Faces (11 page)

Catilla sat up straighter. “That,” she said, “is excellent and unexpected news.” Then her eyes narrowed. “
Potential
pass?”

The Lady shrugged. “The borders of Aygrima are currently closed to me. The Autarch has access to the magic the ancient rulers of Aygrima crafted to seal off the then-kingdom from the plague ravaging the world, the same magic, I believe, that forced your ships aground. That magic prevents me from reentering Aygrima. The Autarch, uncertain if I were truly dead, put that protection in place within days of our final confrontation, before he even returned to Tamita.

“But it does not prevent ordinary people from entering. And it will not be activated by Mara here.” She nodded in Mara's direction again. “With my instruction, she can break that protection . . . only in the small area of the pass, but that is all I need to allow me to return to Aygrima.”

“How can you be certain she will not likewise be attacked by this magic?” Catilla said. “Why would he not set protections against her return just as he did against yours?”

Arilla snorted. “Because he can only set those protections in
person
. Do you really think there is the slightest chance that the Autarch would risk his august personage on a journey to the northern mountains knowing that a new rebellion is afoot?”

Catilla inclined her head. “Fair enough.” She studied the map. “So. We get our small force into Aygrima without being detected. We have some time to maneuver. Where do we maneuver to, and to what end?”

“There are two places in the north we must take before we even attempt to move south,” Arilla said. “They are relatively close to each other.” She flicked magic, and two red dots appeared, both close to the mountains, one slightly north of the other.

“The mines,” Edrik said.

“The mines,” Arilla agreed. “The new one to the north, identified with Mara's unwilling help, has barely begun to be developed, but already magic is being shipped from it—and a lot of that magic is going to the force of Watchers the Autarch has positioned near the ravine, and the garrison at the Secret City which guards the shore.”

“Why hasn't the Autarch sent a force after us?” Chell said. “Why won't they simply come into this valley from the west as we did, following our trail?”

“I cannot match the magic of the Gifted who crafted the barriers around all of Aygrima,” the Lady said tartly, “but I
can
manage a barrier to prevent
that
. They cannot pursue us. All they can do is what they are doing, and try to defend their own borders.”

She turned her attention back to the two red dots. “So. First we take these two mines, to cut off the Autarch's supply of magic. He has substantial stores in the Palace, of course, but they are far from inexhaustible . . . and without that magic, his Gifted fighters are just ordinary men. Whereas Mara and I . . .” She smiled a cold smile. “We do not need the magic mined from black lodestone. We have other sources.”

Catilla gave Arilla, and then Mara, long, level looks. Her expression betrayed nothing of what she was thinking. Then she turned her attention back to the map. “And then what?”

Arilla shrugged. “We march south. We attack Tamita. We take the city.”

“With our tiny force?”

“The size of the force is sufficient to achieve its sole purpose: to allow Mara and me to reach Tamita.”

“To do what?”

Arilla smiled. “Allow me
some
secrets, Catilla. I will make that part of the plan known to you in good time. Its success depends entirely upon secrecy.”

“You ask us to take a lot on faith,” Catilla said.

“Faith?” Arilla said softly. “Have you not seen enough by now, Catilla, to
know
the power both Mara and I command?”

Is that true?
Mara thought suddenly.
Am I really capable of everything the Lady of Pain and Fire is?

That was the fate she'd tried hard to avoid. And now she welcomed it?

She felt a sudden surge of doubt. Again she wished she could talk to Ethelda about it. But Ethelda was dead. The Lady of Pain and Fire herself had taken Ethelda's place . . . had taken everyone's place . . . in Mara's life.

Do I really want to become like Arilla?

Have I already?

The discussion of how best to organize their forces for the march into Aygrima began, but Mara had suddenly lost interest. She stood up. “Excuse me,” she said. “I . . .”

Arilla waved a hand in her direction. “Go,” she said. “No need for you to worry about all this. We'll talk later.”

Gratefully, Mara turned and went out through the screened passage. But she did not return to her room as she had planned. Instead she made her way once more onto the battlements, and stared down again at the village and the tents of the unMasked Army. Keltan was there, presumably, eating the rougher food of the camp instead of the rich meal provided by the Lady.

She'd thought a lot about what he had said in the days since she had met him surreptitiously, a meeting the Lady had never found out about . . .
or at least
, Mara told herself honestly,
never saw reason to mention.

He'd said he loved her. She'd thought about
that
quite a lot. But she'd also thought about what else he'd said, trying to make her doubt the goodwill of the Lady, trying to turn her toward Catilla. Now she knew why the Lady needed her. She, and she alone, could break the wardstone keeping the Lady from entering Aygrima. The power to either take the first step toward toppling the Autarch or halt the Lady's plans for revolution forever both lay within her—a different kind of power from the power of her magical Gift, but in some ways even greater.

The fate of Aygrima rests in my hands
, she thought. It sounded absurdly pompous when baldly stated like that, but it was undeniably true.

She walked to the corner of the fortress wall, and this time looked south at the mountains that lay between them and Aygrima, their snow-covered peaks painted silvery blue by the moon.

The truth was, without meaning to, Keltan had accomplished the exact opposite of what Catilla wanted. She would do what the Lady wanted her to do. She would use her power as required. And together, she and the Lady would overthrow the Autarch.

Turning her back on the spectacular view, she headed back to the Great Hall. The Lady had given her permission to sit out the discussion of the march into Aygrima, but she no longer wanted to do so.
Nobody will ever manipulate me again,
she thought as she had before
. I choose my own path.

And I choose to follow the Lady of Pain and Fire.

When at last the delegation had departed, the Lady took Mara once more to her private chambers, where hot herbal tea and sweet nutty pastries waited. They settled in what had become their usual places. The Lady filled their cups. “And what did Keltan want to talk to you about, when you saw him last week?” the Lady said, just as Mara lifted hers.

Her hand jerked, almost spilling her tea.

The Lady laughed. “Did you really think you could walk around the village without word getting back to me? I heard how you were skulking around.” She shook her head. “I told you not to go down there, and I am not happy you disobeyed . . . but, I suppose, no harm done, and young love . . .”

“Young what?” Mara said.

“Your young man . . . the one named after the Autarch's horse . . . fancies himself in love with you, I'd wager. No doubt he hoped for a kiss or two. No doubt you hoped for the same. Did either of you get what you wanted?”

“That's not why I went down there.” Mara's face felt hot. She told herself it was from the tea. Even though she hadn't touched it yet. She raised her cup, sipped from it, and carefully set it down again. “I just wanted to tell him how well my training was going. I wanted him to know he had nothing to fear—none of them have. I wanted him to know I wasn't going to become . . .” She let the final words trail off.

“A monster?” the Lady said softly.

Mara sipped more tea to avoid answering.

“And was he impressed?”

Mara sighed. “No. He told me . . . he tried to warn me about you.”

“About me?”

“Tried to make me think that . . . that you're as bad as the Autarch. I think Catilla put him up to it. He was talking to her just before I arrived.”

The Lady nodded. “Most likely,” she said. “So he was trying to drive a wedge between me and you?”

“Yes,” Mara said.

“What did he say, exactly?”

Feeling uncomfortable, Mara told her. “He said you are stealing magic from all the villagers all the time, making them docile—stealing their humanity, just like the Autarch is doing with his new Masks. He said your Cadre is no different from the Autarch's Child Guard.”

The Lady's eyes narrowed. “And did you believe him?”

“No,” Mara said. “You'd never do what the Autarch does. You hate him too much.”

“Yes, I hate him,” the Lady said. “And how did his accusation make you feel, Mara? Angry? Betrayed?”

Mara nodded miserably.

“That's good.”

“Why?” Mara said. “I don't like feeling that way.”

“Of course not,” the Lady said. “But you can use it.” She leaned forward. “You have done some amazing things with your magic, Mara. Stopping the explosion in the mining camp. Blowing down the city wall. Killing multiple Watchers at once. And every time, it was because of some powerful emotion: fear, rage . . . hate.” She leaned back. “I learned very early on, Mara, that magic responds to emotion. Yes, you can use it with fine control and accomplish many things. But the truly astonishing achievements come only with deep emotion. When I fought the Autarch, I drew on hatred and anger in every encounter . . . and if I'd also had this,” she touched the amulet, “I would have destroyed him then and there.”

“But you can't control emotion,” Mara said. “You either have it or you don't.”

“You can generate it, Mara,” the Lady said softly. “You have so many memories to draw on that will help you. So many injustices you have witnessed. And, most powerful of all, your father's death. Your anger and hatred is always there, even if you don't think you're feeling it. You're controlling it without even knowing you are. Reach down inside yourself and find your rage and hate, Mara. Don't fear letting it out. Learn to use it to power your magic. Do that, and there is almost nothing you cannot achieve.” She reached out and took Mara's hand. “There are those who will tell you that love is the most powerful emotion,” she said in a soft, savage whisper. “Perhaps Keltan is one of them. But he is wrong. Hate is more powerful than love. Grief is more powerful than joy. And both can feed anger, the most powerful of all. You cannot let them consume you. But you
can
use them. And I will teach you how.”

Unbidden, the memory of her father's death, the sound of his neck breaking as his naked body fell from the gallows, rushed into her mind. “I'd like that,” she said, her voice thick. “I'd like that very much.”

S
IX WEEKS LATER,
Mara stood staring up at a notch in the mountain skyline, trying to see the spire of rock she had to destroy. “I dare go no closer,” the Lady had said when they had emerged from her pavilion into the early morning light. “You must approach it alone.”

“Are you sure I can do this?” Mara had asked.

“I am sure, or I would not ask it of you,” the Lady had replied.

Am I sure I can do this?
Mara now asked herself, and her own answer was nowhere near as reassuring.

But she had no choice. She turned and looked behind her. She stood on an outcropping a quarter of a way up the slope from the camp of fighters, just over three hundred in all, assembled from villagers, the unMasked Army, and Chell's men; mostly men and older boys, with a sprinkling of the strongest single women. She knew well it was not a formidable force, though even now she could hear the shouts of captains putting squads through training exercises with sword and pike and bow. It was certainly not enough to take on the Autarch's Watcher Army in open combat. Their only hope was stealth: and the only way they could stealthily enter Aygrima was through the pass blocked by the obelisk of black lodestone preventing the Lady from passing the borders.

“Clearly, the great mages of old knew of this pass, though memory of it has been lost,” she had told Mara, “or they would not have placed one of the black lodestone border guardians at its apex. The Autarch had only to trigger one of those stones to activate them all, and he would have used the one closest to the place where he last saw me, so I am certain he never came here himself and is unaware of both the pass and the stone.

“I cannot destroy it myself,” she had continued. “The border guardians are tuned to my magic, and this one would rip my own Gift from me and tear me apart in the process were I to come anywhere near it. But if you do what I tell you, the magic will be rendered inactive in this one spot, at least for a time—long enough for us to pass through.”

She had explained to Mara that the black spire, and the others like it every few miles along the border, drew magic from the very spine of the mountains, the vast deposits of the strange mineral tapped by both the old and new mines of the Autarch. “You cannot destroy the border guardian directly,” the Lady had said. “Instead . . .”

And then she had explained.

And that was when Mara had started to worry.

She looked down from the rocky outcropping. For the first time, the Lady had sent all thirteen wolves with her, though Whiteblaze stayed the closest. She could feel the magic they held, ready to be drawn into herself, ready to be hurled at her target. It was the most magic that had ever been hers to control—perhaps not more magic than she had tapped at the mine, but then, that hadn't really been controlled, had it? And she hadn't had the amulet to focus and filter it.

She sighed and clambered down from the outcropping, then resumed toiling up the slope. All she was doing was stalling, and she knew it.

The Lady had pointed out a copse of pine trees some three hundred yards down the slope from the spire of rock. “That should be both close enough to the spire for you to accomplish your task, and far enough away to keep you safe.”

Should,
Mara thought.
If. Rather a lot of qualifiers, if you ask me.

There was one good thing about all the walking she'd done in the last while: she had toughened. She did not believe the Mara who had gone to her Masking could have climbed as steadily as she did now, breathing hard, yes, but never needing to stop. It took her almost an hour to reach the trees. Then she did pause, to regain her breath and gather her wits. Whiteblaze bumped his nose into her hand and she scratched his head absentmindedly, while the other wolves clustered around her, tongues lolling, and waited to see what would happen next.

Despite the wolves, she felt very alone. She looked back downslope at the camp. Tents remained in place, horses continued to graze, smoke rose from cooking fires. The army would not break camp until
she
had broken the magic keeping the Lady north of the mountains. If she could not accomplish her task, the assault on Aygrima would fail before it ever began. She wondered how many of those distant figures were looking up at her now, wondering, like the wolves, what would happen next.

She turned away from them.
Well
, she thought,
let's find out
.

The problem, the Lady had told her, was that no magic they could bring to bear could destroy the obelisk. It would rebound any direct magical attack onto the one who sent it. Nor could it be destroyed by nonmagical means. A would-be demolitionist slamming a sledgehammer against it wouldn't live long enough to wonder why it wouldn't break, having been reduced to a drifting red mist on the wind.

But it
could
be attacked indirectly, and that was Mara's task.

She looked from the stone itself to the ice-shrouded peak of the mountain, still four or five thousand feet above them. She reached out to the wolves.

She drew on their magic.

It flowed into her through the amulet, filling her, overfilling her, swelling her until she felt enormous, powerful . . . and on the verge of exploding. She could only hold that much magic for a moment. It had to be released.

And so she let it go, a flash of pure red fire, the color of magic used to manipulate physical objects, a blast that hurtled the distance between her and the peak in an instant.

High above, mingled dust and smoke and steam puffed from the mountainside. It looked like nothing much, and for a moment Mara stood there, panting a little, horribly afraid she had failed, feeling suddenly weak now that she was empty of the magic she had pulled from the wolves, who had all, as one animal, dropped whining onto their bellies.

And then she realized the mountainside was moving.

It dropped away, obscured an instant later by a growing new cloud of dust. And then the sound arrived, a distant roar, a terrifying thunder of stone on stone on stone that waxed and waxed and waxed, until Mara suddenly thought maybe she was a little too close to the rock spire after all. She turned and dashed down the slope, pursued by the roar, until the thunder grew so loud she had to stop and look back up again, panting.

With terrifying speed, a wall of jumbled stone and ice thundered down on top of the standing spire of black lodestone—and obliterated it. One moment it was there, the next there was only the roar of the landslide, a cacaphony that stopped only as the mass of rock piled up against the slope on the opposite side of the pass.

Of course, not all of the rocks stopped: some of them, ranging from house-size to merely horse-sized, bounded down the slope toward Mara. Gasping, she pulled more magic to her from the wolves and struck out with it, shattering the four or five that seemed certain to crush her into pink paste, each blast accompanied by the whining of the wolves, until they had no more to give and Mara herself was on her knees, sobbing with weakness.

But the deadly stampede of boulders had stopped.

The noise of the landslide had stopped.

It was over.

Mara let herself fall forward and dug her fingers into the soil, grateful for its stolid permanence. She breathed deeply of the smell of damp dirt and crushed grass, then raised herself up again. Whiteblaze lay on his side beside her. He looked at her, and his tail flicked feebly. “Sorry, boy,” she whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

He whined and licked her hand.

She knew she should return to the camp, but she couldn't bring herself to move. Instead she lay down again, Whiteblaze warm against her side, and stared up at the sky, as empty of thoughts as she was of magic. She was still lying there when the Lady's Cadre arrived, led by Hamil. He knelt beside her. “The Lady comes,” he said. “Can you stand?”

“I think so,” Mara said. With Hamil's help, she climbed unsteadily to her feet. She looked around. The dozen burly men had formed a circle around her, as though shielding her from something. The wolves formed a closer circle inside that. Both circles opened as the Lady approached.

She strode toward Mara with her arms outstretched, and clasped Mara's hands warmly. “Well done, child,” she breathed. “Well done.” She put her arm around Mara's shoulder and gazed up at the tumbled mess of stone and ice and twisted, broken trees. “The way is open. I can feel it.”

“I can't feel much of anything,” Mara mumbled. “Drained.”

The Lady nodded sympathetically. “There is a cost to such magic,” she said. “But I can help.” She released Mara's shoulder, took her hands again, and gazed into her face. Her eyes glowed white with magic. Mara couldn't have looked or pulled away even if she had wanted to. Peripherally she glimpsed the men around her dropping to their knees, but the strangeness of that seemed far off and unimportant. The light from the Lady's eyes waxed, spilling out over her face, spilling out over the whole world, blotting out everything else . . .

And then magic and life flowed into Mara, and she gasped as if awaking from a deep sleep, and jerked her hands free at last.

She looked around. The villagers' faces had gone slack, but they, too, were beginning to stir. Breathing deeply, one by one they climbed to their feet. Hamil nodded at the Lady, face grim, then turned and started up the slope with the others, presumably to try to find a way over the mess left by the landslide.

“You revived me with magic you drew from
them
,” Mara said. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

“I've told you,” the Lady said. “They expect it. They trust me. They would follow me anywhere.”

Mara licked her lips. “I'm thirsty,” she said. “And
hungry
.”

“I have brought both food and drink,” the Lady said. “Sit.”

They sat side by side on a flat boulder in an open space, watching the men of the Lady's Cadre toil up the slope. “Can they really find a way through that mess?” Mara asked. She gulped another handful of dried apricots, and washed it down with a swig of cold spring water from a metal flask.

“They will go as far as they can,” the Lady said. “If there are places too blocked for them to proceed, they will wait for you or me to clear the path with magic.”

“Where is everyone else?” Mara asked. She twisted around, but trees blocked her view downslope.

“I forbade anyone else to leave camp,” the Lady said. “They will not advance until the path is clear. Ah, I see our four-legged friends are also recovering.”

Mara took another drink of water, wiped her mouth, and looked at the wolves, yawning and sitting up and generally looking a bit more alive, much like herself. “I
emptied
them,” she said. “How do they survive that?”

“Their life force is very, very strong,” the Lady said. “And though you drew much, you remembered your lessons and did not draw enough to permanently harm them. However, I will not draw on them again for a week. I will not even use one for my eyes over the pass until tomorrow.” She held out her hand and three of the wolves trotted over, crowding to get their heads scratched. Whiteblaze sat up, looked around, saw Mara, and came to join her, giving her hand a quick lick before sitting on his haunches beside her.

Hamil reappeared, picking his way down the slope. He came over to the Lady and Mara, panting a little. “The going is very difficult,” he said, “but we have a path as far as the crest. I do not think we will need any magic.”

“Excellent,” the Lady said. “Go down and tell the others to break camp.” Her eyes flashed, though whether with magic or just a reflection of the bright morning sun Mara couldn't tell. “Tonight we make camp in Aygrima.”

The journey through the tumbled remnants of the slide was long and difficult, and the campsite on the other side of the pass was not ideal, with neither particularly flat land nor any source of fresh water, but it was definitely inside Aygrima, and that alone felt like a triumph. As the sun set off to her right, Mara sat on a rock staring down the mountain into the rolling foothills beyond. No smoke spoke of hunters or loggers or villages or even bandits. The northeast corner of Aygrima, Mara had always heard, was the wildest part of the Wild. The nearest villages would be many miles south.

From here they would descend, then turn west, following the base of the mountains until, in some four days' time, if all went well, they would reach the new mining camp, built on the site of the fantastical cave of magic she herself had proved out.

They did not expect there to be a very large garrison at the mine, since the Lady was certain the Watcher Army, believing the borders secured by magic, had headquartered at the Secret City to watch the shoreline and the ravine where the Lady had made her last stand in Aygrima as a young girl. But they would not know whether their assumption was correct until they got closer.