Masks (31 page)

“We will,” Edrik said. He looked at Grelda. “Can she travel?”

Grelda grimaced. “She’ll be weak from lying in bed. She needs to get up and eat proper food and get her strength back. I wouldn’t recommend her traveling for at least three days.”

“No,” Mara said. Now it was Grelda giving her an angry look, but after facing Catilla she could easily ignore that. “We leave as soon as you can get your people ready to go. I’m ready now.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. Pain stabbed her calf, the room spun around her, and for a moment her vision grayed, but she managed to stay upright, and after an instant the dizziness passed; the restorative Grelda had given her had worked wonders. “See?” she said a little breathlessly.

Edrik had taken half a step closer, hand outstretched, ready to catch her if she fell; now he let the hand drop and stepped back again. “I see.” He glanced at Grelda. “But we will not be ready to leave until the day after tomorrow, in any case. She has that long to recover.”

“Not long enough,” Grelda grumbled. “But it seems
I
have no say.”

Catilla looked at Mara with approval. “You have fire, child . . .” She stopped herself. “Young woman,” she amended with what might almost have been a small smile. “More than I realized when you were first brought to me.” She turned to her grandson. “Go, then, as soon as may be. Rescue this other girl if it can be done. Bring her back here.” She glanced at Mara. “And Mara, too. Keep her safe. All of this is a waste if she gets herself killed.”

“I’ll keep her safe,” Edrik promised. His mouth quirked. “I know a couple of boys who will help.”

Catilla snorted and departed without another word. Mara took a deep breath and sat down on the bed again with a feeling of relief.

Grelda stepped forward. “You endanger your health,” she said with disapproval. “But the tide is against me. See me after you are dressed. I will give you a supply of the herbs for the restorative I prepared earlier, and the recipe. Just don’t make it where anyone who doesn’t have the Gift can smell it. Unless you’re trying to ruin their appetite.” She, too, went out.

Edrik was the last to leave. He swept aside the red curtain and watched the others depart, then closed the curtain and came back to Mara’s side, face grim. “Though I agreed to it to bind you to our cause, this is a fool’s errand. You are endangering my men and women, me—and yourself, not least of all. We may already be too late to rescue this friend of yours, and
my
friends may die in the attempt.” He leaned closer, looming over her. “Training or no training, Mara, if there comes a point during this rescue mission where your Gift could save lives, you
will
use it. At
whatever
risk to yourself. Or I will throw you into that camp
myself
, to rot until the Autarch is overthrown. Am I clear?”

Mara swallowed. “Yes.”

“Good.” He exited in an angry swirl of red cloth.

Mara fell back on the bed and stared up at the whitewashed ceiling.
I
am
doing the right thing. I know I am. Katia is my responsibility. I made her a hostage. I have to rescue her.

At
any
cost?
another part of her whispered.

Any cost
, she tried to tell herself firmly. But all her certainty seemed to have blown away in the gale-force winds of everything she had just set in motion.

She curled up on the bed, closed her eyes, and wished once more, wished more than anything in the world, that she
was
still the child Catilla had called her, still a little girl in her own bed in her own house in a world where everything made sense and nothing could happen that her parents couldn’t make right, wished that at any moment she would hear her mother’s voice outside her door, calling her down to breakfast.

But all she heard was the beating of her own heart and the cry of wild gulls in the chill salt air outside her window.

The Return

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
Mara lay on her back in the beach’s silvery sand, staring up at the pearl-white sky. A horse’s head appeared in her field of view and gazed at her quizzically. “Do you put me down here just so you can get a good look at me?” she said conversationally. “This is the third time.”

A second horse’s head appeared, this one accompanied by Hyram, who held its reins. “Don’t blame the horse,” he said severely.

“I don’t think he likes me.” Mara pushed herself up on her elbows and groaned. “I’m one big bruise. All the bruises I brought back with me from the camp, all the new ones I’ve got in the last three hours trying to learn to ride—”

“Trying to learn to stay on the horse,” Hyram corrected. “You don’t really learn to ride in one afternoon.”

“Apparently you don’t really learn to stay on a horse in one afternoon, either!” she said, and Hyram chuckled.

Keltan, leading his own horse, came over to join them.

“What about
him
?” she said, nodding at Keltan. “How long did
he
take to learn to ride?”

“Keltan knows how to stay on a horse,” Hyram said. He gave Keltan a look, half-joking, half-challenging. Keltan glared back, and Mara sighed. She had seen a lot of those kinds of looks passing back and forth between the two boys all day, since midmorning when she had emerged, limping slightly, from the sickroom, where she had spent all of the previous day recuperating. They had been waiting for her—apparently they had been forbidden to visit her—and had shadowed her ever since, making sure she got a good breakfast, taking her to the stables, showing her how to saddle her own horse, and then how to ride . . .

. . . how to stay on . . .

Oh, be honest
, Mara thought grouchily.
How to get used to falling off!

She looked from one boy to the other. Flattering and kind of exciting though she had to admit she found having two boys interested in her at once, it did get rather wearying. As to which one she preferred . . .

She couldn’t answer that question. Not now.

Maybe later, after we get back from the camp . . .

If we get back.

She shoved those thoughts out of her mind. One thing at a time. “I think I’m getting the hang of it,” she said, although she didn’t think any such thing. “Let me try again.”

After another couple of hours, she was sorer than ever, but she really
was
getting the hang of it. Even Hyram admitted it. “You’re much better,” he said as the three of them sat on their horses, looking out over the ocean at the long orange streaks of clouds streaming out from the setting sun like tongues of fire. “Don’t try anything silly and you should be fine.”

“She’d better be,” a new voice said. Mara jumped and almost fell off her horse again, then turned her head accusingly to see Edrik, on foot, standing in the sand behind the horses. “Before we see the sun again, we’ll be on our way.”

“How long before we can rescue Katia?” Mara asked him.
Another day lost
, she thought.
A day I spent learning to ride, laughing with Keltan and Hyram. While Katia . . .

“Two and a half days to get there. A night and a day to reconnoiter. We might try it in five nights’ time . . .
if
I deem the risk acceptable.”

Mara jerked her head back around to stare blindly out at the burning sky.
Five nights! Katia . . .

She heard Edrik’s footsteps crunch away through the sand. “It’s the best we can do,” Hyram said softly from her left.

“I know,” she said. She blinked back tears that had nothing to do with the glare of sun on water. “I just hope it’s good enough.”

They ensconced the horses in the stone stables, then made their way to the Great Chamber, taking their food—venison, tonight, with bitter greens and (Mara sighed happily) mashed redroots—to where Alita, Prella, Simona, and Kirika already sat at a shadowy table in the corner. It was the first time Mara had seen the other girls since her return from the camp, and she tried to ignore the sidelong glances they all—with the notable exception of the ever-sullen Kirika—shot at her while she sipped her soup. She knew they wanted to hear everything that had happened. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to tell them. Especially Prella, who still seemed like such a little girl.

But she’s not a little girl,
she told herself.
We’re all the same age. None of us have been little girls since our Masks failed. Prella . . . all of them . . . deserve to know what’s out there. They deserve to know what awaited them in the camp they luckily never got to.

And so, when she had finished eating, she told them everything: about Grute, about the mine, about Katia. They listened in silence, Prella and Simona with wide eyes, Alita impassively, Kirika without looking at her at all. Hyram and Keltan had heard some of it by then, but not all. Mara talked until her throat was sore. At first the words would hardly come; but the longer she talked, the easier it became, until the words rushed out like the waterfall that had thrown her and Grute into the sea. She felt as if a boil had been lanced, or a scab peeled away. More blood and pain might follow, but in that moment all she felt was relief.

When at last she ran out of words, the seven of them were alone, the other tables empty, the food cleared away. “And tomorrow you’re going back?” Alita said.

Mara nodded.

“Of course my father agreed to rescue Katia,” Hyram said. “Once he knew about—”

“He and Catilla still think the risk is too great,” Mara said harshly. “I’m blackmailing them. They need me. If they didn’t . . .”

“My father would have come around eventually anyway. He would have done what’s right. He always does.”

Mara opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again.

She’d felt the same way about her father, once. It seemed a long time ago.

Kirika snorted and spoke—and looked up—for the first time. “
My
father,” she said, voice venomous, “would have dragged you back to the camp himself, and sold you to the highest bidder. He would have done the same to
me
. How
he
was successfully Masked when I . . .” She broke off and looked down at the floor again, jaw clenched. Simona reached out tentatively to put her arm around Kirika’s shoulder, but Kirika leaped to her feet, fast as a cat, slapping Simona’s hand away with a violent swing of her arm. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled. “Don’t
ever
touch me.” And then she turned and stalked away.

“I’m sorry,” Simona called after her in a stricken voice, but Kirika strode out of the Great Chamber without looking back. “I’m sorry,” Simona said again, but this time to the rest of them.

Alita shook her head. “Not your fault,” she said. “Blame her father.”

“He must have been even worse than mine,” Keltan said sourly. “And here I didn’t think that was possible.”

Prella said nothing, but her lower lip trembled and her eyes glistened. She was obviously thinking about her own father, who just as obviously had been nothing like theirs. Mara reached across the table and put her hand on top of the smaller girl’s, who gave her a small, watery smile of gratitude.

Mara glanced at Keltan and Hyram. “Oh, and I’ve been meaning to thank you two,” she said. A half-smile twitched up one corner of her mouth. “Your father tells me you
both
volunteered to
personally
give me a bath after the Watcher was burned to ash. That was
so
kind and selfless.”

Her smile flashed to a full grin as they both turned roughly the same color as the mashed redroots and started sputtering out incoherent sounds of apology. Mara laughed, and Alita laughed with her. Prella looked a little scandalized, but then she started grinning, too, as did Simona, and soon all of them were laughing together.

The laughter felt good. Mara still felt good as she, Alita, Prella, and Simona made their way to their room, where Kirika already lay in bed, back to them all.

But she didn’t feel good in the middle of the night when her decapitation of Grute and disintegration of the Watcher replayed themselves over and over and. . . .

She woke screaming, bringing the other girls gasping awake in their beds. After apologizing, she took a long time to fall back asleep, and slept poorly once she did; and when Keltan called to her from the corridor, with the sky not even graying yet outside the window slits, she didn’t feel good at all. She heaved her aching body out of the bed, wincing at a throb from the raw, red scar on her forehead and a jab of pain from the wound in her calf. Though healing well, both still hurt. Alita raised her head, looked at her blearily, said, “Luck,” and rolled over and went back to sleep. Prella and the others didn’t even stir.

Mara wanted nothing more than to go down to the baths and soak in the warm water, but there was no time: the rescue party was to set out at first light, and first light was just around the corner. She dressed in the warm, newly repaired clothes the Warden had provided her, visited the latrine, picked up the pack she had prepared the day before, and left as quietly as she could, with a whispered “good-bye” she doubted anyone was awake to hear.

Edrik had assembled a force of eight, counting himself, Mara, Keltan, and Hyram. The other four consisted of two women and two men: Tishka, who gave Mara a warm smile; Illina, a young woman—no more than twenty, Mara judged—and twin brothers, only a little older, introduced as Skrit and Skrat. She’d seen all three around the Secret City but had never before spoken to any of them.

They led their horses out of the stables and saddled and mounted them in silence, except for the groan wrung out of Mara as she swung her wounded leg over her mount’s broad back. Edrik gave her a hard look, just visible in the gray light that had seeped into the sky while they readied to ride. “All right?”

“I’m fine.” She gave him what she hoped was a bright smile but suspected was more of a grimace.

He looked skeptical, but clucked to his horse, wheeled it around, and trotted off toward the ravine they had followed into the Secret City when she had first been brought there. With varying degrees of skill, the rest of them rode after him. Mara, after a brief argument with her horse, which clearly would have preferred to rejoin its stablemates rather than trot off into the chilly twilight, fell in behind Keltan. Hyram waited for her, then brought up the rear.

They rode silently up the ravine while the world brightened. After twenty minutes, the sky flushed pink. After an hour, sunlight found them, its touch bringing a little more life into Mara’s chilled, stiff limbs, though the air remained cold enough to make her grateful for her gloves, vest, coat, and cloak.

Mara thought they must be heading for the cave they had passed through on their way to the Secret City, but instead, at midmorning, Edrik turned left and led the party out of the ravine, up a long defile. They rode the rest of the day through sun-dappled forest, the cold wind swirling golden leaves around the trees’ black trunks.

They camped that night by a small lake. Keltan and Hyram took turns hammering in the pegs for the tent Mara would share with Illina and Tishka, competing to see who could do it faster, then sat on either side of her at the campfire as they all ate venison stew and crusty bread, washed down with a pale beer that, though weak, made Mara’s head swim. She was glad to crawl into her bedroll . . .

. . . only to wake, gasping, from yet another dream of Grute.

A dark shape loomed over her and she cried out and tried to push it away, but, “Shhh, shhh,” said a soothing voice, and she lay there, panting. “It’s Illina. It’s all right. You’re safe.”

On her left, Tishka muttered under her breath and rolled over, but then resumed the heavy breathing of sleep. Illina lay down close to Mara. “Bad dream?” the older girl whispered.

Mara nodded. “Every night,” she whispered back. “I see Grute. He . . .” Her throat closed.

“The boy you killed? With magic?”

Mara turned her head. She couldn’t see the other girl, but knew she was looking at her. “Yes,” she whispered.

“He tried to rape you,” Illina said. “Didn’t he?”

Mara nodded. Her eyes filled with tears. “Yes.” Grute, naked, leering, coming toward her; the magic on her hands, her hands on his head; the horrible burst of red and white and gray, the sickening sound, the hot slick of blood all over her—

She jerked her eyes open, gasping. She’d almost slipped back into the nightmare.

Illina moved closer in the dark, found her, wrapped her arms around her. Her body against Mara’s felt warm and comforting. It brought back memories of cuddling with her mother on nights she was ill or had a bad dream, nights her mother had soothed her just as Illina soothed her now, and suddenly she found herself sobbing, trying to be silent so as not to wake Tishka, her body shaking in Illina’s arms.

“Shh. Shh. It’s all right,” Illina whispered. “You’re safe. He’s gone. He can never hurt you again. Never.” Her arms tightened. “You’re safe. Go to sleep.”

Mara took a long, shuddering breath. “Thank you,” she whispered.