Mina went to the guard at the door. “You have her?” she asked in a low whisper.
The guard nodded. “She’s unharmed. We locked her in the tower, as you ordered.”
“Good,” Mina said. “Give me the key.”
He handed it to her just as Gregory appeared beside them. “It’s done?” he said once Mina ordered the soldier away.
“She’s in the North Tower,” Mina said. “I’ll go see her now.”
But before she could step out the door, she felt Gregory’s hand clamp around her arm. With the candlelight behind him, he seemed to glow red. “Don’t disappoint me, Mina.”
Mina pulled her arm away from him, but she didn’t trust herself to respond. Even as she was climbing the stairs of the North Tower, she still didn’t know what would happen when she and Lynet were reunited. She took a breath to steady herself, and then she unlocked the tower door and stepped inside.
Lynet was standing at the boarded-up window, peering through the gaps out at Whitespring’s grounds below her. When Mina entered, Lynet turned to face her.
Lynet’s hair was shorter now, and she was wearing southern clothes, the bright red silk standing out against the faded blue furniture and the pale moonlight coming from the patches in the tower roof. Anyone else would have been shivering from the cold dressed like that, but not Lynet. Mina had the urge to touch the red fabric, such a vivid reminder of her home, but she stopped herself. I should have been the one to show her the South, she thought. That was mine to give her.
The Lynet who faced her now had none of the restless energy—that sense of always moving, even just to tap her foot or play with her hair, like she’d jump out of her skin at any moment—that she’d had before. Instead, Lynet was completely still, especially compared to Mina’s trembling hands.
Most startling of all, though, was that Lynet was alive. Mina could still see the corpse in her mind when she closed her eyes—it had been her last image of Lynet, an image that was so much like her and yet nothing like her at all, because there was no life in it. For those few moments after walking into the room, all Mina could do was stare at Lynet and marvel that she was standing there, alive.
She was suddenly back in the chapel, the night of Lynet’s birthday, reliving the moment when she discovered that Lynet had heard all her secrets. How can we ever move forward from this? she had wondered then, and she thought it again now. They could never walk in step together again—one of them would always have to lose ground, until there was nothing left to do but fall.
Mina took a step toward her. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.
She’d expected Lynet to respond to that simple phrase as she always had—I’m not afraid, spoken quickly, defensively, trying to convince herself as well as anyone else—but Lynet simply returned Mina’s stare. Her lips formed a word, almost too low to hear: Mina. And then she said, more loudly, “There’s something I have to ask you, something that’s troubled me. Were you with my father when he died?”
Mina was surprised by the question, but she said, “Yes. He asked for you.”
“Did he … did he die because of me? Because he thought I was dead?”
She started to fidget with her dress, some of her old restlessness creeping in, and Mina knew that she would have lied to her if she had to, rather than allow Lynet to carry any of the guilt of her father’s death. “No,” Mina said. “I tried to tell him, but he didn’t believe me. He was a little delirious toward the end, and he thought you were coming to see him.”
Lynet’s face scrunched up for a moment as she struggled not to burst into tears, and Mina wanted to reach out and smooth the lines on her forehead. You don’t want to spoil your beauty.
Why didn’t she go to Lynet at that moment and hold her, or let her cry onto her shoulder as she’d done so many times before? But she knew why this time was different—before, she’d always known how long to hold Lynet before gently pushing her away, so that she wouldn’t notice the silence where Mina’s heartbeat should have been. But now Lynet already knew, and so it was already too late—too late to push her away, too late to hold her at all.
Lynet composed herself, smoothing her hands over her dress. Now that she had asked about her father’s death, she seemed lighter, like she had shed her last remaining doubts. But how could she seem so sure, so confident? Mina almost felt like she was the one who had been captured instead of Lynet.
“You’re the only family I have left,” Lynet said. “I was hoping…”
“Hoping for what? That we could be as we once were?” Mina hadn’t known how harsh her words would sound until she saw Lynet start to shrink away.
“No,” Lynet said. She took a breath, held it for a few moments, and then she straightened up again, looking Mina in the eye. Her voice was rich and clear as she continued: “I don’t want things to be as they were. You kept so much from me, and I … I wanted to be you without really knowing who you were.”
Mina tensed. “But I suppose you know now, don’t you? You know exactly what I am. Of course you don’t want to be just like me anymore.”
“That isn’t what I meant. We can’t go back to the way things were before, but maybe…” She took a step toward Mina, walking right into a patch of moonlight that illuminated every scrap of hope and determination in her eyes. “Maybe we can make something new. I know more about you now than I ever did before, and I still want you to be my mother.”
“Your stepmother.”
“No,” Lynet said. “It was always you I wanted, from the first time you found me hiding in that tree. My mother is the woman who watched me grow, who combed my hair every night with her own hands. You’re the mother I chose, the one I love.”
Lynet stepped toward her again, offering so much, asking so much, and all Mina could do was take a step back and look away from her. “You can’t love me,” she muttered. “You can’t.”
But Lynet was in front of her now, taking her hands, holding them tightly. “How can you believe that? During all these years, didn’t you see how much I loved you?”
Mina pulled herself out of Lynet’s reach, her back against the door. She had allowed herself to be cornered, and she resented Lynet for doing this to her, for making her words sound so true, so real, when Mina knew they never could be.
“You don’t understand,” Mina said. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do.” She swept Lynet aside so she could pass around her, almost tripping over the dusty armchair to reach the center of the room.
Her back was to Lynet, but Mina could still hear her say, “That’s why I went south. I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to know myself, too. I thought Gregory could give me those answers. I thought he could help me find a cure for you, for your heart.”
A laugh escaped Mina, scraping her throat. She turned to Lynet slowly. “And were you successful in finding a cure for my heart?”
Lynet shook her head, still standing tall, but her eyes betrayed her fear, her doubt. “If I failed, it’s because I looked for answers in the wrong place. Gregory doesn’t know you at all. He’s never understood either one of us, or the bond we’ve shared. My father didn’t understand either.”