The wolf nodded. “The Winds command some of the oldest magic there is.”
I brushed my fingers over my newly healed skin, then reached up to touch my scars. I wished the Winds had been there that day in the field so many years ago. “I’m sorry,” I told the wolf. “I shouldn’t have tried to leave.”
“I am sorry, too. I am afraid you are stuck here, my lady, until the year runs its course and the power in the wood fades along with me.” His eyes blazed bright.
His words echoed in my mind: I am old, my lady. I am dying.
I thought about the strange spidery clock in the bauble room, and wondered if it was ticking down the remainder of the wolf’s life. “Thank you. For saving me from the wood.”
He dipped his muzzle. “You are welcome.”
For the first time, I wondered if there was a way to save him.
And I realized I wanted to find it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I GOT DRESSED BEHIND A SCREEN that appeared when I asked for it, in a cloud-soft blue gown I pulled out of the wardrobe. It had satin ribbons tying up the cuffs, and embroidered silver birds around the waistline in an unbroken circle of wide wings.
“Come,” said the wolf, when I was dressed and had eaten my breakfast of nut bread with sliced pears and spicy orange peel jam. “I will take you on a proper tour of the house, or at least as much as we can manage in one day.” He paused at the door and cast a glance at my dressing table, where I’d laid the braided belt and pouch. “You will need your tools.”
I put the belt on and followed the wolf into the corridor.
“Think of the house as a quilt, the rooms as patches,” he told me as we went along. “There are two kinds of bindings: the kind we did yesterday, to keep whatever is in a room in, and the kind that keeps all the rooms bound to the house. Those bindings rarely fail, but they can unravel, and so must be checked regularly.”
We walked down a stone hallway, sapphires gleaming from inside the rock, and came to the door I had bound the day before. The fire crackled noisily behind it, but I tugged on the mended scarlet cords, and they held firm. The wolf gave me a nod of satisfaction, and I swelled with pride.
We walked along a grassy hallway and stopped at all the doors that lined it. One was carved with the image of a flower; another, a spider; another, a bear. To my surprise, the wolf told me to open the spider door.
Inside was a vast hall, overgrown with moss, sunlight streaming in through a tall, broken window. Silver spiders the size of my palm were gathering the sunlight and spinning it into elaborate webs that hung all around the room. In one corner sat a spinning wheel and a basket heaped with empty spools. I gaped, awed. The whole place buzzed with magic.
“The spiders make the binding thread,” said the wolf, with a toothy smile. “Sometimes you can convince them to wind the spools for you, too, but it makes them a little cross, so mostly you have to do it yourself.”
“How often does the thread run out?” I asked.
“Sometimes every day. Sometimes once a year. It depends.”
“On what?”
“How the house is feeling,” said the wolf, as if that were obvious.
I shook my head in bewilderment, and we went on to the bear door. That room contained, unbelievably, the inside of a huge circus tent, where a trio of white bears sang a sort of song in strange throaty voices.
“I like to bring them honey every day or so,” said the wolf. “It soothes their throats.”
I stared. “Do they do anything besides sing?”
“Not really.”
“Don’t they get exhausted?”
“How should I know? They are the singing bears. That is what they do.”
Behind the flower door lay a venomous garden. Roses bloomed purple, dripping poison. A wicked-looking vine grew up from the center of a crumbling well. The sky was mottled with dark clouds, and the air stank of mold and decay. The vine turned toward us, reaching out with dark tendrils.
“House!” cried the wolf, “Axes!”
And then an axe appeared before each of us and we grabbed them (the wolf with his teeth) and started hacking away at the vine as if we had done it a hundred times before. When the vine was cut down to a stub, oozing black, horrible-smelling sap from its wounds, we hurtled back into the hallway. I gladly took out my needle and bound that door tight. “We have to keep an eye on the vine,” said the wolf. “Binding or not, it’ll seep through and devour the house.”
On we went, down dusty hallways and leafy ones, up some stairs that seemed to be formed from dragon scales, others of paper. Monsters beat against one door, thudding, hissing, wailing. The binding was fraying; I used the needle and thread to knit it back together. There was a door made of silver that shimmered and sang. Behind it lay a whirling, twisting something that I didn’t comprehend. “A gateway to another world,” said the wolf. “But we cannot go there; the journey would rip us apart.”
There were more normal rooms, too. We passed through an armory, where racks of weapons, chain mail coats, and shields lined the walls, all emblazoned with a white bear on a blue field. There was a treasury, countless parlors, a storeroom, a small conservatory lined with windows and filled with perfectly ordinary plants. There was even a laundry.
Every so often, I saw evidence that a young woman had once lived here: a wooden-heeled shoe, discarded in the hall; the loose beads of a bracelet gathering dust in a wall niche; a spilled bottle of perfume in front of one of the doors that smelled of sunshine and wildflowers. I wondered where the owner of these things had gone, and if the wolf had brought me here as her replacement. But every time I opened my mouth to ask him about it, we were somehow at another door, with another binding to check, another task to do.
The day spun away, and the infinite, terrifying, wonderful house began to weigh on me.
“You are tired,” said the wolf, concern in his voice.
I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. I had just bound a room that randomly grew or shrank with no warning, and had nearly been trapped behind a door the size of my thimble. The wolf had dragged me out just in time. “I don’t know how you’ve lived here for so long all alone,” I said, wheezing. “The house is—the house is—”
“Unwieldy?” the wolf supplied. His teeth flashed in a smile. “That is why I am glad you are here. It is very hard to hold a needle in one’s mouth, you know.”
I laughed—I’d been wondering how he’d managed binding the doors on his own.
He nudged my hand with his white muzzle. “I want to show you one last room.”
BEYOND THE DOOR LAY A tall, sparse chamber, with wooden floors and a window looking out over the forest; the sky was deepening toward twilight.
I gasped. In the center of the room was a dark mahogany grand piano, the lid lifted to reveal gleaming strings. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“I thought you would like something to practice on, while you are here.”
“I don’t really know how to play,” I replied, wondering how he’d think to bring me there. But I paced toward the piano anyway, sank onto the blue velvet bench. I pressed a few keys. Notes awoke from the heart of the instrument, echoing all the way up to the ceiling like embers in an underground cavern.
The wolf came to sit beside the bench. He tilted his head at me, as if debating something. “The last mistress of the house was a musician. I could teach you what I learned from her.”
I thought about the shoes and gowns and discarded bracelets. I wondered who the former mistress of the house could have been, and why the wolf had told me the night before that I was his only guest. Whatever the case, I very much wanted to learn. I touched the smooth wood of the piano, and couldn’t stop my smile. “I would like that.”