Several of the soldiers waited in the chapel, standing around the central altar. With a flick of his hand, Felix waved them aside, and he gently led Mina forward. And only then did Mina see that this was Lynet’s corpse, and Lynet was dead.
Even as she bent forward to inspect the corpse, she still thought it was all some kind of trick, or that she had been mistaken, and she would see the faint movement of Lynet’s chest signaling that she was alive, but unconscious. But her chest remained still, and for the first time, Lynet’s heartbeat matched Mina’s own.
Her neck was broken, and there was still a small cut on her cheek from where Mina had accidentally wounded her with the glass. No, Mina told herself, none of this was an accident. Lynet must have fallen, probably from a tree where she’d been hiding—hiding from Felix and the soldiers. Every piece of Lynet’s death came together, like a hundred tiny shards of glass, and together they formed a mirror that showed Mina her own face, her own guilt.
Mina stumbled, and Felix took her by the arm, helping her stay upright. “Did anyone see you bring her here?” she asked, her voice a thin rasp.
“No,” he said. “No one knows but you.”
But they would all know eventually. The princess’s death, so soon after the king’s accident. Would anyone believe that Lynet had met a natural end? Or would they all assume that she had taken her own life, fearing for her father’s? Some terrible part of her whispered that she could use that assumption to her advantage, if she needed to shift suspicion away from herself.
Hands trembling, Mina gently laid her hand on Lynet’s cheek. Her skin was as cold as it had ever been, her face just as pristine and beautiful. And yet the corpse was a pale imitation of the living girl; it was only a facsimile of beauty without the animation of Lynet’s face, without the spirit behind her eyes. Wasn’t that what Mina had secretly wanted—to strip Lynet of her beauty, to be the only woman worth looking at, worth loving?
She was glad now that she had told the young surgeon to leave Whitespring instead of inflicting some harsher punishment. She was glad there was someone else in this world who would carry the memory of Lynet’s eyes, her smile, the way she was always dashing down the halls instead of walking. Nicholas had his own memory of Lynet, and the courtiers would remember a princess who looked like her mother. But if that young woman had been Lynet’s friend, then she might have been the only person other than Mina to know Lynet as she was, not as she appeared.
Felix’s hands gently came around her, trying to lead her away. “No,” she said. “Not yet.” She slipped the silver bracelet off Lynet’s wrist. She would keep it on her bedside table, beside the empty mirror frame that had once belonged to her mother. A collection of things she had lost, she supposed, or of people she had driven away.
“Take her to the crypt,” she ordered, though it felt wrong. Lynet had always been so scared of the crypt, so certain that she would end up there beside her mother, both of them identical in death as in life. Now her fear had come true. “Try not to let anyone see you. I don’t want the king to hear about this before I tell him myself.”
Felix led the others away, and Mina took a breath before returning to the king’s rooms. She wondered if this news would kill him.
He was lucid when she sat at his bedside, though his skin had taken on a sickly gray tint. His first words were, “How is Lynet?”
Mina kept her face still. “Why do you ask that?”
He stared up at the canopy above his bed, eyes wide and unseeing. “I think I dreamt of her. I think … I think she was saying good-bye.” He closed his eyes, his face screwed up in pain. “I can’t tell anymore, I can’t tell who … which one of them I saw.…”
“Nicholas…”
“I keep hearing her voice in my head, telling me terrible things, the same things you told me—that she never cared about her mother, that she’s been unhappy—but I can’t remember if any of it is real.” He reached for her hand, and Mina took it in surprise. “Tell me, Mina, tell me—she was happy, wasn’t she? We were happy together.”
Mina didn’t know if he meant Lynet or Emilia, and she wasn’t sure if Nicholas knew, either, or if they had come together to form one beautiful dead woman, far from his reach. He’d love me, too, if I were dead, Mina thought. For all the bitterness that lay between them, she knew that if she died on the spot, he would weep for her. He would mold her memory into a wife he could love, and he would worship her dead body just as he had shunned the living one. He loves nothing so much as his own grief.
“Nicholas, you have to listen to me. I have to tell you something.”
“She said good-bye.… Why did she say good-bye? Where did she go?”
Mina had the curious feeling that she wasn’t in her own body, that she was watching from somewhere else, and she clasped his hand more tightly, willing herself to come back and finish what she had started. “She’s dead, Nicholas. Lynet is dead.”
He released her hand at once, staring at her in disgust. “Do you hate me so much?”
“I don’t hate you, Nicholas, I never have. It’s always been you who hated me.”
Nicholas shook his head. “I never hated you. But I can’t love you, and I think you’ll never forgive me for that. That’s why you’re lying to me now.”
Mina sighed, wishing she had just waited for him to die rather than ever tell him. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m lying. Lynet is in her room.”
“Get her for me,” he said, his eyes fluttering closed.
“I will,” Mina said. “You’ll see her soon. You’ll see them both soon.”
He murmured something under his breath, something that sounded like, “She said good-bye,” and tears began to flow from beneath his eyelids.
“Nicholas?” Mina whispered, a hint of panic in her voice.
But before she could say more, he was gone.
*
Mina stood alone in the chapel, staring at the jagged pieces of glass in the empty window frames. She shouldn’t have come back. The room reminded her of Lynet—something Mina had known would happen when she first brought Lynet here. She had been strangely nervous that time. Maybe she’d just been afraid that Lynet would see her too clearly, see the angry, homesick girl that she had been.
Mina’s fears had been unwarranted. Lynet had understood. Lynet had thanked her for sharing this piece of herself, and if she had seen some past vision of Mina here, she had not judged her too harshly.
Mina fell to her knees in front of the altars, her ragged breathing the only sound. Broken glass dug into her knees through her thick skirts, but she barely felt the pain.
Mina heard the door open behind her, but she kept her head down.
“I thought you’d be here,” Felix said, kneeling at her side.
“Leave me.”
He gently cupped her face in his hands, lifting her head to look at him. “Ask me again, and I will.”
She didn’t answer, so he leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers.
“The king is dead,” she told him.