Masks (12 page)

Two fires flickered to life. Mara immediately went to the nearest and sat as close to it as she could, soaking up the glorious heat as if she could never get enough—which, at the moment, she didn’t think she could. Keltan was busy elsewhere, and Simona and Kirika already slept, despite the stony ground, stretched out near the second fire, but Alita and Prella joined her. The smaller girl cuddled close to Alita and promptly dozed off. Alita stared into the flames, her face drawn and her dark eyes glittering in its unsteady light.

“So,” Mara said. “We’ve been rescued.”

“For now,” Alita said. “But the Autarch . . .” She looked around to make sure she couldn’t be overheard. “He won’t stand for this,” she said in a low voice. “They’ve gone too far. Sooner or later, he’ll find this ‘unMasked Army,’ no matter where they hide. And then it will be worse for us all.”

Mara looked across the fire to the dark bundle of Grute, who, still bound and gagged, had been dumped unceremoniously on the cold gray stone. “I doubt it,” she said. “This mining camp they were taking us to must be full of people like Grute. Would you really rather be
there
than
here
?”

Alita also gazed at Grute. A small smile flickered across her tired face. “Well, when you put it like that . . .”

After that they both fell silent, staring into the fire. Somehow Mara lost track of time: the next thing she knew she was being gently pulled upright by Keltan; she’d fallen over onto her side. He shoved a bowl of steaming stew with a spoon in it into one hand, and a hunk of brown, crusty bread into the other.

“Eat,” he said. “And then sleep.”

Like the good girl she’d always thought she was, Mara did as she was told.

Magic in the Dark

E
DRIK WAS TRUE TO HIS WORD—
or threat, Mara thought wearily, as at first light she was rousted out of her bedroll, which had proved more comfortable than a couple of blankets spread across bare rock had any right to be. The bump on her head had subsided, she discovered, feeling it carefully, though the spot was still very sore. But a night in a cold, hard bed hadn’t done much for her bruised side and she gasped, pressing a hand to her ribs, as she got stiffly to her feet.

After a hurried breakfast of bread and dried fish, the party moved on, leaving the rushing stream behind to climb up the narrow, winding gully. Only a trickle of water flowed down the middle of it, but rounded rocks and scattered driftwood spoke of past floods and made Mara wonder uneasily what they would do if one came roaring down on them now. She asked Keltan about it; he shrugged. “Drown, I guess.”

She punched him on the arm for that and got a grin in response.

Edrik had relented enough to untie Grute that morning for a short period of time, but this time when he’d relieved himself he’d done so in full view of the entire camp, though thankfully his back had been turned. Mara sighed. It seemed that she was doomed, in her new unMasked life, to watch Grute pee.

Once he was done, he’d been fed a chunk of bread and a chunk of fish, then gagged and tied again and once more thrown like a sack of meal onto the wagon horse, which Tishka led. “What will happen to Grute?” Mara asked Keltan as they left the river behind and began trudging up the gully.

Alita, walking nearby, snorted. “Who cares?”

Keltan glanced at her, then turned back to Mara. “That’s up to the Commander.”

“Edrik?”

“He’s not the Commander.”

“He’s not?” Alita asked.

Keltan shook his head. His mouth quirked at some private joke. “You’ll see.”

“See what?” Mara asked, but Keltan wouldn’t say anything more about it.

“Newest of the new, lowest of the low, remember?” he said primly. “Not my place to fill you in.” And with that, Mara had to be content.

The second day’s travel, though as miserable as the first, was at least miserable in a whole new way. Icy water no longer ran around their feet, but the tumbled stones of the gully threatened a twisted ankle with every step, and as the day went on, the way grew steeper, the little stream leaping down beside them in a series of miniature waterfalls. The riders led their horses: the only one mounted, if you could call it that, was Grute.

They climbed all morning. Just as the sun found them, having finally cleared the ravine’s rock walls, they toiled up one last slope to find themselves at one end of a small lake, out of which the stream they’d been following poured down toward the river they’d left behind. Sheer cliffs surrounded the lake, forbidding and black except where the occasional stunted tree clung in defiance of gravity.

Just beside the creek’s outlet grew a tiny patch of yellowed grass, barely large enough to accommodate them all. While the horses pulled up mouthfuls of the scraggly growth, the humans rested and ate a meager lunch of dried meat, dried fruit, dry bread, and hard cheese. Mara thought longingly of mashed redroots, soft white loaves, tender roasts, and brown gravy.

I wonder what Mommy made Daddy for lunch today?
she thought, and the claws of grief clutched her heart and squeezed her throat so tight she could hardly swallow, the pain far worse than the fading discomfort of her bumps and bruises. But she forced herself to keep eating. She had no idea how long they would have to walk before they got wherever they were going.

She glanced at the creek, tumbling down into the gully they had left, and wondered if, even then, black-masked Watchers were relentlessly climbing after them. Like Alita, she couldn’t believe the unMasked could evade the Autarch forever. Children told each other that the Autarch’s powerful magic allowed him to see everything that was happening in the Autarchy, everywhere at once; that he could actually look out of the eyes of any Mask he chose. Mara’s father had told her that wasn’t possible. But she no longer knew if what her father had told her was the truth, since the Mask he had crafted just for her had betrayed her so viciously.

It’s not his fault
, she told herself.
It’s yours. For helping Keltan . . .

But looking at the boy who sat beside her, munching unenthusiastically on his own rations, she couldn’t wish she had betrayed him to the Watchers, even if it would have meant success at her Masking.

If it’s my fault, then so be it
, she thought defiantly.
And to hell with the Autarch!

The seditious thought, surely enough to at least twist a Mask, if not shatter it entirely, sent a strange thrill through her. She shivered a little, grinned, and ate with more appetite.

Grute was untied and once again Mara found herself looking at his back as he peed. She groaned and turned to Keltan. “Where do we go from here?” she said. “It looks like a dead end.”

Keltan shook his head and pointed. “Look again. Down at the far end.”

Mara squinted in that direction as Grute’s arms were seized and tied behind him once more. “He didn’t wash his hands,” Prella said from where she sat with Alita. “Yuck.”

Yuck
, Mara thought.
That sums up Grute in a nutshell, doesn’t it?
She was gazing at the far end of the lake as she thought it, still not seeing whatever-it-was Keltan was pointing out . . . and then she did.

“Oh, no,” she groaned. “Is that what it looks like?”

Keltan grinned. “If it looks like a cave, yes.”

“And we’re going in there?”

“Only for three or four hours. It’ll take us to another ravine, and that one leads us the rest of the way to the Secret City.”

“Secret City?” Mara stared at him. “How can there be a Secret City? How do you hide a whole city from the Autarch?”

Keltan shook his head. “Not—”

“—your place to tell me.” She sighed. “I’m getting really tired of hearing that.”

To get to the cave, they had to splash around the shallow edge of the lake. No one mounted. Even Grute walked now. His gag had been removed so he could eat and drink, and hadn’t been replaced, but his wrists remained bound behind his back, and Tishka still held his leash.

By sheer bad luck, Mara found herself right in front of him as they reached the cave. “Mara,” he said, voice hoarse and mocking. “I’ve still got plans for you, pretty girl.”

Keltan spun and backhanded the other boy across the face, the crack of skin against flesh so loud that even the unMasked at the head of the column, just about to enter the cavern, turned to look. “Don’t talk to her,” Keltan snarled. “Ever.”

Grute jerked his head back to face the other boy. Blood trickled from his split lip. He caught Mara’s eye and licked the blood away, slowly, obscenely, then showed his teeth at her in a skull-like grin.

Mara looked past him at Tishka, who flicked Grute’s leash. “Keep moving, you,” she growled. “And keep your mouth shut. Or I’ll gag you again. And I won’t use a clean rag, either.”

Grute gave her a glance over his shoulder, then pressed his lips together and started forward. Keltan and Mara moved aside to let him pass. Alita and Prella had been behind him. “He talks to you again, knee him in the knackers,” Alita told Mara under her breath. “Works every time.”

“What are knackers?” Prella asked.

Alita gave her a look. Prella blushed. “Oh,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Keltan said. “It’s just talk. He can’t hurt you. The unMasked won’t let him.”

“They can’t keep him a prisoner forever,” Mara said.

“Long enough,” Keltan said. “Either he changes, or . . .”

“They should string him up,” Prella piped up. “By the knackers!” She turned bright red as she said it, but stuck out her chin and looked defiant.

Mara couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing. So did Alita. Keltan looked faintly alarmed. Mara found that even more amusing.

The glistening rock of the tunnel walls almost brushed the shoulders of the horses as the column passed through it, single file. Four of the unMasked carried torches. It wasn’t nearly enough light, in Mara’s opinion, but the flickering glow at least
usually
illuminated the rough places that could catch your feet or the stalactites that could split your scalp. The horses blew and stamped and shivered, clearly uneasy, but they kept moving.

After a couple of hours’ travel, the party took a break in a large chamber from which several tunnels exited. Mara looked around uneasily.
If you went down the wrong one, you could wander in the dark forever
!

They carried on, until finally, after another couple of hours, the tunnel widened, the ceiling drew away, and they emerged into an enormous cave mouth, gray evening light flooding in through an opening as big as Mara’s lost home. The view wasn’t much—yet another towering wall of rock on the other side of yet another stream—but Mara thought she’d never seen anything more beautiful.

A blackened circle of stone near the mouth of the cave spoke of previous camps, and sure enough, Edrik called a halt. The riders stripped their horses of saddles and saddlebags and led them out of the cave and out of sight, presumably to some patch of grass. The other unMasked started unrolling bedrolls. Tishka lit a fire in the old fire circle, using wood from a stockpile in one corner.

“One more day’s travel,” Keltan said as he and all five girls from the wagon stood near the crackling flames, warming themselves. “And it’s easier walking.” He nodded to the outside. “That ravine runs downhill, all the way to the sea.”

“And that’s where the Secret City is?” Alita said.

Keltan nodded.

The sea
, Mara thought, spirits lifting at the thought. She’d never seen it, could barely even imagine such a vast quantity of water. But then again, she’d seen a lot of things in the past three days she would have previously found hard to imagine.

Two corners of the cave, screened by rocks, had been set aside as latrines. “I’ll be back in a minute,” Mara told Keltan and the others, and headed toward the women’s side, grateful that at least in
this
camp Grute would be peeing out of her sight.

She did what she needed to do, trying not to breathe too deeply—several women had been in the space before her—then started back toward the fire.

Something caught her eye, a glint of light deep in the darkness of the cave’s recesses. At first she thought it was a bit of shiny rock, reflecting the firelight; but as she watched, its color shifted, from red to blue to green to yellow and back again. She hurried over to it.

In a hollow atop a large boulder of black stone, magic had gathered.

There was very little of it, compared to the magic in her father’s stone basin, or even the magic Ethelda had poured from her small vial onto her hands before healing Mara’s face. But there could be no doubt that that was what it was.

She hurried back to the others. “Come see what I’ve found,” she said excitedly.

Looking puzzled, they followed her. “What is it?” Alita asked. “An animal?”

“Gold?” Simona guessed.

“Diamonds?” added Prella.

“No . . .” They reached the place. Mara stared down at the seething color in the tiny pool, entranced. “Better!”

The others followed her gaze, then exchanged glances. “Um . . . Mara?” Keltan said. “There’s nothing there.”

“Just black rock,” Prella said.

“
Boring
black rock,” Alita added.

Mara stared at them, bewildered. She’d assumed that Grute had been lying to her about the Gifted losing their Gift when their Masking failed. Keltan, Simona, and Kirika shouldn’t be able to see it, of course, but Alita and Prella had also had the Gift. “But . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Alita’s eyes suddenly widened. “Magic? Is it magic? You can still see it, even after . . . ?”

“Yes,” Mara said simply. “I can see it.”

“Oh!” said Prella in a small, wondering voice. “Lucky . . .”

“But why?” Alita demanded. “Why can you still see it when we can’t?” She sounded almost angry. “I’ll bet it was that Ethelda, that Healer that came to your Masking. I’ll bet she did something to save your Gift. While Prella and I . . .” She pressed her lips together.

Was that it? Mara thought. Had Ethelda healed more than her face?

It was the only answer she had. She looked at the resentment on Alita’s face, and felt bad, but she couldn’t wish she’d lost her Gift along with everything else.

Although she didn’t know what she could do with it. She was supposed to have started training to use her Gift just as soon as she was Masked. Now . . . who would teach her? Who would be able to tell her anything about magic or how it could be used?

Or abused
, she thought uneasily. There were a lot of old stories about magic being used for terrible things, and stories about Gifted hurting themselves and others by sheer accident.

“What are you doing back here?” said a deep voice behind them, and Mara jumped—even though they were doing nothing wrong, that authoritative voice had triggered her naughty-child reflex—and turned to see Edrik frowning at them.