Masks

by E.M. Prazeman

  Chapter Five

  The gardener spent a great deal of time keeping the driveway smooth and packed well for Lord Argenwain’s sleigh. It had several loose inches on top, and walls of snow as high as Mark’s shoulders on either side with the frosted dark green of ancient holly hedges rising out of them. Beyond those hedges lay a garden beyond most people’s imaginings. Gutter’s design.

  Mark wondered if, despite the obvious benefits of position and money and nearness to the king, Lord Argenwain had had trouble finding a worthy jester because of his sexual bend. In that regard Gutter may have been too understanding, and Mark tried not to dwell on that too much.

  I’m always trying to ignore and forget things. I have to get out of this house.

  He always imagined freedom better once he passed the garden gates and walked along the sidewalk in front of the great manor. When he was alone out here, he could pretend to be a passer-by astonished by Pickwelling Manor and the massive property it commanded at the top center of the hill in the center of the city. The situation had only one flaw: no view of the bay, a strange deficiency for a great house in a coastal town on Hullundy Bay. It wasn’t just the angle against Cathret’s famous one hundred mile cliffs. The cliffs were actually quite low in this area, less than forty feet high at the port itself. The main problem was that Pickwelling stood uphill from the university, once an enormous castle. Those high walls, covered in ivy, and the fat corner towers, barred all but glimpses of the great bay at the horizon on either side.

  Gutter once told Mark that people feared, when Lord Argenwain settled here, that he would have the university moved, stone by stone if necessary, to a new place. They had nothing to worry about. The only views Argenwain cared to enjoy were in private salons, in his garden, and in his own bedroom. The old man was probably too near-sighted to see any farther anyway. Mark allowed that he must have been different as a younger man, but the fact remained that Argenwain didn’t do any harm to the university, and that people then and now still believed he was capable of doing whatever he wanted politically and monetarily.

  Mark had to walk in the road where street sweeps kept the way more or less clear for sleighs and carriages. He passed a whole row of grand houses lined up across the street from Argenwain’s, too grand for Mark to own even in his imagination. They looked like ample portions of dessert lined up in front of a wedding cake.

  It took Mark twenty minutes to reach the edge of the property. Just before he crossed the intersection, he noticed a pair of priests walking uphill through the snow. His heart jumped and fluttered wildly inside him but he couldn’t move. Their ridiculous winged hats made them look unnaturally tall, and their half red, half white robes made their left sides appear larger than their right. Absurd, but monstrous. The wings on the white hats had slits through which red peered out, like they were wounded. Were they coming to the house? Mark wanted to dash back to his room, but he couldn’t move.

  One looked up at him. All the wild fear inside him went still, but noise rose in his ears instead, roaring and rushing.

  The priest, hair traditionally hidden by the hat, beardless, could have been just about any age but he looked old and gray. His companion seemed younger, and he seemed to struggle with his emotions as much as his footing. The older priest’s gaze slipped from Mark to a fine house painted yellow and white—the violin house, as Mark called it because the eldest daughter practiced violin every day.

  Please not that house.

  He’d grown up with her music. In winter he seldom heard her but in summer she practiced with her windows open and Mark lingered near the wall in that part of the garden so he could hear her better.

  The priests stepped onto the dry stone where the servants had swept, walked relentlessly up the stairs and knocked on the door.

  The priests that had come to settle Mark’s father’s indenture hadn’t knocked. They’d just walked into his mother’s wine shop and claimed everything a grieving boy had ever known. For his own good, of course. Because he was too young to understand, they’d said. He’d needed protection from his father’s guarantor.

  Which would have been ideal, except nothing they did protected him from anything. Worst of all they, who were supposed to hold justice higher than anything, didn’t care about who murdered his mother. They gave only a token platitude when Mark begged them to wait until someone found out one way or another if his father was dead or captive or if he’d ...

  He wouldn’t have abandoned us.

  Over the years his childish certainty, born from pain, had faded. Fortunately logic remained to bolster him.

  His father wouldn’t have abandoned his men and the ship he loved, especially not before his son reached his age of majority. The decisions the Church made ‘in trust’ suited no one but the Church itself.

  Until Gutter got in their way.

  The door to the violin house opened, emitting a beam of cheerful light that widened slowly.

  Who had died? Maybe the priests had some other reason to visit that house, but Mark couldn’t think past the feeling that the music he loved had been silenced.

  The priests entered, the door closed, and he was alone.

  It was getting dark. Obsidian ....

  Obsidian didn’t know Gutter was in the city. That knowledge might change everything.

  Mark hurried toward the Church. He could tell Lord Argenwain he’d been delayed in delivering his payment and have time to meet Obsidian at the swan bridge, hopefully before the other jester arrived. If the other jester was already there, he’d be forced to wait, and hopefully not too long, until the two parted ways.

  But what if Obsidian was hurt or killed?

  Obsidian falling in a duel conjured terrifying images in his mind that tangled with his mother’s death, but he would rather be there tending to Obsidian’s wounds and calling for help than to imagine him dying alone in the snow.

  The Church grounds neighbored Argenwain’s. They didn’t look as stately, but only because so many buildings crowded the property. Looming beside the road, the barracks for the sacred guard had all the fine qualities of a large manor house aside from the blocky utilitarian design. Two large three-level wings attached to a central tower where the sacred guard held their group meals, functions and practices. Even now a group of them had begun to sit down for a meal. Their uniforms matched the red plaster walls and white trim on the windows. Hidden behind the barracks, a horse nickered to his companions other in the stables.

  A small garden, sheltered behind a large gate, gave a bit of breathing room between the barracks and the Church itself. Mark slowed. People like him weren’t allowed inside. Only nobles and their jesters could enter the great domed hall. Sometimes he could hear the most exquisite music, but tonight the Church was silent.

  The architecture sang for itself in the place of a human choir. The rounded shoulders on the dome’s support perfectly echoed the dome’s curve, gracefully connecting it to the linear façades beneath it. Icicles hung from feathery embellishments and formed crystalline bars in front of arched panels. Carved leaves and blossoms of no living design embellished the panels, layers on layers that seemed to hide something within them.

  Four vaulted galleries attached to the dome structure, the ones behind taller than the ones in front like long mountain ridges fronted by foothills with the great peak in the middle. Walls and arcades enclosed the way toward the entrance—double doors set deep under a lofted gallery. The lines carried his gaze ever higher in bounds and leaps to the lantern at the top of the dome. Light always glowed there—either sunlight fragmenting against the leaded glass, or lamplight burning bright from within.

  He’d halted without meaning to, as he often did, to stare. Mark tugged his gaze away and trotted, skidding on the packed snow, to the Court.

  The Court always reminded him of a graveyard. The flat of its roof stood on a level with the Church’s ground. Conical lanterns laced with filigree allowed air to exchange with the spaces below, but little if any light m
anaged to work its way inside. That silver filigree was the only variation from black on the building’s exterior. Iron railing ran between the lanterns closest to the roof’s edge. Many of the ten-pace sections of railing had made their long-dead makers famous for their beauty. Most had strange, somewhat floral motifs, but a few had martial or legal themes.

  The central lanterns clustered together like a close copse of trees, the centermost reaching high enough to provide a deadly fall if someone managed to climb to its sharp peak.

  Those lanterns weren’t silent. The wind made hollow, lonely noises in them. Steam rose from a few, creating fragile ice sculptures around the iron.

  An iron grill, from which hung icicles, alternated with covered arches to shade the broad stairway down inside the Court. The last of the evening light began to fail in a narrow stripe behind him as he paused before the open doors. Just inside, four guards in black uniforms stood with death-like patience, seldom blinking.

  Mark impatiently waited a few moments to let his eyes adjust before he hurried past them into the vast atrium. His shoes clicked on the dull marble floor, the sound bouncing close to his ear off the marble walls and ceiling. Arched pockets within the ceiling seemed to hide unpleasant things. The cold made him clutch his arms, and even in the faint light cast by tiny lamps set in the walls, he could see his breath go white and vanish almost instantly as it did on only the coldest days above. Though others roamed or waited in the Court, he felt isolated and alone.

  The echoing emptiness softened as he passed into the clerk hall where a priest, the younger of the two that had visited him after his mother’s death, had managed his ledger for the past six years.

  Doors and benches provided the only embellishment down this lonely hall. Two people waited ahead of him at the third door; a young woman with unbound hair in a plain but well-made dress and coat with a matching wool hat, and a poorly-dressed servant with ginger hair that suggested a Nuech ancestor somewhere in his lineage. Judging by his shoes, he worked in a stable. He probably smelled of one too, but Mark’s nose had gone numb already.

  The poor man had to be freezing, especially sitting on the iron bench. He had only a coarse shirt, thick breeches, and the holes in his shoes revealed holes in his stockings too.

  Mark could only stand to watch him hunch there, white-lipped, for a moment. “Sir—would you like to borrow my cloak?”

  The man gave him a long look over.

  Mark peeled his cloak off. The chill immediately seeped past his great coat, but he’d felt worse. “Here.” He held it out.

  The man stared at him.

  The young woman tipped her head toward them but kept her gaze down-turned.

  The cloak started to get heavy. Mark pushed it toward him. The man flinched up and backed away. “Keep away from me.” He walked a pair of paces and kept his back turned.

  Especially when he walked with Lord Argenwain, he’d gotten some pretty dark looks, but this ... and how did the man know? Or did he know? Revulsion, pity, disdain, mockery all came with being an old man’s boy, especially from those who considered their own sins as ordinary and forgivable by comparison. But this was more like fear. Maybe he thought Mark was a jester, but it seemed too disrespectful a fear to be that.

  “What about you?” Mark wasn’t sure the young woman had heard him. He didn’t lend much voice to the idea. But then she nodded, and her pale cheeks turned a bit pink. Mark settled the cloak on her shoulders and sat a few feet away from her.

  The door opened and a clerk in crisp brown and white scuttled out. The coarse man strode in. He didn’t stay long enough for Mark to strike up a conversation with the young lady. She slipped out of Mark’s cloak and went in, though she spared him a glance from the door before she shut it.

  Would his father’s crew reject him, now that he was whatever he’d become?

  The sea would wash it all away.

  He just hadn’t met the right lady yet, was all.

  Except the men who’d impressed him and made his face warm and his heart skip hadn’t needed an introduction. All they had to do was walk by. He’d never known a woman to do that to him.

  He couldn’t blame Lord Argenwain, though he wanted to. Lord Argenwain hadn’t yet invited him into his rooms for intimate conversation the first time Mark noticed a certain soldier. Mark only saw him once, but he dreamed about him so many times since then ....

  He loved that dream.

  The cold started to get to him. Mark wrapped himself back up in the cloak. What could she be doing in there so long? A few unworthy thoughts crossed his mind. At first it struck him as funny, but then not so much. She shouldn’t have to go to a man in that way and trade that sweetness he’d sensed from her for a payment on indenture.

  Not that priests were supposed to do such things, but he didn’t carry much faith in their supposed purity.

  At last the door opened and the lady slipped out. She left the door open and gave Mark a curtsey and a smile before she went on her way. To his relief, she didn’t seem upset or ashamed or tousled. He leaned up to his feet, stiffened by the wait more than the cold.

  A guard came running. Mark stopped in the doorway, uncertain. Warm air from the priest’s porcelain stove drifted out, caressing the bare skin on Mark’s face.

  “Come in,” the priest called.

  The guard yanked open the first door in the hall. “We must close the building. There’s a fire at the docks.”