“You have done tolerably well so far.” Her tone is aloof. “But I don’t think you know everything.” She’s holding another of the red flowers from her throne, and she strokes its petals thoughtfully. It trembles in her hands, and I have the feeling that, to her, I am nothing more than another flower, for her to toy with as long as it amuses her, then discard when she grows tired of the temporary diversion. “Does she, Hal?”
He turns his head to look at her, and I feel again his own fragility, the weight of the curse stretching him too far, too long. “I don’t know what you mean, your majesty,” he answers softly. But I can sense he’s lying.
“Don’t you?” The Queen’s lips turn up in a momentary, humorless smile. “Well, let me remind you of the terms of your enchantment. The terms that she agreed to, when she came to live in your house for a year. What really happened when she broke those terms.” The Wolf Queen steps slowly around us, her skirt sweeping the forest floor behind her as she walks. I have the sudden idea that she fashioned it from ice and snow, with wind for thread. “I think you should tell her.”
Hal sits a little back from me. I can feel his heartbeat echoing in our joined palms. He doesn’t speak.
The Queen keeps circling us. “Let me rephrase. Tell her, Halvarad. Tell her exactly what you made her agree to. Tell her what would have happened if she didn’t light that lamp. Tell her.”
He doesn’t look at me, just stares at the ground and shudders like he’s breaking to pieces.
“TELL HER!” thunders the Queen.
I can feel the shiver of magic pass between them. She’s using the enchantment to command him. He cannot help but obey.
“And look at her, when you do,” she adds.
His chin jerks up, against his will. His eyes are wet. The scar from the spot of oil is stark against his pale skin. “Echo.” His words sound strangled, torn from his lips. “If—if you would have waited. If you wouldn’t have lit the lamp—”
The Wolf Queen is laughing, and begins picking up the threads of her spell-song once more. I sense its rising power.
“You would have been free,” I say. “I know. Instead I doomed you to come back here. Back to her.”
He nods, tears leaking down his cheeks. “It’s true, yes, it’s true. But Echo, all the things I told you. About being a caretaker for the house. About seeing your family again—” He wants to look away but he can’t, and his whole body trembles with his resistance to the spell. “If you hadn’t lit that lamp, I would have been free. But—but she would have taken you instead. That was the deal. The only way to break my curse. Your life for mine. That was what I asked of you. That is what you agreed to, though you didn’t know it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
HAL’S PULSE BEATS BENEATH MY FINGERTIPS: erratic, unstable.
His eyes still meet mine, but I glance away. I can’t bear it. My breath is ragged and wild in my chest, my whole body sears with the pain of everything I’ve endured. I can’t bear it. Can’t bear it.
“He never wanted you,” hisses the Queen. “He never loved you. He was just trying to save his own worthless skin.”
“No.”
“Tell her!” the Queen commands.
Hal’s wretched voice, torn from his lips without his consent: “It’s true. I’m sorry, Echo. I’m so sorry—but it’s true.”
I stare at my hand, wrapped around his wrist. I am collapsing inward, falling through a jagged crack in the ice, dark water closing over my head and sealing me into oblivion. In the service of the Queen there will be peace. Forgetfulness. When I belong to her, body and soul, I won’t remember him—won’t remember this.
I am outside myself as I watch my fingers loosen their hold. They move so slowly, too slowly, as if my own body rebels against me.
“Echo,” breathes Hal, “Echo, no.” And he jerks himself close to me, his leg grazing my foot as he grabs my head with both his hands, fingertips piercing into my skull. “Let her see.” He says it like a prayer. “Let her remember.”
Light explodes behind my eyes and pain bursts inside of me. I fracture into a thousand different pieces, spin out and out and out, beyond sight and sound and breath. But not beyond feeling. Not beyond pain. Somewhere I think I’m screaming.
An image unfolds in the nothingness around me: a woman lying in bed in a square room, a fire burning on a hearth, two men standing over her. One is my father, much younger than I’ve ever seen him. He’s tall and thin; there is no silver in his beard. He’s crying.
The woman in the bed isn’t moving. There’s a baby cradled in her dead arms, a baby with blue eyes and dark hair and smooth, perfect skin.
The other man eases the baby from the woman and hands her—hands me—to my father. “I shall call you Echo,” he whispers, “because you have the echo of your mother’s strong heart. No one can ever take that from you.”
The image melts away like honey in hot tea and another uncurls to take its place: A dark-haired girl playing in a fort built of books in her father’s shop, laughing as a pile of them collapses on top of her. A dark-haired boy pulls her free and spins her in a circle before setting her firmly on her feet again. “Best put them back before Papa gets here!”
The girl and boy scramble to collect the books, slotting them expertly onto the shelves as though they’ve done this many times before.
Confusion swells hot and sharp inside of me. This girl is me, but not me. I remember this, and yet I can’t. Because this me is nine years old, and the skin on her face is as smooth and clear as the day she was born.
Impossible.
The strange, cruel not-memory fades into another: the me-who-can’t-be-me is several years older, sharing lunch with a crowd of children at school. She’s laughing and happy. She has friends. No one is throwing stones at her. No one is cursing her as the spawn of the Devil or crossing themselves.
I’m breaking. This can’t be. And yet some part of me remembers it—the taste of the sunlight on my skin, the easy friendship of a girl called Sara, the sense of belonging strong enough to banish a lifetime of loneliness.
I don’t understand. Make it stop! I try to scream, but I’m caught fast in the sticky unwinding of my life as it should have been—as it could have been.
I watch as the other me grows up. She still laughs with Rodya and holds Papa dear, but her world is larger than the bookshop. She visits the city with her friend Sara. She goes to a dance in the village. She blushes as boys ask her to dance. She wiles away hours practicing the piano, pouring her soul into Czjaka and Behrend. She dreams of studying music at the university, of filling all the world with song.
My father introduces other-me to Donia, who doesn’t seem to disapprove of my existence any less for the absence of the scars. Her hatred oozes from her like muck from a bog. My father shows me the cottage in the woods. We work on it together, fix it up just as I remember, only the carpet in front of the fire is blue—wasn’t it red?
I watch as my father marries Donia in the new chapel, as Rodya gives me the compass-watch for my birthday. I fall asleep with it pressed up against my chest, the steady ticking following me into my dreams like it had never been broken.
Debt finds us in this version of my life just as it did in the other: Donia demanding more than we could afford, my father obliging her because he is capable of greater kindness and sacrifice than she could ever comprehend. He leaves for the city to sell his rare books and maps.
He’s missing for half a year.
I watch the other me find him in the snowy wood, hear the wolf asking her to stay with him. No, not asking. Demanding. Or he’d kill her father and her brother. He’d kill her, too. I can taste other-me’s fear, hot and sharp and filled with despair. But she agrees to the wolf’s terms, to save her family.
I watch as the other me goes with the wolf to the house. She swears not to light the lamp, and spends the whole first night awake, staring into the darkness, afraid to shut her eyes lest the wolf devour her in her sleep.
The strange half-memories fly thicker now: beautiful-me grows to trust the wolf, even admire him. She explores the book-mirrors and falls in love with Hal. Mokosh convinces her to light the lamp, and Hal is taken by the Wolf Queen’s soldiers.