Masks (5 page)

And soon I’ll be Masked, too.

She shivered, and the thick blankets of the bed into which she burrowed a few minutes later did nothing to warm her.

···

A week before her fifteenth birthday and her Masking, Mara sat once more on the city’s north wall. She remembered sitting there with Mayson before her Second Testing, watching the Autarch and the Child Guards proceed below them through the Outside Market.
By now he’s Masked, too, like Sala. A Watcher.

Glad he wasn’t a Watcher yet that night Sala and I got caught skinny-dipping
, she thought. Bad enough to be seen naked by strange men. But if
Mayson
had seen them . . .

She shook off the thought. Her bigger worry today was that her
mother
might see her, dressed as she was in what her mother would consider a scandalously short tunic that left her long legs bare and had a tendency to slip off of one suntanned shoulder. Her mother had taken to insisting she wear a proper long skirt and long-sleeved blouse when she went out. “You’re not a child anymore, Mara,” she’d said. “You’ll soon be Masked, and then you’ll be an adult. It’s time you started acting like one.”

Mara glanced over her shoulder, looking up Maskmakers’ Way to the green roof of their home. She could see her parents’ bedroom window. She wondered if her mother were looking out.
Well, even if she is, it’s not like she can pick you out at this distance
, she reassured herself.

She sighed. Her mother would have preferred Mara not to leave the house at all, but she couldn’t bear spending day after day locked up there, especially now, with her Masking so close—and the workshop off-limits.

Ever since Healer Ethelda paid a visit
, she thought.

She’d been in the workshop, mixing the special clay for a new Mask, when her father had suddenly come in. “Leave that, Mara,” he said. “Go downstairs and get something to drink. The Master Healer is here to speak to me.”

Obediently—and willingly enough; she
was
getting thirsty—she’d put down the stirring stick, taken off her leather apron, and left the workshop. On the landing she’d come face-to-face with a small woman—only a little taller than herself—wearing a blue Mask (bright blue, unlike the pale blue Mara’s mother wore), decorated with green gems. Her robes were that same sky-hue. Even her eyes were blue: they looked at Mara gravely as she gave a small curtsy. “Healer Ethelda,” Mara said.

“Mara,” said the Healer. “I hope you are well?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Go downstairs, Mara,” her father repeated, and she descended to the empty kitchen—her mother was out shopping. She helped herself to bread and cheese and drew a glass of cold water from the pump, wondering what the Healer had come to talk to her father about.
I hope she doesn’t take too long
, she thought.
That clay isn’t going to mix itself.

But she’d never finished mixing that clay. Ethelda was closeted with her father for a very long time. She was still there when Mara’s mother came back. Mara helped place the bags of meal, jars of oil, onions and redroots, and other foodstuffs from the market into the pantry. She’d washed dishes. She’d weeded the garden. The day had slipped away, and it wasn’t until suppertime that Ethelda at last descended, said a brief hello and good-bye to Mara’s mother, and slipped out into the darkening street.

Her father came down the stairs soon after. He looked . . . shaken. Mara’s mother frowned at him. “Charlton?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine, Karissa.” He gave his wife a brief smile, then turned to Mara. “Mara,” he said. “It’s only a few weeks until your Masking, and I’ve decided . . .” He stopped and took a deep breath before continuing. “I’ve decided you should stop helping me. Just until after you’re Masked and you’re a full apprentice.”

She’d been shocked, hadn’t known what to say. “But, Daddy, the Masks I’m working on . . . that Engineer’s Mask is ready for the—”

“I can manage just fine without you for a few weeks, Mara,” her father had said. “I’ve decided it’s time to start working on your Mask, and I don’t want you to see it.”

“But—”

“You heard your father, Mara,” her mother said, though Mara did not miss the uncertain glance she’d given her husband. “I’m sure I can find you plenty to keep you occupied around the house.”

And that had been that. She hadn’t been back in the workshop since. That was bad enough, but worse was the fact she’d hardly seen her father. He spent hours locked in his workshop. He’d stopped coming up to her room to say good night, as he had every night of her life before. And he’d stopped coming to eat with his daughter and wife, not even for breakfast, which had always been one of their favorite times together as a family, sharing porridge or bread and bacon in the morning sun, sometimes laughing over silly jokes and wordplay, sometimes just sitting in sleepy, silent companionship.
He might as well be in Silverfall
, she thought bitterly: the mining town high in the eastern mountains was famously the most inaccessible place in all of Aygrima, snowed in most of the year.

“He’s just busy, Mara,” her mother insisted when she asked. “And one of the things he’s busy with is your Mask. He wants it to be very special.”

“I know,” Mara mumbled, but inside she thought,
Busy with my Mask for
weeks
?
He’d only taken ten days to create a Mask for Stanik, the Guardian of Security and the most powerful man in the Circle, and Guardian Stanik was his
boss
, overseer of all the Maskmakers of Aygrima.
Of course, he had my help
, she thought; but she knew she hadn’t been
that
much help to him. She hadn’t really done much more than mix glazes and watch the kiln.

It was all very strange, and very disturbing, and strangest and most disturbing of all was the fact that in a week’s time, she would be Masked and she still didn’t know if her Gift had run true, and if, in fact, she could do the magic required of a Maskmaker.

And that was why she was sitting on the city wall as she had so often in the past, once more dressed in the simple tunic of a child in blatant defiance of her mother, who had seen her go out wearing her staid skirt and blouse, but hadn’t seen her slip into the gardening shed and exchange those clothes for this, and leave her sturdy shoes behind to once more run gloriously barefoot. It was her last chance to be a child, after all. In a week, everything would change forever.

Although, she admitted to herself, she might have thought twice about her current attire if the weather had already turned cool. But though harvest had come and gone and the damp, chill Tamita winter must surely follow, for now the sun, beating down from a bright blue sky, still had real heat in it. On a day like today, who could bear to be wrapped up in a woolen skirt and scratchy blouse?

But she glanced uneasily over her shoulder and up the hill again at her green-roofed house, and decided it was time to move. Just in case her mother
could
see her.

She pulled her feet up, stood, and trotted easily along the wall, unconcerned by the sheer drop to hard stone just steps to either side, until she’d reached the next tower, safely out of sight of her house.

With one hand on the tower’s smoothed yellow stone, she looked down into the Outside Market again—and froze. That bright-red hair, that blue dress, it had to be . . . !

“Sala!” she yelled at the top of her voice. A birdfruit vendor, a little girl in a long red skirt, and a shirtless boy in a green kilt all looked up at her, but the object of her shout kept walking without so much as a glance her way.

Mara dashed into the tower and down its narrow winding stairs. She burst out through an archway onto the Great Circle Road that made its cobblestoned way all around Tamita just inside the wall. A cart horse snorted and balked, earning her a curse from its driver, but she ignored him and ran as fast as she could to the Market Gate. She dodged through it and then, twisting and turning, slipped through the crowds in the Outside Market like a snakefish through seaweed. Masks of every sort turned her way, some smooth and beautiful, chased with designs that spoke of their occupation (here the red scrollwork of a lawyer, there the crossed silver hammers of a blacksmith); some dull and gray, all decoration long worn away. One or two Gifted looked her way: a blue-Masked Healer, a red-Masked Engineer, his Mask set in a permanent smile but his real lips beneath pressed into a disapproving line.

The black Masks of two Watchers talking to a trembling gray-Masked knife sharpener turned toward her as she ran past, but an instant later she rounded a papermaker’s stall and was out of their sight. An old woman whose Mask looked like a bleached skull screeched and swung her cane, but Mara dodged with the ease of long experience and didn’t lose a step.

She reached the lane. Sala had been walking in
that
direction. Mara stood on tiptoe, trying to see over the throngs, and glimpsed red hair and blue cloth in front of a baker’s stall a hundred feet distant. She dashed that way, and reached the stall just as the red-haired girl dropped a silver coin into the baker’s hand and turned away with her basket full of rolls.

“Sala!” Mara gasped out with what little breath she had left, then doubled over, hands on her knees, panting.

Sala turned, and Mara looked up at her snow-white Mask and the red hair, once so flyaway, now piled in an elaborate, coiled coif above the gleaming clay covering her face. Shining silver grapevines curled across the Mask’s forehead and down its cheeks, where the red circles on the cheeks marking her as a glassmaker would be added once she had finished her two-year Masked apprenticeship. Mara hadn’t seen the Mask since she had applied that silver filigree, and she felt a surge of pride as she looked at it now.
It really is beautiful
, she thought. As it well
should
be: her father, tasked as he was with making all the Masks for the Gifted, only rarely made Masks for the non-Gifted, and those he did were so expensive only the wealthy could afford them, but for his daughter’s best friend he had not only made an exception, he had done so free of charge, insisting that Sala and her parents accept the Mask as a gift from Mara and her family.

“Oh,” said Sala. “Hello, Mara.”

Mara frowned. Sala’s voice sounded different: not just slightly muffled, but almost
embarrassed
.

Embarrassed to talk to
me? Mara thought.
That’s crazy. We’ve been best friends forever.

“I haven’t seen you since the night the Watchers hauled us out of the Waterworkers’ pool,” Mara said, her breath coming more easily now. She straightened up. “How’s the apprenticeship going? What’s Masked life like? I want to know
everything
.”

“I am enjoying my apprenticeship very much, thank you,” Sala said. “Esterella is an excellent mentor.” Her voice remained cool and detached, as though she were making small talk at a party. “And I have become quite accustomed to the Mask. Please thank your father again for me for such a wonderful Masking Day gift.” She looked over her shoulder, the now-orange light of the westering sun turning the silver vines in her Mask into lines of fire on the white glaze. “And speaking of Esterella, she must be wondering where I am. I must catch up to her.” She glanced back at Mara. “It has been good to see you again, Mara. Once you are Masked, we must get together some time.” And then Sala turned and walked away.

Mara gaped after her, as unable to speak as if her breath had been knocked out of her. “Sala!” she finally managed to call, but her friend, already twenty feet away, didn’t turn around. “Sala!” she shouted louder, and took a step after her, but a heavy hand landed on her shoulder, restraining her. She twisted around and saw the black, blank mask of a Watcher, eyes glittering deep within the eyeholes.

“Don’t bother the citizen, girl,” he growled.

She’s my best friend!
Mara wanted to shout at him, but even as upset as she was, she knew better than to talk back to a Watcher. “Yes, sir,” she said. The Watcher lifted his black-gloved hand, and she swallowed, turned, and walked as unhurriedly as she could back toward the Market Gate, certain she could feel his gaze on her the whole way.

Her stomach roiled inside her like the time she had foolishly eaten one of the tiny round chokeberries that grew on the bushes in their backyard. How could Sala have changed so much in such a short time? Just three months ago they’d been laughing together at the Waterworkers’ pool. And now Sala was all, “It’s been very good to see you again,” and “Once you are Masked, we must get together.”

Mara felt her face heat.
Not bloody likely. You think you know someone . . .

It’s the Mask
, she told herself as she began climbing Maskmakers’ Way.
She’s got herself a Mask, and now she thinks she’s better than me. Even though
everybody
gets a Mask. It’s not like they’re anything special. I’ll have one myself in a week, and it’s not going to change me!

But not for the first time, she wondered if that were really true.

The Colors of Magic

M
ARA HOPED AGAINST HOPE
that her father would be sitting at the dinner table when she got home, but his place was empty. “Where’s Father?”

“At the Palace.” Her mother didn’t turn from the counter. “Another meeting with Ethelda.”

Mara’s heart fluttered a little. Her mother claimed all the hours her father had been spending with Ethelda had to do with some changes to the Masks assigned to Healers—a new shade of blue, additional ornamentation—but Mara couldn’t help wondering . . .

“He’s not . . . sick, is he?” she asked softly, her voice breaking a little. Afraid of the answer, she hadn’t dared ask the question before. But with her Masking so close . . .

But to her relief, her mother turned at once and came to her. She wiped her palms on her yellow apron, then took Mara’s hands in her own. “No, darling! No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just work. That’s all.”

“Are you sure?” Mara felt her lip trembling. “It’s just . . . I’ve hardly seen him in weeks. And my Masking is coming. He . . .”

Her mother pulled her into a tight, encompassing hug. “It’s all right, Mara,” she murmured, stroking her hair. “He’s not ill. And he misses you, too. He’s just busy.” She released her, stepped back. “All right?”

Mara, biting her lip, looked into her mother’s eyes. She thought, after almost fifteen years, that she would know if her mother were simply telling her a comforting lie. She saw no sign of it.

Of course, her mother could read her face as well as she could read her mother’s. “There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?”

Mara nodded. “I saw Sala today.”

“Did you?” Her mother indicated the table. “Go on, sit down. Your dinner is getting cold.”

Mara pulled out her chair and sat down. Back at the counter, her mother spooned mashed redroots onto a plate, poured gravy over them, laid a slice of ham alongside, and turned to the table. “And how is Masked life treating Sala?” She put the steaming plate down on the polished brown wood of the table and went back to the counter for a tumbler of water and a knife and fork. “Is she enjoying her apprenticeship to the glassmaker?”

“She seemed well,” Mara said reluctantly, picking up the utensils. “And she said Esterella is an excellent mentor. But she was . . . different.”

“Well, she’s a grown-up now, Mara.”

“It’s not just that, it was . . .” Mara hesitated. “Mother, the Mask doesn’t change you, does it?”

Her mother, who had just turned around with her own dinner, stopped in surprise. “Mara, you know the answer to that. You’re a Maskmaker’s daughter, for stars’ sake! You’ve made Masks yourself!”

“Only the outside,” Mara said. “I haven’t put in the magic.” She poked at the ham as her mother sat down opposite her. “I know what I’ve been told, Mother, but . . .”

“Told by your
father
, Mara,” her mother reminded her. “I hope you’re not suggesting that he hasn’t been telling you the truth!”

“No, of course not, I just . . .”
I just I wish I could talk to
him
about it
, she thought, falling silent again. She took a bite of ham and chewed mechanically, hardly tasting it. True, “The Masks don’t change you,” her father had told her back when he was still talking to her. And yet . . .

Sala
had
changed.

It couldn’t have been the Mask
, Mara tried to reassure herself.
Mother’s right. It’s just that Sala is working now, she’s an apprentice, she has grown-up things to worry about. She could be married and pregnant by this time two years from now!

And so could I
, she realized suddenly, but
that
was such a strange and scary thought that she hurriedly pushed it aside.
It’s only . . . I miss my friend. And it feels like the Mask took her away.

Maybe I’ll get her back when I’m wearing a Mask, too
, she thought; as she would be, in just a few days—well, whenever she was in the street, anyway.
And no more sneaking out in short tunics,
she reminded herself.
From now on it’s going to be proper dresses and proper cloaks and proper shoes and proper manners.

Only a week left to be a child. And after that . . . an adult. A new school, new classes with other newly Masked Gifted, in which one of the powerful magicians from the Palace would teach them about the permissible and impermissible uses of their Gifts, the laws restricting magic to the service of the Autarch, and more.
At least I’ll be fully apprenticed
.
I’ll learn the final secrets of making Masks. Daddy and I will be working side by side again . . .

Provided
I really do have the right Gift . . .

That fear never really left her; it hadn’t really left her for two years, and it was returning fourfold now that the day of her Masking was so near.

The next time she looked at magic, what would she see?

I could find out. There’s magic in Daddy’s workshop. Daddy’s at the Palace. I know where he hides the spare key. I could sneak in and . . .

The thought shocked her.
She couldn’t believe she’d had it.
Sneak into her father’s workshop, when he’d ordered her to stay out of it? Uncover the basin of magic, which he had always refused to open in her presence, explaining that it was expressly forbidden for the unMasked Gifted to even be in the presence of uncovered magic except during their Tests?

It was wrong.

But it was also tempting.

It wouldn’t hurt anything. How could it hurt anything? I wouldn’t do anything with the magic. I’d just look. No one will ever know.

She could picture the magic basin clearly in her mind: a bowl of thick black stone, as wide across as her forearm was long, atop a three-legged stand of bronze, its contents hidden by a heavy stone lid. It would be a simple matter to push that lid to one side, not too far, and get a glimpse of the magic within . . .

...see what color it was . . .

She found herself, without being aware she had decided to do so, getting up from the kitchen table, the chair legs squawking on the stone floor. “Excuse me,” she muttered. Her face felt hot, and she was certain her mother would figure out what she was up to. But her mother just said, “Of course,” and kept washing dishes without looking up.

Mara hurried up the smooth-polished stairs of dark brown wood to the closed door of her father’s workshop at the first landing. She knelt down in front of it. There was a loose floorboard, up against the wall where no one would tread on it accidentally, with a thin crescent of wood missing along one side, remnant of a knot in the original tree. She stuck a fingernail into that small opening, lifted the floorboard, and from its underside unhooked a big brass key. She’d seen her father take it out of there one very late night when she’d woken to hear a noise downstairs and had crept out of her room to peer into the darkness below. Her father had been at some function in the Palace at which, she guessed, a great deal of wine had been served, and although he had probably thought he was being quiet, in fact he’d been stumbling and banging and grunting enough to wake the dead. Mara doubted he even remembered coming home that night. He certainly had no idea she’d been watching.

But she had, and now the key he had inadvertently revealed to her slipped easily into the lock. She turned it, and it made a snicking sound that caused her heart to leap to her throat; but her mother continued clattering dishes in the kitchen and after a moment of frozen terror she took a deep breath, turned the brass doorknob, pushed the door open, and stepped into her father’s workshop.

Ordinarily the yellow light of the oil lanterns hung from the rafters gleamed off the racks of unfinished Masks, spools of gold and silver wire, pots of clay and glaze, the giant kiln in the corner, and the array of tiny blades and hammers and pliers placed neatly above the long workbench of smooth golden wood. But tonight the only light was a faint, faint glow through the window at the far end of the narrow room . . .

...and a glimmer, almost invisible, but definitely present, from the basin of magic in the middle of the workshop.

If she had never been in the workshop before, Mara would have hesitated to step into that darkness, afraid of banging her shins or sending something crashing to the floor, alerting her mother to her transgression. But Mara had spent many, many hours in the workshop watching her father craft Masks, learning, in fact, all there was to know about them except for the secret of imbuing them with magic. She knew exactly where everything was, even in the dark. And so she stepped forward, cautiously but without terror, and made her way to the faintly gleaming basin.

The lid sealed it as tightly as always. The faint glow came from the stone of the basin itself, as though it were covered with a thin film of luminescent oil.

Taking a deep breath, Mara reached out with both hands and slid the heavy stone disk away from the edge of the basin.

She looked down, and caught her breath in delight, with dismay close on its heels.

Magic seethed inside the basin. To Mara it looked like a liquid, a liquid heavy as quicksilver, an endlessly shifting mass of twisting, twining color . . .

...but still, all colors: none stronger than the others. Her Gift still had not settled. She still could not be certain she would have the ability required to craft Masks like her father.

And her Masking was only days away
.

But as she stared down into the magic, her dismay faded, while the delight remained.
It’s so beautiful!
Her heart ached at the thought that someday all that beauty would vanish forever, replaced by only one or two colors instead of the endless variety before her now.

Then her dismay returned full-force: not because of what she saw in the magic, but because of what she heard downstairs—the sound of the door opening, and her father’s voice, “Karissa?”

“In here, sweetheart,” her mother said.

Mara whispered a word she’d heard on the street but never dared to use in her own house before, and quickly pulled the stone lid back over the basin. She hurried to the door . . . then froze. She could tell by the sound of his voice that her father was at the base of the stairs. He’d hear her for sure if she opened the door now.

“Where’s Mara?” he said.

“Upstairs in her room,” her mother said. A pause. “She misses you,” her mother continued, so softly Mara could barely hear her through the door. “She doesn’t understand why you won’t talk to her.” Another pause. “I miss you, too.” Yet another pause. “I don’t understand, either.”

“I told you,” her father said.
He sounds worn out
, Mara thought, her breath catching in her throat.
As if he’s at the end of his strength. Maybe he really is sick!
“I’m busy. Working on her Mask. I can’t—”

“You’re always working on a Mask,” her mother interrupted. “I don’t see why this one should be—”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” her father snapped. “Is there anything to eat?”

A very long silence followed. “Bread. Cheese,” her mother said. “Nothing hot.”

“Fine.” And then, to her relief, Mara heard her father’s steps move away from the base of the stairs. Quick as a frightened mouse, she nipped out, closed the door of the workshop silently behind her, locked it, put the key back in its hiding place, and fled: up the stairs, down the upper hallway, then up a final flight of stairs as steep as a ladder and through a trapdoor into her own room.

She closed the trap behind her and sat down on her narrow bed, beneath the thick black beams that supported the roof, sloping down sharply to her right. Head in her hands, elbows on her knees, she stared at the tiny blue flame flickering inside the glass tube of the gas lamp in the corner. The pilot light illuminated nothing but itself, but she left the lamp turned down, content to sit in the deepening dark, leavened only by the fading glow through the skylight window over her bed.

Warning bells rang in the streets, deep, slow, ominous: curfew for the children of Tamita, and a warning to the Masked that they must hasten home or else make their way to the well-lit boulevards lined with shops, restaurants, and theaters that were the only streets in the city where even the Masked could congregate after dark.

The Night Watchers not only patrolled the boulevards, they patrolled everywhere else, ensuring that no one lurked or lingered in the darkened alleys and winding lesser streets. The Watchers’ black cloaks, Masks, and clothing made them almost invisible in the darkness. Some said they carried magic that could
really
make them invisible, but Mara had watched the Watchers patrolling the shadowy streets too many nights to believe they had mystical powers: not only the night she and Sala were caught skinny-dipping, but many other nights when they
weren’t
.

Of course, all Watchers
supposedly
had enough of the Gift to read Masks, but Mara wondered if that were true. She remembered what Tutor Ancilla had told them. “There are maybe twenty thousand people in Tamita,” she’d said. “An enormous number. But at any given time there are no more than two hundred who have the Gift. Only half of those have it in great enough measure to actually use magic. And fewer than half of
those
can use it to any great purpose.”