Unmasked (Rise of the Masks Book 1)

by Kaplan, EM

  "I'm sure you left a large gaping hole in their lives."

  "Yes. Very vast," Rav agreed.

  "As big as the sky."

  "Without me, they've probably had no discipline. No order. So, I'd better bribe them with good enough gifts into respecting me again. Will it suit you to go with me?"

  "Certainly. I'd be glad to go," Mel said. "Should we gather a small group together, perhaps include Rally?" Under her dark skin, Rav blushed again and Mel laughed.

  Chapter 3

  At the appointed hour the next day, the intimate group gathered at the horse-drawn carriage that would take them into the sleepy local town, which was nestled in the forest further down the hill. Rav and Mel joined Liz and two young men, Rally and Jack. Rally was the tall, broad-shouldered one in whom Rav had expressed interest the previous day. Jack, a freckled young man, perpetually cheerful and pleasant to be around, had arranged for the carriage, which drew up to them at the front gates of the Keep.

  Liz, always talkative, said, "I don't think you have heard the news, so I'll tell you. The dance is going to be a pageant." Usually, she was fun-loving and full of energy, but today seemed to be one of the days when she was slightly anxious and therefore more assertive and abrasive, more likely to offend others. Her cheeks were flushed. Her dark, curly hair looked moist in the humidity. She had a way of flashing her eyes from one side to the other, an artifice practiced so long that she now did it unconsciously.

  Mel could see that Rav was unfamiliar with the term, but Liz was already explaining. "Costumes. It's going to be a costumed dance, like a masquerade. The girls are already crowding into the sewing room, looking at fabrics and digging through the feathers and whatnot. Beads. Fringe. I don't know what in the world I might be." She climbed up into the carriage and arranged herself opposite Rav and Mel so that she'd have the opportunity of sitting close to at least one, if not both, young men. She was placing herself at an advantage—another Cillary lesson learned. Jack obliged by lowering himself next to Liz. Rally sat between Rav and the window, forcing Mel to press against the window on the other side of the bench. He gave her an apologetic smile and shut the door, securing the handle with a firm twist. Then they were off.

  Liz feigned exasperation, gesturing too broadly in the small space of the carriage. She had pretty hands, smooth and plump. Mel doubted either of the young men noticed her hands. The effort was lost on them. They watched her mouth, her animated eyes, and flicked their eyes at her bust line, even Rally, who was not interested. A whole season of training, strictly attended to, when really, the simplest and oldest attractions still held true between the sexes. Liz was saying, "What do you think? It's such a dilemma to choose a costume. I just don't know what I'm going to do. I've been thinking about it for hours. Maybe I'll just go as a Mask."

  Mel's eyebrow shot up in astonishment, and then she wondered at her own unchecked reaction. The scent of the bodies all together in the warm carriage was very strong, almost stifling, and might have accounted for her lapse of control. Because it was a warm day, none of them wore wraps or jackets. Mel was acutely aware of Rav’s and Rally's arms touching. The heat between their skin shimmered to Mel, though the two of them were studiously not looking at each other. She was aware of each half-thwarted movement of their fingertips toward each other.

  She reached beside her and began to crank the glass window down. She rolled it all the way down so she could rest her elbow on the sill. The dappled blue light strobed down through the trees onto her lap. The wheels of the carriage scraped noisily along the worn road through the woods. Her eyes stung. The light seemed too bright, and she hoped she would recover as soon as they reached the little village.

  Jack laughed, his hand catching the sill of the carriage window as they were jostled. "A Mask? Then no one will even be able to tell whether you're a male or female. That big heavy robe scratching you like a punishment. Cloak over your head. Face covered. What good is that? The whole purpose of the dance is to show yourself off. It's your last night at the Keep. Better to go as a farharini dancer. Two diaphanous scarves and you're done." He waggled his eyebrows salaciously. Liz turned pink. Mel doubted she would have blushed before training at the Keep.

  When Liz first arrived, she'd regaled them with tales of her exploits in the large city that she was from. Nothing serious, just risky, like having drinks with traveling strangers, passing the time with an older gentleman in a public park so that he could be prevailed upon to buy her a pretty bauble. Then she would turn on her heel and leave him after acquiring what she desired. She told other stories like this. Not deadly, although malicious and with an element of mild danger. Nevertheless, her blush was honest now. In fact, her neck was reddish, too. Like a mild heat irritation or rash.

  "I really feel like we should choose something that reflects where we're from since we're from all over the place," Jack continued, more earnestly. "You know. Warriors. Contributors of agriculture. Nomads. Grrrr." He gestured at Rav. "Or like myself, disgustingly wealthy, charming, attractive, witty. Though that's more of my nature than my culture. Still, there's no help for it. I'll just have to come as myself. Fabulous though I am."

  Mel suppressed a smiled though her head was really starting to ache. There was something odd in the air; she wasn’t able to suppress her perception of things around her. Jack could be sweet. He was easy to read. He wanted no specific girl at the Keep and yet, he wanted all of them. He'd happily accept any girl who returned his affection, though it wouldn't be Mel by any stretch of the imagination. "What about you, Mel?" he turned to her, intruding on her thoughts as if asking her if she could be that girl.

  She blinked. Even in a small group of people such as this one, she should have been able to divert attention from herself. He was staring at her intently, leaning forward, his hand nearly on her dress-clad knee. Liz fumed. Mel looked back and forth between them and around the carriage. Details flooded her senses. The window sill was made of dark wood, a strip of it molded to the shape of the window and painted blue. Gold, actually, but colored blue by the light. Jack's foot was pressing against hers. She fumbled for the window handle to get some air, though her window was already down.

  Mel was grateful when the others turned the other windows down, too. Maybe she was sick, she thought, though she had no recollection of what it was like to feel sick. Usually, her kind fought illness off quickly once they detected it. It was just a matter of diverting energy. Energy followed thought, coaxed it into the right paths to heal the body. Fresh air swirled into the cabin, although it did little to alleviate her strange discomfort. "Oh, I suppose a Mask would do for me, too," she said.

  Liz made a face. "How original, I'm sure."

  "Sorry," Mel offered lamely. There was a gust of air through her window with a peculiar odor, almost like rancid meat, maybe a dead animal on the road. She was starting to feel a little dizzy, and wished she could get out of the carriage.

  Rav squeezed her hand, "Are you feeling unwell?"

  But Liz lashed out, "You're a terminal tease and you know it, Mel. The less you say, the more interesting you become and I hate you for it." Mel blinked. Liz's face was flushed all over. The curls on her forehead were clinging to her face with perspiration. Mel was gasping for air, trying to get as far away from the others as she could, physically and emotionally, but it wasn’t working. Just the reverse, actually. She felt herself expanding out over the others, affecting them in a way beyond her control, like watching a cup of wine spill and not being able to stop it. She tried to gather herself in, but Liz was going on, disrupting her concentration.

  "Go easy, Liz," Rav said sharply.

  "No, I will not," Liz said. "You slobs can take it, but I won't. She has spent this entire season laughing at us. To our faces. Let her try to deny it." Mel frowned. Liz was standing up in the tiny carriage now, yelling into Mel's face. She was so close that Mel, with her distorted perception, felt as if she were going to fall into the pores of Liz’s skin. A sheen of sweat broke out across
Mel's forehead. She was unable to even regulate her own temperature, as if she had a fever. She couldn't breathe properly through her nose. She panicked, not able to smell anything.

  "Liz, you're making her cry," Jack shouted, grabbing Liz's arm to pull her away from Mel. Was she crying? Mel stared up at Liz, who shot out a hand to brace herself as the carriage rocked violently. Liz sensed weakness and attacked more viciously with harsher words, words that didn't even fit. Nothing fit. Nothing made sense. Mel's vision blurred.

  "Thinks she's smarter than us. Better than us. Stronger. Bigger than all of us. I could just bite you. Rip that smug look right off your skin." Liz's jaw jutted out, the veins at her temples standing out, too, bluish under her fair skin.

  The carriage hit another rut in the road, and all five of them were jostled. A hand was flung up and struck the underside of Mel's chin. Someone's fist struck a dark brown cheekbone. Skirt fabric billowed. Jack was thrown backward at first, his boot suddenly level with Mel's eye. Despite her impaired senses, she saw it all happen slowly in fragmented pictures. Surprise and confusion on Jack's face. Rav seeming to fall away from her as the carriage car buckled for an instant at the diagonal pressure from being tipped on its corner. Then Liz was flung backward so violently that she lost her balance. Her feet came up, she bowed at the waist as if performing an elaborate exit from a stage, and then she tipped backward out the window. Jack lunged after her disappearing feet.

  "Stop the carriage!" Rally stood and pounded the carriage ceiling. The road sped by as they dived toward the window calling for Liz. The carriage, at last, slowed, shaking in a drunken wobble as it lost the last of its lopsided cant. They were all focused on the opposite side of the carriage, reaching for the door, getting their own bearings.

  No one saw the arm grab Mel. It reached through the window behind her and clamped around her waist, sucking her out. Her ankles scraped against the sill, and her cotton shoes were torn right off her feet and left behind.

  Chapter 4

  "What do you mean, an attack?" Vanese Skance’s fan twitched in her hand, the back of which had a slight sheen from the rare, imported cream she applied daily. A carriage attacked on the road? She was personally insulted. The lands around Cillary Keep were entirely neutral for miles, with only that piddling town of former Keep servants in the immediate vicinity, which was why families chose without hesitation to send their daughters there. Generations of daughters, as she personally could attest to. This protected forest was not for bandits and thieves. It was not for marauders. The driver of the carriage and the young man Jack stood in her receiving room relaying the events. "How many attackers? More than one?" she demanded. She was careful to keep her face smooth, though it took great effort.

  "At least one," the young man Jack said, standing on the thick woven rug in her antechamber. "We were very involved in rescuing Liz when she fell out of the cabin, you see. We didn't exactly see what happened to Mel. Not at first." He was only a little distressed, mostly excited. Less than twenty years old, she thought. Very far from home for maybe the first time. She evaluated his clothing and accent, and decided he was only moderately wealthy, but well-schooled. A very pleasant demeanor, respectful toward women as well as toward the driver standing next to him. Not a stunning match for any of her top students, but a very good one for one of the middle ranking young women. Very good, indeed.

  Lady Skance smacked her fan against the arm of her chair, slightly harder than was decorous. She would get to the bottom of this . . . this vandalism. "And you, driver? What did you see?" The driver was an elderly man who'd been at the Keep for years. Lady Skance knew he was called John Teaves, that he had a daughter and granddaughter who both had positions in the Keep, that he suffered from pain of joints during the colder months and often complained about it to the stablemen. It was her duty to know many useful things about him, but she chose not to use his name. It simply wasn’t done.

  "A big fellow," he said. "A man . . . sort of . . . with a great axe in his belt. He came running out of the woods and ran into the carriage."

  "Ran into it?"

  "Smack into it," he reiterated, hitting his hands against each other. "I thought we hit a rut at first, for we nearly tipped right over. Never seen such a man before. He hit the carriage like he was an angry bull. I was tossed right out of my seat. I didn't even see when he took Miss Mel. But that was the thing, when she came running out of the woods some time later, she was fine, thank the Lord. Don't know how she got away from him. He was a big fellow."

  Interesting, Lady Skance noted, momentarily distracted, noting his thanks to a sole deity. Teaves was a monotheist, a rarity among the Keep staff. Locals and polytheists, most of them, praying to this god or that. Colorful and quaint, was how she viewed it when she'd first arrived at the Keep herself many, many decades ago, long before the trees had started turning blue. More than she cared to mention. The locals were an interesting people to reckon with, friendly, loyal, and stubborn. She’d have to learn more about Teaves. Clearly, there were some things in her Keep that she did not yet know.

  "And he was carrying an axe?" When she turned away from the man speculatively, she caught a glance of herself in the gilded mirror on the opposite wall. She was pleased to note that her posture did not need correction. She faced Teaves again and met his eyes firmly, demanding respect, yet coaxing his trust. Always manipulating, encouraging, no matter how insignificant the encounter might be. She'd spent decades honing her skills, so long, in fact, that she could not stop using them; it was ingrained behavior now.

  "Yes, a big one maybe half again the size of a regular one," said Teaves, "It was a big one, like a woodsman might have, maybe."

  "Maybe not like a woodsman," Jack suggested unhelpfully.

  Lady Skance turned to Jack, "And the girl is fine?"

  He nodded enthusiastically, "She was very well. She looked . . . " He seemed like he was about to say more. His face went lax in the attitude of one who was entirely smitten. Lady Skance watched him closely. Though he didn't say it, she could tell he had thought Mel beautiful, stunning, and absolutely gorgeous. And he was wondering why he'd never noticed it before. "She was barefoot. Her hair was full of leaves, and her dress a bit muddy, but she was fine," he said out loud. If he had the facility of a poet, Lady Skance imagined he might have spoken volumes about the way her eyes shined, the tendrils of her tawny hair, and the gentle flush of her cheeks, obviously from running away from the fellow that had gotten her.

  He might have said, Really good of her to have run away from the lout like that. It said she could look after herself a little. Her dress kind of flowing around her with the sunlight shining through it. Angelic, maybe. Heavenly. He'd hardly left her side since they'd gotten back to the Keep, which made Liz a bit put out, but she was hardly one to be jealous. When they'd rescued Liz from the middle of the road, she was a bit bruised and angry and feeling clumsy. Nowhere near as angry as she'd been the moment before she'd fallen out of the window. And then after they'd all gotten back in the carriage, Liz had sicked up out the window and that had shut her up for the rest of the drive home. But she was a big girl from a big city after all. She'd get over it.

  All these pretend thoughts, Lady Skance manufactured, imagined, concocted from the dreamy expression on the young man's face. But Mel . . . for some reason, she could not recall the young woman’s face at the moment. That rarely happened to Lady Skance. Usually she had an excellent memory for placing a name with a face for every woman currently at the Keep.

  Lady Skance dismissed the two men from her antechamber and immediately rose to visit the two women. They were confined to the sick room, which distressingly had been used long ago to house the very worst of the socially diseased—although that was never spoken of now—where they were being watched over by physicians. It was better to be safe than sorry. She had made it to the end of the season with no great illnesses or injuries to any of the participants only to have this happen during the last week. She felt greatly irritate
d and illused by the bandit, whoever it was.

  "Lady Skance?" Jack said, turning back, suddenly pink around the ears, "You won't cancel the end of the season promenade, will you?"

  She drew herself up to her full height as she exited the room. "Certainly not."

  She walked with measured steps down the chilly corridor to the sick room, smooth faced and composed. The Keep’s stone walls locked the cool air in no matter what modernizations had been made—indoor water pumped by heated agamite, the best adornments money could procure—but still, the chill persisted. After all this time, Lady Skance was accustomed to it. And no matter what situation she encountered with these young women, she would meet it as usual, absolutely proper, never flustered, always assured. She certainly remembered who Liz was. The girl was a plump, mouthy little thing at the start of the season, but she could not call to mind any face to match the name Mel.

  It was that ridiculous shortening of their given names that they did without fail every season. Lovely names turned curt and masculine. Marinda became "Mar." Patriana became "Pat." Perhaps Mel was one of five or six of those nondescript brown-haired women that she so desperately tried to encourage to shine, to stand out, and to distinguish herself. Every season she had a few girls like this, and some moderate successes. The boy Jack seemed taken with her. Perhaps she had made something of the woman well enough.

  Lady Skance decided not to announce anything to the families of her students. This season—yet another successful one—would be over within a few days, and the women would be released either to their families or other appointed escorts. There was no time to send messengers, and she had not the means—neither horses nor additional riders—to notify all of the families in such short time.