Page 60 of Echo North

We stepped into the mirror. I felt the weight of magic, heavy as a waterfall, pounding on my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe.

And then I blinked and I stood with Hal in a sunny room. Windows stretched up to the ceiling. Bookshelves lined the walls. A blond-haired man with graying temples sat behind a desk, a pair of silver spectacles perched on his nose. He was alternately sipping wine and writing in a thick ledger book.

I glanced at Hal, who looked suddenly stricken, as if he’d taken a punch to the gut. He let go of my hand and stepped up to the desk, but the man didn’t lift his head. Like he didn’t know Hal was there.

The similarities between the two men were striking, younger and older versions of each other.

“Is he your father?” I asked Hal.

The man still didn’t seem to hear us. He kept writing in his book.

“Yes.” Hal’s voice was tight. Choked. He reached out to touch his father, but his hand passed through nothing—his father wasn’t really there.

This wasn’t like the other book-mirrors. This wasn’t a story, invented by a sorcerer. This was a memory.

Hal’s memory.

I folded Hal’s hand in mine. “Let’s see what else is here.”

Hal allowed himself to be drawn from the room, dazed.

A small boy ran down the corridor, clutching a wriggling orange kitten in one hand, and a blue paper pennant in the other. “Mama!” he shouted. “Mama, I found her!”

Hal froze in his tracks. “One of the kittens wandered away. We thought a wolf had got her, but she was curled up asleep in the toy chest. She used to sleep on my shoulders. Even when she got big. I called her Lion.”

We went on, down the hall and into a drawing room. A woman sat on an elegant sofa, braiding her long pale hair. A slightly older boy-Hal scowled at her feet. “But Iwantto go with Illia! I’m big enough.”

“When you’re older, dear one.”

“I’mtwelve.”

“Papa will get you a horse, Halvarad.”

“I don’t want a horse. I want Illia!”

“We can’t always have what we want.”

Beyond the wide windows of the drawing room loomed a wood, dark and green.

There was always a wood.

I blinked, and boy-Hal and his mother were gone, the room empty.

Hal shook beside me. “Illia was my closest sister. Six years older than me. She went away to be married. I never saw her again.”

“You were alone,” I said softly. “For much of your childhood.”

“I was always alone.” He paced up to the window, and I went with him.

A blond boy on a chestnut horse thundered toward the wood. Even from this distance, I recognized Hal, not much younger than he was standing beside me.

Why was there always a wood?

His eyes were wet, staring at his other self. “The wood was forbidden. I was taught to fear it, all my life. But I couldn’t resist. I went anyway.”

“Hal?”

His face grew hard. He jerked away from the window. “I don’t want to remember any more.”

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