Chapter 3

CELENE

Three months. That was how long it took for the roots to finish their work on me, though it had not felt like months while I was inside them. It had felt like one long breath held underwater, waiting for a shore that kept moving further away.

When the Hollow Mother finally led me out of the trees, the world hit me all at once, too bright, too loud, too real. I stood at the edge of the forest with the sun on my face and did not know what my own face looked like anymore.

"There," she said, and produced a mirror from somewhere in the folds of her mossy sleeves, as if she had been carrying it the whole time, waiting for the correct moment to be cruel with it. "See what I have made."

I did not want to look. I made myself look anyway.

The woman in the glass had silver-white hair, pale as frost on a window, falling loose around a face I had never worn. Her eyes were amber, a color no one in my family had ever carried, warm and strange and entirely unfamiliar. Her cheekbones sat higher than mine had, her mouth was fuller, and there was not one single feature left that belonged to the girl who had stood on that tower three days before her wedding.

"Who is she?" I asked, meaning the question two ways at once, and knowing the Hollow Mother would only answer the easier one.

"Her name is Celene Gray," she said. "An orphaned noblewoman of minor blood, recently arrived from the eastern provinces, with no family left to ask after her and no portrait anywhere to compare her against. I have been thorough. You will find that people believe what paperwork tells them to believe, far more readily than they believe their own eyes."

"Celene Gray." I said it slowly, testing the shape of it in my mouth, the way I once tested a new dance step before trusting my feet with it in front of witnesses. It did not feel like a lie yet. It felt like a costume I had not decided whether I could bear to wear.

"You will need to believe it," the Hollow Mother said, as if she had heard the thought directly from wherever thoughts are kept. "Not pretend it. Believe it. Alorna Thorne is dead. The court buried an empty coffin for her a month ago, with real tears and a real eulogy, and no one at that funeral will thank you for proving them wrong before you are ready."

The word funeral landed harder than I expected. Somewhere, Brian had stood over a box with nothing in it and grieved a version of me that no longer existed in any form he would recognize.

"Will he know me?" I asked, and hated how small my voice sounded asking it. "Will anyone?"

"That depends entirely on you." She studied me with those still water eyes, patient and unreadable. "The face will hold. I have made certain of that. What might give you away is not your face, Celene. It is everything underneath it. The way you were raised to stand in a room. The way you speak to men who outrank you. Old habits leave marks that magic does not always think to cover."

"Then I will learn new habits."

"Yes." Something that was almost approval crossed her face. "I believe you will."

I turned back to the mirror, forcing myself to hold my own reflection's gaze instead of flinching from it. Amber eyes. Silver hair. A stranger's mouth arranging itself into an expression I did not recognize as my own.

"I don't know her," I whispered, more to myself than to the Hollow Mother. "I don't know how to be her."

"You will not need to invent her from nothing," the Hollow Mother said. "You only need to bury the parts of yourself that would give you away, and let the rest come through wearing a different name. Grief is grief, whatever face carries it. Rage is rage. You have plenty of both to draw from."

I studied the reflection a moment longer, searching for some trace of the girl I had been, some familiar line at the corner of the mouth, some old scar, anything at all that had survived the crossing. I found nothing that belonged to me.

And then, for the space of one held breath, the mirror shifted.

It was there and gone so quickly I could not swear to it afterward, a flicker behind my own unfamiliar eyes, a curve at the mouth that was not mine and never had been. My sister's smile, warm at the edges, watching me from inside a face that was supposed to be entirely my own.

I flinched back from the glass so hard I nearly lost my footing on the uneven ground.

"What is it?" the Hollow Mother asked, though something in her voice told me she already knew, or already suspected, or had perhaps been waiting to see whether I would notice at all.

"I saw her," I said, my heart hammering against ribs that were not quite the ribs I remembered owning. "In the glass. Just for a moment. I saw Victoria."

The Hollow Mother did not look surprised. She did not look concerned either, which frightened me more than concern would have.

"Did you," she said, and it was not quite a question.

THE HOLLOW MOTHER

I had wondered how long it would take her to see it.

Magic like mine does not simply borrow a face from nowhere. It has to take the shape of something, and I had built hers from the deepest well of feeling I could find inside her, which meant I had built her, in some small unavoidable part, from the very sister who put her in that river to begin with. Grief and rage share a bloodline of their own, whatever family they are born into.

I did not tell her that. Not yet.

"The eyes play tricks, in new light, on new faces," I said instead, which was true in the way that most useful lies are true, wrapped around a smaller truth I had no intention of handing over for free. "You will grow used to your own reflection soon enough."

She wanted to believe me. I could see it settling over her, the way relief settles over anyone offered an easier explanation than the one waiting underneath.

I let her have it, for now.

There would be time enough, later, for her to learn exactly whose face she was truly wearing beneath the one I had given her, and exactly how much of her sister she would be forced to carry with her into that court, whether either sister wanted it or not.