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.