Girls Made of Snow and Glass

by Melissa Bashardoust

  Lynet nodded. “In a month and a half.”

  “Sixteen.” Mina knelt down beside her. “That’s how old I was when I left my home in the South to come to Whitespring. I think part of me has always thought of myself as sixteen, no matter how many years have passed.” Mina looked at the mirror and scowled, seemingly disturbed by what it showed her. Their faces were side by side, and for the first time, Lynet noticed a single white strand in her stepmother’s hair.

  “You’re still young,” Lynet said uncertainly.

  Mina wasn’t paying attention to her, though. She brought her hand up to her cheek, examining the corners of her eyes, the thin lines around her mouth. “If they love you for anything, it will be for your beauty,” she murmured softly, but Lynet didn’t think the words were meant for her, so she felt guilty for hearing them at all.

  She waited a moment and then she said, “Mina? Is something wrong?”

  Her stepmother shook her head. “Only a memory.” She turned to Lynet and kissed her on the head. “You’ve grown up so fast. It took me by surprise. Soon you won’t even need me anymore.” Mina stood and gave Lynet’s braid a playful tug. “Run off now, and enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  Lynet started to go when Mina called to her, “And do let me know what happens with your young surgeon. It’ll be good for you to have someone closer to your own age to socialize with for a change.”

  Lynet didn’t respond as she hurried out the door, but for some reason she couldn’t explain, she felt herself blush.

  2

  MINA

  At sixteen, Mina knew she was beautiful. Sitting on the grass, angling her mother’s hand mirror so that the reflected sun wouldn’t blind her, she discovered the secrets of beauty: the way the blaze of the afternoon sun transformed her dark hair into a halo of fire; the way her golden-brown skin glowed when she held her face at the right angles in the light; the way the shadows elongated her cheekbones.

  These were secrets no one had taught her. Her father, when he was home, kept to himself, and her nurse, Hana, would sneer at her for being so vain. Her mother was long gone, of course, but Mina liked to think that she had left behind the silver-backed mirror as a guide for her daughter.

  “Dorothea,” Mina whispered to herself, wishing that just saying the name could conjure her mother on the spot. She had died so soon after falling ill that Mina didn’t remember her being ill at all. She’d been four, recovering from an unrelated illness of her own, when her mother had died, so memories of her mother were faint, shimmering things, like coins at the bottom of a moving river.

  “Mina!”

  Mina groaned at the sound of her nurse’s call. She had hoped that leaving the house for the refuge of the hills would allow her some peace from the woman’s constant disapproval.

  Hana had been old and shrill for as long as Mina could remember, but now that Mina was growing out of girlhood, Hana had become superfluous as well. The only reason Mina listened to her at all was because she was the best source of information about her mother. Hana loved to talk about the lovely girl who had run off with a young man against her wealthy family’s wishes and had consequently been disowned by them. Mina wondered sometimes if the nurse was just making up stories—it was hard to imagine anyone risking such displeasure for the love of her father, and Hana hadn’t become Dorothea’s maidservant until after the marriage. But even half-true stories were better than nothing.

  “Mina, I know you can hear me, you selfish child!”

  There was a hint of desperation in Hana’s voice, like she was scared of something. But there was only one thing Hana was scared of, and that was Mina’s father, Gregory.

  He’s home, Mina thought. He’d left on one of his frequent journeys nearly two months ago. Mina always valued the times when he was away; the house felt lighter with Gregory gone, like some stormy cloud overhead had dissolved. Mina looked at herself in the mirror once more, wishing she could crawl inside it and wait until both her nurse and her father went away.

  “There you are,” Hana said, huffing behind her. “I know you come all the way out here just to make me kill myself from climbing these hills.”

  She was almost right. Avoiding Hana was one benefit of the hills, but if the nurse had been paying any attention, she might have noticed that the Summer Castle was visible from this hill. Though the royal family had never finished its construction, leaving it half-finished for nearly a century, the completed gold domes of the Summer Castle still gleamed in the sun, shining through the trees like a beacon. If it weren’t so far, Mina would have tried to sneak onto the grounds, maybe plant a little garden there. She imagined that garden growing all around the castle, keeping everyone—especially her father—away.

  “Your father is home,” Hana said. “Don’t you want to greet him?”

  “Did he ask to see me?”

  Hana glowered at her, but didn’t respond, so Mina knew he hadn’t. Still, she couldn’t avoid him forever, so she stood up and brushed the grass from her skirt.

  “Fine,” she said, “let’s go.”

  Hana grabbed her by the arm, but then she released it and reached for the mirror lying on the grass. “Is that—is that your mother’s mirror?”

  “I was just borrowing it,” Mina said, blocking Hana from taking it away.

  “I can’t believe you would treat your dear mother’s belongings so poorly. What if you had broken it? What if you had lost it? It’s as if you don’t care about her at all.” She shook her head at Mina in reproach.

  “I do care!” Mina protested.

  “I don’t know about that,” Hana muttered. “You don’t care for anything but yourself.” She grabbed at Mina’s arm again. “Now hurry up.”

  Mina wrenched her arm out of her nurse’s grip, grabbed the mirror, and charged down the hill past her. She was in no hurry to see her father, but she didn’t want Hana to think she was afraid of him. She kept up her quick pace until she reached the edge of the village market.

  She hadn’t been planning to come home so soon. She had snuck out early this morning, and she’d been planning to stay out for a few more hours. She’d never purposefully walk through the village in the middle of the day, especially not on market day, when it would be at its busiest.

  “Just keep your head down and walk fast,” Hana whispered. “No one bothered me on my way through. It’s your father they fear, not you.”

  But Hana was as forgettable as she was unthreatening. People remembered Mina just as clearly as they remembered her father. Ever since magic had made the North freeze over, people were often suspicious toward those born with unnatural abilities. Whenever her father heard rumors of others with magical talents, he would set off at once to investigate, but as far as he knew, he was the only magician for the past few generations. Still, that didn’t stop the villagers from considering Mina to be just as dangerous as her father. It never occurred to them that now it was Mina who felt she had to keep safe from them.

  The village on market day was a visual feast. There were the familiar sights of the South—brightly colored fruit, fresh dates and nuts, colorful woven rugs—along with the rarer luxuries of the North—jewelry with gems from the mountains, soft furs, intricate wood carvings. Mina would have loved to spend all day walking back and forth down the long passageway between stalls, reveling in all that beauty. But as she and Hana passed through the crumbling stone archway that marked the entrance to the marketplace, Mina kept her eyes down on the dusty ground, letting her sheet of hair fall forward to cover her face.

  It didn’t matter. No matter how dowdy she tried to look, how modestly she cast her eyes downward, someone always recognized her, and then the whispers spread outward until they surrounded her.

  The villagers went quiet as she passed. Then she heard the word magician in hushed tones, over and over again, until it sounded less like a word and more like the chirping of crickets. Once the whispers had spread far enough, the villagers started to step aside from her, keeping their
distance from the magician’s daughter. But in the narrow passageway through the market, there wasn’t much room for keeping one’s distance, not for the villagers, and not for Mina, either.

  On all sides, people jostled into her and then jumped away. It would have wounded her, perhaps, if she’d felt anything but contempt for these people. They were hypocrites, shying away from her in the light of day, but sneaking to her father’s house at night, begging him for magical solutions to their mundane problems. She passed by Lila, the weaver, who glanced away from her as she wrapped her arms around her swollen belly. She had come to Mina’s father a few months ago asking for something to help her conceive a child, and even though she had gotten what she wanted, she didn’t want to be reminded of how she’d done it. Vulgar midwifery, her father had dismissed the potion he’d given her. He didn’t even consider such services to be magic, but they provided him with money to conduct his own experiments in his private laboratory. Of course, it was rumors of those experiments—his meddling with the forces of life and death—that made the villagers so wary of the magician and his daughter in the first place.

  They were nearing the last of the merchants’ stalls when Mina felt something strike the backs of her ankles. She halted, and she could practically hear the collective gasp of breath. When she turned around, she saw a young boy scurry behind his mother’s legs, peeking guiltily up at Mina. Small rocks littered the ground by her feet—he must have thrown them at her. For now, it was only the children who struck out at her, but she knew she couldn’t count on that forever.

  “Come on, Mina, stop lingering.”

  “Just a minute, Hana,” Mina said, loud enough for people to hear. They were all pretending to go about their business, but their movements were slow and unfocused. “Since we’re here, we might as well do some shopping.”

  The backs of her ankles still stung from where the small stones had hit her. If she hurried away now, it would only prove that violence would deter her, that they could scare her away. The scale of fear was still tipped in her favor: they were more scared of her than she was of them.

  She walked to the nearest stall and picked an object at random: a plain silver bracelet. “How much?” Mina demanded of the merchant. If he had been local, he might have waived the fee to get rid of her quickly. But Mina could see from the cool olive of his skin and the drab colors he wore that he was from the North, too concerned with his own business to worry himself with gossip about the magician and his daughter, and so he named his price. Mina handed some coins over to him and placed the bracelet around her wrist, a reminder that she would not be chased off.

  “I’m ready to go home now,” Mina said, turning again to Hana. She pitched her voice a little louder: “I’m ready to see my father.”

  * * *

  Her bravado faded once she reached home. Mina knocked on the door of her father’s study, taking a deep breath. After receiving no response, she peeked inside, but the room appeared empty. “Father?” she called softly.

  Did he not even want to see her, after being gone for so long? True, she wasn’t particularly eager to see him again, but some part of her always stubbornly expected him to reach out to his daughter, the way she imagined most fathers did, even though he never gave her any reason to believe that he would.

  Mina’s hands balled into fists at her sides. Her eyes went to a door at the back of the room, almost hidden by the surrounding bookshelves—the door to her father’s laboratory, the inner room where he did most of his work. Mina had been here in her father’s study before—it was ordinary, if a little chaotic, with books scattered everywhere—but it was merely a presentable facade meant to distract from the hidden door leading to that secret adjoining room. She’d only been in the laboratory once in her life. Those memories were foggy, though, and her head pounded whenever she tried to remember.

  She listened for the sound of her father approaching, and when she didn’t hear anything, she crossed the study to that unassuming door. It was unlocked; she slipped inside.

  The laboratory was dim and narrow, and along the walls were shelves full of vials and jars. She read a few of the scrawled labels: some were simply potions for sleep or health, but others announced themselves as deadly poisons. They had oddly fanciful names, like Whisper of Death or Burning Needle, and she knew from the proud penmanship that they were Gregory’s inventions. He brewed death here, in a myriad of creative ways, just to pass the time.

  She walked past a long wooden table where a lamp burned low. There was a dark black stain in one spot, but otherwise the table was covered in open books with strange symbols and drawings. She knew how to read, but most of the books were written in unfamiliar languages, so she ignored the books and focused again on the shelves.

  Mina’s eyes kept flickering to the contents of the jars, and she grew more unsettled each time. In many of the jars were misshapen lumps of … flesh? Bone? Feathers? She wasn’t sure what they were until she saw an actual miniature replica of a human being in one of the jars. It floated in cloudy liquid, like a tiny wax doll, except she was sure it wasn’t made of wax.

  At the back of the room was a single jar resting on a small table. There was something inside the jar, and when Mina saw it clearly, she drew back at once. Unlike the strange fleshy things in the other jars, the contents of this one hadn’t been preserved. She peered at the rotten lump of meat in the jar, thankful there was no smell coming from it. What purpose did this withered, shriveled piece of flesh serve for her father? Another failed experiment? An ingredient for one of his poisonous concoctions? The sight of it filled her with an inexplicable sense of dread.

  “Repulsive, isn’t it?”

  Mina whirled around at the sound of her father’s voice. He leaned against the doorway, his arms folded over his chest. But he wasn’t the same as he had been when he’d left two months ago. His dark hair had lightened to gray, and there were more lines on his now-gaunt face. He looked to have aged at least twenty years while he’d been away.

  “What happened to you?” Mina said, forgetting for a moment that he had caught her trespassing.

  He walked over to the table, ignoring her question completely. “Do you know where I’ve been these past months?”

  Mina was still tense, waiting for him to scold or berate her for invading his inner study. “Off on a useless search for another magician, I assume,” she said.

  He fumbled with the books on his table, tossing some on the floor, while stacking others in a pile. “Wrong,” he said. “I was at Whitespring.”

  Mina couldn’t hide her curiosity. “At the castle? With the king and queen?”

  “With King Nicholas, yes. Queen Emilia, however, is dead.” He looked up and watched for her reaction, but Mina gave none. Why should she care if the queen was dead? What happened in the North was of little concern to her.

  Gregory chuckled to himself and leaned heavily against the table. “I don’t know why I expected you to care. You should care, though, because her death has changed both of our lives forever.”

  Again, he waited for a reaction, for her to ask him what he meant. Mina knew he was baiting her, so she refused to answer at all. He’d tell her whatever he wanted to in the end, with or without her prompting.

  “She died in childbirth,” he continued, “but she left behind, in her stead, a daughter as beautiful as she was.”

  “I didn’t know she was carrying a child,” Mina said placidly.

  “News travels slowly, I suppose. But she had … complications. The child was killing her from the inside out. The king called for me in secret to see if I could save her and the child through magic, since medicine had failed. He’d heard what I could do, he said. He’d heard whispers that I had power over life and death.” Gregory’s eyes glittered in the dim light, his voice solemn with pride, but then he glanced away, and Mina saw his hands gripping the side of the table. “I was too late to save the queen,” he forced out, “but I did manage to save the child, using unconventional mean
s. That’s why you find me so … changed. The process was draining.”

  For a moment, Mina forgot that she was pretending not to care, drawn in by her father’s faltering words, his altered appearance. She had never seen her father look so vulnerable, so uncertain, and she wondered if the change in him was more than physical. Shyly, she reached out to lay a hand on his arm. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Gregory looked down at her hand and then brushed it away like it was a piece of dirt on his sleeve. “You’ve never pretended to care before, Mina. There’s no need to start now.”

  Mina flinched and crossed her arms, trying to keep herself from storming out. She didn’t want to give her father the satisfaction of driving her away.

  “And now what?” Mina snapped. “You said this would change things for us.”

  His eyebrows went up in mock surprise. “You don’t think I would perform such a feat without a price, do you? In exchange for saving his daughter, the king has invited us to live at court.”

  “At Whitespring?”

  “A fresh start for us both.”

  “But it’s so … so…” Cold, she was thinking. Mina was used to the bright days and warm nights of the South. Whitespring was so named because even in the spring, the ground was white with snow. How could she ever belong in such a place?

  “It’s better than living like outcasts.”

  Mina wrung her hands, trying to think of a way to persuade him without having to beg. Summoning as much authority as she could, she dropped her arms to her sides, stood tall, and said, “Go without me, then. I’ll take care of things here. You don’t need me.”

  He released the table and stepped closer to her. “Oh, but I do need you. I need that face of yours.” He took her face in one hand, his fingers pressing into her jaw. “You’ll marry someone highborn, and my place—our place—will be secure even if the king forgets his debt to me.”

  Mina tried to push his arm away and free herself from his rough grip, but even in his weakened state, he was stronger than she was. He waited until she’d given up before finally letting go.