For a moment, Mina forgot that she was pretending not to care, drawn in by her father’s faltering words, his altered appearance. She had never seen her father look so vulnerable, so uncertain, and she wondered if the change in him was more than physical. Shyly, she reached out to lay a hand on his arm. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Gregory looked down at her hand and then brushed it away like it was a piece of dirt on his sleeve. “You’ve never pretended to care before, Mina. There’s no need to start now.”
Mina flinched and crossed her arms, trying to keep herself from storming out. She didn’t want to give her father the satisfaction of driving her away.
“And now what?” Mina snapped. “You said this would change things for us.”
His eyebrows went up in mock surprise. “You don’t think I would perform such a feat without a price, do you? In exchange for saving his daughter, the king has invited us to live at court.”
“At Whitespring?”
“A fresh start for us both.”
“But it’s so … so…” Cold, she was thinking. Mina was used to the bright days and warm nights of the South. Whitespring was so named because even in the spring, the ground was white with snow. How could she ever belong in such a place?
“It’s better than living like outcasts.”
Mina wrung her hands, trying to think of a way to persuade him without having to beg. Summoning as much authority as she could, she dropped her arms to her sides, stood tall, and said, “Go without me, then. I’ll take care of things here. You don’t need me.”
He released the table and stepped closer to her. “Oh, but I do need you. I need that face of yours.” He took her face in one hand, his fingers pressing into her jaw. “You’ll marry someone highborn, and my place—our place—will be secure even if the king forgets his debt to me.”
Mina tried to push his arm away and free herself from his rough grip, but even in his weakened state, he was stronger than she was. He waited until she’d given up before finally letting go.
“If you need me,” she said, rubbing her jaw, “then you should try to be more persuasive. I don’t owe you anything.”
His face twisted in anger, but then he laughed. “You don’t owe me anything? No, Mina, you owe me everything. You owe me your life. And not just because I’m your father.”
Mina wanted to turn away, but there was nowhere safe to look. The whole room was full of him. “Fine,” she said. “Tell me what I owe you, exactly. If you’re convincing enough, maybe I’ll change my mind.”
He nodded, wearing the arrogant smile of a man who knew he was about to win. “All right, if that’s the game you want to play.” Gregory grabbed her wrist, and Mina, resenting the feel of his fingers digging into her skin, but knowing from experience that she couldn’t break his grip, allowed him to drag her over to the table. He took a small pouch from his pocket and poured its contents—a handful of sand—out onto the table.
“Watch carefully,” he said, sifting through the sand.
To Mina’s astonishment, the sand started to move, to shift even without his touch, and then it wasn’t sand anymore but a small gray mouse, bouncing off the sides of his cupped hands. She gasped, berating herself for it when she heard him laugh. She’d heard the same whispers that the king had, that the magician Gregory had the power to create life, but she’d never seen her father demonstrate his otherworldly power. He played the part of magician for the villagers with his potions, but he kept his real magic in his laboratory, for himself alone.
Gregory was grimacing, his jaw tense as if with pain, but then he recovered. “It’s alchemy in its purest form,” he said, “transforming one thing into another without any intermediary. I was born with the power to take any inanimate substance and transform it into something organic … but only to some extent. This mouse is no true mouse. It is, in its essence, still sand. It will not grow or age or die. It’s not even truly alive.” To prove his point, he balled his hands into fists, and the tiny, squeaking mouse abruptly disintegrated, once again a pile of sand.
Mina nearly gasped a second time, but though her jaw hung open, she made no sound. Her eyes saw a pile of sand, but her mind transformed it into a pile of bones and meat. It was both grave and corpse in one.
With a careless gesture, Gregory swept the sand back into the pouch. “It’s like a mechanical doll, do you see? If you wind it up, it resembles life, but it is only a resemblance. In order to make it a real, living mouse, I would need to add my blood—the source of my magic.” A weary note crept into his voice. “It … has taken me many years and many attempts to figure that out.”
“What’s the point of all this?” Mina rasped, her throat dry. She kept thinking of the shelves around her, of the misshapen creations in their jars.
“Ah yes. This was only a prologue to the story I want to tell you. When you were a child, no more than four years old, you fell deathly ill. Your mother wept, for there was no one who could help you. Your heart was damaged, likely since birth, and all we could do was wait for it to stop altogether. And one day, it did. Your mother was frantic, almost furious, in her grief, and I hated to see her in such a state.”
Mina couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at that, especially since Gregory’s lip curled slightly at the mention of her mother. Gregory paused, glaring coldly at her, and Mina couldn’t stop herself from taking a step back away from him.
“I know what you’re thinking, but I did love your mother once. I wanted her to be happy. And so I brought you here, to this room. I laid you down here, on this table. And then I opened up your chest, took out your useless heart, and replaced it with a new one, made from glass.”
Mina almost laughed at him. Was he trying to frighten her? True, she’d been sickly as a child—Hana had told her that—but this was the first she’d heard of glass hearts. She made no effort to hide her skepticism, but Gregory was undeterred. He placed one hand on her chest and said, “Don’t you have a scar, right here? Haven’t you ever wondered why you don’t have a heartbeat?”
This time, Mina did laugh. “I may have a scar, but I also have a heartbeat. I wouldn’t be alive, otherwise.”
“Have you ever heard it? Felt it?”
“Of course not. It’s too quiet for me to hear.”
“Give me your hand,” he said, but he grabbed her hand before she could give it and held her palm to his chest.
Mina instantly started to take her hand back, but she stopped when she felt something peculiar under her palm: a faint, rhythmic pounding. She pulled away in shock. “What is that? What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s not me, my sweet. Put your hand to anyone’s chest or wrist or throat, and you’ll feel the same steady pulse.”
Mina put her hand on her own chest, waiting for something she’d never felt before.
“Don’t bother. You won’t find it, because you don’t have one. Remember what I told you about my blood? When you were sick, I didn’t yet know how to create something more genuine than that sand mouse.”