“Fine,” Lynet said. “I’ll go with you for now.”
Nadia helped Lynet rise from the ground, and if she was pleased that Lynet had agreed to her offer, Lynet couldn’t tell. Nadia’s face was as stern and impassive as when she was working. They crossed the hall carefully, Nadia peering closely around corners to make sure they were alone, and went out another side door. They entered an older stone building beside the main one, and Nadia led Lynet up a flight of stairs and down a hall lined with doors until she stopped to unlock one of them.
Lynet followed Nadia inside a small stone room, bare except for a desk, a chair, and a narrow bed along the back wall beneath a low window. And when Nadia shut the door behind her, Lynet’s heart finally started to slow.
Nadia let out a sigh, her back against the door. Her hair was coming out of its braid, and she impatiently shook it out, letting the dark waves fall loose and free around her face. “Sit, and I’ll take care of your burn,” she said, gesturing to the bed.
Lynet perched stiffly on the edge of the bed, never taking her eyes off Nadia. She watched as Nadia opened a small chest beside her desk, inside which were two neat rows of jars. She selected one, and then, for one brief moment before she turned, Lynet saw Nadia’s shoulders sinking under some invisible weight, her face shadowed by some unknown sorrow.
But when she came to Lynet with the jar, she was the perfect surgeon again, methodical and untroubled. Nadia took the chair, moving it across from the bed, and reached for Lynet’s wounded palm.
“I’m sorry about your father,” she said softly.
Lynet didn’t respond, her throat tight.
“Would you tell me what happened up north? Why do people think you’re dead?” Nadia didn’t look up as she asked, her eyes focused on the angry, blistered skin of Lynet’s palm.
Lynet might have told her—Gregory already knew, after all—but she remained cautiously silent.
Nadia didn’t react to Lynet’s silence as she started to apply the green ointment to her palm. “Would you at least tell me what happened between you and Gregory? Why he’s looking for you?”
Again, silence.
This time Nadia shook her head a little, her mouth stretched into a pained smile. “No, of course you wouldn’t,” she muttered. “I’m the one who owes you explanations.” But she was quiet as she finished with the ointment, and Lynet tried not to notice the way Nadia’s eyelashes cast long shadows against her cheeks, or the way she still had grains of sand in her hair from when they’d tumbled to the ground. She tried not to care that the ointment was such a relief from the burn that she could now begin to enjoy the sensation of Nadia’s thumb rubbing small circles against her skin.
“Explain, then,” Lynet said, her voice thick.
Nadia released Lynet’s hand and looked her in the eye with the same fierce determination as when she’d amputated the servant’s foot. But what was she going to sever this time? What invisible thread existed between them that now was in danger of being cut?
“I told you before,” Nadia began, “that it was often difficult for me to find work after my parents died. Imagine how I felt when the queen’s father came to me and offered me a position at Whitespring. He was on his way south, passing through the village I was in, and he sought me out when he heard of the work I had done. Whitespring needed a surgeon, and he … he needed a spy.”
Lynet could tell she wanted to look away, her eyes continuously darting to the floor.
Nadia took a breath and forced herself to meet Lynet’s gaze. “It was so simple. All I had to do was keep close to you, tell you how you were made, and share with him what I’d learned about you. And before the year was out, if he was satisfied, he would give me passage south and a place at the university.”
Lynet’s heart beat in her ears, a bitter taste on her tongue. Her legs felt restless, and she stood, going toward the door even though she and Nadia both knew that she had nowhere else to go. Nadia turned in her chair but didn’t rise or try to stop her, not even when Lynet reached for the door handle, gripping the metal with her good hand until it hurt. Lynet turned, her back against the door giving her the illusion of escape, of freedom.
“And so every time we spoke,” she said, “everything I told you, or that you told me—it was all so you could tell him?” She thought of the night in the tower, of the strange connection that they had woven between them, as fragile and hidden as a cobweb, visible only at certain angles, in certain patches of light. Had those moments been dissected, recorded in letters to Gregory?
“No,” Nadia said firmly, and Lynet was sure she was answering the second question, the one Lynet hadn’t asked aloud. “I didn’t tell him everything. I was only supposed to tell you enough to make you want to seek Gregory out. The journals I gave you, the experiments we tried in the tower … all of those were against my orders.” She shook her head, her hands twisting her hair into a long rope as she looked away. “I wanted it so much—to go to the university where people would take me seriously so I could do my family’s work. I told myself you weren’t real, that you were just … a paper doll, an experiment, not even a real person. I told myself it didn’t matter.”
Lynet flinched at hearing Nadia voice all her worst fears. “And now?” The words came out as a croak. “Do you still see me that way?”
Nadia stood, looking at her in disbelief. “Lynet, I stopped seeing you like that the first time we met.” She walked slowly to the door, giving Lynet enough time to move away or tell her to stop, but Lynet didn’t move or say anything. When Nadia was standing in front of her, she reached tentatively for Lynet’s hand—the left one, the one with the faded scar from when she’d fallen from the tree. Nadia brushed her fingers against the scar now. “You made me laugh for the first time since my parents died,” she said quietly, keeping her eyes down.
Lynet let out a shaky breath. She wouldn’t cry, not in front of her.
“I lied to myself to make the job easier, but then when I told you about your creation, I saw how deeply it shocked you. I wanted to help you learn more. I wanted … I wanted to be around you. I couldn’t even write to Gregory anymore, not when you had become my friend.” She looked up from their hands to meet Lynet’s gaze, a fearful uncertainty in the depths of her eyes. “We were friends before, weren’t we?”
In Lynet’s mind, she had always seen Nadia as the fearless surgeon or the smiling girl, but this was something new, another part of her that Lynet had only seen in glimpses before. This was the girl whose parents had left her alone in the world, the one who had no letters or reminders of home in her bare room because she had no home.