Did he recognize Nadia from Whitespring? Lynet had thought he had already been away before Nadia arrived, but maybe she was mistaken.
“The queen sent me,” Nadia answered, her voice stiff.
Gregory scoffed. “She found out, didn’t she? Ah, well, it hardly matters now.” His voice lowered. “Listen, I don’t have time for questions, but come to the old church behind the university tonight. I have a new task for you.”
Nadia hesitated for only the space of a breath, and then she nodded.
Gregory continued on his way, and when he was out the door, Nadia let out a long exhale. She turned to Lynet, her face tense with dread, but she didn’t move aside. “I can explain,” she said.
Lynet hadn’t understood the full meaning behind Gregory’s words, but her skin prickled with suspicion as she took in Nadia’s guilty expression, and she felt the same as when she’d overheard Mina and her huntsman in the chapel. She recognized the bitter taste in her mouth as betrayal. “Let me out,” Lynet said, her voice low.
“He described you to people. If you run out of here now, someone will recognize you.”
Lynet was having trouble breathing in the close confines of the alcove. Her muscles were itching for movement. “Move,” she said, with a note of rising panic this time.
Nadia reached for her arm. “At least let me—”
Something about Nadia’s hand coming toward her made Lynet lash out. She tried to knock Nadia’s arm aside, but her right palm screamed with pain as soon as she made contact. For a moment, she only saw red, and she sank to her knees, the last of her strength leaving her, and cradled her hand against her chest.
She didn’t notice at first that Nadia had stepped away from the alcove, no longer blocking the way. Run, part of her urged, but she was so tired, so dizzy, and the truth of Nadia’s words was now apparent: if she tried to run, she wouldn’t get very far.
“Please listen,” Nadia whispered, crouching down at Lynet’s side. “You’re hurt, and you’re exhausted, and I can take you somewhere safe to help you with that burn. I’ll explain everything, and then … if you never want to see me again, I’ll understand. But I won’t hand you over to anyone. If I had wanted to do that, I could have done it a moment ago.”
The red haze of pain started to fade, as did the mounting panic from earlier. And now Lynet just tried to think. Gregory had said this disoriented feeling would pass in time, and time was what she really needed—time to heal, to rest, to wait until darkness could hide her features from anyone who might recognize her by Gregory’s description. But what was this understanding between Gregory and Nadia? Could she trust Nadia now? Then again, Nadia was right—if she had wanted to hand Lynet over to Gregory, she had already had the perfect opportunity to do so.
“Fine,” Lynet said. “I’ll go with you for now.”
Nadia helped Lynet rise from the ground, and if she was pleased that Lynet had agreed to her offer, Lynet couldn’t tell. Nadia’s face was as stern and impassive as when she was working. They crossed the hall carefully, Nadia peering closely around corners to make sure they were alone, and went out another side door. They entered an older stone building beside the main one, and Nadia led Lynet up a flight of stairs and down a hall lined with doors until she stopped to unlock one of them.
Lynet followed Nadia inside a small stone room, bare except for a desk, a chair, and a narrow bed along the back wall beneath a low window. And when Nadia shut the door behind her, Lynet’s heart finally started to slow.
Nadia let out a sigh, her back against the door. Her hair was coming out of its braid, and she impatiently shook it out, letting the dark waves fall loose and free around her face. “Sit, and I’ll take care of your burn,” she said, gesturing to the bed.
Lynet perched stiffly on the edge of the bed, never taking her eyes off Nadia. She watched as Nadia opened a small chest beside her desk, inside which were two neat rows of jars. She selected one, and then, for one brief moment before she turned, Lynet saw Nadia’s shoulders sinking under some invisible weight, her face shadowed by some unknown sorrow.
But when she came to Lynet with the jar, she was the perfect surgeon again, methodical and untroubled. Nadia took the chair, moving it across from the bed, and reached for Lynet’s wounded palm.
“I’m sorry about your father,” she said softly.
Lynet didn’t respond, her throat tight.
“Would you tell me what happened up north? Why do people think you’re dead?” Nadia didn’t look up as she asked, her eyes focused on the angry, blistered skin of Lynet’s palm.
Lynet might have told her—Gregory already knew, after all—but she remained cautiously silent.
Nadia didn’t react to Lynet’s silence as she started to apply the green ointment to her palm. “Would you at least tell me what happened between you and Gregory? Why he’s looking for you?”
Again, silence.
This time Nadia shook her head a little, her mouth stretched into a pained smile. “No, of course you wouldn’t,” she muttered. “I’m the one who owes you explanations.” But she was quiet as she finished with the ointment, and Lynet tried not to notice the way Nadia’s eyelashes cast long shadows against her cheeks, or the way she still had grains of sand in her hair from when they’d tumbled to the ground. She tried not to care that the ointment was such a relief from the burn that she could now begin to enjoy the sensation of Nadia’s thumb rubbing small circles against her skin.
“Explain, then,” Lynet said, her voice thick.
Nadia released Lynet’s hand and looked her in the eye with the same fierce determination as when she’d amputated the servant’s foot. But what was she going to sever this time? What invisible thread existed between them that now was in danger of being cut?
“I told you before,” Nadia began, “that it was often difficult for me to find work after my parents died. Imagine how I felt when the queen’s father came to me and offered me a position at Whitespring. He was on his way south, passing through the village I was in, and he sought me out when he heard of the work I had done. Whitespring needed a surgeon, and he … he needed a spy.”
Lynet could tell she wanted to look away, her eyes continuously darting to the floor.
Nadia took a breath and forced herself to meet Lynet’s gaze. “It was so simple. All I had to do was keep close to you, tell you how you were made, and share with him what I’d learned about you. And before the year was out, if he was satisfied, he would give me passage south and a place at the university.”
Lynet’s heart beat in her ears, a bitter taste on her tongue. Her legs felt restless, and she stood, going toward the door even though she and Nadia both knew that she had nowhere else to go. Nadia turned in her chair but didn’t rise or try to stop her, not even when Lynet reached for the door handle, gripping the metal with her good hand until it hurt. Lynet turned, her back against the door giving her the illusion of escape, of freedom.
“And so every time we spoke,” she said, “everything I told you, or that you told me—it was all so you could tell him?” She thought of the night in the tower, of the strange connection that they had woven between them, as fragile and hidden as a cobweb, visible only at certain angles, in certain patches of light. Had those moments been dissected, recorded in letters to Gregory?
“No,” Nadia said firmly, and Lynet was sure she was answering the second question, the one Lynet hadn’t asked aloud. “I didn’t tell him everything. I was only supposed to tell you enough to make you want to seek Gregory out. The journals I gave you, the experiments we tried in the tower … all of those were against my orders.” She shook her head, her hands twisting her hair into a long rope as she looked away. “I wanted it so much—to go to the university where people would take me seriously so I could do my family’s work. I told myself you weren’t real, that you were just … a paper doll, an experiment, not even a real person. I told myself it didn’t matter.”
Lynet flinched at hearing Nadia voice all her worst fe
ars. “And now?” The words came out as a croak. “Do you still see me that way?”
Nadia stood, looking at her in disbelief. “Lynet, I stopped seeing you like that the first time we met.” She walked slowly to the door, giving Lynet enough time to move away or tell her to stop, but Lynet didn’t move or say anything. When Nadia was standing in front of her, she reached tentatively for Lynet’s hand—the left one, the one with the faded scar from when she’d fallen from the tree. Nadia brushed her fingers against the scar now. “You made me laugh for the first time since my parents died,” she said quietly, keeping her eyes down.
Lynet let out a shaky breath. She wouldn’t cry, not in front of her.
“I lied to myself to make the job easier, but then when I told you about your creation, I saw how deeply it shocked you. I wanted to help you learn more. I wanted … I wanted to be around you. I couldn’t even write to Gregory anymore, not when you had become my friend.” She looked up from their hands to meet Lynet’s gaze, a fearful uncertainty in the depths of her eyes. “We were friends before, weren’t we?”
In Lynet’s mind, she had always seen Nadia as the fearless surgeon or the smiling girl, but this was something new, another part of her that Lynet had only seen in glimpses before. This was the girl whose parents had left her alone in the world, the one who had no letters or reminders of home in her bare room because she had no home.
Lynet looked away. She didn’t trust her own feelings. Nadia was a friend. Nadia was a spy. She drew her hand back. “And now what?” she whispered, both to Nadia and to herself. “Am I supposed to forgive you because we were friends once?”
Nadia had no answer. She turned away and went to stand by the window, running a hand through her hair. But then her shoulders tensed, and when she faced Lynet again, the scared, lonely girl was gone, replaced by the surgeon who wanted to fix what was broken. “No,” she said clearly. “Let me earn your trust again. Let me help you. I … I thought you were dead, and the whole world seemed to die with you.” Her voice wavered, but her eyes were fierce, almost angry. “I’ll hide you. I’ll keep you safe.”
Lynet shook her head, an idea forming. “I need you to do more than that. Gregory is already expecting you. If you go to him now and tell him that you saw me preparing to go back north, he’ll believe you.”
Nadia nodded slowly. “And he’d stop looking for you here.” She thought for a moment, the deep orange of the setting sun passing over her face, making her seem alight with new conviction. “You’ll keep hidden until it’s safe?”
“I will,” Lynet said.
Nadia walked over to her, her stare direct and unflinching. “Will you still be here when I return?”
Lynet held her gaze. “I promise.”
“All right, then. I’ll go now.”
After Nadia left, Lynet waited a few minutes, watching the shadows from the sunset grow long across the floor. And then she broke her promise and hurried out of the room.
And now where? she asked herself once she was on the main street. Her strength was returning, but all she had was a cloak, a half-empty purse, and the clothes she was wearing—
And the letter. She still had that, too, tucked away inside her dress.
Lynet froze on the street, and people jostled into her on either side until she started walking again, more slowly this time. She could find a way to send the letter north, to Mina. It seemed wrong that Mina shouldn’t have it, that she would keep thinking her mother was dead. I wanted to cure her, Lynet thought, but she’d assumed Gregory would deliver that cure to Mina. Now she knew the only thing Gregory would deliver to Mina was more lies.
And what lies has my father told me?
Nicholas had already lied to Lynet and to everyone else about her mother’s death. So few people knew the truth of Emilia’s death—that she hadn’t died in childbirth at all. It didn’t seem fair, that a person’s legacy could be twisted or forgotten so easily. Everything Lynet knew about her mother, she had learned from Nicholas. She was fragile, he said. She spoke in whispers and murmurs. She was sweet and gentle. Like you, like you, he said, but Lynet had never felt fragile, though she looked it. If her father had never truly recognized his daughter, then had he remembered his wife wrong as well? What if everything he’d ever told her about her mother was only how he’d seen her, not how she truly was?
What if she was more like me?
But there was no point wondering—even if she could remember a hundred different stories about her mother, told to her by different people, Lynet still would never really know her. She could ask and ask, but she’d never feel her mother’s hands or hear her laugh or see her cry. Emilia was lost to her, and no story or portrait would ever truly recover her.
And for the first time in her life, Lynet missed the mother she had never known.
There was a crowd gathered ahead of her, forcing her to stop. She looked up and saw that she had reached the new church, the one with the bell tower that had rung for her and her father. Curious, she tried to peek through the crowd, and she managed to push herself through to the front.
There was a small fire burning in the churchyard, in a coal pit surrounded by stones. All around the stones were flowers and other offerings—straw dolls and ribbons and letters. Children seemed to be leaving most of the gifts, and Lynet watched a little girl take one of the ribbons out of her braided hair and leave it with the others. A memorial for a child, Lynet thought.
And then, with a shiver, she understood that it was her memorial.
She saw her name written on one of the letters in the circle, and then she tried to look at the rest—Princess Lynet, some of them said. For the princess. The celebration was over, then; now that they were secure in Mina’s reign, they could afford to grieve for a dead king and his daughter.
They think I was just a child, Lynet thought. A girl who never had the chance to grow up or take one step out of the castle. And why shouldn’t they? Lynet had led the life of a child in Whitespring—sheltered and carefree. She’d clung to her childhood as much as she could, running away as soon as she thought she’d have to step into the role of an adult—the role of a queen. No one would ever know that that princess had liked to climb impossible heights, or that she had survived an attack on her life, or that she had the power to control snow. This was all she was, all she would ever be—this girl who looked just like her mother, this child who died before she could grow up.
She thought of the shivering people she’d seen in the northern villages and of the work Mina had done for the South. And as she stared into the flame that burned for her short life, she knew this wasn’t the legacy she wanted to leave behind.
I can do so much more. I can be so much more.
Lynet had wanted to become someone else in the South, someone other than her mother. She had spent years wanting to be strong, because she’d thought her mother was weak. She had wanted to be fierce and invulnerable like Mina, never seeing that Mina had become that way because she’d had to protect herself from the cruelty of her father. Weak or strong—she didn’t know what they meant anymore. Maybe they didn’t mean the same thing for everyone. All she knew as she turned away from the churchyard and headed back in the direction of the university was that it was time to discover what kind of strength lived in her.
She hid in the shadows by the dormitory building, waiting to see if Nadia would return alone or with Gregory—a final test to see if she could trust her. When Nadia did return alone, Lynet felt a weight lift from her, more relieved than she wanted to admit. She was still angry and hurt from Nadia’s confession, but at least she wasn’t as alone as she’d feared.
Nadia jumped when Lynet approached her. “You said you were going to hide,” she whispered as she looked frantically around.
“I’m tired of hiding,” Lynet answered.
* * *
“He’s returning to Whitespring at once, but he wants me to go after you, to go north with you and hand you over to the queen,” Nadia said. She frowned o
ut the window, her arms wrapped around herself like she was cold. “And then … and then he wants to kill you.”
“I know,” Lynet said. She was sitting with her ankles crossed on Nadia’s bed, her hands in her lap, her pulse curiously steady as she toyed with different ideas in her mind. She wished now that she had answered Nadia’s questions about what had happened at Whitespring. She hated that Gregory had been the one to tell her about Mina’s betrayal. “He wants to cut out my heart.”
Nadia started to fiddle with her hair. “He wants me to do it,” she said. “He said he would need my help transferring your heart to his body. He chose a poison from one of the shelves in his laboratory. It was called Winter’s Kiss. When it’s absorbed through the skin, it kills almost instantly, freezes you from the inside out. He said—” She twisted her hair more violently, lips pursed in disgust. “He said the poison will keep your heart from spoiling.”
Lynet stood and turned away, nausea passing over her at the thought of herself carved up.
She felt the light pressure of a hand on her shoulder, heard the silence that meant Nadia was holding her breath as she waited for Lynet’s reaction to this small gesture. And Lynet knew that if she turned and faced Nadia now, if she saw the play of moonlight softening the sharp angles of her face, she would also see the light glinting off that cobweb again, the threads spelling out something she couldn’t yet read. If she turned now, she would be agreeing to forget Nadia’s crimes against her.
Lynet jerked her shoulder away, and she heard Nadia’s footsteps moving back to the window. When Nadia spoke again, her voice wavered at first, but then grew steady. “I don’t intend to let Gregory come close enough to you again to give you that poison, but in case he does … I did something to make sure you’ll still be safe. When he was out of the room, I found another poison similar to Winter’s Kiss—the same color and method of delivery, but instead of death, it causes a deathlike trance that wears off in time.”
Girls Made of Snow and Glass Page 25