“I never really …” I hadn’t thought about the faces they borrowed. I just assumed that each Robber made one up.
“We steal the faces,” she boasted. “You have to have some part of them, like hair or blood, in order for the magic to work.” She walked over to her face twin. I remembered how Jagger had borrowed Bale’s face. That meant he had taken something from Bale. But when? How?
“Do you kill them?” I asked, fearing Fathom’s response. What the River Witch had said about sacrifice came back again. It seemed that perhaps the less magic you came by naturally, the more sacrifice you had to make.
“Not usually. Think of it this way: after they die, some part of them gets to live on. That’s something, right?”
“But where do you find the bodies?” I asked, hoping and assuming she was joking about the killing part. Finding dead bodies was creepy enough.
She sighed. “Grave robbing, of course.”
That’s better than the alternative, I thought. But I felt the already slippery world of the Robbers turn on its axis toward an even darker reality than I’d imagined.
“You can come with me if you’d like. We can pick out something pretty for you,” she dared, almost sweetly.
What had I gotten myself into? I shook my head and walked out of the weird morgue. Once I got out the door, though, I began to run.
24
When I got back to my room, there was a dress laid out for me on the bed. It was prettier than the collection of day dresses that had appeared in my closet after my first night at the Claret. It had feathers all over it. And it was a stunning silvery lavender color that reminded me of the trees tonight.
I touched the dress.
“Wear me and come to the roof,” a voice whispered in my ear.
The door slammed shut a second later. The voice belonged to Howl, the girl who was singing in the Throne Room.
She must have used an invisibility spell. But to what end? Would the dress suffocate me to death when I put it on? Was it a trick? Was it a trap?
I stared at the dress for a few minutes before I slipped it on and headed up the stairs. With every step I took, I reasoned that I was doing the right thing. But the truth was I couldn’t sit alone with that dress a minute longer. Maybe it was all that time at Whittaker not being able to do things that other kids did. But a ball gown and an invitation to mystery could not go unanswered.
When I got to the roof, all the Robbers, save Margot, were standing in a circle around a strange symbol scrawled on the rooftop. It reminded me of the markings on the Tree.
The girls wore feather dresses like mine, only theirs were in iridescent pastel colors. A couple of the girls stepped aside, and I spotted Jagger just outside the circle. He dragged his hand through his hair, messing it into tousled perfection, and smoothed down his suit, which was covered in feathers, too: black ones. The fashion statement shouldn’t have worked for anyone, but Jagger’s good looks had a magic all their own. He could wear anything. And he still looked good, even when I was mad at him.
Each Robber held an unlit candle.
I realized this was some kind of initiation. All this was for me.
“You can’t be serious?” I asked.
“When you first arrived, we didn’t get to properly welcome you into the Robber fold,” Fathom said.
She was clearly in charge of the girls in Margot’s absence.
“So what happens now?” I said impatiently.
“Tomorrow you train. Tonight we welcome you,” Fathom said with a flourish.
I was more than a little surprised. These girls had made it pretty clear they didn’t want much to do with me, and I had made it pretty clear that I didn’t want anything to do with Jagger. I hadn’t even bothered to get to know all their names, because I thought I wouldn’t be staying long enough for them to matter.
Despite what I thought of him, I watched Jagger as he took his place at the symbol on the floor. I wondered if he actually knew what the symbol meant, after all. Was that another lie on top of all the others?
Light some candles, say some poetry. Dance around a bonfire. I could do this. Howl handed me a candle, and I walked to the center of the symbol. I turned my back to Jagger.
Fathom blew on her candle and it lit.
The flame jumped through the air from one candle to the next. Another magic trick. Finally the candle in my hand lit.
“Welcome, Robber Princess. Your life is yours. Your spoils are ours. We will see you on the other side.”
Fathom put down the candle and grabbed my hand.
Was that it? That was less painful than a group therapy session back at Whittaker. But no. It wasn’t so easy. Fathom pulled me to the edge of the roof.
She took a step up and expected me to follow.
She wanted me to jump off the roof.
It was another test. I was supposed to tornado down or something. I wasn’t sure if I could do it without tearing the Claret apart.
“You want me to use my snow…”
“No, I want you to a take a leap of faith. Trust in us. Trust in the Robbers. And when you land, you will be part of us.”
“But I am not a real—” I began, but I stopped myself before saying the last word: Robber.
“You don’t have to do this,” Jagger offered.
I scowled at him. I was still not ready to talk to him.
“We’ve all done it,” countered Howl, a lot less gently.
The girls looked on, waiting to see what I would do.
I would have to be a real Robber to get to Bale. I knew I would have to take this step no matter what.
When I was in group therapy in Ward A at the institute, we used to do trust falls in the shared rec room. It was a comedic disaster. Wing did not want to be caught, and Chord believed he would fall into another century. I had not much more faith in the Robbers as my toes curled around the edge of the roof.
But then I remembered Margot and the way that the Robber girls looked at her. I remembered my snow and how I thought it might just save me even if I didn’t direct it to. And I thought of Bale, who was out there somewhere under the Lights, dreaming of me and waiting for me to find him.
The other girls joined me on the ledge. And then I stepped off the roof.
The other girls followed, a line of us falling in the dark.
Gravity took hold faster than I thought it would. The sensation of being pulled downward filled me with a new kind of panic. I looked below and began calculating the distance and time to the ground. How many seconds would it take for my snow to pick me up, if it came to that?
I waited and watched, feeling like I was both inside and outside myself as the Claret whizzed by on the left, the now-purple trees on the right.
The other girls looked happy, as if they were exhilarated by the fall.
Maybe they were all a little off. Maybe this was just a game of chicken and I was supposed to pull my snow like a rip cord. Maybe I was supposed to save them all.
The ground was coming up fast to greet me. I closed my eyes and called on my snow. Perhaps I could sweep us all into a tornado. Maybe it would work if we all joined hands and held on tight enough.
Just when I had hit the serious-wishing-and-hoping-for-a-miracle stage, I heard a flapping sound. My eyes opened. It was the feathers on my dress. They were flapping.
I was pulled upward by the feathers, and so were the other girls. It was the strangest sensation. Relief washed over me, and I could feel myself smiling in the few seconds of flight as we ascended and then descended again, landing softly on the ground in front of the Claret.
Howl let out a noise befitting her name. Girls stretched and laughed, then began to file back inside.
“You want to go again?” Howl asked as she approached me, pushing her feathers down.
“Maybe in a minute.”
She shrugged and headed inside.
I leaned back against the Claret and looked up.
A few minutes later, I watched as the girls flo
ated down from the roof again. Each in a different dress, feathers flying. I wished Wing could see this. I had really come so far from my tiny room at Whittaker. Tonight I could fly.
25
The next morning I found Jagger sitting on Margot’s throne.
“What the hell? Where’s Margot?”
“She’s in her lab. No doubt still trying to find a way to use your blood without having to use you. Now, shall we begin your Robber education?”
“No!”
“There are two tenets to robbing, Snow,” Jagger said, ignor-ing me, “the physical and the mental. And then there’s the seduction…”
“I told Margot I didn’t want you to teach me.”
“First rule of being a Robber. No one gives you what you want. You have to take it.”
I felt myself coming to a boil, but I didn’t want him to see it.
“Fine.”
“If you’re going to be a thief, you’re going to have to be physical. And I don’t mean using your magic,” Jagger continued. “Until you get a handle on your power—until you can use your power in big ways—it’s not going to help us in a heist. A Robber is physically and mentally faster than their marks, and you spent a long time drugged up in Whittaker.”
“And what about seduction?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not what you think,” he said with a knowing smile. “You just have to figure out what people want and then give it to them. And while they’re busy being happy, you pick their pockets. The idea is to get in and get out without anyone noticing until much later. So that hours from now the mark will get home and wonder if maybe the fault was their own. Maybe the thing they’re missing was lost and not stolen.”
“You make it sound so easy,” I said.
My mind went to Magpie, the look of secret joy that she wore a lot of the time. It wasn’t the stuff that she had under her bed. It was the pride in taking. It was the game itself. Magpie wasn’t born evil. The tools that she had used against me in Whittaker she had learned here at the Claret. How could I ever really trust the place and the people that had made her?
Jagger smiled. “Robbers sometimes work by themselves, but actually collaborating in couples or in groups is the norm. In some ways it minimizes the risk. But relying on another person can also increase it.”
My heart was racing at the future and maybe also a little at Jagger. It was both exhilarating and frightening at the same time. I was going to be his Robber girl.
A few hours later, Jagger was close. Too close. Kissing close. He was leaning into me. I was pressed against the stone wall of the Claret. We had taken our lesson outside, just in case I got frustrated and decided to freeze something.
But heist training had been a little more intimate than I’d anticipated.
He smelled like a girl. Like a heady mix of roses and orchids. I just couldn’t pinpoint which one. Which Robber girl had been close enough to him to leave a lingering scent on his clothes? Underneath there was something else, coffee and something more masculine, something clean and soapy and all Jagger. Despite the fact that he probably had been equally close to one of the Robber girls some time today, I felt myself tempted to lean into him in return.
Being with Jagger was like a constant game of chicken, and I somehow always managed to blush first.
I ducked under his arm and took a few steps away from him.
“Now check your pocket,” he demanded.
I already knew that it was his timepiece.
I fished it out and tossed it back to him with a sigh.
“Your turn,” he said, slipping it back into his pocket.
He wanted me to take it from him again.
We had been at it for hours; perfecting a lift meant hours of staring into Jagger’s silvery-gray eyes while trying to keep him from seeing what my hands were doing.
Snow formed between my fingers, and I threw an icicle at the tree line.
He stepped in front of me.
“You saw what I did there. Now you do it.”
“You want me to kiss every mark … there must be some other way…”
“Sometimes it’s not the thing you want. It’s the promise of the thing you want … I want you to think about me and nothing else for just a second. And in that second, I’ll rob you blind.”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about robbing, and while I was wondering just that he pressed me suddenly and without warning into the side of the Claret.
“Jagger …,” I said breathlessly. I knew I was supposed to push him away. I knew that this was probably a more advanced part of our lesson. And I was probably failing spectacularly. I was supposed to control the moment. The attention. Get his eyes on me while I stole something from him. But somehow even when I took the timepiece from him, it felt like I was the one who had given something away.
“Don’t move until I tell you to,” he said, his silvery eyes lighting on something on the horizon that I didn’t see. I followed his gaze and found nothing.
The stone wall dug into my back. And I didn’t care. I didn’t want to move.
I reached out one of my hands, experimenting with a web of ice between two of my fingers, considering how I could use it against him.
But he pressed my hand closed with his own and dragged me along the building’s side as if he were running from something. This wasn’t the game. This wasn’t the training anymore. There was something out there. Something big and bad enough to cause Jagger to lose his cool.
“Quiet, Princess,” he said, his voice urgent, devoid of its usual charm.
When we got to the front door, the other Robbers were there, weapons drawn. There were daggers and vials at the ready. They were still dressed in their Robber dresses and heels. If it weren’t for their weapons and their crouching positions, ready to pounce, they looked like they should have been waiting for a music video shoot. Not for whatever threat was coming.
I heard the rustling in the snow at the green tree line. Snow Beasts shook themselves out of the snow.
They were here for me.
I half expected the girls to offer me up—or for Margot to. She was standing behind the line of girls, looking at me almost pityingly.
“Hush, child,” she warned.
Then she began to chant something under her breath.
Jagger whispered to me, “Cloaking spell.”
The other girls chanted, too, all the while prepping for battle. Shields appeared out of thin air. Two girls wheeled out a catapult.
The Enforcer emerged from behind the Snow Beasts.
The girls stood frozen-statue still, their eyes scanning the moving beasts and their Enforcer, who shepherded them.
“He can’t see us,” Howl whispered with confidence.
But the Enforcer was looking in my direction. Just as he had in the square back in Stygian.
Part of me wanted another shot at the Enforcer. I also wanted to hide behind the Robber girls. I had never lost a fight before, not counting the few times Vern had to restrain me.
I inched a step in his direction.
Howl stepped beside me and grabbed my hand. Jagger did the same on the other side of me. One by one, we all held hands, forming a line. It was as if every Robber were letting me know they stood with me against the Enforcer.
But the Enforcer came right up to me, inches from my face, just like he had during our fight.
This is not my end, I reminded myself. And despite the line of those who were ready to fight for me, who I knew I should stay quiet for, I felt myself tempted to take another punishing stab at the Enforcer.
Jagger squeezed my hand tighter. Either he had taken a mind-reading potion or he could see it in my face.
The Enforcer looked to the right and moved on, his Snow Beasts trailing after him.
Jagger released my hand. The other girls put down their weapons and began going back inside the Claret.
“Does this happen all the time? Or was that just for me?”
Howl spoke first. “The King leaves us alone, mostly. He has a history of underestimating us.”
The Enforcer was here for me. I had put them all in danger. I half expected her to volunteer to give me up to the King. To say that I was too much of a risk.
But all she said was, “If you don’t know how already, you’re going to need to know how to fight.”
We stood there watching the diminishing North Lights until there was nothing left to do but go back into the Claret.
26
At dawn, I got up and went outside. Watching the sun rise, I practiced my snow. I sent wave after wave of snow against the tree line, thinking about the Enforcer in my face the day before and imagining eviscerating him with every wave. When he found me, I had a taste of power for the first time in my life, and he had shown me that it wasn’t enough. At least not yet.
I noticed a couple of snow angels on the ground. Leftover from some of the Robbers, I assumed. I filled up the outlines with snow and tried to animate them.
The winged snow figures were halfway up when I heard a sound behind me.
I let off a snow-cicle on instinct.
A flame came out of nowhere and melted my arrow in midair.
Jagger whistled as if he were impressed with me. He was standing behind me in the snow in front of the Claret. He was the source of the flame. But how?
“What the hell, Jagger? I could have frozen you! How did you…”
He raised his wrists, and inexplicably a stream of flame came from each of them. I put out the fire with a blast of snow that cut a little too close to Jagger. He jumped to the side.
I’d grazed his hand with my flash of snow. His face didn’t betray the pain.
But he showed me the frostbitten evidence. He pulled a vial out of his pocket and poured it over his wounds. The skin healed up in an instant.
“What is that? How did you do that?”
“It’s a healing vial. Small magic,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Not that. The fire.”
“Fathom and Margot have been working on it. Kind of a magic-science combination.”