Masks

by E. C. Blake

  She wanted it. A lot.

  Grelda wrinkled her nose as she handed it over. “Foul stuff,” she said. “But if my books are to be believed . . . can you sit up?”

  “I think so.” Cautiously, she raised herself up. Her skull no longer seemed made of lead, and this time she was able to sit right up in the bed without breaking into a sweat, or, at least, not much of one. The thin white shift left her arms bare, and as the blanket fell from her shoulders the cool air raised goose bumps. Grelda handed her the mug and Mara closed her hands gratefully around its warmth. “Choke it down, if you can,” Grelda said doubtfully.

  “What are you talking about?” Mara said absently, absorbed in the heavenly scent. “It smells wonderful.” Grelda’s eyes widened in surprise as Mara raised the mug and took her first sip of the hot liquid. It tasted as marvelous as it smelled, thirst-quenching as the freshest spring water, sweet as the sweetest redcherry juice, but with a fiery warmth that spread through her weak, stiff, bruised, and aching body in an instant. Unlike the cold water, it didn’t make her empty belly cramp: in fact, it seemed to fill it, erasing the pangs of both hunger and thirst.

  Mara drank the rest as quickly as she could without burning her mouth, and by the time she returned the empty mug to Grelda, she felt almost normal. The aches and stiffness remained, the bruises hadn’t disappeared, her leg was still bandaged (and I’m still wearing a diaper, she thought), and the bad memories still lurked in her mind, but all those things, even the memories, seemed manageable now, annoying rather than debilitating.

  “That was amazing,” she told Grelda. “No wonder there’s no one else in here. No one can stay sick after drinking that.”

  Grelda shook her head. “I’ve never made that concoction before,” she said. “It looked utterly noxious. And smelled worse.”

  Mara blinked. “I don’t understand—”

  “In one of my tattered old books, this recipe was listed as a restorative ‘for those with the Gift suffering from a surfeit of uncontrolled magic.’ Your description of what happened to you seemed to imply that might be the cause of your coma.”

  “And it really smelled bad to you?”

  Grelda grimaced. “Like the sickroom chamber pot after a week’s run of sourbelly.” She looked around the room. “And this room is empty because it’s where I put the patients I expect to die,” she added bluntly.

  Mara blinked. “Oh,” she said in a small voice.

  Grelda laughed for the first time since Mara had met her. “Not to worry, girl. You might still die—”

  Mara gasped.

  “—but it won’t be from whatever brought you in here flat on your back.”

  Mara let out her breath in a rush.

  Footsteps sounded beyond the curtained arch. Grelda glanced that way. “Company,” she said.

  Edrik pushed through the curtain, Asteria peering anxiously over his shoulder as he entered. His eyes went at once to Mara, and relief, plain as the growing daylight outside, washed over his face. “You’re alive!”

  Mara nodded. “But I don’t remember being brought here.”

  Edrik glanced at Grelda. “May I talk to her?”

  Grelda shrugged. “As far as I can tell, she’s right as a rainbow, just a little weak, a little sore.” She gave Mara an appraising look. “I’ve seldom seen a more comprehensive set of bruises, with some nice scrapes thrown in. A particularly nasty cut on your leg. And an older, healing wound on your head. I took the stitches out of that for you.”

  “The mine is . . . hard on people,” Mara said softly. “Two days before I left it, I was in hospital with a concussion and a broken arm, too.”

  Grelda frowned. “Cracked, you mean?”

  Mara shook her head. “Broken. Healer Ethelda fixed it.”

  Grelda’s face closed down. “More magic.” She turned abruptly and headed for the entrance. “Take all the time you want,” she snapped at Edrik on her way out. “Asteria, with me.” Her granddaughter leaped to follow. The red curtain swirled angrily in their wake.

  Mara stared after them. “What did I say?”

  “Magic Healing is a sore point with Grelda.” Edrik grimaced. “Sorry, that sounded like I was trying to make a joke.”

  “Not a very good one,” Mara said.

  “I said I was sorry.” Edrik pulled a chair over to Mara’s bedside and sat down. He leaned toward her. “What happened?”

  “You tell me.”

  Edrik frowned, then sighed. “Very well.”

  He told her how, on the day she had been kidnapped, it had been several hours before anyone realized she’d gone missing. As scouts had come back from the fruitless search for Grute, they were sent out again in search of her, uselessly. It had been Hyram—probably thinking of their conversation along the beach, Mara thought—who suggested they search along the shore, and finally, near where the water of the underground river poured into the sea, they had seen two sets of footprints in the sand, and had realized that Grute had not only evaded them, he had kidnapped Mara.

  “At least, we assumed you were kidnapped,” Edrik said, watching Mara’s face. “Keltan, Alita, and Prella all insisted you would never have willingly run off with Grute.”

  “But you thought I might have?” Mara said, face heating. “Or was it your grandmother?”

  “We don’t really know you,” Edrik said, not sounding at all apologetic. “Or what you’re capable of. As recent events have demonstrated.”

  “I did not run off with Grute,” Mara said with finality. She told Edrik how Grute had evaded them with his improvised breathing tube, how he had surprised her in the lake, and how they had gotten out of the Secret City unseen.

  When she had finished, Edrik sighed. “We were fools. It never crossed my mind that the river might offer a path of escape. Or at least,” he amended, “not a path of escape that anyone could survive.”

  “We almost didn’t,” Mara said. “But Grute didn’t seem to care whether he survived or not. Much less whether I did.” She shuddered, remembering that terrifying, watery rush through darkness.

  Edrik told her how they’d tracked her and Grute toward the mountains, and guessed they were making for the mining camp. They’d lost the trail as it climbed up into the rocks of a high ridge, and had crossed into the valley on the other side to try to pick it up again. But when they finally did find more tracks, hours later, they’d been puzzled. “The tracks we picked up were of a horse and a mule, and you’d been on foot,” Edrik said. “But they were headed toward the camp, so we followed them, and finally saw some of your footprints by the stream where the animals had stopped to drink . . . along with new footprints we hadn’t seen before. What we didn’t see were any of Grute’s tracks. We didn’t know how to read it.”

  “A man from the camp found me,” Mara said. “I was on the mule and he rode the horse.”

  “So Grute rode double with you?”

  “No,” Mara said. “Grute didn’t ride anywhere. Grute was . . . is . . . dead.”

  “Dead?” Edrik looked confused. “How—?”

  “I killed him.” Mara hadn’t intended to say it, had been planning to keep it a secret, to claim Grute had wandered off in the night and never returned, perhaps had fallen down a cliff. But the words came out before she could stop them. She needed to tell someone, needed to explain to someone . . .

  ...needed someone to tell her that what she had done was all right.

  “We took shelter in a hut,” Mara said, as Edrik stared at her, clearly shocked. “Grute had found some whiskey. He was drunk. He . . . he came at me. He was going to . . .” She shook her head. “I couldn’t . . . I did the only thing I could. I grabbed magic. I–I killed him.”

  “Magic?” Edrik repeated, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “You killed him with magic? Where did you find magic?”

  “In the hut. In a basi
n of black stone. It’s what they call a magic-well. A place where magic oozes to the surface, and can be collected.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Edrik said.

  “No doubt there are many things you’ve never heard of, hiding in this hole all these years!” Mara snapped, anger spurred by the disbelief in his voice.

  “And you claim you used this magic to kill Grute?” Edrik said, the disbelief thickening. “A boy twice your size and strong as a bear?”

  “The magic didn’t care how big he was.”

  “You just struck him dead? Poof? Just like that?”

  “I grabbed his head with both hands and his head exploded!” Mara snarled. “Do you know what that feels like? It came apart in my hands like an overripe melon. I was covered in his blood, bits of his brain, chunks of skull with hair still clinging to it . . . I pulled two teeth out of my hair. Blood painted the walls, and I did it!” Her anger faded, her voice fading to a whisper. “I killed him with magic.”

  On Edrik’s face, disbelief warred with horror, and then with . . .

  ...the word that came to Mara’s mind was “avarice.” He looks like a greedy shopkeeper suddenly offered the bargain of the year.

  “I’ve never dreamed . . .” Edrik breathed. “Never dreamed anyone could use the Gift like that. I’ve never even heard rumors of such a thing.” He stood up. “This is more important than making fake Masks. If you can do this, you can—”

  Her anger roared back, full force. “Shut up!” she screamed at him. “Just shut up and listen to me!”

  Edrik’s eyes widened, and she wondered if it had just occurred to him that a girl who could blow Grute’s head off could blow his off, too.

  Not that she would. Not that she could, not without magic at hand.

  But that had been what she’d thought when she was in the grip of the Watcher, too.

  Edrik sat down again, but not comfortably; he perched on the edge of the chair as though poised to leap to his feet again at a moment’s notice. “What else?”

  “I also used the magic to clean up the hut,” Mara went on, voice trembling. “When the Watcher came the next morning he found me, alone; no Grute and no magic left in the magic-well. He was most annoyed by that, but never even considered that I might have somehow made use of it. It’s well-known the Gift doesn’t survive the failure of a Mask.”

  Edrik’s eyes narrowed. Mara went on. “He took me to the camp. The Warden was suspicious, of me and of the tale I told of how Grute and I had escaped the wagon after they were attacked by bandits. But I stuck to my story.

  “He sent me down into the mines.” Her throat closed as she remembered. “It’s a terrible place,” she managed after a moment. “And the unMasked are worked to death in it.”

  “Not all the unMasked,” Edrik said shortly. “We know about the trustees.”

  The trustees. She thought of the ones she’d seen, the hardened men, the harder women, like Hayka, and their casual cruelty toward the other unMasked. How many of those suffering the mines and the barracks were of the same ilk, suffering only because they hadn’t yet found a way to turn the tables and become one of the abusers instead of one of the abused? The Masks—the old Masks—had been very good at identifying the people who would be the dregs of any society, the bullies, the beaters, the sadists, the selfish, the predators, the perverts.

  But Catilla herself had told Mara that, even before the Masks changed, not all of the unMasked were like that. Some were simply those who didn’t fit in, who were different. And they were the ones the others preyed on. “Of those who are not sent to the mines—the women, the girls—many are given to the Watchers. For a night. Or . . .” Her throat closed again as she thought of Katia. “Or for longer.” She remembered the woman in the bed opposite her in the hospital, the one whose heart the Healer had stopped with a touch. “For life. Which isn’t very long, as a rule.”

  “We know about that, too,” Edrik said.

  Mara’s anger returned. “If you know so much about what goes on in the camp, why haven’t you done anything?”

  Edrik spread his hands. “What would you have us do? Attack the camp? Kill the Watchers? Free the inmates?”

  “Yes!”

  “And how long would they live in the Wild? Or if they survived the Wild, how long before the Autarch’s Watchers hunted them down?” He leaned closer, face hard. “Or would you have me bring them all to the Secret City? Including the trustees, and all the others who are as bad, or worse, than Grute?”

  Mara pressed her lips together and said nothing.

  Edrik sat back again. “We were considering an attack on the camp to free you. I am glad we did not have to carry it out.”

  “How did you even know for certain I was there?” Mara said.

  “From the ridge to the north, you can look down into the camp,” Edrik said. “We saw you: going into the mine, carried to the hospital, and then walking to the big house. That gave us hope we could rescue you.”

  “Why?”

  “On the north side, it is possible to sneak up very close to the palisade without being seen—the camp is a prison, remember, not a fort. The wall and the guards are there to keep people in, not out.”

  Mara nodded.

  “As well, on the east side, there is a hill from which it is possible to shoot arrows over the palisade wall. Our plan was to fire the hay near the stables with flaming arrows. During the resulting panic and confusion, with horses screaming and Watchers running to save them and fight the fire, we would scale the northern wall and snatch you from inside the house.”

  “If you’re so fearful of discovery, why would you even risk that much?” Mara said bitterly. “Am I really that valuable?”

  “I judged the risk acceptable,” Edrik said. “If all went well, it would have been put down to another raid by bandits, a follow-up to the attack on the wagon. We would have made it look like a robbery, ransacking the house for food, clothing, and gold. Hopefully, they would have thought you were taken as nothing more than an incidental prize, just because you were there. And to answer your second question, my grandmother has deemed you that valuable, so, yes. You are.” He regarded her coolly. “You should be grateful.”

  Mara ignored that. “But before you could try this plan . . . ?”

  “You came out. We were hiding on the ridge to the north even as you rode over it.”

  “Then why didn’t you attack then? Or that night, when we camped?”

  “You didn’t seem to be in any danger,” Edrik said. “And we were curious as to where you were riding, with two Watchers, and two others who were not Watchers.”

  Pixot and Turpit. Mara had completely forgotten about them. “The two who aren’t Watchers, are they dead?”

  “No,” Edrik said. “Imprisoned, separately. We are still debating what to do with them.”

  “Don’t hurt them,” Mara said quickly. “They’re not bad men. At least Pixot isn’t. They’re just geologists.” She thought of the camp’s gold mine along the shore. “They might even be useful.”

  Edrik frowned. “Geologists?” he said carefully. “I don’t know that word.”

  “Rock-men,” Mara said, remembering what the Watcher had called Pixot. “They know about rocks. That’s why they were riding with us. The Warden found out that my Gift had survived. He had a use for me. He sent me out with the others to examine a find of black lodestone.”

  Edrik cocked his head. “Black lodestone?”

  “Like regular lodestone attracts metal, black lodestone attracts magic,” Mara explained. “Black lodestone is what they’re mining in the camp. Or to put it another way, they’re mining magic.”

  Edrik blinked. “Magic? Are you sure?”

  Mara nodded. “Yes. But the mine is playing out. I saw it for myself: there’s barely a trace of magic left in the rocks down below. It must take ton
s of stone to get enough magic to fill a single urn. But the place where we were when you rescued me . . .” She shook her head, remembering the wondrous beauty of the cavern with the underground lake, the auroras of magic swirling across the sparkling walls. “There’s magic there, all right. More magic than fills all the store halls of the Palace. Magic to make the Autarch drool.”

  Edrik leaned even closer. “And now we come to it,” he said. “What happened to the Watcher?”

  “You killed one,” Mara said.

  Edrik made an impatient chopping motion with his hand. “Yes, yes. We shot him from up above when he stepped into the open. Once they made you go into the cave, we feared for you and decided we could wait no longer.

  “But the second Watcher was smart. He figured out where we must be and stayed out of our line of fire. I signaled Hyram and Keltan and the rest waiting at the mouth of the ravine to attack. When they reached the cave, they saw the other Watcher straddling you. He had your head pulled back, he had his knife out, he was half a second from slitting your throat, and then . . .”

  Edrik paused, as if waiting for a response, but Mara said nothing. She didn’t know what to say. Edrik frowned, then continued. “And then he vanished. One instant he was there. The next—gone. Nothing but dust, swirling in a sudden, powerful whirlwind centered on you, flat on your back in the water, face turned into the stream, not stirring; you would have drowned if Hyram and Keltan hadn’t pulled you out. You were breathing, but that was the only sign you still lived. And you were covered in fine white dust. The whole glade was covered in dust, left behind by the whirlwind.”

  Dust, Mara thought. Covered in dust. The dry ash that was all that remained of the Watcher, burned away in the fury of the magical fire that almost burned me away, too. The same ash that was all the magic left of Grute, in the hut . . .

  She shuddered. “I hope somebody gave me a bath.”

  “Hyram and Keltan both volunteered,” Edrik said, and Mara’s mouth fell open. She felt herself blushing. Edrik laughed. “Don’t worry. One of the women did it instead.”