by E. C. Blake
She sighed. Her body was the reason she couldn’t beat Sala at swimming, or running, or much of anything else. Oh, her face was pretty enough, she thought—she hoped—at least, boys did take a second look at her in the street. But she was still short and rather . . . she glanced down . . . flat. Sala, on the other hand, was, well, statuesque was the word Mara supposed applied. Certainly there were strong similarities between Sala’s current appearance, nude and shining, and some of the statues along Processional Boulevard, which led from the main gate of the city up to the Palace.
“Are you scared about your Masking tomorrow?” Mara asked. She kicked at the water, splashing it up in shining silver sheets.
“No,” Sala said. She gave Mara a grin. “At least I know I’ll have a beautiful Mask.”
Mara grinned back. “You’ll love it,” she assured her friend. She and her father had labored long and hard over it. Mara herself had carefully laid in place the silver filigree that traced twining vines along its gleaming white cheeks and forehead. In the almost two years since her Second Testing, she’d learned everything there was to know about the making of Masks except how to infuse them with magic. She would not learn that until after her own Mask was in place in six weeks’ time. Then she would be fully apprenticed to her father, and begin her adult life as a Maskmaker.
Assuming her Gift had finally settled, and assuming that Gift had run true, as her father had seemed so certain it would. She had not been allowed to see magic since her Second Testing.
What if she still saw all the colors? Or no colors?
She shivered. Suddenly she did feel a little cold, although the air remained as milk-warm as ever, unusually so even for late summer.
“Don’t worry,” Sala said. “We’ll still be friends. And you won’t be very far behind me, you know. In six weeks, I’ll be able to come to your Masking.”
“I wish I could come to yours,” Mara said, but she knew that was impossible: children were not allowed into the Maskery, the circular temple of white stone, topped with a golden dome, where the Masking ceremonies took place.
“I do, too,” Sala said. She shrugged. “But it really won’t change anything. It won’t change me. I’m not Gifted. I’ve already learned a lot about glassblowing. I’ll just keep learning and improving. All it means is I’ll have to wear my Mask whenever I go out.”
“No more sneaking out at night, though,” Mara said. She grinned at her friend, but she felt a strange pang. Tonight wasn’t the first time she and Sala had gone skinny-dipping in the Waterworkers’ pool, but it would be the last. It was a minor offense for a child to be caught out after curfew. For a Masked citizen . . .
For a Masked citizen, the consequences could be dire. Prison, or . . .
Mara shuddered. Or Traitors’ Gate.
To be caught out after curfew probably wouldn’t earn a citizen a one-way trip to the gallows, but there were no guarantees. The one certain way to be sent there was to be caught out in public unMasked. From tomorrow on, Sala would never feel the outside air on her face, except in the closed and concealed courtyard of her own home.
“No, no more sneaking out,” Sala said. She shrugged. “But we have to grow up sometime.”
Mara looked down at herself again, and sighed. “That’s what they say.”
Sala stood up. “Race you again? I’ll spot you four lengths this time.”
Mara scrambled to her feet. “You’re on.” But before she could dive into the water, a voice—a male voice—boomed from behind them.
“Hold it right there!”
Both girls squealed and jumped into the water . . . from which they were hauled a few moments later by black-Masked Night Watchers who draped them in cloaks, handed them their clothes, and, once they were dressed, separated them and, silent and disapproving, took them to their own homes.
As she endured an endless lecture from her mother about how horribly embarrassed she was and how much disgrace Mara had brought on the family—“And your father the Master Maskmaker, at that!”—Mara’s main regret was that she hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye to Sala and wish her good luck in her Masking.
I’ll see her again soon, she thought as she climbed the ladder to her attic room. She’s just being Masked. It’s not like she’s dying.
And soon I’ll be Masked, too.
She shivered, and the thick blankets of the bed into which she burrowed a few minutes later did nothing to warm her.
···
A week before her fifteenth birthday and her Masking, Mara sat once more on the city’s north wall. She remembered sitting there with Mayson before her Second Testing, watching the Autarch and the Child Guards proceed below them through the Outside Market. By now he’s Masked, too, like Sala. A Watcher.
Glad he wasn’t a Watcher yet that night Sala and I got caught skinny-dipping, she thought. Bad enough to be seen naked by strange men. But if Mayson had seen them . . .
She shook off the thought. Her bigger worry today was that her mother might see her, dressed as she was in what her mother would consider a scandalously short tunic that left her long legs bare and had a tendency to slip off of one suntanned shoulder. Her mother had taken to insisting she wear a proper long skirt and long-sleeved blouse when she went out. “You’re not a child anymore, Mara,” she’d said. “You’ll soon be Masked, and then you’ll be an adult. It’s time you started acting like one.”
Mara glanced over her shoulder, looking up Maskmakers’ Way to the green roof of their home. She could see her parents’ bedroom window. She wondered if her mother were looking out. Well, even if she is, it’s not like she can pick you out at this distance, she reassured herself.
She sighed. Her mother would have preferred Mara not to leave the house at all, but she couldn’t bear spending day after day locked up there, especially now, with her Masking so close—and the workshop off-limits.
Ever since Healer Ethelda paid a visit, she thought.
She’d been in the workshop, mixing the special clay for a new Mask, when her father had suddenly come in. “Leave that, Mara,” he said. “Go downstairs and get something to drink. The Master Healer is here to speak to me.”
Obediently—and willingly enough; she was getting thirsty—she’d put down the stirring stick, taken off her leather apron, and left the workshop. On the landing she’d come face-to-face with a small woman—only a little taller than herself—wearing a blue Mask (bright blue, unlike the pale blue Mara’s mother wore), decorated with green gems. Her robes were that same sky-hue. Even her eyes were blue: they looked at Mara gravely as she gave a small curtsy. “Healer Ethelda,” Mara said.
“Mara,” said the Healer. “I hope you are well?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“Go downstairs, Mara,” her father repeated, and she descended to the empty kitchen—her mother was out shopping. She helped herself to bread and cheese and drew a glass of cold water from the pump, wondering what the Healer had come to talk to her father about. I hope she doesn’t take too long, she thought. That clay isn’t going to mix itself.
But she’d never finished mixing that clay. Ethelda was closeted with her father for a very long time. She was still there when Mara’s mother came back. Mara helped place the bags of meal, jars of oil, onions and redroots, and other foodstuffs from the market into the pantry. She’d washed dishes. She’d weeded the garden. The day had slipped away, and it wasn’t until suppertime that Ethelda at last descended, said a brief hello and good-bye to Mara’s mother, and slipped out into the darkening street.
Her father came down the stairs soon after. He looked . . . shaken. Mara’s mother frowned at him. “Charlton?” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s fine, Karissa.” He gave his wife a brief smile, then turned to Mara. “Mara,” he said. “It’s only a few weeks until your Masking, and I’ve decided . . .” He stopped and took a de
ep breath before continuing. “I’ve decided you should stop helping me. Just until after you’re Masked and you’re a full apprentice.”
She’d been shocked, hadn’t known what to say. “But, Daddy, the Masks I’m working on . . . that Engineer’s Mask is ready for the—”
“I can manage just fine without you for a few weeks, Mara,” her father had said. “I’ve decided it’s time to start working on your Mask, and I don’t want you to see it.”
“But—”
“You heard your father, Mara,” her mother said, though Mara did not miss the uncertain glance she’d given her husband. “I’m sure I can find you plenty to keep you occupied around the house.”
And that had been that. She hadn’t been back in the workshop since. That was bad enough, but worse was the fact she’d hardly seen her father. He spent hours locked in his workshop. He’d stopped coming up to her room to say good night, as he had every night of her life before. And he’d stopped coming to eat with his daughter and wife, not even for breakfast, which had always been one of their favorite times together as a family, sharing porridge or bread and bacon in the morning sun, sometimes laughing over silly jokes and wordplay, sometimes just sitting in sleepy, silent companionship. He might as well be in Silverfall, she thought bitterly: the mining town high in the eastern mountains was famously the most inaccessible place in all of Aygrima, snowed in most of the year.
“He’s just busy, Mara,” her mother insisted when she asked. “And one of the things he’s busy with is your Mask. He wants it to be very special.”
“I know,” Mara mumbled, but inside she thought, Busy with my Mask for weeks? He’d only taken ten days to create a Mask for Stanik, the Guardian of Security and the most powerful man in the Circle, and Guardian Stanik was his boss, overseer of all the Maskmakers of Aygrima. Of course, he had my help, she thought; but she knew she hadn’t been that much help to him. She hadn’t really done much more than mix glazes and watch the kiln.
It was all very strange, and very disturbing, and strangest and most disturbing of all was the fact that in a week’s time, she would be Masked and she still didn’t know if her Gift had run true, and if, in fact, she could do the magic required of a Maskmaker.
And that was why she was sitting on the city wall as she had so often in the past, once more dressed in the simple tunic of a child in blatant defiance of her mother, who had seen her go out wearing her staid skirt and blouse, but hadn’t seen her slip into the gardening shed and exchange those clothes for this, and leave her sturdy shoes behind to once more run gloriously barefoot. It was her last chance to be a child, after all. In a week, everything would change forever.
Although, she admitted to herself, she might have thought twice about her current attire if the weather had already turned cool. But though harvest had come and gone and the damp, chill Tamita winter must surely follow, for now the sun, beating down from a bright blue sky, still had real heat in it. On a day like today, who could bear to be wrapped up in a woolen skirt and scratchy blouse?
But she glanced uneasily over her shoulder and up the hill again at her green-roofed house, and decided it was time to move. Just in case her mother could see her.
She pulled her feet up, stood, and trotted easily along the wall, unconcerned by the sheer drop to hard stone just steps to either side, until she’d reached the next tower, safely out of sight of her house.
With one hand on the tower’s smoothed yellow stone, she looked down into the Outside Market again—and froze. That bright-red hair, that blue dress, it had to be . . . !
“Sala!” she yelled at the top of her voice. A birdfruit vendor, a little girl in a long red skirt, and a shirtless boy in a green kilt all looked up at her, but the object of her shout kept walking without so much as a glance her way.
Mara dashed into the tower and down its narrow winding stairs. She burst out through an archway onto the Great Circle Road that made its cobblestoned way all around Tamita just inside the wall. A cart horse snorted and balked, earning her a curse from its driver, but she ignored him and ran as fast as she could to the Market Gate. She dodged through it and then, twisting and turning, slipped through the crowds in the Outside Market like a snakefish through seaweed. Masks of every sort turned her way, some smooth and beautiful, chased with designs that spoke of their occupation (here the red scrollwork of a lawyer, there the crossed silver hammers of a blacksmith); some dull and gray, all decoration long worn away. One or two Gifted looked her way: a blue-Masked Healer, a red-Masked Engineer, his Mask set in a permanent smile but his real lips beneath pressed into a disapproving line.
The black Masks of two Watchers talking to a trembling gray-Masked knife sharpener turned toward her as she ran past, but an instant later she rounded a papermaker’s stall and was out of their sight. An old woman whose Mask looked like a bleached skull screeched and swung her cane, but Mara dodged with the ease of long experience and didn’t lose a step.
She reached the lane. Sala had been walking in that direction. Mara stood on tiptoe, trying to see over the throngs, and glimpsed red hair and blue cloth in front of a baker’s stall a hundred feet distant. She dashed that way, and reached the stall just as the red-haired girl dropped a silver coin into the baker’s hand and turned away with her basket full of rolls.
“Sala!” Mara gasped out with what little breath she had left, then doubled over, hands on her knees, panting.
Sala turned, and Mara looked up at her snow-white Mask and the red hair, once so flyaway, now piled in an elaborate, coiled coif above the gleaming clay covering her face. Shining silver grapevines curled across the Mask’s forehead and down its cheeks, where the red circles on the cheeks marking her as a glassmaker would be added once she had finished her two-year Masked apprenticeship. Mara hadn’t seen the Mask since she had applied that silver filigree, and she felt a surge of pride as she looked at it now. It really is beautiful, she thought. As it well should be: her father, tasked as he was with making all the Masks for the Gifted, only rarely made Masks for the non-Gifted, and those he did were so expensive only the wealthy could afford them, but for his daughter’s best friend he had not only made an exception, he had done so free of charge, insisting that Sala and her parents accept the Mask as a gift from Mara and her family.
“Oh,” said Sala. “Hello, Mara.”
Mara frowned. Sala’s voice sounded different: not just slightly muffled, but almost embarrassed.
Embarrassed to talk to me? Mara thought. That’s crazy. We’ve been best friends forever.
“I haven’t seen you since the night the Watchers hauled us out of the Waterworkers’ pool,” Mara said, her breath coming more easily now. She straightened up. “How’s the apprenticeship going? What’s Masked life like? I want to know everything.”
“I am enjoying my apprenticeship very much, thank you,” Sala said. “Esterella is an excellent mentor.” Her voice remained cool and detached, as though she were making small talk at a party. “And I have become quite accustomed to the Mask. Please thank your father again for me for such a wonderful Masking Day gift.” She looked over her shoulder, the now-orange light of the westering sun turning the silver vines in her Mask into lines of fire on the white glaze. “And speaking of Esterella, she must be wondering where I am. I must catch up to her.” She glanced back at Mara. “It has been good to see you again, Mara. Once you are Masked, we must get together some time.” And then Sala turned and walked away.
Mara gaped after her, as unable to speak as if her breath had been knocked out of her. “Sala!” she finally managed to call, but her friend, already twenty feet away, didn’t turn around. “Sala!” she shouted louder, and took a step after her, but a heavy hand landed on her shoulder, restraining her. She twisted around and saw the black, blank mask of a Watcher, eyes glittering deep within the eyeholes.
“Don’t bother the citizen, girl,” he growled.
She’s my best f
riend! Mara wanted to shout at him, but even as upset as she was, she knew better than to talk back to a Watcher. “Yes, sir,” she said. The Watcher lifted his black-gloved hand, and she swallowed, turned, and walked as unhurriedly as she could back toward the Market Gate, certain she could feel his gaze on her the whole way.
Her stomach roiled inside her like the time she had foolishly eaten one of the tiny round chokeberries that grew on the bushes in their backyard. How could Sala have changed so much in such a short time? Just three months ago they’d been laughing together at the Waterworkers’ pool. And now Sala was all, “It’s been very good to see you again,” and “Once you are Masked, we must get together.”
Mara felt her face heat. Not bloody likely. You think you know someone . . .
It’s the Mask, she told herself as she began climbing Maskmakers’ Way. She’s got herself a Mask, and now she thinks she’s better than me. Even though everybody gets a Mask. It’s not like they’re anything special. I’ll have one myself in a week, and it’s not going to change me!
But not for the first time, she wondered if that were really true.
THREE
The Colors of Magic
MARA HOPED AGAINST HOPE that her father would be sitting at the dinner table when she got home, but his place was empty. “Where’s Father?”
“At the Palace.” Her mother didn’t turn from the counter. “Another meeting with Ethelda.”
Mara’s heart fluttered a little. Her mother claimed all the hours her father had been spending with Ethelda had to do with some changes to the Masks assigned to Healers—a new shade of blue, additional ornamentation—but Mara couldn’t help wondering . . .
