“It shouldn’t matter to you what my motivations are. As soon as the people of Whitespring know she’s alive, they’ll all be demanding your head. This is your last chance. If you indulge in any pity for that girl, you may as well hang yourself and save everyone the trouble. Now answer my question. Will you do whatever is necessary?”
“Yes,” she hissed at him, her head bowing under the weight of his hand.
Gregory didn’t seem entirely satisfied, but he nodded and released her at last. He took something out of the pocket of his coat and hid it in his fist. “I sent someone after Lynet to accompany her north.”
“Another spy?” Mina spat out. She could still feel her father’s hand on the back of her neck, and she was itching to rub at the skin there.
“The same spy, in fact. The surgeon you dismissed. She came straight back to me and told me Lynet was leaving for the North. When they’re near Whitespring, the surgeon will come to you and let you know where you can find Lynet. And then you’ll give Lynet this.”
He opened his fist now, holding out a small glass vial full of some clear liquid. From the handwriting on the label, Mina knew it had come from his own stores. “Poison?” she said.
“Instant and painless. It’s absorbed through the skin, so you’ll have to find some way to give it to her without making her suspicious. When she’s dead, bring the body back to Whitespring, and I’ll dispose of it.”
Mina stared at the vial with growing nausea. “Take it, Mina,” Gregory urged, and she obeyed, hoping he would leave once she had.
He did leave, satisfied that Mina would do what he wanted. As soon as he was gone, Mina rubbed at the back of her neck so viciously that it burned, but even that wasn’t enough. Gregory was in her blood, in every part of herself that she hated.
Despite what Gregory had told her, Mina still didn’t know if she should believe him. She had seen Lynet’s corpse, and that horrible sight was still too strong and too insistent in her memory to yield to her father’s words. That corpse lay in the crypt, and even if she went and looked at it again, she still wouldn’t be able to tell—
But no, that wasn’t true. If the body was made of snow, it would still be unspoiled, exactly as it had been the last time she had seen it. There would be no sign of decay at all. No sign that it had ever been alive in the first place.
Mina couldn’t wait till morning. She lit a lamp and stormed out of the room and down to the royal crypt. Mina continued through the cavernous walls of the crypt until she reached Emilia’s casket, undisturbed in its alcove. Beside it was Lynet’s, in the place that had been marked out for her since her birth. As Mina slowly lifted the casket’s lid, she didn’t know what she hoped to find. Would she be relieved to know that Lynet was alive? Or would that only mean that she would have to find a way to get rid of her all over again?
Lynet’s body looked the same. No discoloration, no shrinking of the skin around the fingernails. This body wasn’t flesh at all. Lynet was alive. Mina had been fooled. All her sleepless nights and guilty thoughts had been for a trick of magic, a pile of snow in the shape of a girl.
Mina slammed the lid of the casket back down with a frustrated cry. She didn’t understand why she was shaking with rage, why she felt so angry with Lynet for not being dead. She let me believe she was dead rather than trust her life to me.
She heard a sound in the darkness, and then Felix walked into the ring of light from her lamp. “My faithful shadow,” she said. “I thought you would follow me.”
How human he’s become, she thought as he came to stand beside her, head down out of respect for the dead. Since bringing her Lynet’s body, Felix seemed to have grown more distant from her—and yet he was with her more than ever before. Perhaps she only felt that way because he was becoming more himself, so many of his feelings now his own instead of hers.
He took her hand and stroked it softly. “The girl’s death still disturbs you,” he said.
Mina laughed, a shrill, weary sound. “No, Felix. My father brought me news tonight. He told me that Lynet is alive.”
Felix looked up at her in surprise, and she looked into his eyes, wondering what would be reflected there. Relief, mostly, as well as confusion, but none of the creeping dread that Mina could feel in her stomach.
“But the body—”
“Lynet has powers of her own, it seems, and she’s used them to fool me. There’s nothing in that casket but snow. My father traveled all this way to tell me because he wants me to find Lynet and kill her.”
“You won’t,” he said at once.
“The choice is to kill her or to let her kill me—which one is better, do you think?”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t want to hurt her. I thought you did at first, but then I realized it wasn’t true. That’s why I—”
He stopped, and Mina frowned. “Finish what you were saying, Felix.”
He hesitated. “That’s why I let her run away instead of killing her.”
“What are you talking about? You said you couldn’t find her.”
“I lied,” he said, those two words falling heavily from his mouth. “I found her as she was climbing the castle walls. I had her throat in my hands, and I chose to let her go.”
Mina slipped her hand out of his. “You kept this from me all this time.” She lifted his head roughly by the chin, forcing him to look at her.
But his thoughts were locked away from her now, his eyes revealing nothing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to protect you. I almost killed her because I thought you would be happier for it, that you even wanted me to do it. But she was so young, and I … I couldn’t, not even when I thought you wanted it. And then I thought of the king, how I had let him be hurt because I thought you wanted that as well. But now I wonder … I wonder if it was only what I wanted. And I wish I hadn’t done it at all.”
Mina listened to his confession with growing fear. She wasn’t afraid because Felix had spared Lynet, but because he had acted on his own impulses, and because he had been able to keep this secret from her. Even the simple fact that he had pitied Lynet frightened her. His knowledge of love was a lie that he’d learned from her, but where had he learned the semblance of pity? Of mercy? Not from Mina.
“I don’t know who you are,” she said softly. “You were mine, but now I’ve lost you.”
He pulled her closer to him, resting his forehead against hers. “No,” he said. “I’m here, as I have always been. I love you.”
She pulled away from him. “You think you love me, because I told you that you do, but you don’t know what love truly is.”
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. Maybe that was true once, but I remember … I remember one night soon after you married the king, after you started calling for me again … you brought peaches, and you told me that when you were a girl, you ate them all the time, but that you hadn’t had one since the first day you’d come to the castle, and I heard such pleasure in your voice. You took the first bite with such relish, not caring what kind of mess you made, and some of the juice spilled down your chin, onto your throat. You were so content in that moment, so perfectly free. And even though I thought I had loved you before, I knew then that I hadn’t understood love until that moment, when I would have given up my life just to keep you as content as you were eating that peach. I remember I reached out to wipe the juice from your throat, and when I touched you, it felt like the first time, the night you made me. I love you, Mina. And I know that you loved that girl.”