Faces (4 page)

“And those wearing the new Masks?”

The Lady nodded. “So I believe. Indeed, I think that was partly the intent of changing the way the Masks were made, aside from providing him with a new source of magic: to provide him with new followers who will be absolutely loyal and obey him without question should he have need of them. Over the past couple of years that the new Masks have been in play, some four or five hundred young people will have become unknowingly linked to him, much like my wolves are linked to me . . . and Whiteblaze to you.”

Mara shuddered. Sala. Mayson. Tamed to the Autarch's will . . . like Whiteblaze was tamed to hers. She dropped her eyes to the wolf, and felt hatred burn through her, hatred for the Autarch, brighter and hotter than ever before. Whiteblaze whined.

“I felt that,” the Lady said. “You truly do have great power.”

“So what?” Mara said. The anger faded as quickly as it had come, leaving behind gray sadness. “What good is it? The Autarch still reigns. My father is dead. Katia is dead. Ethelda is dead.” Tears started to her eyes. “Everyone is dead.”

“Not everyone.” The Lady pulled Mara closer, her white fur cloak warming Mara's cold neck. The heat of the Lady's body was nothing compared to the blazing fire inside that slight frame, a power that both frightened and attracted Mara, like a candle flame attracted a moth.

Just remember what usually happens to the moth
, Mara thought, but thoughts of caution seemed insubstantial compared to the indubitable power of the old woman at her side. She nestled closer.

The Lady said nothing more: just held her. And in the warmth of her embrace and the glow of her powerful magical Gift, Mara's eyes closed, and sleep washed all her concerns away.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING MARA,
alone except for Whiteblaze, trudged through the snow several strides behind the Lady, who was in deep conversation with one of her villagers.

The Lady had a black wooden staff in one hand and two wolves with her, while the others continued to range ahead and behind.
Is she scouting along the trail even as she walks here, watching through the eyes of the wolves for any other hazards that might threaten us?

Probably not
, she decided after a moment's reflection.
She must have to close her own eyes to make sense of what a wolf's show her.
Nor did she think it likely the Lady could look through more than one wolf's eyes at a time. The confusion would be too great.

But still, to be able to do such a thing at all . . . ! The Lady's Gift . . . the power she had sensed within that small, old body, the power that had warmed her to sleep the night before . . . how great was it?
Greater than the Autarch's? Greater than mine?

And if so . . . how does she control it?

The Lady glanced behind her and motioned Mara forward. Mara hurried to catch up. “Mara,” the Lady said as she joined the other two, “I don't believe I've introduced you to Hamil yet. He's the headman of my village. Hamil, Mara is my new . . .” she paused, as if searching for just the right word, “protégée.”

Hamil, a broad-shouldered man with a bushy gray beard and eyebrows to match, gave Mara a sharp look, but said nothing. He turned his attention back to the trail ahead. The slope went up and up ahead of them, the trail switchbacking through thick stands of dark trees and outcroppings of gray rock. “We'll be climbing for the rest of the day at this rate,” he growled. “We'll have to camp at the top.”

“The weather seems good,” the Lady said.

“Let's hope it stays that way.” He looked at her. “If I may be excused, My Lady, I will join the forward scouts to discuss possible campsites.”

“Of course, Hamil. Thank you.”

“My Lady.” Hamil briefly turned his eyes to Mara, his gaze impassive. “Mara.” He strode forward, his long legs bearing him quickly away.

Mara watched him go. “You took magic from him yesterday, to stop the avalanche.”

“I took magic from all of those who came with me,” the Lady said. “As they expected. As I said, they have all volunteered. In the village, it is considered a great honor to be selected to be part of the Lady's Cadre.” She smiled. “That's the formal name. I believe informally they're called my ‘human wolfpack.' In any event, as you can see, he was unharmed by my drawdown of magic from the Cadre yesterday to stave off the avalanche.”

Mara said nothing. She watched Hamil climbing toward those toiling through the snow at the head of the column. “But when you stopped the avalanche,” she said slowly, trying to think straight, trying not to be drawn in by the Lady's reasonable words and tone—she had been drawn in far too often, with disastrous results, by reasonable words spoken by reasonable-sounding people—“the members of your . . . Cadre . . . fell to their knees. As if they'd been stunned.”

“A momentary weakness, that's all,” the Lady said.

“But what if one of them had been doing something dangerous—swinging an ax, maybe, or lighting a fire. They could have been injured, even killed—”

“It was an emergency,” the Lady said, with a flash of irritation. “I thought the risk of minor injury was worth the reward of saving all our lives. Didn't you?”

Mara said nothing. She
wanted
to believe the Lady: wanted
so much
to believe her. From Shelra, the Autarch's Mistress of Magic, she had learned to fine-tune her use of magic, to make it do precisely what she willed: but that was magic drawn from black lodestone, blended and smoothed by the strange rock. She had not dared speak to Shelra about her other means of getting magic. The fact remained that every time she had pulled magic from others it had hurt her . . . but it had also thrilled her, in a way she had no words to express. And every time Ethelda's words had echoed in her mind, warning that she might grow to like the taste of that raw magic so much that despite the pain she would become a soul-sucking, pain-loving creature of destruction like . . .

...well, the example she had always used was walking next to her right now.

Or like the Autarch, pulling magic from the enslaved children of his Child Guard, stunting their development, causing some to sicken and die, and now also drawing from the youngest of his subjects, those most recently Masked, sapping their will, altering their personalities.

Whom do I believe?
Mara thought. Once, she would have asked her father: but he was dead, and even now her mind shivered away from the image of his death and what she had done afterward, brutally slaughtering Guardian Stanik, blasting a hole in the city wall, causing the ground to swallow a mounted patrol of Watchers, horses and all, blowing a boatful of Watchers out of the water, slaying more Watchers on the beach . . .

She might have asked her mother, but she, too, was lost to her, hiding somewhere in the far south.

She might have asked Ethelda, but Ethelda had died on the beach. Catilla would have no wisdom to impart, nor, she suspected, any inclination to share it if she did. Nor would Edrik, or Hyram. All three of them hated her, blaming her—with reason—for the destruction of the Secret City.

Prince Chell, she was convinced, was concerned only with his own kingdom across the sea, everything that had happened here only of interest if he could somehow turn Aygrima's magic against his realm's foes. He had hardly spoken to her since the events on the beach.

Not
, she thought, trying to be fair,
that I have given him any opportunity.

That left Keltan, and seeking wisdom from a fifteen-year-old unGifted boy who had kissed her and no doubt wanted to keep doing so but otherwise understood nothing about what she had gone through seemed the height of folly.

The thought of Keltan made her feel guilty. She had promised to go down to the camp and talk to him the previous evening, but once she had fallen asleep in the Lady's embrace, she had gone nowhere but to her own bed after a brief supper taken in the tent. This morning she had seen him at a distance but, not knowing what to say, hadn't sought him out. And he had so far made no effort to catch up with her.

In any event, she didn't want the advice of another youth. What she wanted was a grown-up to turn to, one she could trust, one who would understand, one who would tell her what to do and make everything all right.

The Lady of Pain and Fire was offering to be that grown-up.
Too bad
, Mara thought,
that she's the one I most want to talk to someone about.

“Mara, don't shut me out,” the Lady said softly. “There's no one else you can turn to who understands the Gift you have, and the burden it imposes.”

Again, the Lady seemed to have read her heart.
Is my face that transparent?

“I understand why you are hesitant,” the Lady continued. She turned her eyes forward, as if to give Mara space alone with her thoughts. “Like Ethelda, you are a prisoner of your misconceptions. You have been told I am a monster, that I destroyed whole villages, that only the Autarch kept me from ravaging all of the Autarchy. It's hard to put aside what your tutors and parents and others you trust have told you, especially when you are young . . . and, Mara, you are very, very young.” The Lady's voice broke a little on that, and Mara shot her a startled look. “As young as I was when my father died, and I discovered my power, and lashed out at the Autarch . . . just as you have.”

Mara stared at her. That was new. “You were . . . my age?”

“Close enough,” the Lady said. “Sixteen. There were no Masks in those days. My father arranged for me to be Tested for the Gift when I turned thirteen. What he learned puzzled and frightened him. He himself had the Gift, very strongly, but only one color: red. He was a talented Engineer.” She smiled faintly. “If you have ever crossed one of the bridges over the river in Tamita, you have walked on his work.”

Mara, who had not only walked on those bridges but hidden under one of them, nodded.

“My father had never heard of anyone who could see all colors of magic at thirteen. Nor had the Tester. He was duty-bound to report his findings to the Master of Magic at the Palace, but my father bribed the Master to keep the results to himself. Then my father went into the Library of the Palace . . . a place open to all scholars in those days, not kept under lock and key like today . . . and dug deep among the books and scrolls to find what they had to say about those with my—our—Gift. What he learned there led him to make arrangements for us to leave the capital quietly, for when he truly understood how powerful my Gift was, he knew it was only a matter of time before the Autarch would want to harness it—harness
me
—for his own purposes. We were going to move to Redwater, a farming village far south of Tamita, a tiny place where we could disappear.

“But before my father's plans came to fruition, a man came to him . . .
Catilla's
father.” She jerked her head toward the back of the column; somewhere back there, Catilla rode on a toboggan pulled by the villagers' wolflike dogs. “He sounded out my father's feelings toward the Autarch, discovered they were aligned with his own. Gradually, my father was drawn into the incipient Rebellion.

“I knew nothing of that at the time, of course. I was only grateful that the plans for us to move to Redwater seemed to have been forgotten.” She shook her head. “I was so blind,” she said softly. “Sixteen. All I was interested in was boys. And there were several who were interested in me. I was going to dances, riding out through the Market Gate to picnic in the woods, joining carriage excursions to the old ruins in the Rose Hills. I noticed nothing . . . until the morning the Rebellion erupted into the open, the morning the old Autarch died horribly, poisoned, and the new Autarch sent his guards into the streets.

“They had a list of people. We never knew how they got it: someone within the ranks of the Rebellion must have been a spy. As fighting erupted, we fled the city, just ahead of the guards, who burned our home behind us. We escaped with our lives, a few clothes . . . and the precious books and scrolls my father had stolen from the Library, detailing everything the ancients knew about my special Gift. We fled into the Wilderness, seeking the Rebel army we'd heard was forming.

“We found them, joined them. For months the Rebellion spat and sputtered, ambushing caravans, killing guards, assassinating loyalist officials. But the people were never really on our side. Outside of Tamita, in those days before the Masks, the heavy hand of the Autarch's father had rarely been felt and they knew little of the new Autarch. They wanted only to be left alone. We could never rest in a village: someone was sure to inform on us. The Autarch offered hefty rewards to anyone who could report on our whereabouts, and there were many willing to take his gold. Eventually the Autarch assembled an army and sent it into the field, and it hounded us, driving us north, until we were trapped between the mountains and the sea. And there, in a series of bloody battles, the Rebellion, and most of its adherents, died.” She was staring straight ahead now, as if she'd forgotten Mara even existed. “On a day like today, a day buried in a fresh white blanket of snow, my father's story came to an end. We had chanced upon a small store of magic, and my father was sent out with it to destroy a bridge the Autarch's army would have to cross to reach our last desperate redoubt. But some of the Autarch's scouts found us. They attacked from hiding. My father had magic, but the urn was on his back. He had no chance to open it, no chance to fight back. Five crossbow bolts struck him where he stood. Heart. Stomach. Leg. Left eye. Groin. Blood gushed everywhere . . . he fell, dead before he hit the ground.

“And that's when I felt it for the first time: the power of raw magic, the magic contained within a human being. It struck me with as much force as the crossbow bolts had struck my father.

“The guards, laughing, had ridden in close. They must have seen me as easy prey, thought to have sport of me before taking me back to be thrown among the camp followers. But I was full of the magic of my father, and I killed them all. Blew them apart into shards of flesh and bone. Their blood painted the trees and the ground . . . and me. And when they died, I felt
their
magic slam into me.

“I thought I would die. The pain . . . the horror . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“I know,” Mara whispered. “I know.”

The Lady turned to her then, almost fiercely. “But I did
not
die. I shaped that power with my hatred. I held it inside me like a weapon. I marched across the bridge we were to have destroyed, strode to the verge of their camp.