He stopped walking and turned to face her, a small crease appearing between his eyebrows. “That’s right. Mina. The girl with the peach. You’ve become…” He shook his head slightly and turned away. “Were they being cruel to you? Is that why you were running off?”
Mina studied his face, looking for some sign that he was goading her into a trap. But his eyes were gentle, and his forehead gently wrinkled with concern. He was the same man she had met in the courtyard two years ago, sad yet kind.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, they were cruel to me. But people have always been cruel to me, for one reason or another.”
He nodded in understanding. “Whitespring can be set in its ways. No one trusts anyone or anything new, not at first. I’m sorry you had to learn that so harshly. I won’t let it happen again.”
Mina didn’t respond at first. Even though she was still shivering, she felt a strange kind of warmth, his words wrapping around her protectively. She had confided something to him, and he had taken her side.
“Thank you, my lord,” she said, “for coming to my rescue.” No one else ever has, she wanted to say.
He smiled a little, but then his expression darkened. “Is your father here?”
“No,” Mina said quickly.
He held his arm out to her. “Then perhaps you’d like to stay for the rest of the afternoon? I doubt anyone will give you more trouble, and I’d hate for you to leave so early.”
She took his arm and he led her back to the crowd before bowing his head to her and returning to sit with his daughter. Mina tried not to gloat too much as the same people who had just shunned and sneered at her now called to her and greeted her warmly, but it was difficult not to enjoy the way Xenia and her friends were suddenly at her side with begrudging smiles.
“The king seems fond of you,” Xenia said. “Have you met before?”
“Once,” Mina responded.
“I do hope you weren’t too offended by what I said earlier,” Xenia added, placing a hand on Mina’s shoulder. “Just a little playful teasing among friends.”
Mina fought off the urge to shrug Xenia’s hand away. She might have said something sharp and biting, something to make Xenia regret having been cruel to her, but as much as Mina wanted to strike back at her, she also found herself enjoying Xenia’s attention. Making Xenia accept her was even more satisfying than rejecting her would have been.
“I understand,” Mina said. “And I’m sure we’ll be such good friends from now on.”
*
Still elated from her success, Mina told her father everything when she returned to their apartment. He sat at his writing desk, listening to her account of the day without saying anything, and when she was done, he only said, “Does the king know you’re my daughter?”
Mina nodded, puzzled, but then she remembered her first meeting with the king, when he had quickly left after finding out who she was. At the time, she hadn’t known he was the king, and so she’d assumed Gregory had just made a new set of enemies. But now she wondered why he had reacted as he had, why he had been so sharp with her when asking if her father was in the garden.
“The king doesn’t like you,” Mina said, noticing the way her father showed no surprise at her words. “But why? You saved his daughter.”
His lips almost twisted into a snarl as he pushed himself up from his seat and retreated to the window, his back turned to her. “But not his wife,” he muttered.
“Still, wouldn’t he be grateful to you?”
“He should be grateful.”
“But then, why doesn’t he like you? Why wouldn’t you come with me to the picnic today?”
Gregory’s fingers curled against the windowsill. “I doubt the king wants to be reminded of the debt he owes me.”
“For saving his daughter?”
Gregory started to laugh, a dry, grating sound that quickly became a cough. When he had recovered, he turned to her, holding his withered hands out in front of him. “Look at what I’ve become, Mina. I’ve lost my youth, my vitality. And for what?” He gazed down at his empty hands. “For nothing. For a lie.” He shook his head and his hands dropped to his sides. “I’ll tell you, at least. I’ll have to content myself with that.”
“Tell me what?” Mina said, tired of his cryptic games.
“I didn’t save the king’s daughter,” he said, voice thick with pride. “I created her.”
Mina was silent at first. She kept thinking of the sand mouse Gregory had shown her back home, the way he had been so secretive about how he had saved the infant princess’s life, his sudden aged appearance and heavy gait since returning home.…
Gregory saw realization pass over Mina’s face and nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “The queen was already dead by the time I arrived north. She had been ill; she wasn’t even carrying a child. That was just a lie to explain why the king suddenly had a daughter. After her death, the king wanted me to create life in a way that I had never done before—an infant that would age naturally. He wanted her to look just like her mother.” The words came rushing out of him, long held back by whatever promise he had made to the king. How difficult it must have been for him never to tell anyone about his greatest success.
“The blood,” Mina said. “You made her with your blood.”
“Snow and blood. It took me many attempts to understand how to make her truly alive, and each attempt weakened me, drained the life out of my heart.” He clutched his chest and lowered himself back in his chair. “It’s a cruel joke, isn’t it? All my life, I’ve wanted to understand my own power, to test my limitations and move beyond them. And now that I finally know what I’m capable of, I’ve become an old man before my time. I can never create life again without giving my own.”
Mina hardly listened to his self-pitying ramble. She was thinking of the little girl squirming on her nurse’s lap. There was no sign that she was anything but a normal child of flesh and blood. True, she would bear an uncanny similarity to her mother as she grew, but she had a beating heart and a loving father who would protect her from this secret—and from Gregory. Mina bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
“Will he ever marry me, then?” she said, more to herself than to Gregory.
Gregory gestured her over to him, staring up at her in cool appraisal. “You have to make him want you so much that he won’t care about anything else. People aren’t rational when it comes to affairs of the heart. After all, your mother married me even when her family threatened to disown her for it.”
And she hated you in the end, Mina thought. Will he hate me, too, if he ever finds out what I am? She didn’t bother voicing her concern to Gregory—she knew he wouldn’t care. I’ll have to make him love me first, she decided. If he truly loved her, he wouldn’t care about her dead heart.
And perhaps—perhaps the king wouldn’t find Mina’s condition so repellant when his own daughter’s birth was so unconventional. Perhaps he was the one person in the world who would be able to love her.
10
MINA