Echo North(67)

But Mokosh isn’t convinced. “The girl is stronger than you know. She has the power to defeat you.”

The Wolf Queen smiles, her teeth curling white past silver lips. “Let me worry about the girl.”

Hal is chained in the dark, clawing at his skin, screaming. Nettles grow up from the ground, piercing every part of him. “Why did you look?” he sobs. “Echo, why did you have to look?”

When I wake, a lamp is burning. It’s morning, but our tent is buried in snow. Ivan catches my eye. “We’ll have to dig ourselves out.”

It takes hours, and we rip the tent in the process. We’ll need to stitch it up before we can use it again.

We’re already weary before we even start for the day.

It’s hard going. Ice seeps under my collar and I can barely see for the wind blearing my vision. Ivan helps me tie a scarf around my mouth and nose, almost up to my eyes, and that helps a little.

The ice seems angry, shifting and groaning and thundering all around us. It no longer sounds like music. Ivan walks quickly; I can see the tension in his shoulders, and his fear scares me more than my own. The Wolf Queen’s reach is long, and if we fall through the ice, there will be no saving us.

On and on we go, leaning into the wind as the snow skitters across the surface of the frozen lake. Sometimes the wind sweeps the ice clean, and I can see once more the strong webbed cracks spidering out in all directions.

We come, sometime in the mid-afternoon, to a place on the lake where lumps of ice lie in furrows like a farmer’s field. They shine beneath the snow a brilliant, impossible turquoise. I stop to examine them and Ivan stops, too. My breath catches in my throat. “Beautiful.”

“Jewels from the North Wind’s crown,” says Ivan. “Lost when he traded his power away.” His face grows tight beneath the shadow of his furred hood. “There are many stories that tell of the jeweled ice of the north. A man once sold his soul to take a bit back south with him, only to find on his arrival home that it had melted away. That very night his soul was required of him.”

I try to shrug away my uneasiness.

“Some say the Wolf Queen’s magic was born in the ice.”

An ear-shattering crack resounds across the frozen lake and the ground splinters apart beneath our feet. My heart jolts, and my hand goes unconsciously to my hip, reaching for the pouch and the binding threads that aren’t there. Ivan is jerked away from me.

“IVAN!” I lunge after him as he skids into a riven in the ice. Black water tugs him under but I plunge my hand in up to the armpit and my fingers close around his. I pull, I strain, I scream, and he’s fighting, too, desperate to break the surface of the water. At last he does, gasping for air. I reach for his pick, mercifully left above ground, and dig it deep into the ice. I wrap my other hand tight around Ivan’s arm, and pull.

It feels like my arm is being ripped from my body, but I don’t let go. For one terrifying moment I think I’ve lost him, but then he’s scrambling back onto the ice, gasping for breath. His body shakes with violent cold—if I don’t get him warm, pulling him from the water will have been in vain, and the Wolf Queen will have won.

I tug Ivan as far as I can away from the gash in the lake, back onto solid ice, and scramble about for the last of our firewood, scattered from Ivan’s pack.

His skin is turning gray, he’s mumbling to himself, rocking back and forth, shuddering. I strike flint against tinder and coax a fire onto the wood, shoving Ivan as close to it as I can. I make him strip off his outer layer of furs, which are soaked through, and wrap him in our sleeping furs. The day is already waning, and I can tell by the clouds more snow is on the way. We’re nearly out of wood. More laughter shrieks with the wind over the ice. It would take very little for the Wolf Queen to kill us now.

I scramble for the sewing kit from my pack and do a hasty job of repairing the tent, thinking once more of the golden needle and thimble, lost somewhere in the ruins of the house under the mountain. Ivan starts to look less gray and breathes more easily. Already the fire burns low.

The sun begins to set, and I scatter the ashes of the fire to conserve what wood we can, then set up the tent. We crawl inside. I make Ivan tell me stories until I’m certain he is warm again; only then do I let him lie back on his furs.

Ivan sleeps, murmuring and shifting where he lies, and I stare at the canvas above, terrified to fall asleep lest the Wolf Queen cause another crack to open wide and swallow us whole. Hal would never know that I had tried to come and save him.

So I lie awake, listening to every sound outside the tent, certain I hear howling that doesn’t belong to the wind.

The howling sharpens, drawing near. I jerk upright. Wolves, coming fast over the ice.

“Ivan!” I reach across the tent floor to grab his shoulder. “Ivan!”

The next moment something hits the sides of the tent and bursts through my hasty stitching job. There’s a flash of eyes in the dark, angry snarling, the scent of wet fur and fresh blood.

“Ivan!” I scream.

He wakes with a gasp, wrestling to extricate himself from the furs. His hand closes about the ice pick, while I reach for the knife at my belt. The tent pole could be a makeshift sword, if I can reach it in time.

The tent rips apart even further, and moonlight floods in, reflecting off the surface of the ice. Wolves circle us, foam dripping from their bone-white teeth. Their fur is a mottled black and red and gray; their yellow eyes are sharp with rage, with death. Silver collars and flashing gems in their muzzles mark them as soldiers of the Wolf Queen. She’s sent them to finish us off.