The wood loomed near. The blond man glanced back once or twice, like he wanted to talk to me, but the soldiers didn’t abide conversation. If any of the men spoke, the soldiers knocked them in the head with their sword hilts or, in one case, sliced off the offending speaker’s ear. I gaped in horror as blood gushed down his neck, wondering how on earth I’d thought this book-mirror innocuous.
We rode into the wood, where dark leaves and darker branches shut out the sunlight and the sky. The men wept. The man who’d had his ear cut off passed out from blood loss, slumping in his saddle—I doubted he would make it to morning. Maybe the soldiers would let me look at the wound. Maybe I could do something for him.
It’s just a story, I told myself firmly.
But it didn’t feel like just a story.
The ginger-haired young man’s eyes grew hard, the line of his jaw determined. Like he’d expected this. Like he’d prepared for it. Had he come on purpose to infiltrate the queen’s fortress?
On we rode, on and on. The wood grew darker and colder the deeper we went into it. Glowing eyes watched us from behind the trees. Whispers and high eerie screams flitted around us. The soldiers at the front of the group lit torches, but the bright flames did very little to banish the dark.
Then all at once we broke past the line of the trees. A black tower rose before us, stretching hundreds of feet into the air—I couldn’t see the top of it. Beyond sprawled a massive city, green lights winking in countless windows.
The soldiers could no longer stop the men from speaking. Their whispers whirled round me:
“The queen’s fortress.”
“The Dead Tower.”
“Her creatures’ dark hovels.”
“She’ll eat our hearts.”
“Drink our souls.”
“Destroy us.”
“Would that we had never been born.”
The ginger-haired young man sat tall in his saddle, like he was unafraid.
But his hands shook.
And then we rode up to the gate and the soldiers were yanking us from our mounts, shoving us through a gaping doorway, pulling us down a winding stone stair. The air grew colder, colder. It stank of decay, and blood.
The men wept.
My teeth chattered, my fingers and toes wholly numb.
We were taken in different directions, shoved through doorways or dragged further on. I was yanked down into a stone room, my wrists chained to a rough wall. I could sit, but it pulled my shoulders nearly out of their sockets, so I crouched instead, my thighs burning.
This book had turned out to be a huge, huge mistake. I thought about leaving, but I kept hoping Mokosh would eventually appear—last time, she hadn’t come until after the confrontation with the queen. And I was curious about the blond man—I wondered where the soldiers had taken him. So I waited.
After a while, moonlight filtered in through a window slit up near the ceiling, illuminating another prisoner chained to the adjacent wall. He was fiddling with his wrist cuffs, a scrape-scrape-tink of metal against metal, and he lifted his head, and grinned at me.
It was the blond man.
“You look uncomfortable,” he said, yawning.
I squinted in the dim light and saw that he was using a dagger to pick the locks on his wrist cuffs. First one, then the other, made an alarming racket as they clattered to the floor. He seemed nonplussed. He stood, stretched, then paced over to me.
“You aren’t in any real danger, of course,” he said as he started on my cuffs. “Readers never are. But it’s good to come prepared.” He gestured significantly with the dagger.
My left cuff fell off, then my right one. I rubbed my sore wrists and sagged gratefully to the ground.
My companion flashed another grin as he sheathed his dagger and pulled a cloak seemingly out of thin air, which he handed to me. I draped it around my shoulders, more than a little bewildered. “Who are you?”
He sketched a little bow. “Hal, at your service.”
“Echo,” I told him.
“Pleasure to meet you, Echo. Now, stay close and try not to make any noise. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of sticking around until dawn.”
I gulped, and followed him over to the cell door. The lock seemed to give him more difficulty than the cuffs had. He fiddled with it for a long while, muttering and cursing under his breath.
I studied him as he worked. He looked younger than I’d first thought, just a year or two older than me. He was lanky and tall. His blond hair curled over his ears; his shoulders were strong beneath his white linen shirt. He wore tall black boots and tight pants, and he smelled like rich earth and sun-warmed stones.
“I read a book once about a girl called Echo,” he said, jiggling the lock. “The ordinary kind of book. She was in love with a god who loved only his reflection, and she wasted away into nothing until she was just a voice in the wood, calling his name for all eternity.”
“That’s horrible.”
His lips quirked. “I suppose it is. Ah. There!” The lock sprung free, and Hal creaked the door open. He peered out into the passageway, then beckoned me to follow.
We crept out into darkness. Somewhere, water dripped, a man sobbed, another prayed.
“This way,” Hal whispered. He grabbed my arm and tugged me through a narrow door. The ceiling was so low I had to duck. I felt like a mole, burrowing through the earth. “Not much farther now.” The passage grew too close and tight for any conversation, so I focused on following him, my heart yammering away in my throat.
And then, just when I didn’t think I could take it anymore, we burst out into cool starlight, whispering trees, freedom.
Hal pulled me to my feet, his warm hand circling mine an instant longer than necessary before he let go. I shook dirt from my hair and spun in a circle, laughing.
He grinned. “We should escape from certain death more often.”
I glanced behind me. “I do feel sorry for the others. Does the queen kill them all, in the morning?”
“If I knew, would you want me to tell you? I wouldn’t want to spoil your reading experience.” He winked at me.
I gave him an exasperated glare. “If I’d thought this story wouldn’t have a happy ending, I would have read something else.”
His blue eyes locked on mine, suddenly serious. “Must you always know a story ends happily before you feel equal to beginning it?”
I stared at him, my heart pulsing insistently in my neck. I thought of my promise to the wolf in a snowy wood, of knife-sharp crystals and a whirring clock behind an obsidian door. A moth flickered past us in the moonlight, and I wondered what kind of story I was in. “Sometimes the adventure is enough.”
Hal smiled. “Adventure is all I live for. Come on!” And he grabbed my hand and tugged me out of the path of our escape tunnel, just as the ginger-haired man and two others from the hunting party came wriggling through. A half-dozen of the queen’s soldiers arrived in the clearing, hoofbeats thudding on hard earth. They drew their swords and circled the escaped prisoners. Hal pulled me behind a tree. We crouched there together.
One of the soldiers hauled the ginger-haired man up by his doublet and spat in his face. “You don’t deserve to live until dawn. The queen is coming for you now.”
“Let her come! I am a prince of my people, and the moon’s faithful servant. She cannot touch me.”
“He’s right,” whispered Hal. “But he’s the only one who knows it.”
I glanced over at him—his grin was back. “You have read this book-mirror before!”
“It’s one of my favorites,” Hal confessed. “The queen has been terrorizing this kingdom for centuries. If anyone crosses her, she kills them. It’s a very involved process. She slits your throat and then drinks your soul out of your ear—it’s how she stays so young. But the prince has been preparing for this his whole life. He’s drawing her out to meet him here, in the moonlight, where he is more powerful than she is. It’s all very exciting, if rather ridiculous.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You are rather ridiculous.”
He winked at me again. “Are you ready to run?”
“What?”
That’s when one of the soldiers spotted us, his blade flashing toward our hiding spot.