Nadia seemed surprised by the request, her head tilting slightly, but she nodded and began to lead the way across the courtyard. Lynet paused for a moment, and then she did what she had done the first time she’d seen Nadia walk across this same courtyard.
Lynet followed her.
5
LYNET
The surgeon’s workroom was much more vivid in person than from behind a dirty window. Lynet paused at the threshold, feeling like she was about to walk into a dream—or like she was waking from a dream only to find that reality was even stranger. Along one fragrant wall were shelves carrying a variety of potions and herbs, along with the occasional bowl of leeches. The jars and vials on the shelves reflected the light from the window, sending shards of sunlight and shadow throughout the room.
Hanging on another wall was a drawing of a bloody man pierced all over his body by different weapons. Underneath it was a low table of knives, scalpels, and other steel surgical tools, some of which Lynet recognized from watching Nadia work over the past few weeks. Strewn throughout the entire room were piles of books and bottles of ink and loose sheets of paper, which Nadia hurried to tuck away as soon as she set foot in the room.
Lynet took a moment just to absorb it all. Ignoring the mess on the table, since Nadia seemed so embarrassed by it, she walked slowly along the edge of the room, observing it from new angles with each step. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Nadia was watching her now with the focus she usually reserved for surgical procedures, waiting until Lynet had come full circle back to the doorway.
“This is where you work?” Lynet said, though she already knew the answer.
Nadia nodded. “Also where I sleep.” She gestured to a dark room in the back.
That was something new, something Lynet hadn’t known from watching her. She had never seen Nadia sleep, not even for a moment over her books. She wondered how it would feel to sleep in a room like this. She wondered what kind of dreams Nadia had.
“I have an ointment for your hand,” Nadia said. In one smooth motion, she turned to one of her shelves and reached up for the jar without even needing to look for it. “My name is Nadia, by the way.”
Lynet nearly said, “I know,” before stopping herself.
“Here, give me your hand.” Nadia started applying the greenish ointment to Lynet’s wounded palm. Lynet pretended to fiddle with the silver bracelet around her wrist, but she also watched from beneath her eyelashes as Nadia rubbed ointment on her skin with the same delicacy as when she turned the pages of her books.
“What is that?” Lynet said, wrinkling her nose at the ointment.
“Comfrey.”
“It smells terrible.”
Nadia laughed, a husky exhalation that seemed to take her by surprise. Lynet didn’t think she’d ever heard Nadia laugh before.
Nadia replaced the ointment on its shelf, and then paused, her back to Lynet. “May I freely ask you something?” she said.
Lynet shrugged. “I suppose.”
Nadia came to stand at the other side of the table, opposite Lynet, and looked her directly in the eye. “Why have you been following me?”
Lynet gaped at her. She was ready to lie and deny it, but she knew her stunned face must have already given her away. What should she do? What would Mina do in her position? The answer, of course, was that Mina would never be in this position in the first place.
When Lynet opened her mouth, the truth slipped out: “Because you were wearing trousers.”
There was a confused pause, and then another burst of laughter escaped from Nadia, and she covered her mouth with her hand. Lynet started laughing too, and she felt the same thrill as when she was climbing, her heart fluttering at the unpredictability of each step she took.
“Is that really why?” Nadia said, shaking her head in amazement.
“That’s how it started, but—wait, how long have you known?”
Nadia looked up at the ceiling as she tried to remember. “I think … the day I first noticed you, I was pulling a tooth.…”
“So you’ve known all along.” Lynet groaned. She covered her face with her hands before the smell of the comfrey made her drop them again. Still, she wasn’t ready to look Nadia in the eye again, so she stared down at the floor and asked, “You … you weren’t angry about it, were you?”
She peeked up in time to see Nadia lean forward, her braid falling over her shoulder as she rested her forearms on the table. “Not … angry, exactly. But once I found out you were the princess, I was so worried that I would slip up in some way while you were watching, and then you’d tell your father and I’d be dismissed.” She shrugged, wearing a rueful smile. “But I couldn’t exactly ask you to stop, could I?”
Lynet frowned, considering the truth of this. If Nadia had come to her and asked her to stop, would she have been angry, or asked her father to throw the surgeon out of the castle? Of course Lynet wouldn’t have, but Nadia had no way of knowing that.
“Even if you’re not angry with me, I’m still sorry,” Lynet said, not just to appease her, but because she meant it. Lynet rested her arms on the table surface across from her, mimicking her pose. “It’s an old habit of mine since childhood, following people, seeing how they spend their days.”
“That’s an odd habit, isn’t it?”
Lynet shrugged. “When I was little, I would see other children at court running around and playing, and I wanted to join them, but my father—I wasn’t allowed to play with them, in case I got hurt.” She stared down at the table. Lynet could feel the words spilling out of her, but she made no effort to stop them. This workroom seemed a world apart from Whitespring, and so any secrets she told here would be buried under snow and earth.
“And then they never stayed for long, anyway,” she continued. “People never stay for long at Whitespring. So I started to follow them around, watching from a distance, hiding so no one would see me. It was the only game I had, and this way I didn’t have to worry about growing too attached to any of the other children my age before they left. And then I just … never stopped. I started following other people too, but all they do is sit around and gossip and complain about each other, so it’s not very exciting, not like you—” She stopped herself too late and her head snapped up, her face growing warm, but Nadia didn’t react to her unintended confession. She just kept watching, waiting for Lynet to finish.
“I … I don’t think I ever considered how invasive it must be to feel like you’re being spied on. I’m truly sorry.” She forced herself not to look away, hoping that Nadia would reward her with a smile, but instead, Nadia’s face seemed to fall, a dark look in her eyes before they darted away.
After a short but uncomfortable silence, Nadia said, “I wouldn’t have asked you to stop, anyway. I became a little—” She broke off and looked down at the table.
Lynet leaned forward. “What?”
Nadia shook her head, but then her lips curled in a slow smile and she answered, “I was going to say ‘flattered.’ I’ve been traveling through the North for almost a year, trying to help people when I can … and during that year, so many people have dismissed me or laughed at me for wanting to practice medicine.” Her voice was light, but she started tracing the lines and whorls on the table, her nails scraping against the wood. “They think girls are too softhearted to witness any suffering, that I’ll be scared off. They think I’m just playing at being a surgeon. But you … no matter what I was doing, whether I was letting blood or pulling a tooth or even amputating a foot this morning…” Her hands stopped moving and she looked across the table at Lynet. There was something heavy, almost expectant, in the force of her gaze that made Lynet lean back again, taking her arms off the table. “You never turned away,” she finished. “And so I always felt like a true surgeon in your eyes.”
Lynet retraced all the steps she had taken following Nadia, now imagining them from the other girl’s point of view. All this time, Lynet had been trying to understand her from a distance
, while Nadia had been purposefully showing Lynet exactly who she was.
She offered Nadia a shy smile, never breaking her gaze. “I’m glad I fell out of that tree,” she said quietly.
Nadia laughed again, more freely this time, and Lynet laughed too, dispelling the serious air that had come over them.
Lynet liked to see Nadia smile, to hear her laugh. When Nadia smiled, her whole face softened, like clouds giving way to the sun. But Lynet also liked the stoic, focused surgeon that she had watched from windows—so different from this smiling girl, but still such an essential part of her. And the fact that the two were the same, that the girl and the surgeon could exist freely in the same person, was to Lynet the very meaning of possibility—of freedom.
“I’d never seen a female surgeon before,” Lynet said. “Are you the first?”
Nadia shook her head, her back straightening into what Lynet knew was her surgeon’s posture. “My father told me about others, mostly from the South. I’ve even read that Queen Sybil knew all the medicinal properties of the plants in her garden and used them to help the ailing. But hardly anyone remembers her for that anymore. They only blame her for the curse.”
“Sybil’s curse,” Lynet murmured, for the first time wondering why people called it that when no one knew whether Sybil herself was responsible for it. But then, what was the life of a queen compared to the legend people created for her after her death? The truth had stopped mattering years ago. “It hardly seems fair,” she said, more to herself than to Nadia.
“Medicine was my family’s trade,” Nadia continued. “My mother was a midwife and my father was a surgeon.”
“Was?” Lynet asked gently.
“They’re both dead now,” she said simply. “A fever.”
“Oh, I—I’m sorry.”
But Nadia just shook her head with a strained smile. “I don’t want to mourn their deaths anymore. I only want to honor their lives.”
Lynet leaned forward. “How do you choose to honor them?” What she really wanted to ask was how anyone could honor the dead while still feeling alive.
“I want to do what they did,” Nadia said at once, like she’d been ready for the question. “My father studied medicine in the South, before the university closed. He taught me what he learned before he died, but now that Queen Mina has reopened the university, I want to go there too, to walk the same halls that he did.”
“When will you go?” Lynet asked, trying to sound light and casual.
Nadia stared at her without answering, and for a moment Lynet saw the light in her eyes waver with uncertainty. “In the next year, I hope,” she said.
Lynet looked down at her feet on the stone floor. What else had she expected, that Nadia would stay at Whitespring forever, when so few people did? That because Lynet had come out of hiding and spoken to her, she would be forced to stay here forever, to keep her company? No one stayed at Whitespring for long, she knew that, except … except perhaps some part of her had thought that Nadia was so unflinching, so steady even in times of crisis, that even the cold and the gloom of Whitespring wouldn’t scare her away.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” Nadia said softly. “I’ve seen so much misery in the North, so much death.…”
Lynet’s head shot up. “What do you mean?”
Nadia’s eyebrow arched in response. “Have you ever been outside the castle? Have you seen what it’s like for people who can’t afford to bury themselves in fur or sit by a fire all day? Nothing grows here, nothing ever … changes, or gets better. Half of this kingdom has frozen over.” She lowered her voice. “And ever since, all we’ve had are kings and queens who hide behind walls while their people suffer.”
Lynet bristled. “You’re talking about my father, you know.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to talk to you like you’re a princess,” Nadia shot back.
Lynet flushed in anger, a fire spreading through her, and she relished the feeling. She had made the mistake of reaching out to someone who would be leaving soon anyway, but she wouldn’t make the mistake of growing attached to her. Let Nadia leave, if she thought the North was so terrible.
“Well, then, I wish you luck,” Lynet said, her words clipped and even. “I’ll leave you to your work.”
She turned for the door behind her, but before she reached it, Nadia had come around the table and was taking her arm. “Wait,” she said, “don’t be angry with me. Princess or not, I shouldn’t have said that. I understand family loyalty.”
Lynet looked down at the hand encircling her upper arm, and Nadia released her, taking a step back.
“I apologize,” Nadia continued, looking Lynet in the eye. “I’ll be more careful of what I say.”
“No,” Lynet said, “I don’t want that. Then you’ll just be like all the rest. No one here ever tells me the truth; they only tell me what they think I want to hear—what my father wants me to hear. They all treat me like I’m … I’m…”
“Like a butterfly,” Nadia said softly. “Something beautiful but frail.”
Lynet stepped away from the door. “Why would you say that?”
“Because that’s what I thought you would be like, before I met you—before you started following me. Everyone spoke of you in such hushed tones, like you might break if they said your name too loudly.” She studied Lynet, brow furrowing in contemplation. “But you’re not like that at all. That’s not your nature.”
She was still watching Lynet like she was some kind of riddle or puzzle, a mysterious specimen caught in a jar. Lynet found that she didn’t mind, though, because she knew that when Nadia looked at her, she was seeing Lynet and not Emilia.
“And how would you know what my nature is?” Lynet said, tilting her head up at Nadia in a manner she hoped was playful and not lofty or superior.
But Nadia didn’t notice her inviting tone. Instead, she seemed to be silently deliberating something as she focused her intense stare on Lynet. “I might know more about it than you think,” she murmured. She turned away then with a little shake of her head and returned to the table, opening one of her journals.
Lynet followed her to the table, closing the journal she was paging through. “What do you mean?”
Nadia wouldn’t look at her, but her forehead was furrowed in thought. That meant she could be persuaded, if Lynet just pushed a little more. “Did you hear something else about me?”
Nadia glanced up at her briefly, just long enough for Lynet to know that she had guessed correctly. “What was it?” she pressed. “Why won’t you tell me? What can you possibly know about me that I don’t have a right to know?”
“I agree,” Nadia said, and now she lifted her head to look at Lynet, her dark eyes shining. “I do think you have a right to know. I thought at first they were keeping it from you for your own good, but I don’t believe that anymore. It’s not fair for them to keep it from you.” She was still watching Lynet intently, and Lynet understood that she wasn’t just teasing—she did truly think Lynet had a right to know. Perhaps she even wanted to tell Lynet this mysterious secret, but something was stopping her.
“How do you even know about this, whatever it is?” Lynet said, more calmly now. To get the answers she wanted, she just had to ask the right questions.
“Because it’s something the court surgeon should know.”
“And why can’t you tell me?”
“Because I’m under strict orders not to tell anyone, especially you.”
Lynet bit her lip. Her father might know, but she knew there was no point asking him—he would think she was too delicate for any secret. The only person she could trust to answer her was Mina, but Mina would never have kept anything from her in the first place. “But you want to tell me, don’t you?”
Nadia smiled in response, leaning toward her just slightly. Lynet only needed to ask one more question—
“So if I ordered you to tell me…”
Nadia shrugged. “Then I would have to tell you, wouldn’t I?
No one could blame me for following the direct orders of a princess.”
“Then as a princess,” Lynet said, “I order you to tell me what you know about me.”
Permission granted, Nadia gave a slight nod of her head and said, softly but clearly, “The truth that they don’t want you to know is that your mother never gave birth to you. She died before you were born.”
It took Lynet a moment to understand what Nadia was saying, but even then, it was preposterous. If Emilia wasn’t her mother, then how could Lynet look so much like her? “Oh, really?” she said. “Then who’s my real mother?” But despite the skepticism in her voice, a flutter of hope in her chest betrayed her, her heart whispering the name: Mina?
Nadia shook her head. “You don’t understand. You have no mother, no father. You never did. You were created magically, out of snow.”
Lynet repeated the words to herself, but they didn’t make any sense. “What did you say?”
Nadia’s jaw tensed; now that the thrill of the secret had passed, she seemed to realize the full impact of what she was telling Lynet. “Your stepmother’s father—the magician—shaped you in your mother’s image out of snow and blood. You were made to resemble her exactly.”
The whole idea was so ridiculous that Lynet almost laughed. This was Nadia’s secret? It was nothing more than a joke, a story, a fabrication. True, her stepmother’s father was a magician—he had magical abilities that made even Mina lower her voice when she spoke of them.
But how could any of this be true if Lynet’s mother had died in childbirth? She had died on the day Lynet was born—that was why her father always took her to the crypt two weeks early, to separate those two occasions in Lynet’s mind.
Unless, she thought, that’s the day my mother really died.
“Nadia?” she said, her voice too loud in the quiet room.
Nadia had been watching her, waiting for her reaction to this discovery. “I’m here.”
“If what you’re saying is true, then when did my mother die? It couldn’t have been in childbirth.”
Girls Made of Snow and Glass Page 5