“Thank you for telling me where to find him,” Mina said, offering him a smile when he was at her side.
“I wish I hadn’t,” Felix said. “I did exactly what you told me to, but I wish I had disobeyed you.” He shook his head. “I watch him for you, day after day, and when we meet, we only talk about him. Sometimes, when I’m watching him, I think I hate him.”
“Felix—”
“And you—” He placed his hand against her cheek, tracing her cheekbone with his thumb. “I see how badly you want him. I saw it on your face today. And even though you’re happy, I—I feel something different.”
Mina removed his hand from her face and kissed his palm, rougher now and more callused than when she had first made it. “Are you angry with me?”
He thought a moment, trying to understand feelings that were for once his own. “No,” he said. “I feel … sadness. Loneliness. That’s the part I don’t understand—the less lonely you feel, the lonelier I become. That’s not the way it should be.”
She smiled sadly at him. “I wanted to say good-bye, Felix.”
“Good-bye?”
“I can’t see you like this anymore.”
“It’s because of him, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I want to be myself with him, or at least I want to try. You’re too big a secret to keep.”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t tell—”
“I know,” she said. She wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her head against his chest. Perhaps she was starting to reflect him now—she could feel his sadness. “I know, my darling, but I can’t be true to him and keep you at the same time. I don’t want to practice love anymore—I want to try to feel it. I’m sorry,” she said, pressing one last kiss to his lips. “But I have to send you back.”
He pulled back from her suddenly. “Send me back where?” he said, his voice harsh. “Into your mirror, where I can only watch you from a distance?”
Mina didn’t understand why he was reacting like this at first, but then she took in his huntsman’s uniform, his scuffed boots, and the small tear on his right sleeve. He had a fresh scar on the back of his hand. Mina had forgotten that he had experiences of his own now, a life beyond this chapel, beyond her use for him. He had become too human to be only a mirror; to turn him back into glass now would be a kind of murder.
“I’m sorry,” she said. He seemed new to her, and she wanted to touch him again, to understand the person he had become in the past three years. But she was afraid that if she did, she might not be able to leave him here, as she knew she must. He had no heart to offer her, and she wanted something more than glass. “I won’t send you back,” she assured him. “But you mustn’t try to see me again.”
Felix didn’t respond. He simply watched her with that endless gaze, and even when she turned her back on him and walked out of the chapel, she thought she could still feel the force of those unblinking, empty eyes.
13
LYNET
Lynet was beginning to regret her choice to sit outside the door and listen as Mina and Nicholas argued. But it was better to know than to sit in her room and wonder.
“You made a decision that concerns me,” Mina was saying, her voice low with rage, “without even telling me.”
“I didn’t tell you,” Nicholas answered, “because I knew you would tell Lynet. Despite my best efforts, you hold a considerable amount of influence over my daughter. I know you would have turned her against me, just as you’ve always tried to turn her against her mother.”
The silence that fell over them now was even worse than the arguing, and Lynet rested her forehead against her knees, bracing herself.
“You don’t know the first thing about your daughter,” Mina said. “She never cared about her mother, not from the beginning.”
Lynet lifted her head in surprise. No, she’s not supposed to tell him that. These were secrets that they had shared, secrets she could never tell her father.
“You’re just trying to hurt me now,” Nicholas said softly.
“No, she’s the one who’s always trying not to hurt you. She doesn’t want you to know how little she cares about Emilia. How could she? She never even knew her. She’s never missed her, never loved her, never wanted to be anything like her.”
“Mina—”
“Emilia isn’t even her mother—”
“That’s enough!” Nicholas roared. “And if you dare tell her…”
Lynet held her breath. Mina had already told one of her secrets—how could she be sure she wouldn’t tell all of them?
But Mina just gave a brittle laugh. “I’m not that cruel.”
“No? You’re your father’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Another silence. “It’s lucky for you, Nicholas, that I’m not,” Mina said, her voice so quiet that Lynet could barely make out the words.
Lynet heard footsteps approaching the door, so she quickly scurried down the hall, turning into another corridor where she would be safe from view.
And now where should she go first? To Mina? To her father? The cracks in her family that had been spreading for so many years were finally starting to break open, creating a rift that was becoming too wide for her to hold together anymore. Even if she mustered the courage to go speak to her father and tell him she had changed her mind, he would probably think it was Mina’s doing. But she had to believe that she could still apologize and explain herself to Mina and repair some of the damage that she had created.
A few minutes later, Lynet knocked softly at Mina’s door. There was no response. There was no light coming from under the door, either, but Lynet knew Mina couldn’t possibly be asleep already. She frowned at the door for a moment, and then she had an idea about where Mina might be.
She knew she was right when she saw a thin stream of light from under the chapel door. Inside, Mina was sitting under the central altar, a candle by her side. Bundled in her furs, her hair streaming down her back, she seemed very small.
“Mina?” Lynet said. She whispered it, but her voice echoed, and Mina jumped a little at the sound.
“Come sit by me,” Mina said.
Lynet treaded carefully, feeling like she shouldn’t make any noise, like she shouldn’t be there at all. She sat on the floor beside her stepmother. “Mina, I didn’t—”
But when Mina looked at her, waiting for whatever pitiful explanation she would offer, Lynet understood how pointless her words were now. She felt a flash of resentment toward her father, because she knew that it was for his sake that she had turned on Mina with her silence. She had done it because she knew it was an opportunity to make him happy, and it was so difficult to make him happy. But she had chosen her father’s happiness over Mina’s because she thought she could take her stepmother’s forgiveness for granted, and she knew that wasn’t fair at all. If she wanted to speak her feelings, she should have spoken before, in front of her father. Anything she said now would only add to the insult of her earlier silence.
In the end, it was Mina who spoke. “It’s the way of things, I suppose,” she said. “I think I suspected something like this might happen once I noticed how much you’d grown. As long as you were still a child, I was young, I was safe … but now that you’re older, there’s no use for me anymore.”