“I beg your pardon!” exclaimed the queen, and we were subsequently thrown in prison, so I didn’t get to ask her about her books or her enchantments.
And he came with me when I harnessed a chariot to a comet and rode it up to the Palace of the Sun, where the East and West and South Winds dwelled with their father in a great bronze house filled with light. The Winds themselves came to greet us, and they were tall and grim, with jewels bound bright on their foreheads: East, whose skin shone the same burnished bronze as his father’s house; West, who gleamed gold and had a pair of wings folded against his back; South, who was a bright copper red and carried a spear made of mountains.
We dined with the Winds in a hall looking out over the world, and the colors tasted bright and the wine smelled of music.
“Where is the North Wind?” Hal asked.
East frowned. West looked stern. South, sorrowful. “His power was greater than ours,” said East, “but he was a fool. He traded it away for the love of a woman.”
I thought of the wolf, who had told me that same story in the temple. I wondered if the West Wind remembered healing me, after I’d been caught by the wood. But these couldn’t be the same Winds, could they? This was a story, and that had been real.
“It’s the oldest of magics,” I said.
The three Winds turned to me, and I didn’t think I imagined the shrewdness in West’s eyes. “What is?”
“Love.” The word burned through me, and I suddenly couldn’t look at Hal.
But he stood near enough that I could feel the heat of him. “That’s something you must never let go of,” he said softly.
West nodded, his wings rustling in a cool current of air. “It could break the strongest curse. The bitterest of enchantments.”
My heart stilled. “What did you say?”
The West Wind’s eyes blazed with all the light and depth of the universe itself. He brushed his fingers across my temple. “You will understand, in time.”
“If you know something—if you know how to help him—”
It was East who spoke next, the jewel bound to his forehead flashing scarlet and orange. “When you have found the oldest of magics, you must not let it go, not even for an instant. Then, and only then, will you be free. Free of all of this.”
“I’m not the one who’s trapped,” I objected.
East just smiled, and he and his two brothers turned away from us.
“Wait,” I said. “Please wait!”
But the East and South and West Winds stepped off their terrace into empty air. I blinked, and they were gone.
I turned to Hal. “I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know how to help you.”
He looked after them, his body taut and still. “It doesn’t matter, Echo.”
“Of course it does!”
He seemed to shrink before me, and to my horror, tears dripped down his cheeks.
“You’ve remembered something else, haven’t you?”
His shoulders shook.
“Hal?”
He pulled away from me, spoke a sharp word to the air and vanished from sight.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WINTER DESCENDED OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, ICE encasing the roses in the garden, frost tracing lacy patterns on the windows.
My remaining time in the house under the mountain had dwindled to a mere two weeks, and I was no closer to helping the wolf—or Hal—than I was at the beginning.
Nearly every day another room came unbound. We lost the rain room, the sunroom, the room with the snakes. Even the dining room fell into the void one evening, a mountain of food tumbling with it. I took my meals in the conservatory or the room behind the waterfall instead.
The house shrank and shrank; it seemed to hum with sorrow. I tended the remaining rooms with as much care as I knew how. The wolf rarely accompanied me—he spent more time in the bauble room than he spent out of it. One day, my guilt at last propelled me to approach the obsidian door, and I stood outside of it for a long while, battling my fear. The door seemed to whisper, to scream. I had almost worked up the courage to open it when the wolf stepped out of the room, covered in blood from nose to tail. I sucked in a breath, catching a glimpse of the sharp spinning crystals before the door shut behind him. He didn’t look at me, just padded off down the hall. Terror twisted through me. I ran away from the bauble room. I didn’t go back.
I practiced the piano. I went reading, searching desperately for answers that evaded me. Hal seemed to be avoiding me; Mokosh was nowhere to be found. So I took to wandering listlessly around the house. It was dying, just as the wolf was. It would take all the binding thread in the world to keep it together, and there was barely any left. I would never become its caretaker.
What, then? Why had the wolf really brought me here?
And what would I do when he was gone? What would I do when I ran out of binding thread, and the library was lost to me, too? Would I just go home?
I thought about that, examined my future like a painted egg: first, studying its colors and intricate design. Then, slowly peeling the shell away to see what lay hidden inside.
I found uncertainty. Hope. As much as I missed my father and Rodya, I had no desire to go back, to return to Donia and the villagers’ derision and a lifetime of lurking in the shadows to hide my face. But all the same, I was seized with a sudden longing to see them again.
I went to the library’s storeroom, took the ivory hand mirror from its cupboard. I settled with it on the floor, pricked my finger, plucked a hair, like I had done so many times at the beginning of my stay in the wolf’s house. “Show me my family,” I whispered.
The mirror swirled white.
And then I was looking down the street of my village, following my father as he strode up to the bookshop, his hands in his pockets, whistling.
He fished out a key and unlocked the door, then stepped inside and went about the business of opening the shop: dusting the register, drawing the curtains, sweeping the already-spotless floor.
A man came in when he was only partially finished with this ritual and requested a book, which my father found quickly. The customer laid silver in my father’s hands before stepping back outside, tipping his hat as he went. This scene repeated several times, with various men and women, and my heart twinged—my father’s business was successful, for the first time in years. I wondered what had changed. Maybe Donia was right—maybe my face had cursed him.
The mirror shifted.
I saw Donia sitting on the couch in front of the fire, her fingers flashing with needle and thread. Her belly was round and tight beneath her dress, and she hummed as she sewed. Snow clung white to the window.
And then the scene changed again. I saw Rodya receiving his tradesman’s sigil from his master, saw him stride out into the street where a girl waited for him, nut-brown hair curling from under her kerchief. She had soft eyes and a shy smile, and she fingered his sigil and kissed his cheek.
Rodya laughed and laughed, and kissed the girl properly, holding her close and safe against him. He murmured quiet words into her ear: “We’ll be wed before spring, if you’ll still have me.”
And then it was the girl’s turn to laugh.
The mirror wavered a third time, and went blank.
I raised my head from the mirror and found the wolf beside me, his amber eyes very bright. “Echo, why are you crying?”
“They are so happy. Oh, Wolf, they are so happy without me.” And I wrapped my arms around his white neck and sobbed into his fur.
THE WOLF AND I WENT to the garden, and settled on the step near the lily pond. The wind was cold but the sun was warm; the air smelled of honey.
I told the wolf everything I’d seen in the mirror, words tumbling out of me until I was emptied of them. I hugged my knees to my chest and wiped away the remnants of my tears.
He watched me, passive and sad, and for a while didn’t say anything. Over the iron fence, the wood was heavy with snow.
“I did this to you,” the wolf said at last, his voice low and more gruff than usual. “I scarred your face. I made your life into something it never should have been.”
It wasn’t at all what I expected. “Wolf, I’ve never blamed you.”