“She’s one of us.”
“I didn’t know it was a rescue,” I said.
The Robbers worked so hard to pretend they didn’t care. But it seemed every time a Robber Rule was broken it was so they could help one another.
“This was a robbery, like any other. Lucky break that Howl hit that high note,” Jagger downplayed, but his voice was laced with a hint of a smile.
The take for the night was the girl they were carrying out in their arms.
The bouncer let us pass, not recognizing the girl and her new face.
29
“Are you going to tell me how I screwed up this time?” Jagger said after we were safely back at the Claret.
“Not this time,” I said cheerfully. I had passed the test. I had actually completed my mission. I was one step closer to going home. So why wasn’t I more ecstatic?
The Robber girls had poured out their wares on the floor of the common room like the one Halloween before I went to Whittaker.
Queen Margot had smiled and nodded, but then turned away and looked at the forest, which was lavender today. Her expression was a somber one. Cadence wasn’t enough. The Duchess’s mirror was what she wanted now. And the other two pieces of the King’s mirror. But to what end? I had told myself I didn’t need to know the story of the Robber girls, of Margot, but the more I knew them, the more I wanted to know.
The girls abandoned their magic treasure and tended to Cadence. Some took their vials and used them to restore her beauty. Others brought her food and clothing and whispered soothing words. Fathom inspected her like the scientist that she was. I looked away, feeling like I was spying on something private. Something that I was outside of.
“Is she going to be okay? What happened to her?” I asked Jagger.
“‘Okay’ is relative. Algid is not always kind,” he said vaguely.
Cadence’s color had returned. She didn’t have the same glow that the other girls had, but the sickly gray I’d seen under Dessa’s snow-globe strobe light was already gone.
“You killed it in there,” Jagger said brightly to me, raising his arms in a victory cheer.
Jagger’s shirt rose up, revealing something I hadn’t seen before. A long, jagged scar ran the length of his muscled torso. Was this the scar from my father?
“What happened to you? Why didn’t you tell me that King Lazar hurt you?” I demanded, changing the subject. But it was essentially the same one. They knew my story. I didn’t know theirs. I was a Robber in name only.
He opened his mouth to say something and hesitated.
“So help me, if you say Robber Rules, I will freeze you where you stand.”
Jagger’s voice was quiet but steady. “It’s mine, Snow. It may have been given to me by the King, but it’s mine to carry. And to talk about or not talk about.”
I took it in. He was right. He didn’t owe me his story because he knew mine. But it didn’t stop me from wanting to hear it.
“I liked freezing that guy. I saw what he was and I thought he deserved it. He scared those girls. I liked making him scared,” I blurted.
Jagger knew who I was, and I could actually tell him things that I could not say to Kai—or anyone else, really.
“I see what King Lazar did to you, and I want to scare him, too,” I said, meaning it.
Jagger hastily tucked his shirt in. I stopped him, wanting him to know that his scar wasn’t anything to be ashamed of or anything to cover up. Lazar was the one who should bear the shame. My hand was on the center of his chest. I had closed the gap between us.
“I want to scare him, too. For you,” he said.
He took a step closer and touched my scar with one hand, and he brushed my hair back with the other. He looked intently at me. So intently that I completely forgot about the scar and my father. I heard myself sharply inhale. All I wanted was to be with him.
“You still think that you kiss people and they go insane?”
“Something like that,” I countered. Bale wasn’t crazy because of me. But he was forever tied to me. He was kidnapped because of me. And on and on … I was danger. I was someone who could break things and people with a single touch.
“Maybe we should test it again…” Jagger leaned in toward me.
We were so close that I could feel the heat radiating from his body. All it would take was another inch for our lips to meet. When he closed his eyes, he looked so vulnerable. So beautiful. I remembered who I was and what my kiss could do. What I could do. I pulled away in time.
We had been inching toward the kiss since we’d met and I’d stopped our momentum. I felt an ache in my chest for what we had missed. For a second, Jagger’s face fell, too. But he recovered with a smile.
“So you like me enough not to turn my heart to ice? I’m touched,” Jagger joked.
“It’s not funny,” I said, feeling anger at my edges. I had not frozen Kai, but I could have. His joke had come a little too close to the truth.
“You are not crazy, Snow. You were just lied to. You are not evil. You have magic. It’s not a curse. It’s a gift. I may be a liar, but I know this much is true.” Jagger said the words like he was absolving me of my guilt and my fear—just by telling me the truth I think I’d been waiting to hear my entire life.
When he leaned in again, I was not sure I could resist him.
He kissed me on the cheek. It was as close as I could let him get to me. But he made it no secret that he wanted to be closer.
30
Our next mission was the important one: stealing the King’s mirror piece from the Duchess. I’d never met this cousin and had agreed to rob her anyway. Aside from the King, she was my only other family in this world. And unlike the King, she had never done anything to me.
What will Queen Margot do when I bring back the Duchess’s piece of the mirror? I wondered. It wasn’t worth anything without the other two pieces, according to the River Witch. I suspected she had a plan to get the other two pieces, but as long as it didn’t involve me, I didn’t really care. This was the last thing I needed to do before the Claret would help me free Bale and bring him home.
It was time. I found Margot in the Bottle Room.
She offered me a green vial. “It’s a new etiquette spell. It gives you instant manners. You’re going to need it where you’re going. The Duchess is royalty, and even though you are in name, well … Let’s just say you could use some help in that department.”
I shook my head. She wasn’t wrong about my manners. But there was no way I was taking that vial.
“This heist won’t work unless you do exactly what I ask when I ask it,” she said.
“This heist won’t work unless you tell me everything.”
I had spent so much time in the dark that I didn’t want to go into this mission blind. I needed to know everything that would happen … that could possibly happen.
“You are a Robber now. We will go over the plan at length with the others tonight, but please ask away.”
“What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I want you to help us get the mirror from the Duchess’s palace. It’s that simple. And that hard.”
“But who is she? Aside from my cousin.”
“She is very graceful. Her people love her.”
“And is she very evil?”
“From what I have heard, there is not an ounce of evil in the girl. Apparently, that trait skips a generation.” She laughed; I didn’t.
I wanted her to know I was serious. “If she’s not evil, then why would she keep the mirror for the King?”
“The Duchess is keeping it from the King. Not for him, we believe, but nobody really knows what her true motives are. This is a very dangerous thing since she lives by his mercy. The Duchess is your age, but in our land that is the marrying age. We are crashing the Penultimate Ball.”
“The Penultimate Ball?”
“It is the ball before the Last Ball. After this ball, the Duchess will have met every unmarried man in Al
gid. She must choose a husband, or her parents will be less than pleased.”
For the millionth time since I’d crossed the Tree, I realized that Algid was not like the fairy tales. My cousin, whoever she was, was being forced into her happily ever after.
“You will attend the ball. We will be with you every step of the way—except the last step, of course. You must find where she has hidden the mirror on your own. With a bit of luck, your magic will help you find it. Whatever happens, don’t get caught. We’ve already tried this once and failed.”
“You don’t know where she keeps it? What kind of heist is this?” I sighed. This sounded about as imprecise as the prophecy.
“Any more questions?”
“What will you do with the mirror, exactly?”
“The King’s mirror piece will give us enough power to move the Claret forever. We will be protected until the end of time.”
Margot raised her red eyebrows as if to ask if that were all.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You want me to break into my cousin’s house and rob her of her mirror piece. This mirror piece belonged to the King, my father, who’s trying to kill me. And the last time you tried to break in, your Robbers got caught …,” I recounted, realizing how completely insane this was. Knowing more had not exactly calmed my fears.
“Precisely,” she said with a smile.
All the mirrors in the Bottle Room frosted over at once as I felt the enormity of what we were attempting.
“Soon, you will be done with your part of the deal and then it is our turn. May I offer you some free advice?”
I shrugged.
“I can’t pretend to know what happened to you on the other side. And I can’t pretend to know how to wield snow. But I know from experience. From mine and my girls. And even Jagger’s. You don’t have to forgive, but you have to move on. Everyone here—we are moving on from something. Everyone here has chosen this place,” Margot said simply.
“Or they didn’t have anywhere else to go,” I countered.
“Sometimes, my dear, that is still a choice. You don’t have to embrace the Robber life. But embrace something. This entire land has been ravaged by what happened a long time ago, but we do not dwell; we live. Sometimes we have to steal our future. In my experience, it is never given freely. No one is handing it out. You and your Bale? You could have a place here at the Claret.”
“We are going back to New York,” I said firmly.
“Very well. You will be missed. By one Robber in particular more than most.”
“Thank you,” I said, surprised by her sentimentality. Perhaps all the daughter talk was getting to her.
“I wasn’t talking about myself,” she countered with a laugh.
And in a flash, I knew exactly who she was talking about. And the thought made me blush.
31
Thinking about doing something and actually doing it are two different things.
Kayla Blue had said that on The End of Almost when she was on trial for murdering her husband. But we weren’t just thinking about robbing the palace. We were actually doing it. As I stood in the Throne Room alongside my Robber sisters and Jagger, it finally felt real. And a lot more involved than our Dessa raid.
I looked down at the gilded table covered in architectural drawings of the Duchess’s castle. We all crowded around the table with Margot at the head.
Markings appeared all over the plans. There were circles where we were supposed to go. Margot moved the ink around by raising her hands. On closer inspection, I could see that there were beautifully drawn representations of each of us on the paper. As she spoke and instructed the group where to be and when, the drawings shifted as well. Mesmerized, I watched as the ink drawing of me moved from the ballroom up the stairs to the Duchess’s bedroom.
I couldn’t help but notice that there were more blue markings than ones of any other color. The Duchess’s guards would be everywhere.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a tower on the map.
“We have people in there,” Jagger explained.
I squinted and saw drawings of tiny Robber girls behind the barred window of the tower. I reached out and touched the window, feeling for the Robber girls stuck there. A tiny room with no way out.
Jagger caught my eye with a small smile, bucking me up and reminding me of the no-sentimentality Robber Rule.
“We may as well get them out while we’re there,” Margot said leisurely. And a murmur of assent went around the table.
“I thought you weren’t in the business of saving people? First Cadence and now them? Robber Rules …,” I challenged.
How much is Robber bravado, and how much is true? I wondered, looking around this place where everyone claimed to be out for themselves. At the end of the day, it seemed like they wanted to help one another. They just didn’t want to admit it.
“Princess, you will go with Jagger in disguise into the palace and mingle with the guests. The rest of the Robbers will be there in disguise, as well. Jagger will keep the Duchess entertained, and you will sneak upstairs, find and open the vault, and get the mirror.”
Snow formed between my fingers at the thought of putting my hand in the lock again.
“How will I find it?”
“The prophecy says it will reveal itself to you. But I am guessing it will be in the Duchess’s quarters. People keep their treasures close.
“Then we will double back with the Robbers after you return to the ballroom and find Jagger.”
I must not have nodded vigorously enough because Howl was taunting me again.
“Maybe the Princess has a problem robbing her family?” Howl asked.
“Why would it be a problem? She’s a stranger. I don’t know her from the Fire Witch.”
A laugh went up, and we went back to planning. The other Robbers seemed to accept this.
I followed up with a question. “I still don’t understand how the Duchess got a piece of the King’s mirror in the first place. Why would one of the coven give it to a regular human?”
“The way of the witch is the exception to every rule, I’m afraid. Unpredictable as snow itself. We don’t know how or why. We only know the mirror is at the Duchess’s because we stumbled upon it when we were robbing the place a few months ago.”
Margot said, “Hence the prisoners … who you may as well save. The mirror has an effect on all magic. And ours went a little haywire that night.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Robbers have a lot in common with heroes.”
“Then you don’t know us, either!” screamed Howl.
32
Even though Margot and the Robber girls had a plan, they were leaving nothing to chance. Howl took charge of the coins we’d taken from Dessa. What was more interesting was the fact that she was adding magic to the coins—though she wouldn’t say what for.
Meanwhile, the other Robber girls were busy trying out new potions of their own. There was a magic bottle to make you smarter and one that made you remind the mark of their favorite thing—anything from a tea biscuit to a field of flowers to a pile of gold bars.
When I wasn’t working on my robbing skills, I’d sneak away from the Claret and work on my snow. This time, I had managed to channel my power into making ice arrows.
“Snow,” Fathom called. “Look at this.”
“Please don’t tell Margot. She wants me to suppress it. But I need to figure it out.”
“I won’t tell. It’s amazing. Almost as amazing as what I have to show you.”
She showed me a little bottle of snow and a vial containing blood.
I guessed it was mine.
The snow was moving around.
“Tell me that isn’t part of a Snow Beast,” I said.
“No, it’s a mini Snow Puppy.”
A second later the Snow Puppy formed. It was kind of adorable except for the giant claws and teeth.
“Now watch this.”
Fathom took a drop
of blood and dripped it into the bottle. At first, the Snow Puppy repelled, moving upward. But a second later, it attacked the drop of blood. The Snow Puppy slammed itself against the glass sides of the bottle and then exploded into a flurry of flakes.
“Um, how does this help us? I already know that Snow Beasts are never going to be my BFFs.”
Fathom looked at me blankly.
“Best friends forever?” I said.
“I think you can freeze Snow Beasts—their hearts and limbs and brains. Your power, once you unlock it, is limitless.”
“Well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“It would. It could help us defeat the King.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I think I’m on to something.”
We began to walk back to the Claret. The world went black again.
I could suddenly see myself in the common room at Whittaker. It was Bale’s point of view again.
“Maybe in the spring,” I said.
I knew immediately what memory this was. Bale had asked me if we could run away. And I had said, “Maybe in the spring.”
He had stood by me every time I had done something awful at the institute, without blinking an eye. But the one time he had asked me for something, I had said those words.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. It was that I didn’t know what our monsters would do outside their cages. I thought Bale would burn something down. I thought I would do something equally awful. But we were out now. Just like Bale wanted. Only we couldn’t be farther apart. And Algid wasn’t burning. And my monster, my snow, had taken a whole other form than either of us could imagine.
There was another flash, and I saw Bale’s little white house again. This time from the outside. I glimpsed a reflection of teenage Bale in the glass windows staring back at me. Not afraid, smiling with a kind of mad glee.
Another flash. And it was the triangular room. Through the window, I saw the North Lights, which looked almost gray. This time he was quiet. He didn’t say my name. He didn’t say anything at all.