Masks (39 page)

“And the Maskings of the Gifted?” Mara demanded. She had a nasty suspicion she knew the answer, and Ethelda confirmed it.

“The Autarch has made it a point, for two years now, to attend almost all Maskings of the Gifted,” Ethelda said. “And one out of ten of those he attends fail. I believe that his need for magic is so great that, in the moment of the Masking, he often draws on it too eagerly, ripping it from the Gifted child with so much force that the Mask shatters, and the wearer’s Gift is lost.”

Mara felt a chill. “Then if he had come to mine . . .”

“But he didn’t,” Ethelda said. “I did.”

“How did you arrange
that
?”

“I didn’t,” Ethelda said. “Oh, I had plans to—I intended to request the honor of representing the Autarch at your Masking because I was ‘an old family friend’—but in fact, before I even made my request, the Autarch announced on his own he would not attend.”

Mara blinked. “Why?”

“I can only guess, but I suspect he knows, at least at some level, that
he
is causing the recent failures of the Gifted’s Masks. If that’s the case, he may have chosen to stay away from your Masking for fear of endangering your Gift. After all, Maskmakers are crucial to feeding his need and you were to be apprenticed to your father, one day perhaps to be Master Maskmaker yourself. Whatever his reason, his decision worked perfectly for our plans.”

“You and my father?”

Ethelda nodded. “Your father confided in me that, just as he had made special Masks for each of us, so he was making a special one for you: one he knew would fail, without ever letting the Autarch draw on your magic. He said he had also arranged for you to be rescued on the way into exile. He told me no more than that. I knew nothing of this place,” she gestured at the cavern walls, “or of the unMasked Army. I thought he must have bribed some of the bandits known to infest the Wild, and wondered that he seemed so confident they would uphold their end of the bargain. But again, I was Masked, and even with the special Mask your father made for me, I dared not learn too much or ask too many questions for fear of . . .” She gestured at the shattered shards of blue.

Mara felt a pang of guilt for doubting her father. An upwelling of love threatened to choke her. “Why?” she cried. “Why is the Autarch doing all this? Destroying Gifted, sucking the life out of the Child Guards, feeding on the magic of his people? Why?”

“Because he’s old,” Ethelda said flatly. “Old and childless. He fears death, and more than that, he fears losing his grip on the reins of state. To hold on to both youth and power, he needs more and more magic to fight the ravages of time. He’s an addict, and like any addict, it takes greater and greater quantities of what he’s addicted to to give him the results he wants. And to hell with those he uses and discards along the way.” She leaned forward. “But it is you I’m most concerned with now, child. Tell me, using magic from the black lodestone jars
hurts
, doesn’t it?”

Mara nodded. “The more I use, the more it hurts.” She remembered the searing pain in her hands when she had killed the Watcher threatening Keltan.

“That is because you are untrained. You have not learned to direct it properly, and so it scrapes your nerves on its passage through your body. But the magic you tore from the people in the camp—that hurt in a different way, did it not?”

Mara shuddered, remembering that soul-shredding agony. “Like being burned alive.”

Again Ethelda nodded. “The magic from the lodestone is smoothed and blended by its long passage through the rock. But the magic from a living mind is pure, strong—and not intended for use by
you
at all. It’s like . . .” she paused as if trying to think of the proper simile. “Sometimes, Healers have tried to replace the blood lost by the victim of a terrible accident by injecting them with blood drawn willingly from someone else. Rarely, that saves a life. More often . . .” She sighed. “More often, the victim dies a painful death. We believe that just as there are various kinds of magic, there are different kinds of blood, though we have no way of telling them apart. And if you receive the wrong kind of blood, it causes a reaction that in many cases proves fatal.

“You received the wrong kind of magic. You received very many
different
kinds of the wrong kind of magic. You were lucky to survive. If you had held it within yourself for long, I don’t believe you would have. Fortunately, you thrust it away at once, to contain the explosion.” She shook her head. “An amazing feat. I wish I had seen it.”

“I wish I hadn’t,” Mara said. “But it’s not just the pain. There’s something else. The . . . dreams.”

Ethelda leaned closer. “More vivid than any dreams you’ve ever had before?” she asked.

Mara nodded.

“You see those who have died?”

Mara nodded again. “Grute was the first,” she said. “The Watcher I . . . destroyed . . . with magic in the mountains. Another Watcher I–I blasted to save Keltan. They’re the most vivid, the most
real
. But I’m seeing others, too, others I
didn’t
kill.”
Not directly, at least,
she thought bitterly. “The Warden. Katia. Illina . . .”

“Here is what I think is happening,” Ethelda said. “When someone dies, their magic is released, and you have the ability to draw magic to yourself. You’re like living black lodestone. So when someone dies near you, whether you killed them or not, their magic flows into you, suddenly, with enough force to leave an . . . an image, like a vivid painting; an imprint of their magic on your mind. And if you
did
kill them, using magic, that imprint is particularly strong.”

“A
permanent
imprint?” Mara cried out, stiffening in terror. “Will I see them my whole life?”

She expected—needed—Ethelda to reassure her, but Ethelda hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m only guessing. I can give you herbs to dull the dreams and let you sleep more calmly and perhaps, over time, the imprints will fade, like the ball of light that remains in your vision after you glance at the sun.”

“
Perhaps
?” Mara felt sick. “You don’t
know
?”

Ethelda shook her head. “No, child, I don’t. I can only guess.” She put her hand on Mara’s shoulder, and squeezed it hard. “Listen to me very carefully, Mara,” she said. Her eyes, wide and clear, free of the shadows of the Mask, bored into Mara’s; her voice, low and intense, bored into Mara’s ears and mind. “You are in a fragile state. Stable, but barely so. Those who kill with magic can grow to
like
killing. Those who pull magic from others can move past the pain and grow to like the power.”

“Like the Autarch?” Mara whispered.

“Worse.”

“Worse!”

Ethelda nodded. “There are tales of those with these powers commingled: the magekings and witchqueens of old. They have names: The Beast of Barak’kum. Bloody Britha. Atul the Slaughterer. Ancient names that have inspired terror for centuries. And one other, not ancient at all: The Lady of Pain and Fire.”

Mara blinked. The first three names, dreadful though they sounded, meant nothing to her. But the Lady of Pain and Fire—the witch the Autarch had supposedly personally defeated—she remembered hearing about from Tutor Ancilla. In recent years Mara had begun to suspect she was a myth created to bolster the image of the Autarch as all-knowing and all-powerful. “The Lady of Pain and Fire was
real
?”

“She was,” Ethelda said. “And maybe still is. Her body was never found. Whether she still lives, outside our borders, I cannot say. Perhaps the Autarch knows. But if you’ve heard of her, you know the things she did: whole villages wiped out, forests leveled, children snatched from their beds, men and women tortured to death for no purpose anyone could ever discern.” Mara had a sudden flash of memory, a white skull grinning at her from a green mound in the ruined village where she and Grute had sheltered. Ethelda leaned closer, lowered her voice further, and said with grim certainty, “Mara, if you continue in this path you have chosen, though you chose it inadvertently and in ignorance, you could become just like her: a thing of nightmare, one of the most terrifying creatures the world has ever birthed.”

Mara gasped, and tears filled her eyes. “No!” she said. “No! I could never—I wouldn’t—I’m not a monster!”

“No,” Ethelda agreed quickly. “No, of course you’re not a monster.” She touched her unscarred face. “I’m not accusing you, child. But I
am
warning you. The danger is there.”

“What do I do?” Mara begged. “Ethelda, what do I do?”

“Be very careful using magic,” Ethelda said. “I think, with training, you can safely use that which is collected in the usual fashion. But do not draw magic from life as you did in the camp. Above all, do not use magic to kill, not if you value your soul.”

Mara’s heart raced. “But–but every time, it just happened. I didn’t do it on purpose. What if I can’t control it?”

Ethelda’s hand trembled on her shoulder, but she didn’t release her. “I don’t know, Mara. Somehow, we have to find a way. I must think on it.” She relaxed her hand, drew it back. “For now, I’ll go prepare a draught of the sleeping potion of which I spoke. It will take some time. Rest here until I get back.” She gave Mara a smile, glanced at the shattered Mask, took a deep breath, and then went out, leaving the broken shards where they lay.

She also left the urn of magic. Without Ethelda to distract her, Mara was more aware of it than ever, aware of the power lurking within the simple black vessel. It called to her, urging her to use it, to touch it, to draw it to her, to . . .

She swallowed.
I could be a monster
, she thought.
Magic could make me into a monster. I’ve already killed three people, maybe more.

It was a horrible thought, a terrifying thought.
Be very careful using magic
, Ethelda had said, but how? How
could
she be careful? She had no control, and Ethelda clearly had no way to teach it to her. She hadn’t meant to kill Grute, or the two Watchers. But she had, magic leaping to do her bidding without conscious thought on her part. And then, in the camp, there had been searing pain as she had stripped living creatures all around her of the magic they unwittingly possessed. Already the memory of the agony was fading, and all she could remember was the power, tantalizing her, calling to her. She’d saved lives, true, but she might just as easily have taken them. If she could not control her magic, when would she kill again? The next time she got angry? And who would the victim be? Edrik? Catilla? Hyram? Keltan? Prella?

As for those she had already killed . . . Ethelda could not promise the dreams would stop. And the last time Mara had seen the shades of her victims, they had not even waited for sleep: they had come for her while she rode the waking world. How long could she live with horrors always lurking just beneath the surface of her mind, ready to invade her thoughts night and day without warning? How long before she went mad? And if she went mad, what would she do with her terrible power then?

Hot tears flooded her eyes, poured onto her cheeks. She let them lie there. She hadn’t asked for this power. She didn’t
want
this power. But she had it, and she couldn’t see any way to be rid of it, or rid of the danger it posed to everyone around her.

Unless . . .

She remembered Ethelda reaching down one blue-sheathed finger to touch the chest of the woman in the bed across the aisle from her in the camp hospital, how the woman’s breathing had simply stopped. “Release,” Ethelda had called it.

There’s one kind of sleep where dreams will never trouble me
, Mara thought then, the idea cold and clear in her roiling mind as a shard of ice shining in a muddy pool.
One kind of sleep from which I’ll never wake screaming. One kind of sleep that will keep me from harming anyone, ever again . . .

The magic called to her.
Use me
, it seemed to cry.
Use me as you will. Use me . . .

It would be so easy. Would she even have to open the urn? She could call for the magic, pull it into herself . . .

. . . and stop her heart.

Her breath went ragged in her throat.
No
, she thought.
No, it hasn’t come to that.

But the horror of the ghosts pulling her from her saddle, the terrible dreams of Grute and all the others . . . she could end them. End it all. Ethelda couldn’t promise she could free Mara from those horrors. But Mara could certainly free herself.

She closed her eyes. Maybe it would be best. Maybe it would.
No more troubles for me, or anyone else. No more dangers. No more deaths after this one . . .

She took a deep breath. She opened her eyes again. She turned her head to regard the urn of magic, rolled over and reached for it . . .

. . . and jerked back as frantic shouts erupted in the next room. Sweeping aside the red curtain, Grelda burst in, shouting, “Put her there!” Simona and Keltan came next, carrying someone between them. Alita followed, weeping as if her heart would break, and behind her came Kirika, face white, eyes red, silent, staring, horror-stricken.

Simona and Keltan gently placed their burden on one of the other beds and Mara gasped as she saw who it was.

Little Prella, still so childlike, lay shuddering on the bed, blood already soaking it as it had soaked her side, pouring from a horrifying wound, a gaping slash in her side through which protruded the white ends of broken ribs. Prella’s eyes had rolled back into her head so that only the whites showed, and blood bubbled from her mouth with each short, choking gasp.

“What happened?” Mara cried, sitting up in her bed.

“
She
happened!” Alita snarled, suddenly turning on Kirika and throwing her up against the wall. She held her forearm across the other girl’s throat. “She’s killed Prella!”

Kirika said nothing, her face a waxen mask. She didn’t try to push Alita away.

“Stop it,” Grelda snapped. “This is a sickroom, not a brawling ground. Mara, where’s Ethelda?”

“She . . . she left. I don’t know where . . . she was going to make me a sleeping potion . . .” Prella gave a shuddering groan and fresh blood bubbled from her mouth. “You’ve got to do something!”