But she had known this would happen one day. The moment Mina had realized how much Lynet had grown—the same night when Mina had first seen a strand of gray in her own hair—she knew that this disillusionment had been inevitable. She knew that Lynet’s childish adoration couldn’t last forever, and that when she became old enough to see Mina—to see right to the heart of her—she would only ever be able to hate her. She should have been better prepared for this night.
Mina frowned. Felix was taking too long. He should have returned with Lynet by now. He’d caught more difficult prey than a frightened girl, even if she was skilled at hiding. Mina felt the same frustrated fear building up in her that she’d felt before shattering the window, but now there was no more glass to break.
I have to win back Lynet’s favor, Mina thought. When Felix brought her back, Mina would explain herself and try to be the stepmother Lynet had always known—
But even as the thought entered her mind, she knew it was impossible. It was too late. There would be no other chances, no other roles but the ones that had been set for them from the beginning—the bitter, aging queen and the sweet young princess poised to take everything from her.
She heard Felix arriving before she saw him—heard him walking at his normal pace, quick and clipped, and so she wasn’t even surprised when he appeared alone in the doorway.
“Where is she?” Mina said in a whisper.
He shook his head, the moonlight from the broken windows making his dark eyes glow with an eerie intensity. “I don’t know.”
Mina lifted her skirts and stepped around the broken glass to reach Felix, taking his face in her hands and searching for answers in those unreadable eyes. “Felix, what are you saying? You couldn’t find her?”
He tried to turn away, but she kept him in place as a broken, shameful look started to fill his eyes. “No,” he said, “I couldn’t find her.”
Mina released him and buried her face in her hands. If she went to Nicholas … “Keep looking,” she said, dropping her hands from her face. “Look in the trees, especially. I’ll check the king’s rooms. We have to find her.”
But Lynet wasn’t with her father. And Felix hadn’t found her in any of the other places Mina had suggested—Lynet wasn’t by the statue, and she wasn’t in the North Tower, and she wasn’t visibly scaling any walls or climbing across any roofs. Where else could she be? Where else in Whitespring did she spend her time? Who else did she visit?
The surgeon, Mina remembered, the one Lynet had mentioned only once more than a month ago, and then refused to talk about ever again, even when Mina had asked about her. She had known from the way Lynet had avoided her eye that she hadn’t forgotten about the surgeon, only that she didn’t want to discuss her with Mina.
She told Felix to wait for her in the chapel and then hurried down to the surgeon’s workroom. Mina knew her name was Nadia, but she had never spoken to the surgeon or had need of her services before Nicholas’s accident; she hadn’t really taken notice of her at all until Lynet mentioned her. Then she kept watch whenever she saw the girl pass by, noticing her confident yet elegant stride, the way she stared straight ahead, not sparing a glance for anyone around her. Others might have interpreted this as arrogance, but Mina recognized the surgeon’s manner as single-minded purpose. A girl in her position couldn’t afford to show doubt or weakness. She could see why Lynet was drawn to her.
When Mina knocked on the door of the basement workroom, there was no answer, so she went into the empty room to wait.
She hoped she wouldn’t have to wait for long. The hair on her arms prickled with warning, and Mina’s breathing became shallow in the cluttered, dimly lit room, its low ceiling pressing down on her. Her eyes swept over the shelves of vials and jars, the stained wooden table, the books piled everywhere, all reminding her of another workroom, and she understood why she felt so ill at ease here.
She went to the table, leaning against it for support as she fought to control her erratic breathing. She couldn’t let the surgeon find her like this, a scared girl with no power. She wasn’t that girl anymore, and this was not her father’s laboratory. The wooden table underneath her trembling hands was made from a lighter wood than the other table. She opened one of the surgeon’s journals and found notes made in her handwriting, messy and slanted, not like her father’s neat, spiky hand—
Mina frowned, blinking at the journals, trying to understand why, for a moment, she had seen her father’s handwriting. Was it simply a trick her mind was playing on her? But no, she saw it again out of the corner of her eye, a piece of loose parchment sticking out from between the journal’s pages. And there, visible on that parchment were two words written in a hand that she could never forget: Well done.
She thought she had ripped the paper in her haste to pull it out of the journal, but it was already torn, a simple half sheet with those two words written on them and nothing more. There was no signature, but Mina knew from the cold sweat on the back of her neck that it had to be from Gregory.
No longer caring how the surgeon would find her, Mina tore through the rest of the papers, looking for some explanation for the note.
I’m going mad, she thought as she flipped through more journals. The room had affected her, stirring up painful memories, and now she was looking for something that wasn’t there.
And then she saw another corner of loose parchment, stuffed under a pile of books, and she knew she wasn’t imagining anything. Mina pulled out the parchment—two sheets of it—and looked down at a half-finished letter in the surgeon’s hand.
She read through it, her fingers clutching the sides of the paper tightly enough to wrinkle them.
The door to the workroom opened, but Mina didn’t move.
“My lady!” the surgeon said in surprise. “Did you need—”
Mina put the letter down and turned to face the surgeon, her earlier, shapeless distress sharpened into a fine point. “When did you first meet the magician Gregory?” she asked calmly.
To the surgeon’s credit, she didn’t flinch or look away. One hand perched on her hip in a show of confidence. “Before I came to Whitespring. He’s the one who encouraged me to apply for this position.”
“He asked you to spy on Lynet?” Her voice was still calm, but her hands were shaking.
The surgeon’s eyes flickered to the letter in Mina’s hands, knowing as well as Mina did that the letter contained, in her own hand, information about Nicholas’s plans to give Lynet the South, with special attention to Lynet’s reaction to this news, her fears and doubts. She took a long breath before answering. “He wanted to know more about her. Nothing … nothing harmful, just her personality, her reactions to … to…”
“To knowing how she was created?”
And now shame forced the surgeon to look away. “I would have told her anyway,” she muttered. “She had a right to know.”
“And what did my father promise you in return for this information?”
“Passage south and a place at the university,” she answered, voice low.
Mina nodded, putting the letter down on the table behind her. She pitied the young woman, in a way. She had been just what her father needed—a stranger, someone with no loyalty to Lynet, who wanted something badly enough to trade seemingly harmless information for it. Mina might have done the same, in her position.