A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  He dropped the rags in and, stifling another dry heave, scrambled to his feet just as she rounded the corner. He jumped about a mile in the air when he turned and saw her. “Ma’am! Sorry, ma’am, I’m still working on the mess here, I just was going to go and—”

  She seized the bucket from him and flung the bloody, grimy contents over me in one sharp movement. I gasped with the shock of the cold. “You,” she snarled at the lad. “Get out of my sight. And you.” She turned to me. “What have you to say about all this? Another pack of lies for me?”

  “Nothing!” I cried. “Nothing! I told you she’d be up to something, I told you she’d try something, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

  “Clearly you know something of her secrets. They wanted to get you out before you spilled everything to me, didn’t they?”

  I struggled to my feet and started pulling off my wet rags. “No,” I said miserably. “I expect they just wanted revenge for me telling you things that sent you haring off into Pattern’s personal business.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to, I guess. You’re only going to kill me anyway.”

  “Not,” she hissed, “until you tell me everything you know. What was all that about that general? Some kind of hint?”

  Nearly naked, I huddled up to the brazier and rubbed my skin, thinking that if I didn’t have pneumonia before, I might by the end of the night. I was so dirty and smelly by that point that I wasn’t sure if the water had lessened or added to it. The smell of blood likely would have attracted more lice and fleas, if the weather hadn’t been so cold. “Hints,” I said. “I guess it depends on what you think is a hint.”

  “Tell me what it meant!” she screamed.

  “Nothing!” I snapped. “I was trying to butter you up so you’d maybe think about not killing me!”

  “So you did make it up,” she said, triumphant.

  I pointed one finger at her. “No. That, I told the truth about. And about the blackwitch!” I pointed to the head in the fire and to the pile of rust and mangled parts that had once been the lock of my cell. It only occurred to me then that I could have run, I could have pushed open the door and escaped. I felt sick with terror just thinking about doing it.

  “Guesses, weren’t they. The strategic truth. To kiss ass.”

  I hid a flinch. “Yes, well, we all have to do it sometimes, I suppose, to save our lives.”

  “It hasn’t saved yours. I’m having you moved to another part of the prison.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I won’t let Anfisa’s little puppets dictate to me when I get to execute my prisoners. Their little gamble bought you some time, old man, because if I killed you tomorrow, they’d probably just be happy about it.”

  So then I was dragged up to the new cell—it was cleaner, much more like the cell I’d been held in when I was first taken on accusations of witchcraft, before they’d buried me alive under a warren of stone tunnels. There was a window at the end of the hall, but it was glazed, and the temperature, while still chilly, was much more bearable than it had been down below. The walls weren’t caked with mud and filth, the floor was swept, . . . The difference was that the bars below had been about a hand’s width apart, and this area of the prison was all stone walls and tiny doors with no openings but a flap at the bottom where, I supposed, the food would be pushed through. The door had five locks on it, all of them shiny new—which wasn’t much of a comfort. If the Weavers came again, maybe next time they wouldn’t even need a blackwitch.

  The guards shoved me in and slammed the door. There was the standard-issue bench, bolted to the floor. I looked around for somewhere to lay out my wet rags to dry—they already reeked of blood and I didn’t have much hope that they’d be bearable to use anymore. My smelly horse blanket was just as sodden, and the wool had soaked up what felt like ten times its weight in water. It might go mildewy before it dried, but that wasn’t too much more of a loss.

  I heard footsteps in the hallway. They stopped just outside my door. I went and scratched at it. “Someone there?” I said softly. No answer. I got down on my hands and knees, then put my head to the ground and poked up the flap in the bottom of the door. I could see the heels of a pair of shoes directly in front of my face, and the butt of a crossbow, but that was about it. The boots’ owner seemed to have settled in for the next few hours.

  A captive audience who refused to speak. I love nothing more. “I’m bored,” I said—bored, and frightened, and wanting comfort. “And you are too, probably, so I’ll just talk to myself and you can listen if you like. If you want me to stop, I’ll be needing some new clothes for the night and a blanket—Vihra Kylliat rather made the ones I have unusable.”

  No answer.

  “Well, just let me know, then,” I said. “I’d like to sleep at some point, and I’m sure you’d like to get some shut-eye on the job too. I won’t tell anyone. Anyway, I’ll keep you entertained until then. No tricks or witchcraft, don’t worry about that.”

  THE ELEVENTH TALE:

  Nerissineya and Adrossinar

  A very long time ago and half the world away, there was a republic that had come together and called itself Illinleyelassalia, which means the Nation of a Thousand Towers at the Foot of the Great Mountains. That was a thousand years ago. Now they call themselves Elanriarissi.

  There has always been a peculiar belief in this nation, going back as far as there are stories to tell about it, which is that the uncovered face renders one as bare and vulnerable as an uncovered body, or an uncovered soul. The Elanri, from the time they are named as babies, wear masks over their faces. They never take them off, even to sleep.

  Adrossinar was a wealthy man in Illinleyelassalia. Some say he was a merchant or a noble. Some say he was a senator, or the consul himself. Whatever the truth, he was rich, he was respected, and he was extremely important. He was blessed with a family whom he loved dearly and whom he ruled with kind discipline—his wife, four sons, and a daughter.

  When the girl was born, her parents saw that her face was stained by a dark birthmark blotching across her eyes and cheeks, like a mask itself. I imagine you are shocked, but see it how they saw it: a daughter who would always be masked, even when unmasked. Who would always be protected. It was a blessing from the gods, in their eyes, and they made no secret of it. They delayed naming her for a week, and then two, so that they could show their friends, and the friends of their friends, the great gift that they had been given.

  But the time came, and Adrossinar and his wife took the child to the temple and paid the priestess for a name: Nerissineya, a good-luck name to match the good-luck mark across her face. The priestess gave the baby a mask as well, of red-purple velvet the exact color of her mark.

  Nerissineya grew into a fine young woman: graceful, lovely, accomplished. Everything a man like Adrossinar could ever want in a daughter. He gave her the finest and most beautiful masks there were. She had a thousand of them, each one different and more beautiful than the last, but she had three that were particularly glorious. The first was a mask of the softest leather as white as a snowy mountaintop when the sun hits it at midday, with long wispy white feathers all around the edges that floated in the barest breath of breeze. The second was a mask of gold and silver, beaten with intricate patterns and inlaid with chips of dazzling jewels, a waterfall of silver-colored pearls falling in strands from the bottom edge. The third was a mask of purest black, so dark it seemed to draw the light into it, so dark it made her skin and eyes seem to glow like the faces of the moons, and it was wreathed in trailing veils of black silk.

  Nerissineya hated each one of them, for she had a secret. All her life, she had looked into the mirror and seen a masked girl. The mark across her face was her greatest burden. A curse, not a blessing. “How,” she would ask herself, “will I ever know who I am when I can’t see my own bare face?” How, too, would anyone else ever really know her?

  One day Adrossinar summoned his daughter into h
is presence and told her that the time had come for him to give her the very last gift a father gives his daughter: a wedding mask. He had already visited the finest mask makers in the city, and each of them had sent him their designs. “Choose,” he told his daughter, “for I love you more than life itself and I would see you in the most beautiful mask the city has ever seen upon your wedding day.”

  Nerissineya looked at the drawings and said, “They are all so lovely. I could never choose.”

  “Come now,” Adrossinar said. “You say that every time the mask maker visits.”

  “Your taste is so fine, Father,” she said. “You’ll pick out the best one. I like them all exactly equally.” In fact, she despised them all equally.

  “Hmph,” said her father. “Well, my taste says that none of these is beautiful enough for my daughter. I shall send them back.”

  “Perhaps that is best after all,” she said, and smiled behind her mask of shimmering blue feathers.

  Adrossinar sent the drawings back. He began to talk about suitors and husbands and marriages almost every moment of the day—but the husband seemed less important to him than the mask he would have made for Nerissineya’s wedding.

  A week later he summoned his daughter again. The mask makers had come up with new designs, even more elaborate and fantastical than the first. Again, Nerissineya declined to choose, and again Adrossinar sent the drawings back.

  Each week a new slew of designs would arrive, and each week Nerissineya hated them even more. The girl was deeply troubled. She donned her white mask, the mask with the floating feathers, and told her parents she was going to the temple to purify her soul for marriage.

  On the way to the temple, she passed a troupe of actors from Faissal. Faissal is gone now, its land absorbed into the southern kingdoms of Girenthal and Borgalos and its people driven out and scattered over the wide world. But even in those days, they traveled too, performing great feats of skill all up and down the peninsula.

  Nerissineya looked out and saw the players performing on their makeshift stage, scandalously unmasked. She envied them, but she passed them by and continued to the temple to pray and sit in contemplation, as a dutiful daughter ought.

  She dreamed that night of the troupe of players, and she dreamed she was amongst them. One of them reached out to touch her face, and she realized she was unmasked. She awoke suddenly and it was morning.

  That day, her father declared that he had chosen a mask—he had searched high and low and he had found a little-known mask maker of foreign origin, who had devised a mask unlike any that had ever been seen before. It was to be a marvel of velvety crimson suede, tooled and pierced in lacelike patterns and laid over a foundation of beaten gold, and it would have feathers of the rarest kind, and sparkling strands of crystals and opals draping across the forehead and hanging in long, delicate threads over her shoulders and down her back. Each of these crystals, the mask maker said, would be enchanted with the tiniest shard of starlight, and the mask would be a glory, a masterpiece, a treasure so unbearably beautiful that legends would be told of it for hundreds of years to come—and, as you see, so they have.

  Adrossinar’s eyes filled with tears when he looked upon the drawing the mask maker had provided him, for he didn’t see a mask of legends. He saw, in his mind, his daughter wearing it, and smiling, and standing next to her betrothed as they were wed. He saw the mask hanging in his daughter’s bedroom in her own house as his grandchildren played beneath it, just as Nerissineya had played when she was a child. He saw his granddaughter wearing it, his great-granddaughter, a whole legacy of daughters to come who would wear that mask in happiness, and his heart swelled and ached in his chest. He looked at the mask and he saw a symbol of joy, a blessing to be passed down through his line forever.

  He gave the drawing to Nerissineya, and her eyes filled with tears, and she could not speak. She went to her room, and put on her golden mask, beautiful enough that no one would notice her weeping, and she went to the temple to pray for a divine intervention of one kind or another.

  She saw the Faiss players again on her way home, and she remembered her dream so vividly that she stopped to watch from across the street, full of fire and want when she saw the men and women unmasked. When the performance ended and the players came around collecting money from the few people who watched, Nerissineya stepped forward and dropped a coin into the cap of a tall boy with a wide face. He had pimples on his forehead. Freckles across his nose. Blemishes on his cheeks. A scar on his chin. She wished again to be rid of her mask so he could see how the mark across her face grew darker with blushing.

  She dreamed of the players again that night, of the boy watching her while someone else touched her face and wiped away the mask stained into her skin.

  The wedding mask arrived in the afternoon. It was everything, and more, that the drawing had promised for both father and daughter. Nerissineya hid her sorrow behind her mask of swallowing black and slipped away when her father was occupied with paying the craftsman. She took her mask of pure white, and she took her mask of bright gold, and she left her home.

  She crossed a bridge and she flung the white mask into the water. She passed a public latrine and flung the golden mask into the pool of night soil. And finally, she approached the circle of the Faiss players’ wagons and their fires, and she flung her black mask into a campfire that was unattended, and then, with nothing on her face but her mark and the shadows, she knocked on the door of one of the wagons.

  I paused there, to see if the guard would speak, just as I always pause when I tell this story. What happened to her? people ask. The guard didn’t, so I didn’t finish it, but I’ll tell you since I can see you want to know: She begged the Faiss players to take her away with them, and at first they refused, for she was clearly the daughter of a noble house—they could tell by her dress and the softness of her hands. But the freckly boy whose face she had seen bare, he spoke up—he’d seen her at the performances. He’d seen her watching, seen her hunger. He’d listened to her plead for a place in the troupe, and he could recognize that the dearest desire of her heart was aligned with his own. So the players took her in and hid her, and left with her, and she learned the arts of the stage by sweeping up after them and cooking their dinners and listening as they rehearsed and performed until she knew all the lines, back to front and sideways.

  The first night she ever went onstage as a player herself, the freckled boy blotted out the mark across her face with a thick paint that players use on their skin, and she saw herself in the mirror for the first time, unmasked by a mask of paint.

  The boy became her lover, and she became the greatest player south of the Silver Mountains. She wrote forty plays and made the legendary theater of Elanriarissi what it is today, but all that is history, not story.

  After I stopped talking, my eyes were heavy; I gave up on annoying the guard to death and curled up to sleep on my bench.

  Over the next few days, I ran through a chunk of my repertoire that was impressive even to me. The guard never spoke, so I hadn’t the foggiest idea whether he or she was actually listening to me.

  Vihra Kylliat came back on the fourth night. She opened the door and I shot up from my bunk—I’d wrapped my clothes around me for what little good they did me, but they’d dried crusty and stained. She staggered into the room, dragging a chair behind her, and placed it in the middle of the room. She didn’t bother closing the door, but I suppose if I’d tried to make a dash for it, she would have had me pinned dead against the wall as soon as I twitched in that direction. She fell, unsteadily, into the chair—her face was beet red and she smelled strongly of drink.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “Why are you sitting around naked?”

  “You dumped a bucket of filth on my clothes last week,” I said. “They’re ruined.” I held up one wooden-stiff arm of a tunic. “I’m afraid it might snap off if I try to put it on.”

  “Private Vidar!” she bawled. “Vidar, send s
omeone down to the debtors’ ward and get some clothes for whosits. This guy.” She squinted at me.

  “Chant,” I said.

  “Stupid name.”

  “It’s the only one I’ve got these days.”

  “Chant,” she said. “Chant. Chant. You know what, Chant?”

  “What, Your Majesty?”

  “I killed Anfisa Zofiyat today.” She slumped in her chair and waved one arm. “And I mean that. I killed her. Me. I mean, execution, yes, it was all official and everything, but I held the sword. Took her head right off.”

  My blood ran cold. “Her trial went badly, then.”

  “Trial, trial. Yes, badly. I probably would have had to let her out, but then her stupid puppets came and tried to break her out. Got her on conspiracy, then, and also conspiracy to commit murder—that was when they tried to kill you, of course—and trespassing on government property.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You killed her for trespassing?”

  “No, I killed her for conspiracy. And attempted murder. And also trespassing.”

  “She wasn’t the one who trespassed, though. The Weavers did.”

  “Yeah, I know. Killed them, too. All of them. There were twelve of them that came to the prison. We killed seven in the fray the other night, including those two blackwitches. Arrested the other five, put ’em on trial, and executed them within six hours. Anyway, there won’t be a Ministry of Pattern anymore.”

  “No?”

  “No. I read the books on what I get to do, being the only active Prime and Zorya Miroslavat having already declared martial law for me. Convenient, really. Laws about it, you know. So I disbanded Pattern.” She threw one side of her cloak back and fumbled a silver flask from a pocket of her trousers. She pinched it awkwardly between her artificial hand and her chest and used her other hand to work open the cap. She took a long swig from it, then closed her eyes, dropped her head back, and offered it to me. I took it slowly and dared a small sip. It was strong. Made me gasp for breath, made my eyes water. “Disbanded Pattern. No more of that nonsense. I reallocated all their property through the other four offices.”