Snow (17 page)

One old man, hunched over sorting a pile of bones, stuck one in his mouth and sucked at it, hoping for marrow. Snow had to work hard not to gag.

Everyone was thin and listless. The work was silent except for scrapes and grinding, and occasional groans.

“The powder is sent to factories.” Cat hissed in disgust, as if she thought this an inappropriate use of bones.

“They separate families,” Raven whispered. “When a poor family comes in, the old people and wives come here, the men go to a different section, and the children go to yet another. They’re not allowed to see one another.”

Snow felt weak, but she couldn’t turn her eyes away.

“This isss what the rich do with the poor,” Cat pointed out, smug and disgusted.

“They figure if you have no work that its your own fault,” Raven said, “that you must be lazy, or immoral.”

“So you ssee, it is
hard
to ssympathize with the rich.”

Snow felt as weak as the people in the poorhouse looked. The smell of burning bones made her feel faint, but it did not dampen her anger.

“So what do you do about it?” she demanded. “You just steal and that’s all right, because the people you steal from are terrible? Do you ever do anything to help
these
people?”

“Sometimes I leave something in the charity box,” Raven shrugged, a little abashed.

Cat hissed. “Would
they
do anything for
me
?” she asked peevishly.

Snow just glared at Cat. She had to control the urge to slap her.

The other girl must have realized this, and for once looked a little surprised, and unnerved. Maybe it was the fact that Snow was more than a head taller than she was, or maybe it was just the force of her emotion.
I’ll bet she thought I was a milksop
.

Cat looked down at her hand, the watch still clutched in it. She growled, then pitched herself through the window, landing silently on her paws and toes. Raven and Snow watched as she scampered through the shadows to the old man who had been sucking a bone. She made a little noise and the man turned around, surprised and scared. Cat held up the
watch, but he didn’t react. She waved her hand in front of his face; he didn’t follow it. He was blind. She took his hand—he flinched but made no noise—and wrapped it around the watch, pushing it to his chest. Then she scampered away again, back up to the window.

The old man waited a minute, listening by instinct to see if anyone noticed. Then, with a growing smile, he held it to his ear and listened to the tick-tocks.

“Someone will just take it from him,” Cat hissed in disgust.

Snow realized that if she said anything Cat would just dismiss it, or ignore it, so she said nothing, letting the gravity of the act speak for itself.

Their trip back to the hideout was slower, each of the three lost in his or her own thoughts. Snow observed that even when they strolled, the two Lonely Ones had ways of making themselves unnoticeable.

They paused once to look in a wealthy mansion, partly for a comparison of opposites and partly because Snow was genuinely interested in how city gentry lived. The house they chose to peek in had its own tiny ballroom that had gilt ceilings and was tiled with silver mirrors from the previous century. The people who owned it were still asleep, but the maids and servants were already up preparing for the day. They wore uniforms that matched, all of them. Snow loved the dumbwaiter, the tiny hand-cranked elevator
that allowed them to move silver-domed meals and less-fascinating stuff like laundry from floor to floor. There was a library with a small fire and thousands of books. Snow wondered what it would have been like to live there for a season, if she had a debut.

But as much as the wealth intrigued and distracted her, she was much more affected by the prosaic sounds of clinking glassware as it was being washed, and the low, whispered laughs of the help. She felt a pang of homesickness.

I wonder if Gwen or Dolly think about me.

Finally they left and wandered back home.

Snow was quiet the entire way, though her shoes rang louder against the pavement than theirs. In the living room she distractedly took off her cloak, staring into space, thinking of all the things she had seen.

“Are you all right?” Raven asked.

“Yes, I—” she shook her head. “It’s just—the city is so
extreme
. Such wealth and poverty—and—” She didn’t even know what to make of the brothels. “It’s just a lot to think about.” She smiled wanly.

“The roof is a good place for thinking. I mean, about things like that. It’s where I always go. Would you like me to show you?”

She was exhausted and not a little bit sad, but he looked so eager, biting his lower lip, his brown eyes hopeful.

“Sure,” she answered. “I’d like that.”

They went into his and Sparrows room. Hidden in the back was a rickety wooden ladder that led up
to an unused closet on the second floor. From there they walked through a narrow tunnel between the inside walls of the house. It fed into a crawl space that led up to the roof at a fairly steep angle, probably beside a gable.

How many other hiding places are there like this in London? How many people are there like the Lonely Ones, living shadow lives of the people who really live there?
She thought about her life piggybacking on someone else’s life and wondered if anyone strange inhabited the walls of Kenigh Hall.

Finally they emerged in a dusty unused attic, which might have frightened Snow if she were alone, not so much from the eerie silence and cobwebs as the cracks in the plaster and the few safe planks to walk on without falling through to the floor below Raven opened a window in the second-to-last gable and crawled out to the ledge, turning back to offer her a hand. Heights did scare her a little, but the space on which to walk was wide, and soon they were scrambling up the slate roof to sit on top of the gable, which somehow felt safer.

Snow gasped at the view.

They could see all of London just waking up. The streets had felt mostly flat when they ran along them, but from up there she could see slight hills and tiny valleys, houses descending one street and climbing up another. They looked jam-packed; she would not have believed there were any alleys between them if she hadn’t been there herself. Chimneys rose
crookedly up in all directions like a field of strange, sick plants. Smoke drifted from them and joined the morning fog. The sky was patchy with stars, and layers of cloud were lit red from the lights of the city below. Everything glowed orange, like the whole city was slowly burning.

The sounds of morning were muffled. Occasionally a night watchman’s call rose up to them, or the cry of a city bird.

“You can see the whole world from up here,” she breathed.

“Yes,” he smiled faintly. “None of the others really like heights. Sometimes Cat comes, but she talks too much.”

Snow couldn’t imagine it.

Raven looked out over the city, as if hoping to find words there. His pale brow furrowed. “It’s almost like … I can fly up here, you know?”

She thought about the feathers on his arms and didn’t say anything.

“I
dream
I can fly. Every night. With the other ones.” He pointed to a raven arcing silently by on huge wings. “I can understand what they say, you know. I hear them talking about their nests, and food, and how wonderful the wind is on certain days.” She thought about her own ravens, how much more pleasant her confinement would have been if she could have understood them.

He looked down at his feet, kicking a pebble off the roof. “I just don’t understand it. Why would I
think these things, or dream them, and not be able to do it? It’s not fair. I feel like I’m … an accident, or a mistake.”

“Raven.” Snow put her hand on his arm. “It must be terrible. But—look at me, I’m just a person. I can’t talk to the birds, I can’t see in the dark, and I can’t do anything the rest of you can. I wish I could.” She had started out saying it to console him, but tears sprang to her eyes when she thought about it.
My life would have been so different….

“What do you dream about?” he asked softly.

“Home. And sometimes I dream that my father really loved me, and talked to me like a real dad. And there was no duchess. Those are the worst.”

It was Raven’s turn to be silent. They spent the last hour before dawn that way, watching the city wake up. When Snow grew sleepy she put her head on his shoulder, and he didn’t pull away.

“I
must find her, if she still lives.”

The duchess opened up a drawer of her vanity and began taking out all sorts of instruments—brass rods and gears, glass eyepieces and lenses. Two days had passed; perhaps the Hunter was dead. Alan could not think of a way to be gone by the morrow. He thought of the droplets of blood.

“Do you know how a mirror works, Fiddler boy?”

Though he had held it a thousand times for her while she gazed at herself, Alan had to admit he had never really given it much thought. He slowly shook his head.

“It’s all about light.”

With the careful diligence of a butler polishing silver, with the grace of a woman born to court, her slender finger began fitting pieces together, assembling the machinery. “Light bounces off of you, taking your image with it. When it hits a polished surface, it bounces back at the same angle, letting you see yourself in the same light.” She chuckled at that.

Alan failed to see where she was going with all of this, but it had to be no place good.

“Mirrors, telescopes, microscopes … they all work on the same basic principle, gathering light and
bending and shaping it so we may see better.” She looked through a lens, blew on it, and fit it in a holder that looked like two angular hands clasping. “Light travels forever, Fiddler, until it is stopped by something. And if you have the right tools you can help it travel
farther.”
She erected a white silk screen stretched taut on a frame like a drum, then adjusted some knobs and screws. The whole contraption looked a little like a fair or a circus as it might be seen from above, Alan decided.
Or a clock and a telescope that had danced together and exploded
.

“I prepared for this day a long while past.”

She lit a candle behind the screen and wound a key. A hazy image was sucked into view, and she turned some knobs and adjusted some rods until it came into focus. A blurry, unfamiliar face came into view, looking down into the screen, making faces and pouting her lips. As if—

As if she were looking into a mirror,
Alan realized.

S
now looked at the pretty little compact the duchess had given her long ago. The silver filigree front had tarnished a little; she used the corner of her dress to rub and polish a particularly bad spot. She snapped it open in her palm, feeling the satisfying click of a well-made object. In the small round mirror her face appeared pale and grave. At one time she had been accustomed to make funny faces in it. She snapped it closed again with a sigh.

“Cat,” she said.

Cat jumped.
Perhaps she thought the normal human couldn’t tell when she was being watched
. She had a lot to learn, about many things.

“Here.” She held out the compact. “I want to give you this.”

It was a rainy fall night outside, and in their basement home it was damp, cold, and boring.
A thoughtful day
. Cat loathed getting wet and tended to spend the rainier days inside, sleeping or being grumpy. She always watched Snow when she brushed her hair, or cleaned or fixed her nails, especially when she was looking at the tiny mirror. Sometimes her claws came out and retracted again and again when she saw the pretty little thing, as if she ached to hold it.

So now of course she looked at Snow with suspicion. “Give it to me? Why?”

“Because you should have something beautiful and nice, just for yourself, and I know how much you like it.”

Because I am no longer the person who needs it
. Still, it was hard to give up, as one of the few emblems left of her former life.
Because I am a Lonely One now, and we share. Because once I was a girl who did what people told her, more or less, and was expected to stay pretty so boys would like me, so men would like me—but it’s still my fault when they kiss me.

Because you don’t have to steal it. It is yours by gift.

She put it in the other girl’s hand, closing her own hand around Cat’s.

“Please take care of it.”

Cat opened the mirror wonderingly, with a flick of the same claw that had loosened Snow’s locket, what seemed like years ago. She looked in the tiny mirror, wrinkling her nose and touching her cheek, watching the effect.

“Would you like me to brush your hair?” Snow offered impulsively.

Cat hissed, as if she knew there was a catch to accepting the pretty thing. “Only girls—sissy girls—care about how they look.”

Spoken like a true sister in a family of brothers
. Snow smiled, remembering Alan’s stories of all of his siblings. She frowned, deciding she was done with the younger girl’s attitude.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cat. You can be beautiful
and
strong and scary
and
still steal like a thief. You have that choice. I didn’t. Now come here and be
quiet.”

Shocked, and still entranced by the pretty thing, Cat sat meekly while Snow went to get her brush and pins.

“No,
it can’t be!”

The image came into focus; the face became clear.

Alan gasped.

It would have been a pretty girl’s face but for the yellow slit eyes and the sharp, fangy canines she kept running her tongue over.

“A demon …,” he said wonderingly.

“It can’t be …,” the duchess said again. She fell back onto her couch in the least graceful movement Alan had ever seen her perform.

Alan kept watching; to his amazement the image shifted and he saw
Snow
. She was brushing the girl-beast’s hair, smiling and saying something. He wished he could hear. She didn’t appear to be in any danger, and from the way the picture suddenly shifted again and focused on the first girl’s face, it was obvious Snow was forcing her to sit still. Like a mother or an older sister would.