned just in time to see a deer—or was it a dark-haired boy? It seemed to be both at once—running through the trees. I sprinted after him, straining to keep his heels—his hooves?—in sight. Starlight dappled across his body like bright leaves in a river.

He burst into a clearing and melted into a thousand other shifting shadows as beautiful and strange as he was. I stopped and stared, trying to make sense of the whirling scene before my eyes.

They were fairies, I think, or something like fairies: wispy creatures as tall as trees that seemed to be made of rain, or flowers; willowy spiders with mossy hair; bears with long fingers and masques instead of faces; hundreds of others harder to describe. They all danced together in the center of the clearing, a mass of strangeness and swirling color. In their midst sat a woman on a writhing throne, her hair the same shade as the moonlight. She peered through the horde of dancers straight into my eyes, and lifting one long pale hand, beckoned me closer.

I went as if drawn on a string, slipping through the fairies who laughed as they danced until I came to the woman on the throne. I knelt in the grass before her.

“I have been waiting for you, Echo Alkaev.” Her voice was slow and slippery as fine-spun gold.

I knew that voice. “You are the smoke-woman,” I said, lifting my face. And thinking even further back, “The thorny queen.”

“I became them for a time. But they are not who I am, even as this form is not.”

I studied her, her skin mottled like stone. Her eyes seemed to have no color at all. “Then who are you?”

She spread her hands wide as she smiled at me. “Who is anyone? The truth of who you are is not represented here. Is it, Echo?”

I flushed with shame as I reached up to touch my face, smooth on both sides only within the pages of these impossible book-mirrors. I didn’t answer.

“I’ve been watching you. Waiting to see what you would do. Have you figured it out?”

Danger crawled along my skin. The noise of the fairies’ laughter grew harsh in my ears. “Figured out what?”

She smiled again, and her eyes sparked orange as flame.

Realization wrenched through me like an earthquake. I took a step backward, the sense of danger sharpening into fear. “You. You’re the ‘she’ the wolf spoke of. The one who controls the wood. The one who gathered the pieces of the house. The one who trapped him there—maybe even the one who enchanted him in the first place.”

She watched me with amusement. Fire crawled hot just beneath her skin, and I felt the sudden, awful heat of her.

She was the roaring fire behind the bedroom door. The wood that had tried to devour me.

I took another step back.

“Poor scarred girl. Lost and broken and unwanted. Marked by the Devil for his pleasure alone. No thought to how to change your fate. You haven’t figured it out at all. I am surprised.”

“Figured out what?”

She lifted a finger, and flame burst bright from the tip, a tiny flare of yellow that vanished again the next moment. “How to break the enchantment.”

The whole world stilled around me. My throat felt ragged and raw. Horror and hope warred within me, a lion raging against a bear. “Tell me. Tell me how to break it.”

She laid her hands back in her lap. “There is one thing that you must not do, one rule you must not break. You must break it.” Her eyes were dangerous, specs of blackness from the heart of the earth. Flames seeped from between her lips. “That will nullify the enchantment. That will free him.”

I thought of the lamp, a spark of light in the dark. “I don’t believe you.”

Fire danced around the ends of her hair. “You are thinking it is too simple an answer.”

Her heat bit into my skin, and I took yet another step back.

“You were looking for the truth. The truth is always simple, but that does not make it easy.”

Anger burned. “Who are you? Why have you trapped him?”

“My dear, Echo.” She rose from the throne, sparks raining down from her hair and searing black spots in the grass. “It is not of my doing. He chose this. He chose me. They always do, in the end. He came to me, in the wood. He loved me. And so I saved him. Preserved him. So he could live forever.” She held out a hand, flames curling through her skin. “What about you, Echo Alkaev? Would you like to live forever?”

The fairies surged around me like a sudden ocean tide, drawing me into their swirling, tangled mass. Stars wheeled bright above my head, close enough to touch. I moved with the dancers, straining to understand the words in the fairies’ voices, sweet as honey, sweet as rain. They folded over me, and I thought it would not be so bad to stay with them, forever, forever.