I collapsed on the front stoop, hugging my knees to my chest as tears leaked down my face. The girl was dead, the queen had won, and I was trapped here more completely than I had been in the wolf’s horrible house.
“Are you all right?” came a sudden voice just above me.
I jerked my head up to see a young woman standing by the garden, the hedgehog cradled in her hands. Beautiful didn’t begin to describe her. She was luminous—willowy and tall, with straight silver hair that hung nearly to her knees and an enormous pair of eyes the color of summer violets. She wore a diaphanous blue gown, and her feet were bare. I got the feeling she didn’t belong here any more than I did.
“Are you all right?” she repeated.
I nodded dully, at a loss for words, and she let the hedgehog loose in the garden again and came to sit beside me. “I haven’t seen you in the books before—is this your first one? I’m Mokosh.”
Her words took a moment to sink in. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged, her lips quirking. “Not many people have access to book-mirrors—there used to be scores of readers like us, but there are hardly any left. I’ve only met one or two others my whole life, and I read a lot. Where is your library? Mine’s in my mother’s palace. You must be a princess, too—or at least a duchess?”
I blinked at her loquaciousness. “I’m not—I’m not anyone important.”
“Of course you are. Ordinary people don’t have access to magical libraries.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
She leapt to her feet and pulled me up as well. “You do know the rules, don’t you?”
“What rules?”
“There are rules for reading ordinary books, aren’t there? Start at the beginning, read in order, no skipping around, and certainly don’t read the last page until you get there.”
“Well, yes.”
She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and propelled me away from the cottage, down a winding path that cut quickly through the wood and spilled out onto the cobbled streets of a tiny village.
“It’s the same thing in the book-mirrors,” Mokosh explained. “You can’t change the course of events—the story always follows its intended path, and it’s impossible for readers like you and me to die here, so you don’t have to worry about battle scenes or the plague.”
“The plague?”
“But you don’t have to follow the story—you can explore the world around it, instead. Just walk away from the main character—as you must have, or we wouldn’t have met—and you’re free to do as you please. There are limits, of course—you can’t go anywhere the author never imagined, but if the book is even somewhat well written, there are layers of places to visit barely touched upon in the story.” She gestured at the street in front of us. “For example, this place has an excellent pub. Come on.”
And then she was tugging me forward again, past the village square, where a fountain shaped like the iron-winged bird spilled water into a stone basin. Thorns coiled up between the cracks in the stone.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Mokosh, noticing my terrified stare, “The story will reset after it gets to the end, and everything will go back to normal. And besides—it can’t hurt us. Ah, here we are.”
She pulled me through a low doorway, into a small, square room, that was lit with flickering candles and smelled of roast chicken. Patrons sat close together at long wooden tables, drinking beer or eating bits of greasy meat with their fingers. At one end of the room stood a makeshift stage where a storyteller sat in multicolored robes, waving his hands in the air and causing little silver sparks to appear above him.
“The winds,” said Mokosh with a disgusted glare at the storyteller, “always inserting themselves into the narrative somehow.”
She found us a seat in a relatively quiet corner and ordered beer and cakes. “In any case, I’m glad to have a friend in the books now—it gets ever so lonely at home. You’ll come reading often, I hope? You never did tell me about your library.”
Glancing down the length of the room, I found one of the patrons watching me. He was seated several tables away and had a thatch of shockingly light hair, neatly trimmed, a handsome, pleasing face, and eyes the color of a midsummer sky. His jaw was clean shaven, and he wore a red surcoat with dark embroidery around the edges.
His eyes locked on mine, and it seemed like the whole tavern grew still. Then he glanced down, and the moment was lost.
“Or your name,” Mokosh was saying.
I jerked my attention back to her. “I’m Echo. And my library is in an enchanted house. I’m still trying to figure it out—the house.” I considered. “And the library. The only reason I found it is because I got lost.” I glanced over to the blond man’s table again, but he had vanished.
Mokosh nodded sagely. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Echo. And I’m sure your house and your library have rules, like anything else. You’ll begin to understand them and become an expert in no time!”
“I don’t even know how to leave this book-mirror,” I confessed.
Mokosh laughed. “Why, that’s the easiest thing in the world! You must only make a request to your library.” She stood and addressed the dirty tavern wall in a language I had never heard before. It sounded like water falling on stones. A mirror shimmered into being, suspended on nothing. “I step through, and I’m home. Now you try.”
I chewed on my lip, wondering why the serving boy who had just delivered our beer and cake wasn’t gaping at the appearance of a magical doorway. I stood and looked at the stones of the fireplace, right beside Mokosh’s glimmering door. “Library, I’d like to stop reading, please.”
Another mirror appeared, its surface wavering like water before growing still. I stepped up to it, but didn’t reach out my hand. I stared at my reflection, stared and stared.
Both sides of my face were smooth, the skin perfect, unscarred, as if that day with the wolf and the trap had never happened.
I touched the left side of my face—it felt just as smooth as it looked. I thought I would be sick.
“Do you look different than at home, Echo?” said Mokosh softly.
I turned to her, blinked back tears, nodded.
“The worlds in these books are not real, you know. Readers project their preferred versions of themselves inside them, whether they’re aware of it or not.”
I looked back at the mirror. This was my preferred self, something I could never be in real life. Bitterness coiled hard in the pit of my stomach.
I didn’t want to be there anymore. I couldn’t bear it.
I stretched my hand out to the mirror, and that sensation of coolness once more rushed through me.
Then I was back in the library, my hand just drawing away from the glass.
CHAPTER NINE
“MY LADY.”
I yelped and wheeled. The wolf stood behind me, his amber eyes flashing.
I scrabbled away from him, my shoulders bumping up against another book-mirror.
The wolf didn’t move. “I mean you no harm. Please.” He sat back on his haunches, ears tilted forward. “Forgive me. The room—the room behind the black door … it helps me remember. If I don’t go there, I forget myself, and the wildness creeps in. But it is dangerous, the most dangerous room in the house. It will hurt you—it already has. Please don’t go back. I’m begging you.”
Pain pulsed anew through my shoulders and palms—something else the book-mirror had erased. I swallowed, feeling my scars stretch tight along my jaw, and tried to push away my sense of loss. “I won’t go back.”
He dipped his white muzzle. “Thank you.”
I balled my hands into fists. “But I’m not going anywhere else with you until you explain—properly—what’s going on. And until I know for sure my father made it safely home.”
He made a soft whuffing noise, which I realized after a moment was his version of laughter. “We are in the right room for that, my lady. Follow me.” And he stepped through the second blue door into the storeroom.
I followed him down several aisles between the shelves of book-mirrors, to a little locked cupboard on one wall. It was made of a smooth dark wood, carved with whorls.