Stealing Snow (33 page)

“Look, I’m sorry, okay. I made a wrong turn and ended up in here. I don’t mean any harm. I was just heading back to the ball,” I lied and moved to walk past her.

She nodded, and one of the guards stepped in my way.

The memory of her laughing at Gerde flooded back to me. If the Duchess didn’t believe my story, some part of me wanted to freeze every last one of them.

The clock struck midnight.

I blurted a curse as my face changed back to normal, but at the time normal was the last thing I felt.

The Duchess breathed in sharply, and the color drained from her rosy cheeks.

She turned to the guards and ordered them out. “Leave us!”

The lead guard hesitated, not wanting to leave his mistress unprotected.

Did he recognize me? Did she?

The Duchess gave him another stern look, and he and the others marched out the door.

We stared silently at each other for a long moment. And then the Duchess spoke.

“Well, Snow. Long time, no see.”

I could hear the voices of my crew abandoning me, not on purpose, but because they had no choice.

She’s caught!

They know we’re here.

Where’s Snow?
Jagger pleaded.

Where is she?
Fathom echoed.

I won’t leave without her.

We’re surrounded.

Get on the boat, Jagger.

No!
Jagger protested.

You’ll thank me later
, Fathom’s voice said.

Fathom, you hit him too hard
, Howl said.

Princess …
Jagger drifted off.

And then there was silence.

They were gone.

I looked at my cousin, the Duchess. I could be her guest, or I could be her prisoner, or I could start a storm and make a path back to the Robbers.

“I know that you came with Robbers, and I know what you came for.”

“Then why did you send the guards away?” I asked. There was no point lying now.

“Because we’re family. We’re blood. And that means something to me. We have so much catching up to do. But first, you must return the mirror,” she finished, holding out her hand.

My heart stopped. The entire time we were talking, the Duchess knew I had stolen her mirror. My instinct was to freeze her, to freeze the guards that were probably still waiting outside the room. I raised my hand, feeling the frosty ice fill my veins. But something was holding me back. This was wrong. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—use my snow. The Duchess hadn’t done anything to me. I struggled indecisively while she tapped her foot against the rug expectantly.

“Why don’t we do this, Snow?” the Duchess suggested. “Give
me my mirror, and I will tell you what it means, why I have it, and why you cannot. Everything in Algid depends on it.”

The opportunity to learn more about this cursed prophecy was too much for me to turn my back on. Reluctantly I drew the mirror from the folds of my dress and began to hand it to her. Something stopped me, though: the image of her in the ballroom with her gift. I didn’t know what kind of person I was handing the mirror over to—no matter what answers she promised.

“Back in the ballroom, you seemed very appreciative of Lazar’s gift. How do I know that you aren’t saying all this for him? That you won’t let him kill me?”

“You don’t. Sometimes trust is a choice.”

“Funny, I thought it was earned.”

“Besides, you’re the Snow Princess, right? If you don’t like what you hear, you can just freeze me and take off with the mirror.”

Her blunt logic made a certain amount of sense.

I opened my palm. She grabbed the mirror and turned it over in her hands with a kind of reverence.

She opened the lid of the compact and said, “Watch and learn.”

The Duchess leaned in and blew on the glass. It liquefied, slinking up and away from her, forming a giant mirror as tall as me. The edges were shaped like a puzzle piece. This was still only one third of the whole. I’d already heard about the mirror from the River Witch and from Jagger.

The Duchess and I were both reflected in the glass.

Then it was my turn to inhale sharply.

Her mask was gone. In the mirror, the Duchess looked exactly like me.

“I don’t understand. It’s a trick,” I said.

“It’s the truth. The mirror tells the truth, among its other qualities,” she said simply, as if this were an everyday occurrence.

She pulled off her mask with effort. The edges of the lace were tiny tentacles that seemed to want to hold on. The mask was a living thing, or at least a magical one.

The Duchess had my face. The same eyes. The same nose. The same lips. It couldn’t be, but it was.

“What the hell!” I said out loud as she dropped her mask to the floor.

And then she said the one part of the story that was the only explanation.

“We’re sisters.”

The Duchess was my twin.

“Call me Temperly. I never expected you to show up at my ball. And with a band of Robbers, no less. It was so clever of you to find friends who are not allied with the King. That is no easy feat in Algid. And I hear that they are a dangerous lot. Do they really steal faces?” Temperly said.

I suppose she could tell that I was still reeling, or perhaps it was just royal etiquette to fill the silence. The Duchess was my sister. She may have been surprised by the company I kept, but I was no surprise to her. She knew about me.

Her cadence, her manner of speech, was different from mine. More formal. Less likely to start a string of expletives at any moment.

“I never expected you. Period,” I countered, finally finding my voice.

Maybe it was a trick. Maybe it was like the faces Fathom stole. It was magic. But something in my gut told me that it was
true. The spell had undone my disguise, and the mirror had shown her real face. It just happened to be mine, as well.

“How is this possible?” I demanded.

Her face fell. “I grew up knowing all about you, of course. You were a bedtime story, a cautionary tale. You were everything I ever heard about, and you didn’t even know I existed. But then, no one does,” she said almost bitterly.

“There were two babies. Only our mother knows about me. And the witches. And now you. When I was born, she secretly gave me to one of the witches. The witch thought she’d chosen well. A good family at the edge of Algid raised me as their own. Our father can never know about me, either, even though I am the one without an ounce of snow,” she explained.

My eyes began to water. I realized I hadn’t blinked since the second she took off her mask.

My mom had saved both of us. But she had not taken my sister with us. Did she think this was safer? If
I
was having trouble with our mother’s choices, I could not even begin to imagine how Temperly had lived with this for all these years. I had been locked up. But she had been left behind.

My heart clenched. Another impossible thing piled upon all the rest and threatened to topple me. But I centered myself and stared into my sister’s face, trying to find something about hers to differentiate it from my own.

“Is that why you hide your face and pretend to be someone else?”

“Yes. Because of the prophecy. One glimpse and the King would know who I really was.”

“This is mind-blowing,” I said. “How did you end up a duchess?”

“I never imagined he would take such an interest in me. I am sure our mother never planned for this. The witch didn’t think twice about putting me with a family that was distantly related to the King. So many people are. But as the years waned, the King had gotten rid of so many of his relatives, including the Duke and Duchess who had adopted me. In a twisted bit of fate, it turns out that the Duchess that he thinks I am is the last of his line.”

“And the King … in all this time, has never seen your face?”

The man I had heard about would get curious at least once in all these years. I was shocked he never saw who she really was.

“The King has no room for me in his thoughts. He has his Snow. He has the memory of our mother. Those are the only two things he cares about in this world or the next.”

She blinked at me with wide eyes. This moment was less strange for her because she had always known about me. She had been waiting for this day. For me.

“When I was little, I used to dream that you would come and switch places with me…”

“And you would go live a glamorous life beyond the Tree? You didn’t miss much. I was in an insane asylum.” I finished her thought, my voice dripping in sarcasm.

“I dreamed I would go there and you would come here, and you would kill our father,” she continued without missing a beat.

Sarcasm she did not know. But bloodlust was a different story.

“Do you know what it is like to be the only one in our family without power?”

But that wasn’t the only thing Temperly was without. She was without love. I didn’t know what Mom was to me, really. She’d kept so many horrible secrets, but in her own way she’d done it to protect me all along.

“How can you be sure the prophecy is about me? Why not you?” I asked, studying her.

My tone was wrong. It was almost hopeful. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if this whole thing was some kind of mistake. If the burden of this place, of this prophecy, belonged to someone other than me.

She held out her hands and shook them futilely. She had no snow.

“It’s not about me. It’s always been you.”

She believed in the story and the prophecy that had done all of this to us. What if it wasn’t true? What if we were all playing parts of a fiction? All these lives ruined. Maybe if we didn’t believe in the story and instead just believed in one another, things would be so very different.

Temperly continued, “I have had to spend my whole life like this … waiting for you and the Eclipse of the Lights.”

I thought of Whittaker and then looked at her beautiful room. My eyes stuck on a mint wrapped in silvery paper on her silk pillow. At least her prison was gilded and opulent and had every comfort imaginable. She had chocolates, and I had the seven dwarfs, a pill for every emotion. I bet she had a dress for every one, instead.

“Yeah, it looks so horrible. Getting dressed up in couture every night, dancing with the Kingdom’s most eligible, starring in your own version of
Princess Bachelorette…
”

I remembered her dancing in Kai’s arms. I blushed with sudden jealousy. Kai wasn’t the point, I told myself.

Temperly blinked hard, perhaps unused to anyone contradicting her.

“I used to get drugged up on a daily basis, and I was literally locked in a room every night,” I added.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said, looking at me. “We both had our prisons.”

But mine wasn’t as bad as hers in a way. I’d had Bale. And in a way, I’d had Mom. Even though I never really appreciated her until I got here.

“But no one is telling you who to love,” she said quietly. This was her cross to bear. The thing that defined her life. The thing that made her beautiful life not so beautiful.

“Your options are pretty dreamy. That guy you were dancing with …,” I silver-lininged. Even I felt a pang of understanding now. I could not have survived Whittaker without Bale. How did she survive Algid without anyone?

“Which one?” she asked, half-annoyed, half-interested.

It was a good question. She’d been dancing with Jagger, too. But it was Kai that came to mind first.

“No matter. I can’t love any of them …,” she rolled on. Her eyes cast down to the gray carpeting as if it had suddenly gotten interesting.

“I don’t understand.”

“I love someone else. Someone the King and people would never approve of.” I rocked back on my heels. The Duchess had layers and secrets. I’d let the gown and the manners fool me. She was more than she appeared.

“Who?” I asked.

“When I was very young, I met someone from another land. We fell instantly and madly in love—only he was taken by the King’s men.”

“The Enforcer?” I asked, shuddering just thinking about him and our first encounter.

Oblivious, the Duchess perked up at the mention of his name. “The King’s right hand? I hope my love never meets him. According to legend, he might not even be a man at all. He might just be an invention of the King. Maybe just a suit of armor filled with animated snow. Regardless, the King is said to be able to see through the Enforcer’s eyes just like he can see through the Shells.”

“Shells?”

“When Lazar gets inside your brain for long enough, legend has it that he can wipe it clean. The result are Shells. I’ve never seen them, but they’re supposed to roam the forest.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I have seen him do incredible things with his snow. Impos-sible things … and I think I’ve felt him trying to glimpse my thoughts. But perhaps it’s just my imagination. The more you see of evil, the more evil seems limitless. I guess the same goes for good, but I haven’t seen as much of that.”

I nodded.

“Do you know … are you … sure that your love … that he’s still…”

Alive
, I thought but couldn’t say out loud. I’d seen what the Enforcer could do.

Her eyes went wide at the thought of the Enforcer hurting her love, or worse.

“I have sources in the King’s palace. My beloved hasn’t had an easy time of it. But he’s surviving.”

“I am so sorry, Temperly,” I said, meaning it.

Suddenly we had so much more in common than I had ever thought possible.

“So you’re going to keep doing this to buy time while you find a way for him to escape?”

She looked away from me again. I wasn’t sure if it was too painful for her to talk about or if there was something else she wasn’t telling me.

“I don’t know how to get him out. There are no efforts except hope. The people of this land depend on me to keep the royal bloodline going. The King and I have a peace. But the people are growing restless. They want a wedding and perhaps a baby to pin their affections to.”

“So how long do you plan on holding them off?”

“Forever if I must,” she said with a sigh. The weight of what she’d been carrying finally seemed to press on her more as she spoke about it. As if the act of telling me had brought all her pain to the surface.