Page 75 of Echo North

And then she released me.

The dream changed.

Hal lay on his side in an underground hollow, his wrists and ankles bound with roots. Blood stained his white shirt. Ragged sobs wrenched his whole body.

“Hal!” I screamed. But I was frozen in place. I couldn’t go to him.

And he couldn’t hear me.

He wept and wept.

Somewhere above, the Wolf Queen was laughing.

IWOKE TO FIND MYSELFhalf-buried—snow had drifted into the cavern while I slept. I shoved free, numb with panic, hating myself for falling asleep.

The house had one more offering: a fur cloak in the snow just outside of the cave. All I had left to my name was my mother’s emerald ring, and the compass-watch from Rodya, ticking steadily against my heart.

I shrugged into the cloak, opened the compass.

I went north, to where the stories always said the wild things lived, where the folktales came from and still magic in the mountaintops.

I passed through open fields of snow and scatterings of forest, climbed up and over a jagged mountain range. I stopped at the first village I could find and bartered away the cloak for supplies, asking everyone I met if they had heard of the Wolf Queen, or a place where the mountain met the sky and the trees were hung with stars.

No one had. They all stared at my scarred face and whispered about devils and passed me hurriedly by.

Every night, I dreamed of the Wolf Queen. Sometimes she spoke to me, and sometimes she did not. But she always, always laughed. And there was always Hal, standing in the snow in his shirtsleeves, or sobbing in the dark, blood staining the ground.

Winter deepened as I journeyed further north.

I happened on a reindeer caught fast in a briar bush. The wind whipped icy down from the distant mountains, and I almost left the beast to her fate, but something pricked my heart and I stopped to help her. I wrestled her free from the brambles and we sheltered together underneath an outcropping of rock as the storm raged fierce and cold around us.

After that the reindeer traveled with me, sharing in my feasts and in my famines, too. Her antlers were velvet and she made her own heat and could sniff out the barest traces of lichen under the snow. Her company eased my heart a little, at least during waking hours.

The weeks dragged on.

I heard no word of the Wolf Queen, no hint of the place ever north. Despair numbed me. Dreams haunted me.

And then I met a reindeer herder in a snowstorm. He shared stew with me from an iron pot hanging over his fire, lent me furs to wrap around my shoulders. I scooped the stew into my mouth with such haste I burnt my tongue, but I didn’t care—I hadn’t eaten anything in two days.

“There’s a storyteller who comes sometimes to the village on the mountain,” the herder told me. “He spins tales of wonder and horror, stories no one has ever heard before. If anyone knows of your Wolf Queen, it’ll be him.”

And so I crossed the valley and climbed the mountain to the ancient village on its ridge.

I came to find the storyteller.

I came to find you.

PART TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY

STEAM CURLS UP FROM THE SPOUTof the teapot that sits on the oft-polished table between us. Through the narrow window to my right I can look down the mountain into a sea of fog and snow-capped peaks, but instead I study the man sitting across from me. He’s past forty—neither as old nor as young as I imagined in the day and a half it took the reindeer and me to climb the mountain. He has black hair with a few threads of silver, weathered brown skin, and a neatly trimmed beard. His eyes are like bits of dark glass, staring beyond me as he ponders the impossible story I’ve just told him.

It’s taken three days, the telling. I’m running out of coins to pay for tea and meals in this tiny mountaintop café. The owner, a wrinkled old woman with shrewd eyes, tried to throw us out the first night when she had to close up shop, but I sold her the reindeer and she let us stay.

My voice is hoarse from all this talking, no matter how much tea stirred with honey I’ve drunk.

I watch my companion, his brown fingers—each bearing a brass ring—wrapped about his tea mug. When I first started telling him my story he asked a few questions, but after that he just listened. I feel exhausted, oppressed by the weight of my own words.

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