Stealing Snow (30 page)

I couldn’t help but think about Cinderella, and if Fathom was my Fairy Godmother, I had no idea what to expect next.

There was a formal dining room in the Claret, complete with mismatched chairs, a ginormous stone tablet that served as a tabletop, and candelabras that lit themselves the second somebody sat down.

The Robber girls didn’t bother with formalities, maybe because of the upcoming heist or because they never stood on ceremony for anything other than magical rituals. There was no dinner bell or announcement. The girls just popped in to eat whenever they wanted.

Howl and I found ourselves at the table at the same time the next day. She informed me that tonight’s meal had come from one of the local restaurants in town. Even the Robbers’ food was borrowed.

I took a bite of purple pasta. It melted in my mouth with a delicate, sweet, almost chocolaty taste. The minty ale concoction I chased it down with came from the speakeasy we’d robbed.
I shoveled it all down, eager to get back to work and away from Howl.

As if on cue, Howl leaned back in her chair and asked, “How is she? Fathom won’t ask you. But I will.”

“Who?”

“Anthicate.”

“Magpie?”

I had not talked about her, and no one, not even Fathom, had asked me about her. I had spent the better part of two years at Whittaker with Magpie. Aside from whatever information Jagger had gathered about her during his visits, I was the sole possessor of the few details about what had happened to their runaway Robber.

“Magpie and I weren’t exactly friends,” I admitted.

Howl nodded as if that were no surprise to her. “She broke Fathom’s heart. She breaks everyone’s hearts.”

“So you’re not sad that I’m here and she’s not,” I said, knowing I had taken Magpie’s place in the Claret.

Howl smiled.

“I wouldn’t trade her for a million snow princesses. But she has her path and we have ours.”

I sensed Howl wanted their paths to cross again. But what she did next took me by surprise.

Howl produced a vial on a chain around her neck from her ample bosom and downed it. When she caught my gaze, she rooted around in her pocket for another vial and offered it to me.

“What does it do?” I asked, wondering if the liquid somehow took the edge off missing Magpie.

“Whatever you want it to do,” she answered.

I shook my head, and Howl studied my face as if trying to figure me out.

“If I told you a rainbow had ten more colors, would you want to see them?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“I only want to see what’s real,” I said. “I have had a lifetime of vials. Mine just came in pill form.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Howl said blissfully. The effects of the vial had kicked in, and she got up abruptly and left me alone with my purple pasta.

As I stood up to blow out the candles, a memory flooded back. I couldn’t stop it. I was looking at the candle on the stone table, but what I saw was a completely different one.

It was my birthday—a couple of months before I kissed Bale at Whittaker. I had had a birthday cupcake with Vern, and my mother had brought me an elaborate piece of cake with a perfect pink flower, which I crushed immediately with a plastic spoon. That night, I had woken up to find Bale sitting beside me in my bed.

How did he get out of his room?
But before I could ask, Bale put a finger to his lips, motioning me to keep quiet. I took the hint.

Bale handed me a donut. It was the middle of the night and—hands down—the best dessert of the day. He’d probably saved it from breakfast or talked his orderly into getting it for him. The donut had nearly brought me to tears. And I was not a crier, not even when I took the Grumpy pill.

“Wait!” Bale said.

I sat up in bed and inched closer to him.

“There’s more?” I asked, clapping my hands together, which was an uncharacteristically cheerful gesture for me. I was relieved only Bale saw it.

I expected Bale’s present to be a book. Bale liked books the way that I liked drawings. It was a travesty the day he would not be even allowed to hold a book because Dr. Harris thought it would end up as kindling.

“Close your eyes,” Bale commanded.

“Are you serious?”

“Just close them.”

I could hear movement, and when I opened my eyes I saw he had placed a candle in the donut. The flame flickered in the dark room.

No one was supposed to have candles at Whittaker. No one was supposed to have matches. And especially not Bale.

“Bale … put it out,” I pleaded. Fire was the reason he was here. Birthday or no birthday, he was tempting fate.

“I think it’s your move. You can’t have a birthday without making a wish.”

Bale wanted to give me a little bit of normal. A little bit of what every other kid had and we didn’t. A simple birthday wish.

“I already have my wish, Bale.”

He looked at the one window in my room, as if to say the obvious wish was for both of us to be on the other side of it. Free from Whittaker.

“Make a wish with me, Bale.” I gestured to him, giving him permission. I knew I would have to get the matches from him after I blew out the candle.

Bale leaned over on the bed … and then it happened.

My bedspread caught fire. Flames quickly edged along the bedspread’s hem, grazing the floor. I jumped to my feet.

But Bale did not move from his spot. It was as if Bale were paralyzed by the flame.

“Grab the water pitcher, Bale!” I yelled as I pulled the comforter onto the floor.

But Bale was frozen. The flames danced in his eyes for a second or two before he finally poured water over the fire, dousing it.

Bale began to apologize, but I cut him off and demanded he give me the matches. He passed them to me with a shaky hand.

“Snow, I didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” I said, palming the matches.

“You have to go back to your room, Bale,” I ordered. “The White Coats.”

“I won’t let you take the blame for this,” he said, sinking down onto the floor beside me and taking my hand.

We sat there together just like that until the White Coats came. It wasn’t a happy memory, exactly. But it was ours.

The memory done, I blew out the candles on the Claret’s dining room table. The heist was tomorrow. I still knew my wish.

And then the night of the heist was upon us. It was the night the Robber girls were going to rescue some of our own. I was supposed to infiltrate the Duchess’s Ball, find the mirror, and steal it. The whole thing sounded ridiculous and impossible.

Howl had outfitted me in another flying dress with feathers. The dress was the palest shade of pink, a color I normally would have run from because it made me think of my mother. But it was the most exquisite thing I’d ever seen. Its bodice had a deep V that managed to be sexy and demure at once.

Fathom had interrupted and given me a locator moth and a blade with a handle made of a burnished metal that looked a lot like the Enforcer’s armor. “I know you plan on fighting snow with snow.”

“I didn’t plan on fighting at all.”

“None of us do—except maybe Howl. But it doesn’t mean you don’t need to be prepared.”

She handed me the knife. The handle felt like the wrong end of a fire poker. I released it, dropping it to the ground.

“Ouch! Are you trying to hurt me?”

“I’m trying to protect you. I should have warned you. It’s going to hurt, but if you get in a bind…”

“I have my snow.”

“But there is another way to fight, Snow … Fire.”

She held the dagger out, and it glowed like Jagger’s cuff.

She reached into her saddlebag, which seemed to have an endless supply of whatever was needed and when.

She produced a garter with a holster and slipped the knife inside. She handed everything to me.

I took it grudgingly.

“Aren’t you Robbers supposed to be so good that it won’t come to this?”

“We’re good enough to know that someday it always comes to this. May that day not be today.”

She took the knife back and kissed the blade.

A Robber blessing. I was not comforted. But as I hitched up my skirt and slid the garter up my leg, the knife did not burn my skin through its holster. And I hoped that her blessing held through the night.

When she was gone, I looked at myself in the pond glass. Sometimes I was more in awe with the small magic than the big. Robber clothes were different from everyone else’s. They were not for the practical purpose of warmth or propriety. They were
for beauty and they were for magic. With enough magic, even their skirts could take flight.

I waited until the very last second to change my face in the mirror. Countess Darby’s face looked different on me. And it wasn’t just the contents of the smile vial that I was pretty sure Fathom had slipped into my water earlier.

I joined the others downstairs. But when my eyes met Jagger’s, neither one of us spoke of the dream he had invaded, and I still wasn’t sure what, if any of it, had been real. Jagger’s hair was short and cropped, and I wanted to run my fingers over the buzz.

“This time we’re taking the River,” he said as if trying to respect the distance I had put between us.

I thought about the River Witch. I wondered how things would have been different if I’d stayed with her—if I’d believed her from the start. What would she think if she could see me now?

Howl approached. She looked positively radiant in a modelesque face that had razor-sharp cheekbones. “Did you get it?”

“What?”

“The knife. Fathom put a double whammy on that blade. You don’t have to know how to fight. The blade knows what to do. This doesn’t mean we like you. But you have to be alive if you are going to bring home the mirror.”

I realized that the weapon had been her idea. I was half-unsure about taking a weapon from her that had a mind of its own. What if she and Fathom had spelled it to stab me in the heart?

Margot called us together for one last spell.

“It’s a oneness spell,” Jagger whispered. “When we are on a mission, we all take it so that we can act as one. We are all in one another’s heads.”

“What if there’s something that we don’t want other people to know?” I asked.

“We have no secrets in the Robber palace,” Howl said and leaned in beside me as we all took hands.

“Relax. There’s a trick to it.” Jagger took my hand in his.

There was a trick to everything at the Robber palace. And somehow Jagger always held the key or the lock pick.

“Another bottle?” I wondered out loud. I needed to learn quickly, or everyone would know my secret, which was no secret at all, really. That I wasn’t done with Jagger.

“No, just your will. The trick to the spell is that it only lets you tell the things that you really want to tell.”

“It binds us together so that the operation moves smoother,” Howl added.

I felt my stomach flutter as Jagger’s hand moved in mine.

Still, I could not back out now.

Margot chanted something, and we all followed suit.

My pronunciation was not as good as the others’, and I hoped the magic didn’t demand it. I hoped I didn’t ruin the spell.

“Sometimes the magic needs the words,” Queen Margot said, “because magic is something that has to be fed.”

To Margot, magic was something as alive as me or her or the roomful of Robbers.

Sometimes words could be a sacrifice, too, I guessed.

An hour later, we were in a boat on the River to the Duchess Temperly’s palace.

The boat glided along another passageway underneath the palace. The walls were muraled with drawings of the Snow King bringing eternal snow to Algid. His face couldn’t be seen, and the pictures made it look like the people were grateful for the snow.

I knew Margot believed that I would locate the mirror with my Snow Princess powers, but I wasn’t so sure.

“How will I find the mirror in the Duchess’s room?” I asked Jagger.

“You’ll know. You’ll feel it when you get there.”

“Won’t there be guards?”

“Yes, but they’ll be a little busy. With us,” Jagger said confidently. “The door to the dungeon may just happen to find its way open.”

There was a noise behind us. It felt as though someone were watching us. I reached for the knife that Fathom had given me.

“Take it easy, Princess. It’s just an invisibility spell.”

“Cadence,” I whispered in recognition. It was Cadence, the girl we had rescued from the club. She now was at full Robber girl glow. She wanted to help rescue the others.

“Invisibility spell?” I asked redundantly as Cadence disappeared back into the night.

Jagger nodded and shushed us as we pulled closer to the palace.

Focus.
I heard his voice in my head.

Focus.
There was an echo from all the rest.

Jagger had said that the palace being on the water had something to do with fortification. Spikes jutted out of its underbelly where the water met the palace, and our boat halted as if it knew it was a breath away from being impaled.

Jagger had used magic for navigation. He used magic for everything.

A thought, errant and wild, crept into my head.
What would he be like without magic? Would I like him?