She sank to the ground, turning the huntsman’s cryptic words over in her head. Perhaps it was some kind of riddle, but no matter how many times Lynet repeated it over to herself, she couldn’t find any other meaning.
Lynet scooped up a fistful of snow and looked at it uncertainly. “Help?” she whispered. Nothing happened, but she didn’t even know what she wanted to happen, or what kind of help she was asking for. What she really needed was a cloak with a hood, something to hide her face so that if she managed to find a way into town, she would be inconspicuous. She was picturing the cloak in her head, something slightly shabby and dull, so it wouldn’t attract attention, when she noticed what was happening to the snow.
It was moving, and Lynet let the snow fall from her hand in panic. But it still kept shifting, somewhere between snow and liquid, as it spread over the ground. And then, between one blink and the next, there was a plain black cloak lying on the snow.
Hardly believing what she had seen, Lynet touched the cloak, feeling the heavy fabric between her fingertips, marveling that it was real. The snow had become a cloak for her, because she had asked. But how was that possible—
Because I’m made of it, she thought, the answer both obvious and incredible at the same time. She’d always had a special knack for making shapes in the snow, forming intricate castles or shaping animals that almost seemed to come alive. And how else had the chapel’s glass windows shattered, unless Mina had made it happen by will alone? How else had those cracks spread out over the huntsman’s neck at Mina’s command? The soldiers with their glassy eyes and vacant expressions … they weren’t real at all. They were men made out of glass. If Mina’s glass heart gave her power over glass, then Lynet must have the same power over snow. She had been made from magic, after all—why shouldn’t some of that magic still remain in her blood?
Lynet swept some pine needles aside and took up a handful of snow. Melt, she thought. The snow turned to water in her hands almost instantly, dripping from between her fingers. Despite everything, she wanted to laugh. It felt like moving another arm, an extension of her body that she hadn’t previously been conscious of.
But Mina knew. She must have at least suspected that Lynet would have this power, since she was clearly aware of her own. Another secret Mina had kept from her, then, another piece of herself that she hadn’t known. There was so much she still didn’t know—about herself or about Mina. Neither one of them was the same person anymore. Lynet still held all the pieces—all of the moments she and Mina had shared together, the feel of Mina’s hands braiding her hair, the small comforts she had offered—but they seemed to be scattered around her, with no way to repair them without creating a distorted image, a cracked mirror. And in the spaces between all those cracks were Mina’s secrets, the Mina who claimed she was unable to love, the Mina Lynet had never known.
Lynet still didn’t understand the strange powers that had shaped them both. For that, I suppose I’d have to ask the magician. But Lynet couldn’t ask Gregory, because Gregory—
Gregory was away in the South.
She felt a prickling all along her skin, thrilling with a growing sense of purpose. She had already been planning to go south, but now she had a more exact destination: she could go to the university, find Gregory, and ask him all her questions. Perhaps he knew how to cure Mina’s glass heart, to make her capable of the love that Lynet remembered. Perhaps the cracked mirror wasn’t irreparable after all.
But first she had to evade Mina’s soldiers. She had the cloak, but that wasn’t enough, especially if they kept moving south until they caught her. She had to mislead them somehow, to make them think she was headed somewhere else so they wouldn’t follow her. She stared down at the snow, wondering how it could help her now.
And then she remembered being up in the tree, thinking that if she fell and broke her neck at their feet, their search would be over. I could make another me, she thought. Another girl made out of snow who looks just like me. Mina wanted her dead—so if Lynet gave Mina what she wanted, if Mina believed Lynet was dead, she would stop her search, and that would buy Lynet the time she needed to go to Gregory.
A body, she thought, sinking her hands into the snow. No, not just any body. Me. Become me.
The snow started to melt in front of her. Lynet kept her own image in her mind, repeating her command over and over again until the snow shifted and liquefied under her hands. The snow stretched out and formed the outline of a human—but creating a perfect replica of herself was more difficult than making a nondescript cloak. The figure in front of her was an eerie imitation of Lynet, but the eyelashes were missing, the dress was the wrong shade of brown, and her fingers seemed to blur together. She’d also forgotten about the small cut on her cheek from where the glass in the chapel had nicked her. The image in her mind hadn’t been precise enough, so she concentrated again and again, making adjustments until she was looking down at her own body, clothed in her same brown dress with its fur lining. It was her exact image, except there was no heartbeat, no breath. She wondered if this was what her mother looked like at the moment of her death.
Lynet shivered. She knew what else she had to do to make Mina believe that Lynet had died on her own in the woods, and she wasn’t eager to see the result.
A broken neck from falling out of a tree, she thought, picturing it in her mind, and after the snow liquefied and solidified again, she stared at the body’s—at her—head, now lying at an odd angle, a reality that she had just barely avoided over and over.
Lynet slipped off her silver bracelet, her first gift from Mina, and placed it around the body’s wrist. She felt light, almost weightless, like a spirit leaving her weakened body behind. Lynet was dead, just like her mother, and the girl who would emerge was someone new, shedding her soft skin to become something cold and untouchable. She had almost forgotten that today was her birthday.
The first true birthday that I’ve ever had, she thought, slipping her new cloak around her shoulders. She lifted the hood to hide her hair and face, and she rose from the snow to begin her new life.
21
MINA
Mina waited for Felix to bring Lynet to her, but instead he brought her Lynet’s corpse.
She had been waiting outside the king’s bedchamber at dawn when Felix came to her, several hours after she had sent him and the glass soldiers into the woods.
Mina had been frightened then, struck cold by the thought that Lynet was waiting for her, full of hate for her stepmother now. She almost wished that Felix hadn’t found her at all.
Felix led her to the chapel, and Mina didn’t understand why Felix avoided her eye when he told her that Lynet was there, why he kept saying he was sorry.