Mina groaned at the sound of her nurse’s call. She had hoped that leaving the house for the refuge of the hills would allow her some peace from the woman’s constant disapproval.
Hana had been old and shrill for as long as Mina could remember, but now that Mina was growing out of girlhood, Hana had become superfluous as well. The only reason Mina listened to her at all was because she was the best source of information about her mother. Hana loved to talk about the lovely girl who had run off with a young man against her wealthy family’s wishes and had consequently been disowned by them. Mina wondered sometimes if the nurse was just making up stories—it was hard to imagine anyone risking such displeasure for the love of her father, and Hana hadn’t become Dorothea’s maidservant until after the marriage. But even half-true stories were better than nothing.
“Mina, I know you can hear me, you selfish child!”
There was a hint of desperation in Hana’s voice, like she was scared of something. But there was only one thing Hana was scared of, and that was Mina’s father, Gregory.
He’s home, Mina thought. He’d left on one of his frequent journeys nearly two months ago. Mina always valued the times when he was away; the house felt lighter with Gregory gone, like some stormy cloud overhead had dissolved. Mina looked at herself in the mirror once more, wishing she could crawl inside it and wait until both her nurse and her father went away.
“There you are,” Hana said, huffing behind her. “I know you come all the way out here just to make me kill myself from climbing these hills.”
She was almost right. Avoiding Hana was one benefit of the hills, but if the nurse had been paying any attention, she might have noticed that the Summer Castle was visible from this hill. Though the royal family had never finished its construction, leaving it half-finished for nearly a century, the completed gold domes of the Summer Castle still gleamed in the sun, shining through the trees like a beacon. If it weren’t so far, Mina would have tried to sneak onto the grounds, maybe plant a little garden there. She imagined that garden growing all around the castle, keeping everyone—especially her father—away.
“Your father is home,” Hana said. “Don’t you want to greet him?”
“Did he ask to see me?”
Hana glowered at her, but didn’t respond, so Mina knew he hadn’t. Still, she couldn’t avoid him forever, so she stood up and brushed the grass from her skirt.
“Fine,” she said, “let’s go.”
Hana grabbed her by the arm, but then she released it and reached for the mirror lying on the grass. “Is that—is that your mother’s mirror?”
“I was just borrowing it,” Mina said, blocking Hana from taking it away.
“I can’t believe you would treat your dear mother’s belongings so poorly. What if you had broken it? What if you had lost it? It’s as if you don’t care about her at all.” She shook her head at Mina in reproach.
“I do care!” Mina protested.
“I don’t know about that,” Hana muttered. “You don’t care for anything but yourself.” She grabbed at Mina’s arm again. “Now hurry up.”
Mina wrenched her arm out of her nurse’s grip, grabbed the mirror, and charged down the hill past her. She was in no hurry to see her father, but she didn’t want Hana to think she was afraid of him. She kept up her quick pace until she reached the edge of the village market.
She hadn’t been planning to come home so soon. She had snuck out early this morning, and she’d been planning to stay out for a few more hours. She’d never purposefully walk through the village in the middle of the day, especially not on market day, when it would be at its busiest.
“Just keep your head down and walk fast,” Hana whispered. “No one bothered me on my way through. It’s your father they fear, not you.”
But Hana was as forgettable as she was unthreatening. People remembered Mina just as clearly as they remembered her father. Ever since magic had made the North freeze over, people were often suspicious toward those born with unnatural abilities. Whenever her father heard rumors of others with magical talents, he would set off at once to investigate, but as far as he knew, he was the only magician for the past few generations. Still, that didn’t stop the villagers from considering Mina to be just as dangerous as her father. It never occurred to them that now it was Mina who felt she had to keep safe from them.
The village on market day was a visual feast. There were the familiar sights of the South—brightly colored fruit, fresh dates and nuts, colorful woven rugs—along with the rarer luxuries of the North—jewelry with gems from the mountains, soft furs, intricate wood carvings. Mina would have loved to spend all day walking back and forth down the long passageway between stalls, reveling in all that beauty. But as she and Hana passed through the crumbling stone archway that marked the entrance to the marketplace, Mina kept her eyes down on the dusty ground, letting her sheet of hair fall forward to cover her face.
It didn’t matter. No matter how dowdy she tried to look, how modestly she cast her eyes downward, someone always recognized her, and then the whispers spread outward until they surrounded her.
The villagers went quiet as she passed. Then she heard the word magician in hushed tones, over and over again, until it sounded less like a word and more like the chirping of crickets. Once the whispers had spread far enough, the villagers started to step aside from her, keeping their distance from the magician’s daughter. But in the narrow passageway through the market, there wasn’t much room for keeping one’s distance, not for the villagers, and not for Mina, either.
On all sides, people jostled into her and then jumped away. It would have wounded her, perhaps, if she’d felt anything but contempt for these people. They were hypocrites, shying away from her in the light of day, but sneaking to her father’s house at night, begging him for magical solutions to their mundane problems. She passed by Lila, the weaver, who glanced away from her as she wrapped her arms around her swollen belly. She had come to Mina’s father a few months ago asking for something to help her conceive a child, and even though she had gotten what she wanted, she didn’t want to be reminded of how she’d done it. Vulgar midwifery, her father had dismissed the potion he’d given her. He didn’t even consider such services to be magic, but they provided him with money to conduct his own experiments in his private laboratory. Of course, it was rumors of those experiments—his meddling with the forces of life and death—that made the villagers so wary of the magician and his daughter in the first place.