Nadia smiled in response, leaning toward her just slightly. Lynet only needed to ask one more question—
“So if I ordered you to tell me…”
Nadia shrugged. “Then I would have to tell you, wouldn’t I? No one could blame me for following the direct orders of a princess.”
“Then as a princess,” Lynet said, “I order you to tell me what you know about me.”
Permission granted, Nadia gave a slight nod of her head and said, softly but clearly, “The truth that they don’t want you to know is that your mother never gave birth to you. She died before you were born.”
It took Lynet a moment to understand what Nadia was saying, but even then, it was preposterous. If Emilia wasn’t her mother, then how could Lynet look so much like her? “Oh, really?” she said. “Then who’s my real mother?” But despite the skepticism in her voice, a flutter of hope in her chest betrayed her, her heart whispering the name: Mina?
Nadia shook her head. “You don’t understand. You have no mother, no father. You never did. You were created magically, out of snow.”
Lynet repeated the words to herself, but they didn’t make any sense. “What did you say?”
Nadia’s jaw tensed; now that the thrill of the secret had passed, she seemed to realize the full impact of what she was telling Lynet. “Your stepmother’s father—the magician—shaped you in your mother’s image out of snow and blood. You were made to resemble her exactly.”
The whole idea was so ridiculous that Lynet almost laughed. This was Nadia’s secret? It was nothing more than a joke, a story, a fabrication. True, her stepmother’s father was a magician—he had magical abilities that made even Mina lower her voice when she spoke of them.
But how could any of this be true if Lynet’s mother had died in childbirth? She had died on the day Lynet was born—that was why her father always took her to the crypt two weeks early, to separate those two occasions in Lynet’s mind.
Unless, she thought, that’s the day my mother really died.
“Nadia?” she said, her voice too loud in the quiet room.
Nadia had been watching her, waiting for her reaction to this discovery. “I’m here.”
“If what you’re saying is true, then when did my mother die? It couldn’t have been in childbirth.”
Nadia’s lips thinned in concern at Lynet’s flat voice, at her glassy eyes staring ahead at nothing. “Two weeks before,” she said.
Lynet took a long breath. That still didn’t have to mean anything. It was a coincidence.
But other hints came rushing to her now—her uncanny resemblance to her mother along with her father’s complete confidence that she would grow up to be exactly like the late queen; a burn scar on her hand even though she never remembered burning herself; the fact that she could lie in the snow for hours and never feel cold. Mina’s pitying look whenever Lynet said she wished she looked more like her—
Did Mina know?
Lynet had never spoken to Gregory alone, and she wondered now if that was no accident, if her father had kept him away from her, for fear that he would tell her the truth. But there had been one time, just a year or two ago, when she had been running to Mina’s room and collided with the magician. Lynet had been mortified, but Gregory had only smiled down at her and insisted that there was no harm done. He had put his hands on her shoulders and told her that if she ever needed help, she could always come to him, that he was always her friend.…
And then Mina had hurried toward them both. She asked Lynet to go wait in her room for her, because she needed to speak to her father alone. Lynet hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now she remembered the slight note of panic in her stepmother’s voice, the way her face was stretched into an unnatural smile, the bloodless grip she had on her father’s arm.
Mina knew. Mina knew and she had kept it from her all these years.
The full weight of this revelation finally fell on her, the truth becoming increasingly undeniable, and Lynet closed her eyes, trying to shut it out. But she couldn’t keep Nadia’s words from reaching her: You were made to resemble her exactly. Made, created, shaped—all those words meant the same thing: she was something artificial. She was a duplicate, created to live out all the days that had been stolen from her mother. Unless she was meant to die her mother’s death, as well. Had Lynet ever had anything of her own? Was she even a person?
“What do I do now?” Lynet whispered. “Am I supposed to just go on like before and pretend I don’t know?” She opened her eyes and looked to Nadia.
Nadia shook her head and leaned over the table, her shoulders hunched with remorse. Her fingers were drumming against the wood, and finally she nodded to herself and looked up at Lynet with a mixture of guilt and resolve.
“If I were you,” she said in the same firm tone as when she gave advice to one of her patients, “I would want to know more, even just for your own safety. That’s why I’m allowed to know, as the court surgeon—I need to know that the cold won’t numb you, because you’re immune to it.”
Lynet didn’t hear a word Nadia said. The room seemed to be getting smaller, and she was having trouble breathing. “I have to go now,” she said.
“Lynet, don’t go—I’m so sorry I told you, please—” But Lynet was already rushing out the door, up the stairs, out into the open air. She kept moving until she had crossed through the courtyard and into the garden, and then she collapsed in the snow, hoping that for the first time, she’d feel something like cold.
6
MINA
The first time she saw Whitespring, Mina’s skin prickled, and not just from the cold. As she took in the sharp spires and steeply curved archways, the high stone walls as blank as snow, Mina thought she was looking at the skeleton of a castle, its meat picked off over the years until only the bones were left. Whitespring was as gray as the sky, and already she missed the bright colors of her home.
And she was so cold. She kept adding layers of clothing, furs and thick wools, but she felt trapped underneath all that fabric, too constrained to move comfortably. She longed to feel fresh air on her skin again. Instead, she had to settle for blowing on her hands to keep them warm.
Gregory hadn’t been thrilled with their small set of rooms in a forgotten corner of the castle, but he said that would all change once he’d made a good marriage for Mina. She was glad the rooms were small; they gave her the illusion of coziness.
“You haven’t gone outside since we came here,” her father told her three days after they’d arrived. “Go get some air. We’re cramped in here as it is.”
It was true. She’d holed herself up in her room, thinking that if she curled up tightly enough, she’d be warm again. Mina weakly protested out of habit, but she was growing restless, so she threw on another layer of fur and obeyed.
“Take the left corridor and keep walking straight, and you’ll end up at a courtyard,” Gregory told her. “Don’t get lost. I don’t want to find you freezing somewhere.”