Echo North(80)

Hal and I huddle together, his arm tight around my shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” he says into my ear, and somehow amidst all this horror of heat, I can still feel the warmth of his breath on my face. “I did this to you. I did this to you twice. I forced you to make promises you didn’t understand. I forced you to come here. I even—I even scarred your face.”

I open my eyes to peer at him through the haze of smoke and ash and I’m filled with a profound sense of release. “It’s all right, Halvarad Wintar. It’s over now. I chose this. I chose you. I will always choose you.”

He lifts his hand to my face, traces the scars with his fingers. Gently, so gently. “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?” I thought all the moisture had been siphoned from me but I’m wrong. A single tear slides down my cheek.

And then I’m leaning into him, pressing my lips against his. Kissing Hal, who was twice a wolf, in the middle of a dying world. He pulls me close and kisses me back. A brittle wind whirls around us, tangling our hair together, my dark and his light. Ash falls like snow.

The lava creeps higher. The earth shakes.

And then Hal draws back from me, tightens his grip on my hand, pulls me to my feet. He raises our joined hands to the ragged, bleary sky. “Do you see this, Wolf Queen? Do you see? You are defeated! Your curse is undone, your rule over me ceases. She has broken it! The century is fulfilled and Echo has broken your curse. Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME?”

“There’s no need to shout.”

Suddenly the Wolf Queen is beside us, floating in the air just above the tumbling lava. Her features seem sharper in the raging light, but no wind stirs through her silver hair.

“Well, then?” Hal’s eyes are hard as flint.

“You have won,” she snaps. “Your stupid girl has prevailed.”

He smiles. “Then we are free.”

“Of the enchantment, perhaps. But not of me.”

She circles us, as she did in the wood.

Hatred and fear and anger gnaw inside of me, and I still don’t let go of Hal. “Where are we?” I demand.

She doesn’t smile, just stares at me as she passes, around and around our rock, walking on nothing, her feet making no sound. “I am the Queen of many realms, many worlds. This is one of them. I was born here. Not the daughter of the Devil as so many have guessed. Just the daughter of another world. But I did not choose to stay.”

Her words are punctuated by yet another eruption, barely fifty paces away. Hal and I fall to our knees, choking on ash. The Wolf Queen regards us without pity. “You have displeased me. You have robbed me. You have brought my enchantment to naught and turned my own daughter against me. And so I shall leave you here. And you shall die.”

Hal struggles to stand amidst the trembling of the world, and he pulls me up beside him. We are one, united and strong against her. “That,” he says, “was not part of our agreement.”

“You don’t make the rules. No one does but me.”

“THAT WAS NOT PART OF OUR AGREEMENT!”

I can hardly breathe. My skin cracks, the heat creeps up to my hairline. We have minutes left. Maybe only seconds.

“I care not,” says the Wolf Queen.

There comes a sudden silence, and then the next second a roaring, like a storm over the sea, and a rushing of wind.

It whirls around all three of us, lifting us from the rock, away from the grasping fingers of the lava, away from the heat and the fire and the certainty of death. I think I catch a glimpse of gold wings.

The Wolf Queen is screaming.

All I can feel is my heartbeat and Hal’s, still together, caught fast between our palms.

The world seems to shift, blurring before my eyes and then sharpening again. But now the fire is gone, and we are back in the Wolf Queen’s court, and she is flat on her back, staring up at three figures looming over her, her face wracked with terror.

The East and South and West Winds blaze with cold fire, and the East Wind presses his sword against the Wolf Queen’s throat.

“You have broken the laws of the old magic, daughter of another world. You have twisted it to your own uses, you have made a deal and failed to honor it.”

The Queen is ragged and small before the might of the Winds. “Please! Please let me be. I didn’t know.”

The South Wind shifts his spear. “You knew very well. You have known always what you do, every second you have been on this world. There is no innocence in your heart. And so there shall be no mercy for you.”

She weeps bitterly on the forest floor, and somehow in spite of everything she’s done to hurt Hal, to hurt me, I feel a twist of pity.

The West Wind spreads his wings, and takes the spinning wheel from his back. “And so we take your power from you, and so your throne is broken.”

“No. Please. Please.”

It’s the last word she ever utters.

A chaos of wind and fire whirl round her, and the East Wind and the South Wind uncurl her magic with their spear and their sword. The West Wind catches it on his spinning wheel, and winds it into shifting, shadowy silver. I think of the threads in the bauble room, the twisted echo of the binding magic.

Her screams pierce through me and I can’t bear it. Hal wraps himself around me, presses my head against his chest. But I can still hear her screaming.

And then suddenly, she stops.