Page 64 of Echo North

The room began to shake, a horrificcracksplintered through the floor. I bid my fern a sad farewell, and left the conservatory just before it tumbled into the void.

“LOOK FOR THE TRUTH,”thesmoke-woman had told me.“If you find it, you will see through the enchantment.”

There was one room in the house I had never properly explored, and it was finally time to face my fear and go back there.

My feet brought me to the obsidian door, glossy and opaque as a pool of ink.

I brushed my fingers over the cold metal of the compass-watch Rodya had given me, hanging as always around my neck. It continued ticking steadily, a second heartbeat against mine. It gave me courage.

Adrenaline pounded through me as I touched the black door. It swung open, the field of hanging crystals shimmering just beyond. I stepped inside.

The world seemed to grow very still, a hush in a snowstorm. The baubles spun on invisible threads, tiny birds and beasts, globes of pulsing fire, stars brought down to earth. They were beautiful, but they terrified me.

I walked slowly, the hanging crystals brushing across my shoulders, slicing through my dress. A few grazed the unscarred half of my face, and it troubled me so much I kept one hand cupped around my right cheek for the remainder of my walk.

The room was deeper than I remembered, the darkness only punctuated by those spinning, vicious globes. I stared up at the strings they hung on, twisted, shadowy versions of the golden binding threads. I felt lost, or rather, that I was becoming lost, my soul unwinding in the dark, erasing itself from mortal thought.

And then suddenly I reached the back of the room and found myself staring up at the strange clock. I let my hand fall from my face. It was streaked crimson.

The clock whirred and clicked, its spidery arms moving so quickly they blurred before my eyes. Each arm was attached to a thin silver thread that spun out into the room, connecting to one of the baubles and crisscrossing the other threads in a complex web before stretching up into infinite darkness. The clock face was just as before: a curl of pale hair tied with ribbon, a smear of what could only be blood. Was it … Hal’s hair? Hal’s blood?

I felt all around the clock face, looking for some way to open it, and found a silver latch halfway down one side. I lifted it, nerves buzzing with a sense of wrongness and danger.

To my surprise, an entire bottom section of the clock swung open, and I found myself staring straight into a mirror.

A book-mirror.

It was damaged, the leather frame scored with claw marks, half a dozen hairline fractures in the glass. The label was torn, the description obliterated, but I could still make out the title:The Queen of the Wood.

The sense of wrongness was overwhelming; everything in me recoiled.

There was always a wood.

I took a deep, shuddery breath, and touched the surface of the mirror.

The world wrenched sideways and a bone-rending cold poured through me. Stars exploded in my vision and pain crawled up my body like I was being pierced with a thousand fiery needles. If I had any breath at all I would have screamed.

Then I was standing on the border of a huge, ancient forest, and the pain and the cold were gone. Trees stretched above me into a brilliant, starry sky, and music sparked bright in my ears, a tangle of wind and moonlight and the soughing of the wood. Everything felt strong and good and steeped in magic. The very ground hummed with it. I could feel it buzzing in my fingers.

I caught a flash of movement in the corner of my eye and turned just in time to see a deer—or was it a dark-haired boy? It seemed to be both at once—running through the trees. I sprinted after him, straining to keep his heels—his hooves?—in sight. Starlight dappled across his body like bright leaves in a river.

He burst into a clearing and melted into a thousand other shifting shadows as beautiful and strange as he was. I stopped and stared, trying to make sense of the whirling scene before my eyes.

They were fairies, I think, or something like fairies: wispy creatures as tall as trees that seemed to be made of rain, or flowers; willowy spiders with mossy hair; bears with long fingers and masques instead of faces; hundreds of others harder to describe. They all danced together in the center of the clearing, a mass of strangeness and swirling color. In their midst sat a woman on a writhing throne, her hair the same shade as the moonlight. She peered through the horde of dancers straight into my eyes, and lifting one long pale hand, beckoned me closer.

I went as if drawn on a string, slipping through the fairies who laughed as they danced until I came to the woman on the throne. I knelt in the grass before her.

“I have been waiting for you, Echo Alkaev.” Her voice was slow and slippery as fine-spun gold.

I knew that voice. “You are the smoke-woman,” I said, lifting my face. And thinking even further back, “The thorny queen.”

“I became them for a time. But they are not who I am, even as this form is not.”

I studied her, her skin mottled like stone. Her eyes seemed to have no color at all. “Then who are you?”

She spread her hands wide as she smiled at me. “Who is anyone? The truth of whoyouare is not represented here. Is it, Echo?”

I flushed with shame as I reached up to touch my face, smooth on both sides only within the pages of these impossible book-mirrors. I didn’t answer.

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