Girls Made of Snow and Glass

by Melissa Bashardoust

  “If you need me,” she said, rubbing her jaw, “then you should try to be more persuasive. I don’t owe you anything.”

  His face twisted in anger, but then he laughed. “You don’t owe me anything? No, Mina, you owe me everything. You owe me your life. And not just because I’m your father.”

  Mina wanted to turn away, but there was nowhere safe to look. The whole room was full of him. “Fine,” she said. “Tell me what I owe you, exactly. If you’re convincing enough, maybe I’ll change my mind.”

  He nodded, wearing the arrogant smile of a man who knew he was about to win. “All right, if that’s the game you want to play.” Gregory grabbed her wrist, and Mina, resenting the feel of his fingers digging into her skin, but knowing from experience that she couldn’t break his grip, allowed him to drag her over to the table. He took a small pouch from his pocket and poured its contents—a handful of sand—out onto the table.

  “Watch carefully,” he said, sifting through the sand.

  To Mina’s astonishment, the sand started to move, to shift even without his touch, and then it wasn’t sand anymore but a small gray mouse, bouncing off the sides of his cupped hands. She gasped, berating herself for it when she heard him laugh. She’d heard the same whispers that the king had, that the magician Gregory had the power to create life, but she’d never seen her father demonstrate his otherworldly power. He played the part of magician for the villagers with his potions, but he kept his real magic in his laboratory, for himself alone.

  Gregory was grimacing, his jaw tense as if with pain, but then he recovered. “It’s alchemy in its purest form,” he said, “transforming one thing into another without any intermediary. I was born with the power to take any inanimate substance and transform it into something organic … but only to some extent. This mouse is no true mouse. It is, in its essence, still sand. It will not grow or age or die. It’s not even truly alive.” To prove his point, he balled his hands into fists, and the tiny, squeaking mouse abruptly disintegrated, once again a pile of sand.

  Mina nearly gasped a second time, but though her jaw hung open, she made no sound. Her eyes saw a pile of sand, but her mind transformed it into a pile of bones and meat. It was both grave and corpse in one.

  With a careless gesture, Gregory swept the sand back into the pouch. “It’s like a mechanical doll, do you see? If you wind it up, it resembles life, but it is only a resemblance. In order to make it a real, living mouse, I would need to add my blood—the source of my magic.” A weary note crept into his voice. “It … has taken me many years and many attempts to figure that out.”

  “What’s the point of all this?” Mina rasped, her throat dry. She kept thinking of the shelves around her, of the misshapen creations in their jars.

  “Ah yes. This was only a prologue to the story I want to tell you. When you were a child, no more than four years old, you fell deathly ill. Your mother wept, for there was no one who could help you. Your heart was damaged, likely since birth, and all we could do was wait for it to stop altogether. And one day, it did. Your mother was frantic, almost furious, in her grief, and I hated to see her in such a state.”

  Mina couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at that, especially since Gregory’s lip curled slightly at the mention of her mother. Gregory paused, glaring coldly at her, and Mina couldn’t stop herself from taking a step back away from him.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I did love your mother once. I wanted her to be happy. And so I brought you here, to this room. I laid you down here, on this table. And then I opened up your chest, took out your useless heart, and replaced it with a new one, made from glass.”

  Mina almost laughed at him. Was he trying to frighten her? True, she’d been sickly as a child—Hana had told her that—but this was the first she’d heard of glass hearts. She made no effort to hide her skepticism, but Gregory was undeterred. He placed one hand on her chest and said, “Don’t you have a scar, right here? Haven’t you ever wondered why you don’t have a heartbeat?”

  This time, Mina did laugh. “I may have a scar, but I also have a heartbeat. I wouldn’t be alive, otherwise.”

  “Have you ever heard it? Felt it?”

  “Of course not. It’s too quiet for me to hear.”

  “Give me your hand,” he said, but he grabbed her hand before she could give it and held her palm to his chest.

  Mina instantly started to take her hand back, but she stopped when she felt something peculiar under her palm: a faint, rhythmic pounding. She pulled away in shock. “What is that? What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s not me, my sweet. Put your hand to anyone’s chest or wrist or throat, and you’ll feel the same steady pulse.”

  Mina put her hand on her own chest, waiting for something she’d never felt before.

  “Don’t bother. You won’t find it, because you don’t have one. Remember what I told you about my blood? When you were sick, I didn’t yet know how to create something more genuine than that sand mouse.”

  Mina’s throat tightened and she had to force out the question: “Are you saying that I’m just like—”

  “Oh no, no,” Gregory said, frowning at her like she had said something completely ridiculous. “You are alive, Mina, and you will grow and live and die the same as any living being; it’s only your heart that’s artificial. I commanded your new heart to keep you alive, but because I created it without my blood, it is still, in essence, glass, so it lacks some of the nuances of a real heart—like a heartbeat. It was the best I could do.”

  She tried to think back to a time when her heart might have lurched or pounded or fluttered—anything to announce its presence—but there was only ever silence. She thought again of that mouse dissolving into sand. “I don’t—I don’t believe you.”

  “Do you need more proof? I was hoping you would. Turn around.”

  She knew. She knew as she turned to the table at the end of the room what he wanted her to see. She knew what that withered, rotten piece of meat inside the jar was, and she fought the urge to retch.

  “That’s your heart, Mina,” Gregory said from right behind her. “Aren’t you grateful that rotting thing isn’t a part of you anymore? Don’t you think you owe me, after all?”

  3

  MINA

  Mina stared at the heart—her heart—and tried not to scream. “Why couldn’t you save my mother, if you could save me?” she asked her father. She might still trap him in a lie, if she kept calm.

  Gregory’s voice grew harsh. “Your mother was never ill. She was horrified when she learned what I had done to save your life. The idea of it was repulsive to her. She’d been unhappy for a long time, but only after I replaced your heart did she choose to do something about it. She wanted to punish me for what I’d done—and to punish you for what you had become.” He roughly turned Mina by the shoulders so that she was facing him. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Mina? Your mother … your mother killed herself.”

  “You’re lying,” Mina said at once. “She died because she was ill. Hana told me.”

  “Because that’s what I told Hana to tell you.” The words sounded bitter on his tongue. “Your mother chose death over me, over you, because she was weak. She could endure me, but when she sensed an emptiness in her child, it was too much for her to bear. Your heart was shaped to survive, not to love, and your mother was selfish: she was incapable of loving someone who could never love her back.”

  “I—I can love,” Mina said. She tried to think of a way to prove him wrong, to fight back. But she didn’t love her father, and even if she pretended she did, he would never believe it.

  Hana? Hana was familiar, but there had never been much affection between them. What did love feel like? How would she know if she’d ever felt it before? I loved my mother, she wanted to say, but then Hana’s accusation came back to her: It’s as if you don’t care about her at all. Mina had denied it, but now she wasn’t sure. She loved the memory of her mother, the idea of having a mother,
but the woman herself was a mystery to her, as was everything that had happened to her before her father gave her a glass heart. She always wondered why she had such trouble remembering her early childhood, but now she understood: her old life had ended the day her heart stopped, and a new one had begun.

  She felt so drained, suddenly, so empty. For the first time, she noticed the silence in her body, the absence of that steady beating in her chest. You don’t care for anything but yourself. She couldn’t even remember if she had ever shed a single tear.

  Gregory came to stand in front of her, blocking her view of the heart in the jar. His face was drawn and solemn. “There’s no point fighting me on this, Mina. I understand how you function better than you do. You can rage and hate and despair and hope as well as anyone else, but love is something more complicated. Love requires a real heart, which you do not have, and so you cannot love, and you will never be loved, except”—he came closer to her and brushed his knuckles against her cheek—“you have beauty, and beauty is more powerful than love. People can’t help themselves: they crave beauty. They will overlook anything, even a glass heart, for it. If they love you for anything, it will be for your beauty. But there’s nothing for either of us here. Come to court with me, and you’ll be the most beautiful lady there, the most envied, the most desired.”

  He stopped to see if his words were having any effect on her, but Mina’s face was as still as her heart.

  “Well? Do you agree? Will you be ready to leave for Whitespring by tomorrow?”

  He reached his hand out for her in a gesture of reconciliation, and though she hated herself for it, Mina put her hand in his.

  What else did she have?

  * * *

  Mina laid her mother’s mirror down on the grass by the stream. She had meant to put it back, but the thought of going into her mother’s room now was too painful. She was sorry to leave behind her favorite places—the hidden stream where it was always cool, the giant oak tree that she had once tried (and failed) to climb as a child, the ruins of the old church with the caved-in roof. They were all solitary places, of course—none of the villagers would miss her or her father when they were gone.

  She remembered the first time she had been brave enough to approach a group of children playing by the stream, dangling their feet in the water. She had been only seven or eight, and her loneliness had finally overcome her timidity. Mina had already begun to notice the way parents would pull their children closer to them whenever Hana took her into the market, but she had never understood why. For all she knew, it was because of Hana, not because of her.

  But she had been alone the time she tried to join the children at the stream, and so when half of them had jumped up from the water and run away, and the other half had sneered and called her and her father cruel names, Mina finally understood: They hate me.

  She had decided at that moment that she hated them, too.

  But today there was no one at the stream, so Mina was free to sit on its banks and say a final good-bye. She refused to hate this place just because of one bad memory on its banks. There was too much to appreciate here—the drops of sunlight falling in between the leaves overhead, the sound of the water rushing past, the scent of the grass. Mina even loved the large chunks of stone that littered the stream, remnants of a bridge that had collapsed years ago. She had come here to cheer herself up, but everywhere she looked, she found something else she was leaving behind.

  Her reflection looked up at her from the mirror, and even that offered her little comfort anymore. From seeing the portrait of Dorothea that hung in her room, Mina knew they bore a fairly strong resemblance. Her life she owed to her father, but her beauty she owed to her mother.

  No, I owe you nothing. You left me with him.

  Weak, her father had called Dorothea. Mina didn’t think her mother weak; she thought her selfish.

  And what about me? What am I? She looked into the mirror for an answer. Her face was ashen, her eyes dull. Even so, she was beautiful. And what was more, the mirror gave no indication of what lay beneath. With her beauty as a distraction, no one would ever know that she was, deep down, hollow. She touched her cheek, the bridge of her nose, the indentation above her upper lip, and she was alarmed by how soft her skin was, how impermanent, like the heart in its jar. Her beauty was merely a shell, and a shell was always in danger of cracking.

  The surface of her mother’s mirror seemed to mock her, its image too flawless, too smooth for how she felt inside. It should be cracked, she thought. Maybe then her reflection could absorb what was broken in her, and Mina could be whole. Her fingers curled into a fist—

  But before she even touched the glass, the mirror cracked by itself.

  She gaped at the mirror in awe, trying to understand. Her chest was aching, and she felt so tired suddenly, but she ignored the feeling. Show me. Show me what you did.

  The glass seemed to dissolve into liquid before knitting back together. Mina stroked the mirror’s undamaged surface with her fingers as the pain in her chest faded away.

  It’s listening to me.

  The glass was responding to her, to the glass in her heart. Her father hadn’t told her about this side effect; was he even aware of it? Was there still something about her that he didn’t understand? Gregory had given her a piece of his own magic when he’d shaped her heart, and she was almost certain that he didn’t know it.

  And what was that ache in her chest? Had the magic done it to her? She started to panic as she thought of her father’s aged appearance, but she recalled that the ache and the fatigue had faded. Perhaps commanding the glass had drained something from her, but at least the effect wasn’t permanent. With growing excitement, Mina whispered, “Be a mouse,” to the mirror.

  This last command drained her even more as the glass shifted again, spilling out of the frame onto the ground. And then the glass became a small brown mouse with twitching whiskers, and Mina heard a series of gasps.

  Mina hissed a silent order for the mouse to become glass again, and the mouse crystallized as she looked up and saw a group of four girls her age gathered by the trees. She recognized their faces, but she didn’t know their names or who they were. They were all staring at her in horror, some of them moving their lips in silent prayer.

  Mina staggered to her feet, hoping to distract their gazes away from the mouse that had just been glass, but several of them were pointing. “You’re just like him!” a tall girl cried. “My mother always said that you were.”

  “No, you don’t understand—” Mina took a faltering step toward them, but they all took a step back together.

  “Don’t come any nearer!” said the girl in front. She bent down and picked up a long, twisted stick from the ground, holding it in front of her like a sword. “We don’t want anything to do with either of you!”

  “I’m not like him!” Mina yelled at them. But hadn’t they just seen proof that she was?

  She took another step forward, and the girl threw the stick in panic. It scraped Mina’s arm, leaving a shallow scratch before it fell at her feet.

  No one will ever love me anyway, so what’s the point in playing nice?

  Mina could hurt them if she wanted to, just as they had hurt her. She could use the glass to scare them. All those sideways glances, all those sneering whispers—why fight their contempt when it would be so much easier to earn it? At least now it would be for her, not just her father.

  “You should be careful how you speak to me,” Mina called to them, “especially when you don’t know what I can do.”

  The girls watched with widening eyes as the mouse shifted into liquid glass and swirled up toward Mina’s hand, circling up her arm like a snake. Mina wondered if she should turn it into a real snake and hurl it at them the way they had thrown the stick at her—

  But then Hana came bursting through the trees like an angry bull, and the girls scattered and ran.

  Mina quickly gave up her hold on the glass, letting it fall back to t
he ground as shards and praying that Hana had been too distracted by the frightened girls to notice.

  “What are you doing meddling with the villagers?” Hana said, taking Mina by the wrist. “You know it’s better just to ignore them. And stop wandering off without telling me where you’re going. You’re my responsibility, you know.”

  “I’m going home now anyway, so you didn’t have to bother coming after me,” Mina said. She pulled away from Hana, still shaken. She was glad Hana had interrupted before Mina had done anything to hurt or scare them, and yet—and yet, she felt cheated, like she was still holding a breath that she had almost been allowed to release.

  “Just a minute,” Mina said, kneeling down so that her back hid the glass and the mirror frame from Hana’s view. In a hushed whisper, she ordered the mirror to fix itself, and the glass slithered back to its home in the mirror frame, where it solidified. She picked it up and went to join Hana at the edge of the trees.

  Hana kept fussing on their way home, and now Mina worried that she had made a terrible mistake. What if those girls told everyone what they had seen, and word eventually reached her father? For the first time, she was grateful that they’d be leaving so soon—perhaps rumors of Mina’s powers wouldn’t have time to reach him. She was almost certain Hana hadn’t seen anything, or else she would have mentioned it by now, but even so, Mina would have to be more careful. If Gregory found out about her power, he was sure to use it to his advantage in some way, and Mina didn’t think she could bear it. She needed to have something to herself, something that he couldn’t take from her.

  Gregory was standing outside the house as they approached, looking even more haggard in the daylight. “There you are!” he called. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Mina went toward him, bracing herself, but Gregory passed by her and went to Hana, walking around her with a thoughtful frown. “You’re … what? Sixteen, seventeen now?”