Faces (14 page)

“Stonefell,” Chell said. He shook his head. “Mara, that's . . . remarkably cold. I've never stopped being your friend.”

“Perhaps that's because you were never my friend to begin with.”

That statement fell between them like one of the rocks littering the streambed. Mara heard Chell's sharp intake of breath. She didn't look at him. If she'd hurt him, it was no more than he deserved. He'd hurt
her
, after all.

The
old
her. The one that had made that embarrassing attempt to initiate something physical between them in the magic hut down the coast. Not the new her, growing these past few weeks in the company of the Lady.

She no longer craved the friendship or attention of someone like Chell.

Or Keltan?

She pushed that voice of doubt aside.
I am powerful
, she reminded herself yet again.
I don't need any of them. I am
powerful.

“Mara,” Chell said softly. “Do you really believe that I have only ever been interested in using you, that I never cared for you as
you
, with or without your Gift?”

“That's what it looked like to me,” Mara said.

Another silence. “Do you know what it looked like to me, Mara?” the prince said at last. “I saw a girl who had saved my life. A girl who bravely reentered the most dangerous place in the world because she thought it had to be done to help her people. A girl with a terrifying ability that was almost undone by the most horrible event any young person could ever witness—the brutal murder of a parent—and yet was
not
undone, who gathered herself together and did her best to save her friends and community.”

And failed,
Mara thought, but she said nothing out loud and once again pushed the guilt down as a waste of emotion.
He's trying to soften you up
.
Stay focused. Stay centered. Stay powerful.

“By that time, I no longer saw a girl,” Chell went on. “I saw a brave young woman. A young woman I respected, and admired, and liked . . . and, yes, occasionally feared . . . but never,
never
saw as someone I could merely
use
. I hoped she would choose to help me, that she would decide that was something she could do and remain true to herself . . . but I always knew that decision would have to be her own to make.

“When I saw the Lady, and approached her in the hope she might help my cause, it was not because I had decided you would
not
, but because I thought there was an opportunity to remove you from the equation, free you from having to make a decision. My mission remains what it has always been, Mara. If we survive this . . . a rather large ‘if,' I admit . . . then I hope to return to Korellia with magic to aid us in our desperate struggle against Stonefell. I still hope the Lady will provide that magic. If not, then yes, I hope you will see fit to do so. But all of that has nothing—
nothing
—to do with how I see you. You are still the girl who saved my life, who became my friend, and whom I have watched grow into a remarkable young woman.” Now a trace of bitterness crept into his own voice. “I hope you can eventually find a way to look at me and see whatever it was you once saw. Because I have not changed, Mara. I am your friend. I will always be your friend. Whether you are mine or not.”

And with that, he lengthened his stride and moved up the slope ahead of her, to rejoin Antril at the lead of the column of armed men, leaving Mara alone with her thoughts.

She tried to push his words away as she had pushed them away before. She didn't
want
to be the girl she had been, stumbling from disaster to disaster, every wrong choice leading to pain and suffering for others, unable to control her Gift, hurting, frightened, confused, plagued by night terrors. She wanted to be whom the Lady had tried to make her: Mara Holdfast, powerful sorceress, possessed of the rarest of all magical Gifts, sure of herself, sure of her goals, sure of her prowess. Confident. Calm. Self-assured.
Powerful
.

I'll show him,
she thought.
I'll show him I'm
not
the girl he remembers. I'll show him who I am
now
.

But even as she made the vow, a small voice deep inside her, a voice that sounded an awful lot like Mara Holdfast the Maskmaker's daughter rather than Mara Holdfast the mighty sorceress, whispered,
Are you sure you're not really trying to show yourself?

T
HEY HAD BEGUN
climbing the mountain at dawn, but by the time they were in position to spy on the garrison, the sun had long since swung overhead and begun its descent into the west. They had left the streambed when it curved off in the wrong direction, and had spent the last several hours picking their way through a sparse pine forest, littered with boulders: boulders of black lodestone, though they seemed to have attracted little magic—none Mara could see, at least. For some reason magic tended to seep down into the ground, vanishing like the water from the rain two nights before. Today the sky was mostly clear, streaked by only a few feathery wisps.

Still, the fact that black lodestone could be seen on the surface this far up the slope made her wonder just how much black lodestone the mountain as a whole contained . . . and how much magic.

She remembered what the Lady had said about how the spire in the pass, the “border guardian,” had a connection to the vast masses of black lodestone in the mountain range's spine. If every mountain contained black lodestone, and all of it had been collecting magic from the countless living creatures that had died on the slopes over millennia . . .

The thought was mind-boggling.

Now at last they were peering over a ridge through a thin screen of scraggly evergreens toward the mine's “back door.” Three stone huts clustered around one side of a gaping hole into which poured a stream that splashed and tumbled down from a white wall of ice and snow another quarter of a mile up the mountainside. Mara shot that overhanging glacier an uneasy look and hoped it stayed exactly where it was. From the fact that the forest they had climbed through didn't really exist beyond the ridge, where everything had a distinctly scoured look, she suspected it occasionally . . . shed.

Four Watchers lounged by the huts. Others might be in the huts, asleep; more likely they were down in the cave with the unMasked workers, whom Mara assumed were housed in the largest of the three huts—the one that could be bolted from the outside and had only slits for windows.
A pen for animals
, she thought angrily.

Possibly some of the Watchers were patrolling, but they'd seen no sign of scouts during the climb and clearly the Watchers below had no clue they were themselves being watched. One looked sound asleep, two were playing some kind of board game, and one was whittling a piece of wood.

Chell snorted. “I think we can take them,” he said dryly to Lieutenant Antril, on his other side. Then he glanced at Mara. “I don't think we'll need your special talents this time.”

Mara nodded. She ruffled Whiteblaze's mane, and his tail thumped the ground in response. “Then I'll leave it up to you.”

Each of Chell's men carried a bow. Below the ridgeline, they strung them, then nocked arrows. There was a brief murmur of conversation as they sorted out targets. Then, at Chell's signal, they rose up and fired as one.

The four Watchers died an instant later.

Even at that distance, Mara felt their deaths, but the magic did not rush to her as she expected. Instead, she felt it pulled away from her, down into the depths of the mountain . . . down to where the vast mass of black lodestone waited.

She felt a surge of annoyance. She didn't
need
their magic, certainly didn't need whatever seeds of horror their soulprints might plant in her mind if she failed to draw that magic through her amulet . . . but she had come to expect it, unless the Lady were around.

And if she really allowed herself to think the truth, she craved it.

Chell's men swarmed over the ridge, dropping their bows and drawing their swords as they rushed the huts. They kicked in the doors, and Mara felt two more Watchers die. Once again their magic plunged downward, into the mountain.

She got up then, and strode toward the huts, trying to project an air of perfect calm like the Lady's. Chell emerged from one, wiping blood from his blade on a towel he must have found inside. “All dead,” he said. “But we're still short a half-dozen.”

“They must be underground,” she said. She glanced briefly, because she didn't want to look closely, at the Watchers dead on the ground outside the huts, their Masks already crumbled into dust and shards. “Will you hide the bodies?”

He shook his head. “Not seeing any Watchers would arouse suspicion if any patrols do come this way. We'll prop these,” he nudged the nearest corpse with his foot, “up against the walls, so they look like they're snoozing, put their hoods up so anyone will have to get close to even see they're not wearing Masks. Might buy us some time.”

Mara nodded. “I'll examine the cave entrance.”

Chell turned to call out orders. Mara walked away from the dead Watchers to the thing they had been guarding so poorly.

From a distance it had been little more than a shadow in the ground. Now that she was next to it, she could see it was a perfect circle, clearly artificial, the sun penetrating only a short distance into it and showing nothing but black rock, wet on the uphill side where the stream poured over the edge and cascaded down, sparkling until it vanished into the depths. The water reappeared a hundred feet below, splashing into a torch-lit pool only visible to Mara after she shielded her eyes against the afternoon sun. She couldn't see anyone moving down there, or hear anything, but all six of the missing Watchers could be standing just outside her field of vision, and she wouldn't know.

She stood up and brushed dirt from her hands. “Well?” Chell said from behind her.

She glanced over her shoulder. “Hundred feet. Torches at the bottom. Nobody in sight, but I can't really see very well.”

Chell nodded, and looked into the depths. “Your wolf won't be able to get down there.”

Mara hadn't thought of that, and felt a moment of anxiety at the thought of losing her canine companion . . . and emergency source of magic. She kept it from her face and turned to Whiteblaze. Touching his head again, she projected an image of the Lady. “Go to her,” she said. He yelped, turned, and loped away.

Chell stared after him. “I'll never get used to those things.”

“Whiteblaze is a sweetheart,” Mara told him. “He won't eat you unless I tell him to.”

He gave her a raised eyebrow, and she returned an innocent smile. Then she let it slip away. “If there are Watchers at the bottom,” she said, “this is a death trap.”

Chell grunted. “Maybe we can fix that,” he said. He turned toward Lieutenant Antril, who had followed him to the pit edge. Mara caught Antril's gaze over Chell's shoulder. The young man smiled at her and she found herself smiling back. Then his smile disappeared into a look of concentration as Chell spoke to him.

“Change of plan,” the prince told the lieutenant. “Take the Watchers into the hut and strip them. Choose four of our men and have them put on the Watchers' uniforms. They'll go down the ladder first.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Antril turned and started shouting orders.

Twenty minutes later, the four men Antril had chosen stood in
almost
-fitting Watcher's uniforms, still glistening with blood, at the head of the shaft, exchanging uneasy glances.

“Anyone down there may be surprised the ones up here are coming down, but they won't suspect an attack until they see you don't have Masks,” Antril told them. “So keep your head down and your hoods up and strike without warning. If we can get a Watcher alive to question, wonderful, but it's more important none of them gets down to the main compound to sound the alarm. Understand?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” each man said in turn.

Antril glanced at Chell, who nodded. The lieutenant turned back to the men. “Go,” he said. “We'll be right behind you. Groll, you're first.”

A bearded giant roughly twice Mara's size nodded, swung his feet over the side, and descended into the darkness.

The other faux Watchers followed, then Antril himself, then the rest of Chell's men, until only Chell and Mara were left. Mara leaned over and peered down. The first man was just reaching the bottom. She thought she heard shouts, a brief clang of metal, then silence, until Antril's voice called up, “All clear!”

Chell nodded his satisfaction, and indicated the ladder. “After you, milady.”

“Thank you, Your Highness,” Mara said. They hadn't talked much since their early conversation on the mountainside, but the tension Mara had felt before around Chell had eased.
I'm your friend. I'll always be your friend.
She'd told herself she didn't care about that, that she wanted only to be powerful, a sorceress, feared rather than liked . . .

...but wouldn't it be better to be powerful
and
liked? Maybe the two weren't mutually exclusive.

Getting onto the ladder was scarier than she'd thought it would be, but within a few minutes she was descending after the others, spray from the cascade dampening her hair and chilling her and making the wooden rungs more slippery than she'd expected. There was one bad moment when her foot slipped, but after a moment's hard breathing and a shouted, “Are you all right?” from Chell above her, she was able to shout back, “Fine,” and resume her descent.

When at last she reached the bottom, stepping from the ladder onto a narrow ledge above the deep pool into which the water fell, then picking her way along that ledge to a broad flat space, she saw Chell's men forming a semicircle around the body of a single Watcher, blood a darker pool amid the glistening puddles left by the constant spray. The sailors had their backs toward the ladder, intently watching the multiple exits from the chamber. Mara counted three . . . no, four: not just the big ones, tall enough to stand up in, that first caught her eye, but another one, an opening near the cascade that looked just about big enough to crawl into and get stuck forever.

Mara really,
really
hoped that wasn't the one they'd have to take. Among her many nightmares were several involving crawling through the depths of the old magic mine, past the collapsed tunnel that held the never-recovered remains of a previous girl who had worked that level.

“Only one Watcher in here,” Antril said softly, “but listen!”

Mara listened, and heard a sound she knew all too well: the ring of hammer and chisel on stone.

“Which one is it coming from?” Chell said.

“That one, I think.” Antril pointed toward the middle of the three openings.

Chell nodded. “Then let's proceed as before.”

Antril turned to the men in the Watcher uniforms. “Groll, Pech, Shreff, Corsan. You're up. Corsan, you take a torch.”

He sorted out the rest of his men along similar lines, with every third man taking one of the torches lighting the entry chamber. Then they set off into the tunnel.

This time Chell walked with Mara in the middle of the column, ten men ahead of them and ten behind. The tunnel was broad and level for the first hundred feet or so, and Mara could see that quite a bit of recent work had been done to make it so—more proof they were in the right tunnel, even without the sounds coming from in front of them. Other tunnels opened at haphazard intervals to their left and right. Corsan thrust his torch into each one as they reached it, taking a good look around before motioning for the rest of them to proceed.

The half-dozen torches they carried made it too bright for her to see if any of the stones around them bore traces of magic, but if they did, there couldn't have been much: she didn't feel it calling to her, not nearly as strongly as she felt the magic in the men surrounding her—

Magic slammed into her, with a force she recognized at once. Someone had just died. Behind her.

Another blow. Another death.

She had been prepared for nearby death since entering the cavern, and despite the suddenness, the magic flowed into the amulet. She gasped with pleasure at the rush of it even as she spun to see what had happened.

Two of Chell's men lay on the ground, arrow shafts protruding from them. One had been shot through the throat, the other through the side. Their fellows were spinning and drawing their swords, but the arrows had obviously come through an opening in the rock, a mere slit. As one of the men near the rear reached out for his fallen comrade, another arrow whizzed through the opening, pinging off his helmet. He fell back, cursing.

Chell swore. “We can't even get at the bastard.”

“Yes, we can,” Mara said. She had magic in her. It needed to be used. She reached out her hand. No one but her saw the red light she hurled at the narrow opening in the rock—but they all saw that rock crack and then explode inward with the sound of a thunderclap, overlaid by a hoarse scream suddenly cut short.

Chell's men raced toward the opening, but Mara was already turning away. She had felt the archer die when the stone had blasted inward. She didn't think they'd find much of him intact.