“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 fears. “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.