I DIDN’T MEAN TO FALL ASLEEP.
But I woke with a start early in the morning to find the other side of the bed empty, sheets mussed where he’d lain, his shirt a shapeless linen puddle just on top.
I could still feel the warmth of his arm, the smoothness of his skin, the strength beneath it.
“Wolf?” I said into the cool gray light.
But there was no answer.
I got out of bed and dressed quickly, shivering. The room was cold, the house still, like it was holding its breath, waiting to see what I would do.
I paced through a corridor made of dying roses into the conservatory, and tucked myself into a window seat hidden by a large feathery fern. I stared through the glass at the winter wood, snow tracing the black branches with white.
The year was nearly up. There was only today and tomorrow, and then time would be gone.
I had failed to help the wolf.
And yet.
The arm I’d touched.
The voice I knew.
I knew, I knew, I knew.
“You cannot help me, Echo. You never could.”
The wolf’s words, the night I’d found him hunting in the garden. And yet Hal had spoken them, too, right after he’d played for me in the abandoned concert hall.
“Ask the right questions,” the smoke-woman had told me.
I picked away at the knot in my mind, pulled out the threads, examined them.
I asked myself:
Why was I not allowed to look at the wolf in the night? What would happen to him, really, when the year was ended? Who was the collector, and what did she want with him?
I leaned my forehead against the window, watched as my breath fogged up the pane.
I asked myself:
Why was Hal trapped in the books? Why were his memories bound behind glass? What had happened to him in the wood?
Why was there always a wood?
Outside, snow began to fall, turning the world into a blur of white. The wood was lost from view. I shut my eyes and let myself consider the thing I had come here to consider.
I let myself ask the question that terrified me:
What if Hal and the wolf were one and the same?
The room began to shake, a horrific crack splintered through the floor. I bid my fern a sad farewell, and left the conservatory just before it tumbled into the void.
“LOOK FOR THE TRUTH,” the smoke-woman had told me. “If you find it, you will see through the enchantment.”
There was one room in the house I had never properly explored, and it was finally time to face my fear and go back there.
My feet brought me to the obsidian door, glossy and opaque as a pool of ink.
I brushed my fingers over the cold metal of the compass-watch Rodya had given me, hanging as always around my neck. It continued ticking steadily, a second heartbeat against mine. It gave me courage.
Adrenaline pounded through me as I touched the black door. It swung open, the field of hanging crystals shimmering just beyond. I stepped inside.
The world seemed to grow very still, a hush in a snowstorm. The baubles spun on invisible threads, tiny birds and beasts, globes of pulsing fire, stars brought down to earth. They were beautiful, but they terrified me.
I walked slowly, the hanging crystals brushing across my shoulders, slicing through my dress. A few grazed the unscarred half of my face, and it troubled me so much I kept one hand cupped around my right cheek for the remainder of my walk.
The room was deeper than I remembered, the darkness only punctuated by those spinning, vicious globes. I stared up at the strings they hung on, twisted, shadowy versions of the golden binding threads. I felt lost, or rather, that I was becoming lost, my soul unwinding in the dark, erasing itself from mortal thought.
And then suddenly I reached the back of the room and found myself staring up at the strange clock. I let my hand fall from my face. It was streaked crimson.
The clock whirred and clicked, its spidery arms moving so quickly they blurred before my eyes. Each arm was attached to a thin silver thread that spun out into the room, connecting to one of the baubles and crisscrossing the other threads in a complex web before stretching up into infinite darkness. The clock face was just as before: a curl of pale hair tied with ribbon, a smear of what could only be blood. Was it … Hal’s hair? Hal’s blood?
I felt all around the clock face, looking for some way to open it, and found a silver latch halfway down one side. I lifted it, nerves buzzing with a sense of wrongness and danger.
To my surprise, an entire bottom section of the clock swung open, and I found myself staring straight into a mirror.
A book-mirror.
It was damaged, the leather frame scored with claw marks, half a dozen hairline fractures in the glass. The label was torn, the description obliterated, but I could still make out the title: The Queen of the Wood.
The sense of wrongness was overwhelming; everything in me recoiled.
There was always a wood.
I took a deep, shuddery breath, and touched the surface of the mirror.
The world wrenched sideways and a bone-rending cold poured through me. Stars exploded in my vision and pain crawled up my body like I was being pierced with a thousand fiery needles. If I had any breath at all I would have screamed.
Then I was standing on the border of a huge, ancient forest, and the pain and the cold were gone. Trees stretched above me into a brilliant, starry sky, and music sparked bright in my ears, a tangle of wind and moonlight and the soughing of the wood. Everything felt strong and good and steeped in magic. The very ground hummed with it. I could feel it buzzing in my fingers.
I caught a flash of movement in the corner of my eye and turned just in time to see a deer—or was it a dark-haired boy? It seemed to be both at once—running through the trees. I sprinted after him, straining to keep his heels—his hooves?—in sight. Starlight dappled across his body like bright leaves in a river.
He burst into a clearing and melted into a thousand other shifting shadows as beautiful and strange as he was. I stopped and stared, trying to make sense of the whirling scene before my eyes.
They were fairies, I think, or something like fairies: wispy creatures as tall as trees that seemed to be made of rain, or flowers; willowy spiders with mossy hair; bears with long fingers and masques instead of faces; hundreds of others harder to describe. They all danced together in the center of the clearing, a mass of strangeness and swirling color. In their midst sat a woman on a writhing throne, her hair the same shade as the moonlight. She peered through the horde of dancers straight into my eyes, and lifting one long pale hand, beckoned me closer.
I went as if drawn on a string, slipping through the fairies who laughed as they danced until I came to the woman on the throne. I knelt in the grass before her.
“I have been waiting for you, Echo Alkaev.” Her voice was slow and slippery as fine-spun gold.
I knew that voice. “You are the smoke-woman,” I said, lifting my face. And thinking even further back, “The thorny queen.”
“I became them for a time. But they are not who I am, even as this form is not.”
I studied her, her skin mottled like stone. Her eyes seemed to have no color at all. “Then who are you?”
She spread her hands wide as she smiled at me. “Who is anyone? The truth of who you are is not represented here. Is it, Echo?”
I flushed with shame as I reached up to touch my face, smooth on both sides only within the pages of these impossible book-mirrors. I didn’t answer.
“I’ve been watching you. Waiting to see what you would do. Have you figured it out?”
Danger crawled along my skin. The noise of the fairies’ laughter grew harsh in my ears. “Figured out what?”
She smiled again, and her eyes sparked orange as flame.