Ivan did it, then. He took me at my word, adopted my story as his own, gave it an ending. I didn’t expect it to end like this, though: printed words on cream pages.
My heart pounds dully in my throat as I skim through the book, passing my eyes down the pages, reading snatches of my life told in Ivan’s lyrical prose. It’s much more fantastic than what I actually lived: book-Echo is scarred in a fierce battle with her stepmother, who is also the enchantress responsible for cursing Hal. The enchantress is a Troll Queen and Hal’s a bear, and book-Echo literally rides on the backs of all four Winds to get to the Troll Queen’s fortress.
I read the ending Ivan wrote for me, all the while feeling Hal’s quiet gaze fixed on my face: book-Echo climbs up to the Troll Queen’s fortress, where she finds Hal chained in a high tower. To free him, Echo must complete three impossible tasks. First, to sew a blanket without needle or thread. Second, to make love fit in a box. Third, to clean Hal’s shirt from where the oil dripped, without using soap or water. Echo completes the tasks, with the help of magical creatures she met on her journey. The Queen goes into a rage, but book-Echo chains her in the tower in Hal’s place, and hummingbirds and the giants and the Winds pull the tower to the ground. Book-Hal, a prince, takes book-Echo to his kingdom and they are married and live happily ever after.
I glance up at Hal, who’s still watching me, his face blank, his manner reserved. I swallow around the lump in my throat and lower my eyes back to the book. I turn the last page and find what I’ve been waiting for: a letter addressed to me on two sheets of crisp paper folded in half.
I open the letter, trying to calm my raging heart.
Dear Echo,
I waited for you the three weeks we agreed on—to be truthful, I waited four. But time runs differently in the Wolf Queen’s domain, and I know that you are most likely well, that you might be there even still, locked with her in combat, freeing your white wolf from her spell. I am sorry I had to leave you, but so it was.
Isidor and Satu are well. Satu has grown tall and brown and merry, and her favorite stories are the ones I tell of you. It is she who demanded I write them down, print them in a book. And I did, with a few liberties I hope you will forgive. The book has made me enough profit to buy a proper house and fine gowns for Isidor. It is a funny thing for a Wind to worry about providing for his family, but it is so, and it is you who has made it possible.
I wrote you an ending, as you wished me to, but Satu has never been easy with what really happened on the mountain. So this year, for her tenth birthday, we have made the journey back here, to see if you had yet come down. But there was still no sign of you, and after a week of waiting, I finally convinced Satu that we must return home again. She swears she will come every year or two, and one day climb the mountain herself, to rescue you if she is able. I am very loathe to lose her, also, to the Wolf Queen, so you will understand my reluctance ever to let her do so.
I hope that when you do, one day, come down from the mountain (and I do not doubt that it will happen), I am still living, and you find us, and tell Satu the real ending to your story.
Many blessings to you, child. And may the Winds be with you always.
Ivan
I read the letter twice, then fold it up again and tuck it back into the book. Hal paces over to me, his eyes fixed on mine.
“It’s been ten years. Ten years since I climbed the mountain, maybe more.”
He nods, and I stare at him as the world blurs before me. Hal takes my hand. “Then it’s past time we got you home,” he tells me gently.
THE BEGINNING OF OUR JOURNEY home is much like my travels with Ivan, minus the singing and without so much ice. The hard grip of winter has eased from the land with the Wolf Queen’s defeat, and there is life everywhere we go: deer on the plain, foxes in the caves, badgers and rabbits and pheasants amidst the scrub and rocks.
Hal and I don’t lack for food. We hunt, we eat, we walk. But that’s all we do. We speak very little beyond the necessities of making and breaking camp, and we sleep on opposite sides of the fire every night. I miss him, I crave his company. He’s here and yet not here, close by but unreachable.
We emerge from caves no longer encrusted in ice to find that the frozen lake Ivan and I spent so long trudging across has melted. We’re left with the unenviable task of walking around it for untold miles, and decide to camp early. We’ll face the extended trek in the morning.
We eat fresh-caught fish roasted over a fire as the sun sinks slowly in the west. I watch Hal eat around the bones and spit them out amongst our coals, and all at once I’m thrown back to the garden, watching the wolf tear into his rabbit. The memory makes my heart ache. Hal glances up to see me watching him.
“Tell me your story,” I say without meaning to.
He fixes his gaze on the fire. “I was the youngest of eleven, six brothers and four sisters older than me. I was partially forgotten but mostly just spoiled and I did as I pleased, always. If I wanted a hound, I was given a hound. If I wanted to ride my father’s warhorse, I rode my father’s warhorse. I was closest with my next-oldest sister, Illia, who liked sunshine and reading and telling me that I oughtn’t always be so selfish.”
I see Hal as he was in his memory book: small and sorrowful, begging his mother to let him go and see his sister. “I’m so sorry.” He shakes his head. “They’re all gone now. It hardly matters.” He reaches for another log to feed the flames. “I was seventeen when I first went into the wood. I was restless, bored. My brothers were given commissions in the army. My sisters were married or sent to learn music and manners on far-off estates. My parents had no use for me, and I had very little use for myself. So I went to explore the forbidden forest, mostly to spite my father. I met—I met her there, and … well, you know the rest.”
“Not from you.”
He shifts in his place across from me, bending his knees up under his chin and looking for all the world like a gangly, overgrown boy. I can see the scars on his left ankle, tight and shiny in the firelight. “She was kind to me. I thought she was just a girl my age. She spun wild stories about caring for her mother deep in the wood, and she fascinated me.”
I try to ignore the stab of jealousy. “What then?”
“I went to see her every day. I abandoned everything else, even fencing lessons, which had been the last thing I loved. We met in secret for six months, and then she showed me what I thought was the truth about her: she was a shapeshifter, unjustly banished into the wood. God help me, Echo, but I fancied myself in love with her, and we schemed—we schemed ways to be together.”
My throat hurts but I just nod, staring at my fingers twisting tight in my lap. This time I feel his eyes on my face, but I don’t lift my own to meet them.
“I agreed to a bargain with the Wolf Queen without even knowing I did. I was a fool. One night in her cursed court and her true nature came clear, but it was already too late. Her enchantment had taken hold, and when I ran from the wood in my wolf form—” Hal draws a ragged breath. “The world had turned long outside her domain. My brothers and sisters, mother and father—they had been dead already many years. But it didn’t count toward my century. No. I must feel every day of my hundred years. Unless I agreed to marry—at first the Queen herself, then in later years her daughter—agreed to become her creature forever, damned to even worse than the half-life I was already living.