Echo North(72)

“Echo.”

Hal’s voice comes, ragged and hoarse, and I turn toward him like my heart is drawn on a string.

The Queen strikes him across the face and his head jerks back against the silver band. A line of blood appears on his neck—the band is knife sharp.

The Queen straightens, any pretense of a smile fled far from her face, and hatred coils tight inside me.

“His name is Halvarad Perun Svarog Wintar, youngest son of the Duke of Wintar who lived, oh—four centuries back, or so. Halvarad was the curious son. The beautiful son.” She brushes her human-wolf hand across his shoulders and he shuts his eyes, his skin blanching paler than before. “He found me in the wood. Came to me every night. Loved me dearly. He wished me to come home with him, to meet his father, to declare me as his prospective bride.” I stare at Hal, willing him to please, please open his eyes. I can bear anything, even the Wolf Queen’s awful story, if he will just look at me.

“And so I showed to him my true form: half wolf and half human, imbued with greater power than any human this world or any other has ever possessed. He was not afraid.” She smiles, wrapping her clawed fingers about Hal’s throat. He sits perfectly still, but I can see a muscle jumping in his jaw. “He wanted to be like me, one of my own kind, but he said his father would not understand such a transformation. And so we struck a deal: for him to be partly with me in the wood, and partly at home with his father. A hundred-year trial: a wolf by day and a man by night.”

“You tricked him,” says Mokosh quietly from her throne. “You always trick them. It isn’t the deal he thought he’d struck.”

“I didn’t know we even made a deal at all,” whispers Hal, from inside the Wolf Queen’s grasp. “And the hundred years were not a hundred—three centuries spun away in your wood the night you cursed me. My father was already dead before my curse had even started—”

“Fool!” barks the Queen. She releases him, leaving five spots of blood on his neck where her sharpened nails cut him. She stalks angrily away.

I don’t follow, just watch her, waiting for the rest of her story.

“As soon as the deal was struck he seemed unhappy with the arrangement.” The Queen stands calm again, resting one hand on the side of her throne. The red flowers stir and whisper at her presence, dipping their heads in reverence. “And so I offered him a way out of his promise: a human girl must live with him for a year without glimpsing his human face in the night. Fulfill this requirement, and he would be free of me. If not, the century would spin on, and he would belong wholly to me at the end of it.”

Hal shudders in his bonds, a bruise purpling on his cheek where the Wolf Queen struck him.

“And so you see, Echo Alkaev, the way out was yours to give him, or not, and you failed to uphold your end of the bargain.”

Anger roils inside me, a wave against a ship, deep water under ice. “I refuse to accept that.”

“Refuse to accept what?” The Queen plucks a flower from her throne and drinks deep of its nectar before she shreds it with her claws and lets the ragged remains fall to the ground. “That you betrayed him? That your journey was entirely in vain?”

“No.”

One silver eyebrow arcs upward. “What then?”

“I refuse to accept there is no other way to free him.”

She brushes her fingers against another flower, but does not pick it. Instead, she strides over to where I stand, coming so close I can feel the heat burning in her eyes, and smell the blood on her breath.

“I can help with these, you know,” she says, so quietly I’m not sure I hear her correctly. She grazes her claws down the scars on the left side of my face, gentle enough that she doesn’t cut me, but I can still feel the cold points of her nails.

“I can make them vanish. I can make you beautiful.”

I stare straight into her fire-eyes. “My scars don’t control me anymore. I don’t need to get rid of them to be beautiful.”

“Don’t control you anymore? This from the girl who prayed to God every night since she was seven years old to make her pretty again? This from the girl who bought a jar of cream worth more than a shipment of books from the city, then buried it in the back garden when she found it had no effect on her? Don’t control you anymore indeed.”

The rage is burning me up from the inside. My eyes snag on Mokosh, and suddenly I know what deal she made with her mother. “You want to be entirely human. That’s what she promised you.”

Mokosh ducks her head, ashamed. “You don’t know what it’s like, Echo. To be a monster, to revile your very existence, to not belong wholly to one world.”

“Oh Mokosh. I wish you would have told me. Of course I know.”

“But how could you?” she whispers. “You are so beautiful.”

My heart tears. “It may not even be in her power. You know you can’t trust her. Why would she make you wholly human when she hasn’t done the same for herself?”

“She doesn’t need to be human. She commands all the magic of the world.”

A strange wind breathes through the clearing, stirring through my hair and smelling of ice. “Not all of it.”

The Queen has been listening to our exchange with a kind of bemused scorn. “Are you quite done?”