Echo North(83)

We emerge from caves no longer encrusted in ice to find that the frozen lake Ivan and I spent so long trudging across has melted. We’re left with the unenviable task of walking around it for untold miles, and decide to camp early. We’ll face the extended trek in the morning.

We eat fresh-caught fish roasted over a fire as the sun sinks slowly in the west. I watch Hal eat around the bones and spit them out amongst our coals, and all at once I’m thrown back to the garden, watching the wolf tear into his rabbit. The memory makes my heart ache. Hal glances up to see me watching him.

“Tell me your story,” I say without meaning to.

He fixes his gaze on the fire. “I was the youngest of eleven, six brothers and four sisters older than me. I was partially forgotten but mostly just spoiled and I did as I pleased, always. If I wanted a hound, I was given a hound. If I wanted to ride my father’s warhorse, I rode my father’s warhorse. I was closest with my next-oldest sister, Illia, who liked sunshine and reading and telling me that I oughtn’t always be so selfish.”

I see Hal as he was in his memory book: small and sorrowful, begging his mother to let him go and see his sister. “I’m so sorry.” He shakes his head. “They’re all gone now. It hardly matters.” He reaches for another log to feed the flames. “I was seventeen when I first went into the wood. I was restless, bored. My brothers were given commissions in the army. My sisters were married or sent to learn music and manners on far-off estates. My parents had no use for me, and I had very little use for myself. So I went to explore the forbidden forest, mostly to spite my father. I met—I met her there, and … well, you know the rest.”

“Not from you.”

He shifts in his place across from me, bending his knees up under his chin and looking for all the world like a gangly, overgrown boy. I can see the scars on his left ankle, tight and shiny in the firelight. “She was kind to me. I thought she was just a girl my age. She spun wild stories about caring for her mother deep in the wood, and she fascinated me.”

I try to ignore the stab of jealousy. “What then?”

“I went to see her every day. I abandoned everything else, even fencing lessons, which had been the last thing I loved. We met in secret for six months, and then she showed me what I thought was the truth about her: she was a shapeshifter, unjustly banished into the wood. God help me, Echo, but I fancied myself in love with her, and we schemed—we schemed ways to be together.”

My throat hurts but I just nod, staring at my fingers twisting tight in my lap. This time I feel his eyes on my face, but I don’t lift my own to meet them.

“I agreed to a bargain with the Wolf Queen without even knowing I did. I was a fool. One night in her cursed court and her true nature came clear, but it was already too late. Her enchantment had taken hold, and when I ran from the wood in my wolf form—” Hal draws a ragged breath. “The world had turned long outside her domain. My brothers and sisters, mother and father—they had been dead already many years. But it didn’t count toward my century. No. I must feel every day of my hundred years. Unless I agreed to marry—at first the Queen herself, then in later years her daughter—agreed to become her creature forever, damned to even worse than the half-life I was already living.

“So I shut myself in her enchanted house, and felt every hour, every second of my life spinning away from me. By day, I was torn in two, my human self trapped in the worlds of the books, not remembering my true nature, while my wolf form raged, because I could not be free of her. Sometimes I couldn’t stand it any longer and went roaming, breaking through the wood she bound around me, searching for some spark of hope. And then I found you.”

My eyes jerk up of their own accord and I stare at Hal across the fire. “Did you ever remember? That we had done it all before?”

“My book self didn’t, until the end. But every night, when the magic grew thin and I shed my wolf form, I remembered everything I’d done to you—everything I was still doing to you—and everything you sacrificed to free me. Twice. And sometimes I looked at you and I knew you from before and it broke my heart. Because, in the end, no matter what happened—I would destroy you. I already had.” His voice catches. “I tricked you. Trapped you. I am as despicable as the Wolf Queen, more. Because I hurt the one I loved. I hurt you, and then I did it again.” He bows his head into his hands and his shoulders shake. He’s crying, and I can’t bear it.

I slip around to his side of the fire and settle next to him, wrapping my arm about his shoulders. He leans into me for a moment, then turns to look up at me, his face twisted into a tangle of emotions I can’t quite understand.

He wipes his eyes and I slip my hand into his and he doesn’t pull away.

“Can you forgive me, Echo? I haven’t dared to ask you since the Queen was destroyed because I knew I couldn’t bear it if you reviled me. But now—now I just need to know. Can you forgive me?”

My throat constricts. I hold tight to his fingers, the heat from the fire pulsing in my skin. “Yes. Oh, Hal, yes. But it hurts. It hurts so much.”

“I know.” He lifts his free hand to cradle my chin in his palm, gently. “I betrayed you. I meant for you to be trapped with the Wolf Queen. I wished for it, because it meant I would be free. Every word she made me tell you was true and I did it to you twice. You didn’t have those scars. The first time—the first time you tried to save me, you didn’t have those scars. You didn’t—”