Everything within me yearns to look at Hal, but I fix my gaze on the Queen. “What are his terms? What are the rules you have bound him under?”
“What do you know of terms and rules but what I have told you?” She stands from her throne and strides over to Hal. He trembles as she approaches him, and bile rises acrid in my throat.
“I have much to thank you for.” The Queen brushes one claw across the scar on Hal’s cheek. He flinches back from her, but the silver band keeps him from moving very far. “I thought you would take him from me. But now he is here, forever. He will marry my daughter and become immortal. As I am.” She smiles, and I try not to shudder at the sight of her jagged teeth.
I dare a glance at Mokosh. “What did she promise you? What deal did you make?”
But Mokosh doesn’t answer, and I turn back to the Queen. I fight to keep the shake from my voice. “I won’t let you have him. I won’t let you damn him forever.”
“Won’t let me?” She draws her hand away from Hal’s cheek. “What do you even know about this boy before you?”
“His name is Hal, and you cursed him. To take the form of a wolf by day while his human self was trapped in the books and to resume his own shape by night.”
“Echo.”
Hal’s voice comes, ragged and hoarse, and I turn toward him like my heart is drawn on a string.
The Queen strikes him across the face and his head jerks back against the silver band. A line of blood appears on his neck—the band is knife sharp.
The Queen straightens, any pretense of a smile fled far from her face, and hatred coils tight inside me.
“His name is Halvarad Perun Svarog Wintar, youngest son of the Duke of Wintar who lived, oh—four centuries back, or so. Halvarad was the curious son. The beautiful son.” She brushes her human-wolf hand across his shoulders and he shuts his eyes, his skin blanching paler than before. “He found me in the wood. Came to me every night. Loved me dearly. He wished me to come home with him, to meet his father, to declare me as his prospective bride.” I stare at Hal, willing him to please, please open his eyes. I can bear anything, even the Wolf Queen’s awful story, if he will just look at me.
“And so I showed to him my true form: half wolf and half human, imbued with greater power than any human this world or any other has ever possessed. He was not afraid.” She smiles, wrapping her clawed fingers about Hal’s throat. He sits perfectly still, but I can see a muscle jumping in his jaw. “He wanted to be like me, one of my own kind, but he said his father would not understand such a transformation. And so we struck a deal: for him to be partly with me in the wood, and partly at home with his father. A hundred-year trial: a wolf by day and a man by night.”
“You tricked him,” says Mokosh quietly from her throne. “You always trick them. It isn’t the deal he thought he’d struck.”
“I didn’t know we even made a deal at all,” whispers Hal, from inside the Wolf Queen’s grasp. “And the hundred years were not a hundred—three centuries spun away in your wood the night you cursed me. My father was already dead before my curse had even started—”
“Fool!” barks the Queen. She releases him, leaving five spots of blood on his neck where her sharpened nails cut him. She stalks angrily away.
I don’t follow, just watch her, waiting for the rest of her story.
“As soon as the deal was struck he seemed unhappy with the arrangement.” The Queen stands calm again, resting one hand on the side of her throne. The red flowers stir and whisper at her presence, dipping their heads in reverence. “And so I offered him a way out of his promise: a human girl must live with him for a year without glimpsing his human face in the night. Fulfill this requirement, and he would be free of me. If not, the century would spin on, and he would belong wholly to me at the end of it.”
Hal shudders in his bonds, a bruise purpling on his cheek where the Wolf Queen struck him.
“And so you see, Echo Alkaev, the way out was yours to give him, or not, and you failed to uphold your end of the bargain.”
Anger roils inside me, a wave against a ship, deep water under ice. “I refuse to accept that.”
“Refuse to accept what?” The Queen plucks a flower from her throne and drinks deep of its nectar before she shreds it with her claws and lets the ragged remains fall to the ground. “That you betrayed him? That your journey was entirely in vain?”
“No.”
One silver eyebrow arcs upward. “What then?”
“I refuse to accept there is no other way to free him.”
She brushes her fingers against another flower, but does not pick it. Instead, she strides over to where I stand, coming so close I can feel the heat burning in her eyes, and smell the blood on her breath.
“I can help with these, you know,” she says, so quietly I’m not sure I hear her correctly. She grazes her claws down the scars on the left side of my face, gentle enough that she doesn’t cut me, but I can still feel the cold points of her nails.
“I can make them vanish. I can make you beautiful.”
I stare straight into her fire-eyes. “My scars don’t control me anymore. I don’t need to get rid of them to be beautiful.”
“Don’t control you anymore? This from the girl who prayed to God every night since she was seven years old to make her pretty again? This from the girl who bought a jar of cream worth more than a shipment of books from the city, then buried it in the back garden when she found it had no effect on her? Don’t control you anymore indeed.”
The rage is burning me up from the inside. My eyes snag on Mokosh, and suddenly I know what deal she made with her mother. “You want to be entirely human. That’s what she promised you.”
Mokosh ducks her head, ashamed. “You don’t know what it’s like, Echo. To be a monster, to revile your very existence, to not belong wholly to one world.”
“Oh Mokosh. I wish you would have told me. Of course I know.”
“But how could you?” she whispers. “You are so beautiful.”
My heart tears. “It may not even be in her power. You know you can’t trust her. Why would she make you wholly human when she hasn’t done the same for herself?”
“She doesn’t need to be human. She commands all the magic of the world.”
A strange wind breathes through the clearing, stirring through my hair and smelling of ice. “Not all of it.”
The Queen has been listening to our exchange with a kind of bemused scorn. “Are you quite done?”
I turn back to her, my voice clear and strong. “I am here to free Hal, and I’m not leaving without him. I invoke the old magic.”
The Queen releases a breath and steps back from me, like I’ve slapped her. “The old magic?” she echoes uneasily.
“I told you, Mother,” says Mokosh. “I told you she has the power to defeat you.”
The Queen doesn’t even acknowledge her. I dare a glance at Hal. His eyes are shut and his lips are moving as if in silent, desperate prayer.
Words pour through me.
The wolf’s, in the Temple of the Winds: Once, I had something precious. I should have held it tight, should have guarded it with my last breath, but instead I let it go.
The East Wind’s, in the book mirror: When you have found the oldest of magics, you must not let it go, not even for an instant.
And Isidor’s, in Ivan’s tent: If you love something you will not give it up, not for anything. It belongs to you, it is part of you. If you grab hold of it and never let it go—no one can take it from you. Not even the Wolf Queen.
“The old magic is stronger than you,” I say. “It has the power to break your curse. I have the power to break your curse. Now. Tell me. How long until his hundred years is fulfilled?”
She doesn’t answer, her expression cold, aloof. And yet I can feel her anger.
“How long?”
“Three days,” says Mokosh, rigid on her throne. “His hundred years are fulfilled in three days.”
“Careful, daughter,” growls the Queen. “You overstep yourself.”
Mokosh says nothing more.
“I want to make you a deal,” I say.