Mistress of Masks

by C. Greenwood

  Eydis blushed, realizing he had caught her searching for signs of his illness.

  After brief introductions, Fenric’s sister made herself scarce, dragging her reluctant son out of the room with her. Eydis got the impression whatever Fenric’s business was with Silverwood Grove, Alda didn’t wish to know anything about it. Then again, considering her brother’s somewhat grisly profession, hers was probably a natural reaction.

  Fenric offered Eydis a drink and waved her to a seat as he pulled up a stool next to the empty fireplace. Accepting the letter she proffered, he split the wax seal with his thumbnail and perused the missive. Even as he read, he paused to cough into a folded handkerchief. Eydis couldn’t help noticing the kerchief was spotted with old bloodstains.

  “Do you know what this message is about?” he asked at length, folding the letter and tucking it away.

  “A little,” Eydis admitted. “If it alludes to someone with the lifetouch and a gift for magical masking, that is me.”

  “It is a great deal more than an introduction to you,” he replied. “It’s the answer to a dying man’s wish. A wish to bring a little light into the world to atone for all the lives he’s taken. A wish not to burden his family with a lengthy departure from this existence. And this,” he touched the coin pouch on his knee, “is an opportunity to leave my sister and her boy provided for, in the same bargain.”

  “The oracle has given you all that?” she asked.

  “I cannot speak to the oracle,” he shrugged. “It is Server Parthenia’s signature I see. She knows of my struggles, and her offer is a timely one. The task for which she hires me resolves many of my problems in a single stroke.”

  Confused, Eydis asked, “So what happens now?”

  “Now,” he said, “you and I have someplace to be and should hurry to get there.”

  Evidently he meant it, because he wasted little time in gathering a small bundle of belongings, grabbing his travel-stained cloak from a peg on the wall, and finding his family to bid them farewell. As casually as if he was going for a simple walk about town, he kissed his sister’s cheek and ruffled his nephew’s hair on his way out the door. But Eydis noticed how carefully he concealed his bundle of belongings beneath his cloak, and she saw him furtively drop his coin pouch on the shop counter. Clearly he didn’t wish the money to be discovered until after he had gone. She noticed too how soberly he fingered the chain and pendant at his throat as she walked alongside him down the muddy alley toward the wharf.

  “The emblem of the First Couple?” she asked, recognizing the symbol on the pendant from her days growing up in the seclusionary.

  “A gift from my late wife,” he said with a sad smile. “She was more devout than I.”

  It was a short distance to the quay. The docks were in disrepair and slick with saltwater and fish guts, so Eydis followed Fenric’s admonishment to watch her step. There were dozens of boats bobbing on the tide and as many fishermen wrestling with ropes and toiling to haul in the evening’s catch. But Fenric seemed to be looking for someone or something specific, and directly approached an old man with a cap pulled low over his forehead and a pipe jutting out the corner of his mouth.

  “By my eyes, it’s the executioner!” exclaimed the old man when they stood before him. “If you’re hunting for heads to cut off, Fen, all we’ve got ’round here be of the fishy variety.”

  “That’s all right, Kerr, I’m here on personal business,” Fenric told him. “My friend is looking to buy a boat.”

  “I am?” asked Eydis, startled.

  Neither man paid her any mind. “What’ll you take for that old fish pail you call a dory?” Fenric asked, gesturing toward a small battered rowboat tied up at the dock.

  The old man squinted up at the two of them, a mercenary gleam in his eyes. “What do you have to give for it?”

  Fenric looked to Eydis who offered hesitantly, “I could trade my horse?” In truth, she didn’t know if she could. No one back at the Grove had exactly said whether the animal was a gift or a loan. Either way, it was too late to take back the offer now.

  Fenric and the old fisherman launched into a haggling match that eventually saw Eydis short one horse but richer by a dory and a pocketful of change.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked Fenric as he helped her into the bobbing craft. “The oracle didn’t say anything to me about sailing off across the ocean.” She had the niggling feeling she ought to have cracked the seal on Fenric’s letter and read it while she’d had the chance. But it was too late now, and he wasn’t offering to share the details with her.

  “Relax,” he said, tossing her an oar. “You haven’t far to go. See that little dot on the horizon?”

  Against the setting sun, Eydis vaguely made out the shape of the distant isle.

  “Row out to that island and wait there,” he told her. “Someone will join you shortly.”

  “Someone. You mean not you?”

  He hesitated. “I have a task to fulfill, and it’s one I must carry out alone.” He plunked down a bundle in the flat bottom of the boat—the same bunch of belongings he had collected back at the cobbler’s shop. “You’ll have need of these provisions later,” he said. “There’s food and dry clothes inside. Oh, and one last thing I need you to do.”

  “What’s that?” At this point Eydis felt nothing could surprise her.

  He reached into his cloak and pulled out a wrinkled poster, of the kind sometimes seen nailed to signposts and hung in shop windows. It was a notice offering a hefty reward for the capture of some criminal. Eydis gaped at the rough sketch. “Who is this man?” she asked. “You’ll think me mad, but I’ve seen him before, in a vision I had while in the sacred pool at Silverwood Grove.”

  Fenric seemed unsurprised. “Can you make me look like him?”

  “What? Why would you want that?”

  “It’s your gift, isn’t it?” he asked. “Server Parthenia wrote that you have the power to change faces.”

  “It isn’t exact,” she protested, still unable to tear her eyes from the familiar features of the man in the sketch. “I can give one person a passing resemblance to another but it wouldn’t fool anyone who knew them both.”

  “It will have to do,” Fenric said. “It’s our best chance.”

  “A chance at what? What have you to gain by impersonating a criminal?”

  His expression became impatient. “Never mind. Will you do it or not?”

  Eydis cast a glance around. She had a feeling practicing her unique talent in public would draw the kind of attention neither of them wanted to deal with right now. Luckily everyone on the quay seemed occupied with their own business. “Very well, come closer.”

  He knelt on the pier, and she braced herself on the gently rocking seat of the boat to reach out to him and lay her fingertips on his face. Something odd happened the moment she touched him. Colors faded to gray, and a disturbing image flashed before her eyes. She saw him collapsed on the floor of a dark room, blood running across the floor stones from a wound in his belly. His hands clutched the hilt of a dagger embedded in his flesh.

  She blinked hard and the vision disappeared. Color and sound returned to her. What had that been about? She’d never experienced anything like it before.

  “Young woman, are you all right?” Fenric asked.

  Swallowing, she drew a breath and nodded. “Yes, I don’t know what came over me. I just had the strangest feeling…”

  His gaze was questioning, and she realized he was still waiting for his transformation. She shoved the incident from her mind to puzzle over later. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the masking trick she had practiced during her journey here. She envisioned the appearance of the man in the sketch, visualizing him clearly as she had seen him in her dream. She felt the magic rippling from her fingers and opened her eyes to see Fenric’s ordinary features distort into the rougher, wilder features of another. The transformation was complete.

  “You’d best go now,” Fenric told he
r. It was bizarre hearing his voice coming from a stranger’s face. “You’ll want to reach the isle while you’ve still got the daylight.”

  She hesitated, feeling she should say something to warn him. What if the glimpse she’d had of his suffering was a portent of the future?

  “Fenric, I’m afraid you may be in danger,” she said.

  He smiled slightly. “I’m always in danger.”

  “Maybe, but this is different.”

  Either he didn’t hear that or he chose to pretend he did not, as he loosed the little dory from its moorings and shoved it out from the pier.

  There was nothing Eydis could do but take up the oars as she drifted out to sea. She rowed until Fenric and the pier became indistinct smudges in the distance. She had a sinking feeling something bad was going to happen to the Shoretown headsman, and she had just missed her chance to stop it.

  * * *

  As the sun dipped beyond the horizon, a thick fog rolled over the water. Her backward view of the shoreline obscured by the mist, Eydis could only look ahead now, toward the looming shape of the island. It was strangely eerie being out in this little boat alone. In the gathering darkness, the slapping of the waves against the hull and the whistling of the wind seemed magnified. She had never felt such isolation. The dip and splash of the oars, the rhythmic rocking of the vessel on the waves—these were unfamiliar sounds and sensations, and she had the disconcerting sense of being at the mercy of the ocean.

  For the first time in her life, she regretted having never learned to swim very well. For that matter, she regretted having never rowed a boat before. Her palms were already blistered with the past hour’s efforts at steering the little craft over the choppy waves. It was the pull of the tide more than her clumsy endeavors that drew her closer and closer to the nameless island.

  When her hull scraped noisily against the shallows, she clambered over the side, into water up to her thighs, to tow the vessel in to shore. The beach, a slippery mixture of shale and sand, worked against her, but she eventually managed to haul the craft safely above the level of the tide.

  Only then, shivering in the chill night air, was she free to take in her surroundings. The island she stood on gave every appearance of being deserted. Where was this mysterious person Fenric had told her to meet? If he hadn’t arrived yet, just how long was she expected to wait?

  Beneath the silvery glow of the moon she made out a rocky rise at the edge of the beach, and thinking to get a better view of her surroundings, she picked her way up the slope. At its crest, she looked down on a sunken expanse of marshland, dotted with boulders and low scrub brush. Here and there rocky ridges divided the marshland, and overgrown paths snaked between the dips and mounds of the uneven terrain.

  Straining her eyes, she tried to make out more details. And that was when she saw it—a tall, dark form flittering silently across the landscape. Its movements were stealthy as it ducked behind boulders and clung to the shadows, reminding Eydis of a wild animal stalking its prey. Only this animal walked upright like a man. Could this be him then? The one she had come to find?

  She opened her mouth to call out to him but immediately thought better of it. One didn’t survive a childhood on the city streets without learning a degree of caution. She hadn’t lived within the safety of the seclusionary walls so long she had forgotten the habits learned during a rougher time. No, she would observe from a safe distance until she could ascertain whether this person was friend or foe. Only then would she announce her presence.

  So she climbed down from the rise and trailed the dark shadow, mimicking his furtive movements, careful to keep a lengthy gap between them. Her progress was complicated by the occasional treacherousness of the marshy ground. At one point she sank into a mire, covering her boots and ankles in mud. In the process of wading free, she discovered the pale stick she grabbed for support was actually a bone. Possibly human. Dropping it with a shudder, she reassessed her surroundings. What was this place? A vast graveyard?

  The rocks seemed to support this theory, for many of the shapes she had first took for boulders turned out on closer inspection to be man-made markers. The inscriptions were so weathered they would have been unreadable even in better light. But she could make out enough to see they contained no familiar letters. Perhaps these were the runes of an ancient civilization. But there was no time to ponder that. She had to hurry on or she would lose sight of her quarry. The landscape was growing rockier and the ground firmer. Still, she knew now not to stray far from the path.

  The moon scuttled behind a cloud, plunging the world into sudden darkness. Eydis froze where she stood, feeling exposed in the open, but unwilling to stumble on blindly. Though she strained her ears, the only sounds she picked up were the wind and the roar of the ocean waves tossing against the distant beach. Then there came a new sound. A blood-chilling howl she first mistook for that of a wild dog. But this wasn’t the cry of a beast any more than it was the scream of a man. It was more like an uneasy combination of the two. And it was very near. Surely it hadn’t come from the man she was trailing?

  Afraid of being caught in the open, she dropped to her belly so when the moonlight returned, it found her hugging the ground. She saw it then, a stark silhouette only yards away. The figure she’d been following was no man after all, and despite being covered with patches of mangy hair, it was no animal either.

  “A minohide,” Eydis breathed, recognizing the half man, half beast commonly described in children’s stories. She had known the monsters were real but never expected to encounter one in person.

  This one, although standing upright, possessed a bearlike snout and jaws. Its eyes glinted in the half-light like those of a wolf. For one breathless instant, those eyes seemed fixed on Eydis. But then they passed on. The creature lifted its snout, sniffing the air. Eydis saw it stiffen, growing suddenly alert, and she feared it detected her scent. When it pounced instead on something that moved in the brush at its feet, she dared to breathe again. The creature had captured a rabbit or a large rat and was devouring it on the spot.

  Thinking fast, Eydis used this opportunity to make for cover, scrambling to her feet and running in a low crouch to duck behind the nearest screen. It was a stone structure of some sort—an oblong building about twice the height of a man. Considering her previous discoveries, she suspected its purpose could be the housing of a corpse. Whatever its intended use, it was the only place at hand for concealment. There was little hope of returning to the beach and the waiting boat without attracting the notice of the beast, and she wouldn’t have wagered much on her ability to outrun it. The best option was hiding and waiting for the beast to move on.

  Exploring the rough surface of the stone, she found fissures in the rock that would serve adequately as hand and toeholds. Cautiously she scaled the side of the tomb and dragged herself onto the roof. There she lay flat, watching from above as the minohide finished its scanty meal and resumed its prowling. How long would she have to lie up here? If she remained trapped until dawn, what would happen when first light revealed her hiding place? She tried not to think about that. Tried also not to wonder what was delaying the man she had come here to find.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Orrick

  For a long time Orrick had heard nothing but the incessant dripping of water and the scratching sounds of rats’ feet scurrying along the walls. That was why his ears perked up at the tread of two approaching pairs of feet echoing down the corridor.

  One set of steps was uneven. Irregular. The familiar tread of the big-bellied prison guard who always walked with a limp. He had no name to Orrick—none of the guards did. They were just the hands that fed him, the mouths that spit on him, and the fists that beat him when he retaliated.

  But the other footsteps, those were new. Those were feet he’d never heard within these walls. The tread was heavy, like that of a large man, but it came without the accompanying ring of boots. Not another guard then.

  Curiosity stirred despite him
self. Orrick sniffed the air. His nostrils were met by the scent of decay. Stale air, moldy straw, the feces of humans and rats, and rotting fish guts. All the smells you’d expect in a water-bound prison like the Morta den 'Cairn. Orrick had had plenty of time to get to know these smells.

  But now there was something new added to the stench. Fear sweat. Of all the kinds of sweat Orrick was acquainted with, fear was the most common in here. The fear of the prisoners who were dumped into cells to rot. The fear of their keepers when the occasional prisoner attempted escape.

  Fear was not new. Thus it wasn’t worth his interest.

  He settled against the damp wall again and returned to picking his teeth with a rat bone, the last remnant of his most recent meal. Capturing the bold rodent was the closest thing he’d had to a good fight in months. If only he could get this bone shank into the neck of a prison guard, now that would be a satisfying victory. Far more fulfilling than the brief pleasure of a full belly…

  Outside, the footsteps stopped before the thick door of his cell. Muffled voices followed, their conversation too low to make out.

  Once Orrick might have gone and poked his face between the sturdy bars of the small window at the top to see what was happening. But not anymore. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of watching him peer like an animal out the bars of his cage or of hearing him call out questions that usually went unanswered. No, if this business had anything to do with him, he’d know soon enough.

  There was a light grating sound as a key turned in the lock, and then the door swung open.

  So they were coming for him. Orrick smiled and fingered the shank.

  “Watch this one. He’s mean as a fire asp and would as soon crush your windpipe as look at you.” The words penetrated the cell, but the guard who spoke them remained outside. Smart fellow. The last time he’d stuck his hand into the cell to deliver the swill that passed for food in this place, Orrick had bit off one of his fingers. And had been whipped for it. But it was worth the punishment to have his first taste in weeks of any flesh besides fish.