CHAPTER THIRTY
STEAM CURLS UP FROM THE SPOUT of the teapot that sits on the oft-polished table between us. Through the narrow window to my right I can look down the mountain into a sea of fog and snow-capped peaks, but instead I study the man sitting across from me. He’s past forty—neither as old nor as young as I imagined in the day and a half it took the reindeer and me to climb the mountain. He has black hair with a few threads of silver, weathered brown skin, and a neatly trimmed beard. His eyes are like bits of dark glass, staring beyond me as he ponders the impossible story I’ve just told him.
It’s taken three days, the telling. I’m running out of coins to pay for tea and meals in this tiny mountaintop café. The owner, a wrinkled old woman with shrewd eyes, tried to throw us out the first night when she had to close up shop, but I sold her the reindeer and she let us stay.
My voice is hoarse from all this talking, no matter how much tea stirred with honey I’ve drunk.
I watch my companion, his brown fingers—each bearing a brass ring—wrapped about his tea mug. When I first started telling him my story he asked a few questions, but after that he just listened. I feel exhausted, oppressed by the weight of my own words.
“Well?” I say, when the minutes stretch on and he doesn’t offer any commentary on my mad tale.
He adjusts his glass gaze to my face. “It is very strange,” he muses. “I seem to remember hearing that story once before.”
“You can’t have. You are the first soul—the only soul—I’ve told it to.”
He peers intently at me for half a moment and then gives an absent smile. “Just a dream then, I suppose.”
I’m not sure why he thinks that matters—I don’t even care if he believes me, or if he ever could.
“Can you help me? The herder down the mountain swore if anyone on God’s earth could tell me about the Wolf Queen … it would be you.”
The storyteller nods, a regal dip of his chin. “I know of the Wolf Queen.”
My head feels like it’s fracturing into a thousand pieces but I force myself to focus, listening with every ounce of my being. “What do you know of her?”
“Old stories. Whispers. Fragments of tales.”
His voice is deep and rich, with a singer’s cadence. I lean forward without meaning to, my tea forgotten. “Who is she?” I ask him.
He leans toward me, too, his elbows pressed hard into the table, his rings clinking against the tea mug. He lowers his voice. “Some say she’s a witch, an enchantress of terrible power. A shapeshifter, a fairy, a demon from hell.”
“But who do you think she is?”
He doesn’t reply for the space of too many heartbeats. He pours himself more tea, drizzling it with honey. A gust of wind blows snow against the window glass, and it seems to be tangled with a high, eerie laugh.
I grip my own mug tighter and try not to hear it.
“To make a bargain with the Queen of the Wood is akin to making a deal with the Devil,” says the storyteller. “The price is the same. She steals your life from you. Your heart. Your years. Your soul. Yet when she traps you in her domain you beg her to bargain with you.”
“Why?” I whisper.
“Because you want your freedom, no matter the cost. She has many names in many stories: the Fairy Queen, the Godmother, the Devil’s Daughter, the Witch of the Wood. Only in the oldest of tales is she called the Wolf Queen. I did not think anyone knew her by that name anymore.
“She is powerful and ancient. She manipulates the words of the poor fools who bargain with her, so that they can never pay her what they owe. She takes, and does not give back. If your Hal has been taken by her, made a deal with her—” The storyteller shakes his head, and raises his dark eyes to my face. “I do not know that you could free him, save by making a deal with her yourself. And even then, she would seek to keep you both.”
Fear curls through me and I shudder in my coat. The little old woman who runs the café comes out of the back and lays a tray of sliced ham and biscuits on our table. I don’t reach for the food, waiting for the storyteller to go on.
“The Wolf Queen has ruined emperors and kings, brought mighty warriors to their knees, stolen the power of gods and spirits. She turns the world to her will, and her will alone. If she wished to rule every continent on the earth she could do it, but thank God she is content to dwell in her own domain.”
“If I was to seek her out,” I say, looking carefully at the tray of ham and biscuits, “would you know where to find her?”
He taps his fingers on his tea mug. “She has the power to step into any corner of the world, but she hides her realm from those who seek it.”
“But you know where to look.” It’s a guess, a hope, a prayer.
He nods, slowly. “Your wolf said ‘ever north,’ and that’s a start. There have been only a few expeditions north of this village, and of the few that have gone, even fewer have returned. It could be that in the wild north lies a place where the mountain meets the sky and the trees are hung with stars—the Wolf Queen’s domain. Or it could be what most people say.”
“And what’s that?”
The storyteller blinks at me. “A wasteland.”
I stare thoughtfully into the dregs of my tea, long since gone cold. Ice rattles against the window. “Why is she called the Wolf Queen?”
“The oldest stories say she was there at the beginning of the world, a wolf imbued with intelligence and human thought, that she saw the creation of mankind and wished to be like them. So she sold her soul to the Devil in exchange for human form.”
“Wolves don’t have souls,” I say, then think of Hal and flush.
He shrugs a little, reaching for a slice of ham. “Other stories say she was the first woman, but she loved the Devil more than God, and so was cursed to a half-life. A bargain with the Devil earned her the power to do as she wished, but she was never counted amongst the line of man. Still others say that the Devil created her, the first in a line of powerful creatures formed to plague the children of men.
“But no matter how it happened, she once had a wolf’s form, and she commands the beasts, and so is the Wolf Queen.”
“She turned Hal into a wolf.”
“So it seems.”
I consider my next words carefully, tracing the scratches in the table with one finger. “It’s my fault she has him in her power again. If I hadn’t lit the lamp—” I swallow down the sudden taste of bile “—if my life is the only thing that might save him, I don’t hesitate to give it. Only …”
“Only?” says the storyteller.
Once more I meet his eyes, and see in their depths that he already knows what I’m going to ask him.
“Only I need a guide to take me into the wild north. To follow the stories and find the Wolf Queen. To try and save him, if I can.”
“And you would ask that of me, a storyteller?”
“You are not a mere storyteller. Your face is weathered, your hands rough with work—you have traveled far, I think.”
He smiles a little sadly. “You see deeply, Echo Alkaev. I have traveled all my life, farther than you know. I collect stories but I’m a trader, too. Stories alone don’t fill the bellies of my wife and my daughter.”
I bow my head, understanding his meaning and feeling a twist of guilt for keeping him here so long. But he’s my best chance—my only chance—at finding Hal, and I’m not ready to give up. “I can pay you with this, for now.” I tug off my mother’s emerald ring. “I will compensate you further upon our return. But I can offer you something even more rare than gold.”
He studies the ring but doesn’t take it. “What is more rare than gold?”
I take another chance: “A story. My story. About a girl with a scarred face, and a white wolf who becomes a man at night, and an evil queen in an enchanted wood. The story is yours, to do with it what you will. But it will have more meaning if you come with me and find out the ending.”
“I do not want your mother’s ring. It is too precious to give.”