Girls Made of Snow and Glass

by Melissa Bashardoust

  She shrank back when the huntsman brought his face closer to hers. That was the other strange thing about him—over all the years that Lynet had seen him, he never appeared to age. Even now, he looked only a little older than Lynet, but she knew that was impossible.

  She was growing uncomfortably aware of how close he was to her, and that his hands were still on her shoulders, so she pulled away from him.

  “It’s late, child,” he said, and she wondered how old he could possibly be to call her that. “Why are you out at this hour?”

  “I have a right to be here if I wish,” Lynet said. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

  “I have a right to be here if I wish,” he echoed.

  Neither one of them sounded entirely convincing, but perhaps that was to Lynet’s advantage. “If that’s the case,” she said, her voice starting to shake a little, “then there’s no reason for either one of us to tell anyone that we met here tonight.”

  They both watched each other, and maybe it was only a trick of the moonlight, but Lynet thought then that he did seem the age he looked, eyes darting nervously over Lynet’s shoulder, body slightly hunched like a guilty child’s. Lynet noticed she was standing the same way.

  He nodded to her in understanding. “Go on your way, then,” he said, “and I’ll go on mine.”

  They both watched each other for a moment, and then almost at the same time, they both headed off in opposite directions. Lynet looked back once to make sure he wasn’t following or watching after her, but he was gone.

  * * *

  Lynet only had to wait a few minutes perched on the windowsill before she heard the loud squeak of the door opening behind her. Nadia appeared in the doorway, holding a lit candle that somehow seemed to throw the room even more into flickering shadow. She had her surgeon’s bag with her as well.

  “This is a very tall tower,” she said, slightly out of breath.

  Lynet shrugged, glancing down at the ledges and footholds she’d used to climb from a nearby tree up to the tower window. She hopped down from the window and sat on the rug in the center of the room. Nadia knelt down to join her, placing the candle between them and leaning in.

  The climb had taken all of her attention, and so she felt calm and focused now, especially next to Nadia’s lingering breathlessness. “Do you know where we are?” she said.

  “The North Tower,” Nadia answered at once. “Like your note said.”

  Lynet shook her head, the shadow of her curls dancing along the wall. “Not just that. We’re directly above the royal crypt. I go there once a year with my father, to visit my mother’s resting place. We went the other day, before you told me that she didn’t die giving birth to me at all.”

  Nadia cringed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d want to know. I thought anyone would want to know. I never meant to frighten you away.”

  “I wasn’t frightened,” Lynet said quickly. “I just needed to … to think about what you had said.”

  Nadia offered an apologetic smile. “So you’re not angry with me?”

  “Not anymore,” Lynet said. “I’m glad I know the truth.”

  Nadia’s whole body seemed to loosen with relief. She pulled something out of her bag and handed it to Lynet, careful not to let it touch the candle flame. “This belonged to Master Jacob, the surgeon before me. I found it in the cellar with the other old records, and I thought it could help you.”

  “Have you read it yourself?” Lynet said, taking the thin, worn journal.

  Lynet knew from her uncertain pause that Nadia had indeed looked at it even before she answered. “I did. There’s a little more detail about you, but not on the creation itself.”

  Lynet started flipping through the journal, stopping when she saw Emilia’s name. She read the account of her mother’s illness, her father’s desperation as he summoned a notorious magician from the South to help save her. When she died, he had asked the magician to create a daughter for him, a girl who would resemble her mother exactly. The magician had created the girl out of snow and his own blood, which held the power to create life. Lynet kept reading, seeing herself from a distance—not as a human being, but as some strange and unnatural experiment.

  Lynet set the journal down, breathing evenly. She wished now that Nadia hadn’t read these pages. Everyone else saw her as her mother’s child, but at least they still saw her as human. Lynet kept her eyes on the candle flame, following its movements. “What do you see when you look at me?” she said.

  Nadia’s voice was guarded when she answered. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you see me now like I’m … a curiosity? Something unnatural or … or a copy of my mother?”

  “I never knew your mother.”

  Lynet looked up at her and tried to smile. “That wasn’t an answer to my question.”

  Nadia went silent, and Lynet tried to read her, but she was half in shadow. Lynet waited for the answer with growing dread—she had been designed from the outside in, after all, her face painted on like that of a doll. Who was she, if not a copy meant to be compared to the original?

  “No,” Nadia said at last, her voice making Lynet jump. “I definitely don’t just see you as a curiosity, or a shadow of someone else. But I don’t have all of the answers you want. I can’t tell you more than what’s in that journal—”

  “But you can,” Lynet said. “The journal says my skin is always cold to the touch, but I have no way of knowing if that’s true on my own.” She inched closer, reached out for Nadia’s hand, and pressed it against the exposed skin below her throat. “Is it true?” she said. “Am I cold?”

  Though she was startled at first, her hand jumping under Lynet’s, Nadia soon went still, her eyes moving slowly up from their hands to Lynet’s face. She was no longer in shadow, and for a moment Lynet thought she saw worry in her eyes—but perhaps that was only the reflection of the flame.

  “Well?” Lynet said quietly.

  Nadia pulled her hand away. “That was the wrong test,” she said, her eyes flickering from the skin of Lynet’s throat back up to her face.

  “Oh?” Lynet said. “Then what would be the right test?”

  Nadia smiled at Lynet’s playful tone, and she pushed the candle forward. “Your skin is cold, but anyone’s skin would be cold in a drafty tower like this one. The real test will be if your skin ever grows warm.” She nodded toward the candle. “Warm your hand over the flame, but don’t burn yourself.”

  Lynet had played this game plenty of times over the years. It was another way to rid herself of that discomfort in her skin, putting her hand over an open flame, moving it closer and closer until she lost her nerve and moved it away. She did it now for Nadia, letting the flame warm her skin.

  After a minute or so, Nadia moved the candle away and took her hand. “What do you feel now?” she said, tilting her head but never dropping her gaze. “Does your hand feel warm?”

  She ran the roughened pad of her thumb over Lynet’s palm, and Lynet’s heart gave an odd little jump that she couldn’t explain. “Yes, I’m warm,” she said, her voice a breathless whisper.

  A slow smile curled on Nadia’s lips. “That’s strange,” she said. “To me, you don’t feel warm at all. Your skin is still cold to the touch.”

  Lynet pulled her hand away, peering down at it and trying to find the answers she wanted in its lines. “How can that be?”

  Nadia shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe anything that isn’t cold feels warm to you, but the cold feels neutral. You’ve soaked in the heat, like some kind of sponge, but the surface still stays cold.”

  “So you’re saying my insides don’t match my outsides?” She laughed dryly. “I could have told you that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m my mother on the outside. I look like her. I sound like her. Put a crown on my head, and no one will be able to tell the difference.”

  Lynet tried to keep her voice light, but Nadia’s face
was serious, and Lynet remembered that she had thought Nadia a contradiction too—the smiling girl and the severe surgeon. “And what are you on the inside?” Nadia said softly.

  Lynet shook her head, her throat suddenly closing up. “I don’t know,” she said. No matter what she did, no matter who she was, the only thing anyone ever knew about her was how much she was like her mother. And with every year that passed, she would only become more and more the woman lying in the crypt below. She was destined to become someone else, to lose all sense of herself. Everyone kept telling her that she wasn’t a child anymore, but Lynet knew that being a child was the only defense she had against becoming a woman she didn’t know. She could feel the sting of tears in her eyes, and she thought of how she had broken down in front of Mina. She refused to let that happen again in front of Nadia.

  Lynet forced a shrill laugh and rose from the floor, hurrying to the window. “Shall we find out?” She slipped one leg over the windowsill, and then the other.

  Nadia came over to her at once. “What are you doing?”

  Lynet laughed again. “Don’t worry, there’s a ledge right outside the window. See?” She lowered herself onto the ledge, the window now at her waist. She clung to the windowsill behind her, and Nadia seemed unsure whether to take hold of Lynet’s hands, or if that would make her lose her balance. “The view from here is extraordinary in the daytime,” Lynet said. “You can see all of Whitespring laid out in front of you.” And even now, in the moonlight, Lynet could still see the outline of the courtyard below, framed by Whitespring’s sharp spires and steep roofs. That dark cloud there was the top of the juniper tree, surrounded by snow that seemed to absorb the pale light, and for a moment, Lynet couldn’t tell if the snow was reflecting the moonlight, or if it was the other way around. Beyond the stern gray walls of the castle were the woods, the dark shapes of pines standing like sentries on watch.

  “I’m sure it’s very beautiful,” Nadia said. “Now come inside.”

  Lynet laughed again. “Are you scared for me? I already climbed up here tonight instead of taking the stairs.” She inched her way along the ledge. “Here, there’s room for you, too.”

  “I’m not climbing out there, and you probably shouldn’t, either. I don’t think it’s safe.”

  A cool wind blew through her hair. “If I fall, you’ll patch me up, won’t you? Just like when we met.”

  “Not if you’re dead when you hit the ground.”

  The thought came to her at once: At least if I’m dead, I won’t turn into her.

  What had made her think such a thing? Lynet glanced down at the ground far below, and for the first time, she fully comprehended that she could fall. She could die. She was not invincible. What am I doing this for? she wondered now, and as always, a voice in her head answered, To feel alive. But this time there was another voice, one she had never heard before, and it offered a different answer:

  To die.

  “Nadia?” she called. “I want to come back inside now.” Her voice sounded so small to her, like she had already fallen and was calling from far below.

  At once, Nadia’s sturdy arms came around Lynet’s waist and hoisted her up over the windowsill. Lynet could have climbed back in herself, but she didn’t trust her own body at the moment. That itching under her skin was dangerous; it told her she could jump from a roof to a tree when she couldn’t. It told her she could hang from a tower window and not fall.

  Even when she was safely inside the tower, Nadia didn’t release her immediately, perhaps afraid Lynet would leap away again. And maybe she would—she could feel the rapid beat of her pulse underneath her skin, trying to burst out of her, and she worried that Nadia could feel it too. Or maybe she wanted Nadia to feel it, to ignore the cool surface of her skin and find the blood burning underneath. Maybe she just wanted someone to turn her inside out for once.

  But how could she explain that? How could she explain any of her actions tonight? She couldn’t just say that her skin didn’t fit her right sometimes, and that the only way to fix it was to do something reckless and exciting. But when she pulled away, Nadia wasn’t staring at her in disapproval or confusion; she was looking above Lynet’s eyes with something like delight, the beginning of a smile on her face.

  “What is it?” Lynet said, her curiosity overcoming her shame.

  “Your hair…”

  Lynet was confused at first until she noticed she was standing directly in a patch of moonlight coming through the roof. She supposed it had created some kind of halo around her head. Lynet was ready to laugh at Nadia for being so entranced by something so commonplace, but then Nadia reached a hand to brush softly against her curls, and Lynet was afraid to move at all. Nadia wound a curl around her finger, her eyes avoiding Lynet’s face, and Lynet’s heart pounded, a slow but heavy knock against her ribs. Even the air around them seemed to still, so that each breath felt significant, the graze of hair on her cheek enough to make Lynet forget the itching under her skin.

  Nadia drew her hand back so suddenly that Lynet thought the entire incident had only happened in her imagination. “I can’t let you keep this journal, but you can come to the workroom any time you’d like,” Nadia said in a rush, her voice a little too loud. “There are other journals, but I haven’t looked through all of them. You may be able to learn more.”

  And then she was leaving—bending down to retrieve the journal and the candle before hurrying out the door. The door swung closed behind her, leaving Lynet still standing by the window in the silent room, staring at the empty space in front of her where Nadia had just been. It had all fallen apart so quickly—Nadia had been moving so impossibly fast—

  Or perhaps Lynet was caught in a single moment, the world around her passing by while time stood still for her.

  9

  MINA

  How did one seduce a king?

  It was too soon, of course. He wouldn’t remarry while the memory of his wife was fresh in his mind, but memories lacked substance and faded quickly enough.

  As the magician’s dreaded daughter, she’d never associated with the villagers back home, let alone been courted by anyone. She had to start somewhere, though. There would be no room for mistakes with the king.

  Maybe it didn’t matter that she didn’t know any young men. She was her father’s daughter, and what she didn’t have, she would create.

  Late one night, not long after the banquet, Mina crept out of bed. She lit a candle, took up her mother’s mirror, and placed both on the ground near the frosted glass of her window.

  Since the day by the stream when she had first learned she could manipulate glass, Mina had practiced using her power, finding that the more glass she had around her, the less the magic drained her, though the effect was always temporary. But her father’s rule of blood did not work for her. She had once tried to make a mouse again, but regardless of whether she used her blood to make it, the mouse was never truly alive—it never had a pulse. That didn’t matter, though. Tonight, she didn’t want to create anything with a pulse.

  Bolstered by the glass window, she concentrated on the mirror, and the glass slid out of the frame to form a silvery pool on the floor. The pool lengthened, and slowly, a shape emerged: a human body, tall and lean. The glass figure was still transparent, but it had become solid, a crystalline mannequin.

  She shaped him in her mind, careful to attend to every detail: the curl of his eyelashes, the calluses on his hands, the jutting of his collarbone. At the last minute, she remembered to clothe him, and the glass shifted into a tunic to oblige her. The glass became bone, flesh, and cloth, and when it was done, Mina bent down over it and whispered, “Live.”

  Even with the window, Mina felt the breath knocked out of her just as his eyes snapped open.

  He was beautiful, his eyes black, his hair dark and shining. Her one misstep was his arms. She’d wavered briefly in forming them, not sure if he should be muscular or lean, and as a result, his brown arms were lined with thin scars, li
ke cracks on a mirror surface.

  She leaned over him. “Do you know who I am?”

  He blinked at her slowly, and then he beamed with recognition. “It’s you,” he said, and his voice rang out like glass. “I’ve looked on your face every day. And though I’ve seen others, you’ve always been the most beautiful of them all.”

  His words were a caress, like the feel of cool glass against her skin on a hot day. “My name is Mina. Let me help you sit up.”

  With one arm under his shoulders, she guided him into a sitting position. He copied her movements, learning how to move his limbs and his body until he was sitting like her, with his knees tucked underneath him. They sat face-to-face, studying each other. Mina bit her lip, and he did the same.

  “My name is—do I have a name?” he said.

  Mina hadn’t thought about a name. She considered it, tasting different options until she found one that felt like broken glass on her tongue. “Felix,” she said. “Your name is Felix.”

  “My name is Felix,” he repeated. “What would you have me do,” he said, “if I can no longer show you your own face?”

  “I need you to teach me what it means to be in love—what it looks like, how it feels. Love me, as best as you can, and I will learn from you.”

  Her voice had started to break on those last words, and she went silent, wishing she hadn’t spoken at all. What did a piece of glass know of love? She could shatter him to pieces now if she wanted, force him back into the mirror frame and forget that she had ever tried this misguided experiment.

  But then he placed each of his hands on her shoulders and leaned forward, his lips hovering over hers before moving to the patch of skin just below her jaw, right where her pulse should have been, and her breath caught. “That’s easy,” he murmured against her throat. “I’ve loved you since I opened my eyes and saw you.”

  Mina’s eyes fluttered closed as her hands skimmed along his scarred arms. She pulled him close, marveling at the unfamiliar but comforting weight of his head buried in the crook of her neck. For a moment she thought, Maybe this is enough. Maybe she didn’t need the king or his crown—maybe all she needed was to shut her eyes and hold Felix tightly enough until she forgot that neither of them had a pulse, that neither of them could ever make the other truly human.