Unmasked (Rise of the Masks Book 1) Read online

  Mel was playing a mental game to amuse herself. The other women at the Keep worried constantly about their beauty, their mastery of courtly manners, and their individual futures—a mundane occupation bred by their present and unremitting leisure. In other words, they had nothing better to do. Set apart as she was by her training and breeding as a Mask, Mel only partly focused on the immediate activities at hand. She was, after all, required to socialize and to set aside her collecting of leaf specimens for the moment. The rest of her mind flexed in mental gymnastics: constant, invisible acrobatics, a juggling of sensations and a gathering of minutiae to be sorted and stored away for later, for whatever future Mask mediation might require it.

  Her mind exercises weren’t magic, just genetics and highly developed skill. Most Masks could make themselves marginally stronger through focused concentration. Some could help heal themselves and others, though it was mostly through a careful application of herbs and observation of the body’s symptoms. Prognostication? Foretelling the future was merely the result of carefully studying the records of the past. The most skilled “seers” among the Masks were simply experts at spotting patterns in history. Stories for children told of Masks who could change their appearances entirely, but that was ridiculous. Fantastical. And Mel didn’t believe in magic.

  The irony of her present situation, however, was not lost on her. She was more of a Mask here than she was among her own kind. At home, she was fidgety, nervous, and, as she had been told numerous times, a general nuisance to others. The fact that she had been sent away from home weighed on her heavily; she needed to do well on this remedial assignment.

  She watched her new friend—she saw the slight hesitation in Rav's swing and the flicker of her eye to the figures in the walkway above them. She noted how Rav's pulse quickened at her throat and how she took a shorter inhalation of breath than normal during her flutterby service. Mel saw increased heat come from the skin on Rav’s wrists and on the slender brown forearms emerging from her white eyelet sleeves. Rav's eyes dilated, the pupils nearly lost in the inky darkness surrounding them.

  Mel, with her eyes on the game but her focus on the periphery, searched through the shaded figures above them. The Keep ladies lingered in the walkway above. Some were instructors in etiquette and courtly behavior—the head of the Keep, Lady Skance, for instance, who was wearing her customary black plumed hair ornament. Young men were up there also, ostensibly as messengers, but actually scanning the field for potential wives. Such activity was hardly a secret, but was never overtly acknowledged.

  Mel had to force herself to distinguish among the young men, just as she had found it a challenge at first to separate the women into distinct persons on her arrival at the Keep. At the beginning of the season, she had developed memory keeps to remember their names until she'd gotten every detail of each person down. Now she was matching women to their potential mates because, despite being an outsider, she had gotten caught up in their contests. This was how she passed the time and amused herself.

  The young women here at the Keep represented thirty-two regions all across the country. Although no one had come from the frozen north—no one ever came from that sparsely-populated, harsh region. Being selected for the Keep was an honor that no one ever turned down. Rav—Ravita, actually—from the southern state, was fiercely competitive in all things, but placid on the surface. Pei, tall, sleek, and golden, from the east, had a habit of touching her thumbnail to her smallest finger of the same hand when she was uncertain. Liz, from teeming Tooran city, never thought a thing without saying it and had learned many difficult lessons this summer. Women from both near and far away assembled here at this court. They were all shuffled together and reduced to monosyllabic, nondescript nicknames. Rav. Pei. Liz. And, of course, Mel.

  The flock of thirty-two young women in their white cotton afternoon dresses decorated the rolling green lawn, lounging in chairs, reading, strolling, Mel among them. All thirty-two behaved casually on the surface, but were acutely aware of the observers above them. Mel listened to the asynchronous quickening of thirty-one heart rhythms. Snippets of conversation drifted toward her.

  "I like him, but he has a strange laugh . . . One more week . . . Mastered the steps . . . I think she’s pretty, but not very bright . . . "

  The final assembly of the session would be at the end of the week. Part promenade, part ball. Mel suppressed the urge to cringe. The Art of Movement had been one of their courses during the season, along with other household arts such as attending to accounts, and supervising the work of others—encouraging them without appearing to shame them. Useful skills for women who intended to rule great households or states. The women were talking about each other. They rarely talked about her. She strove to be average. Not unpleasant, but not memorable.

  From reading historical accounts prior to her arrival, Mel had learned that for hundreds of years, Cillary Keep had stood high on the hills in the largely uninhabited northwest state. Nestled in the rocks above the Cillary Forest, it had been a place of respite for one of the first rulers of the realm before falling into disrepair for nearly half a century. Largely forgotten while the rest of the world developed bustling cities and thriving ports and other modernizations, such as the powering of machines by steam and compressed agamite, Cillary Keep lay in ruins until a singularly-minded wealthy family depleted their entire fortune refurbishing it nearly three centuries earlier. Since that time, it had served, among other purposes, as a religious encampment, an exile for diseased patrons of brothels, and now, finally, a retreat for young, privileged women.

  Mel’s people, the Masks, had two interests in the Keep. First, she was supposed to observe first-hand some of the mannerisms and motivations of the representatives there. In no other place in the world would she have the opportunity to interact with so many cultures, and here at the Keep they were gathered together all in one place. No other person in Mel’s settlement met the age and gender requirement to attend the vernal gathering—the Mask settlement rarely produced children. And although the compulsory activities seemed frivolous to Mel, she could not deny the number of observations she had made so far.

  Foremost, however, Mel had been dispatched to the Keep because of the matter of the leaves. The normally golden-leaved forest surrounding the Keep had, over the course of the last few decades, been turning slowly blue. The earliest mention of this phenomenon that the Masks had been able to corroborate had been in a personal letter from a surprisingly poetic local shopkeeper some forty years ago to his sister in Port Navio. In the letter, he mentioned observing a “distinct indigo sheen to the woods” one evening as the sun struck the top of the forest canopy that reminded him of their coastal childhood and subsequent upbringing.

  In her trunk in the chilly dormitory of the Keep, Mel had carefully collected and pressed leaf specimens of all types. She had a notebook of fastidiously made drawings and careful observations. At summer’s end, she would distribute her findings when she returned to the settlement. Although it was not her place to draw conclusions about her observations, she felt well-equipped to present her research.

  For now, on the lawn of the Keep by the flutterby courts, Mel's mind worked at pushing back the oddity of her surroundings. Although her home was not more than an hour away by carriage, the lands surrounding the Keep felt very foreign to her. The blue-veined bark and leaves distracted her. Their strangeness was pervasive, invading her senses, and she had to exert herself to remember that they were now normal here. The leaves cast a cool light over everything, the grass, the stone walls of the keep, the fluttering white dresses of the women displayed across the yard. The other young women did not seem troubled by them. Sometimes she cursed her own sensitivity and forgot it was a privilege to be born this way. Or so she had been told on numerous occasions.

  Mel sought out the voices of her instructors above. They were too soft for even her to hear, but she felt their momentary attention on her as they, too, surveyed the women and judged their qual
ities and their potential. Instinctively, Mel dulled the shine on her hair. She turned slightly from direct sun and used the shadow to turn her hair to a grayish brown. To an observer, even Mel's white dress took a grayish cast. Eyes passed from her to others, and she relaxed her manipulation somewhat. She merely blended.

  "Cover!" shouted Mel's flutterby partner. No, it was not a shout. The voice was more melodic and much softer.

  "Return," Mel said, tapping the fly back over the net to Rav.

  Rav returned the fly skillfully, Mel's partner let it drop to the ground, and the game was quickly lost. The women returned their bats and fly to the storage casement, and Rav took Mel's arm for a walk around the garden. To Mel's eye alone, the dark woman's face was flushed with pleasure at her victory.

  "Well, Mel," she said, "The season's almost over. Just a week left." Mel nodded. Rav was not expecting an answer. She had several younger sisters at home and was not used to the luxury of soliloquizing, so she enjoyed it when she was with Mel. "I am growing tired of all these trees. And the blue. It makes me feel cold although I am not. It gets through my skin. At home, I'm used to red, orange, and brown—brilliant yellow of the hot, hot sky. No trees like this." Rav fingered a silvery blue leaf as they made their way into the walled garden where there was a tall hedge maze.

  The far south where Rav was from was mostly high plateaus made of red dirt. In a way, Rav herself smelled like heat and sand, a dusty mix of dry cleanliness that Mel could detect even after a whole season at the Keep. The people in Rav's homeland raised a highly valued breed of lean meat herd animals. They mined gemstones. They warred with each other without end. Women could be wives or warriors, or both. Their people didn't have the choice of confining their women to any one occupation, and after generations of such freedom, would not have been able to confine them. Mel had seen pictures of the southern lands in books in the massive Mask archives in her home. She'd read some of the older writings of Rav's people, the stories from their oral traditions transcribed and collected by Masks over generations.

  Mel liked Rav very much. The tall woman had a cap of tight black curls and a wide, though seldom-shown, smile. Rav spoke her mind and seemed to sense that Mel was not a threat to her. The other women were Rav's competitors.

  Very few people anywhere required women to become wives, but as the saying went, "No woman ever went to Cillary Keep who wasn't looking for a husband." Except Mel. The Cillary Keep season was famous for assembling beautiful and ambitious young women. Most of the women were in their early twenties. Mel was twenty-five, but her smooth face and other appearance-shifting abilities allowed her to pass among them. She stood five feet and eight inches tall, the average height of both men and women of her kind, which allowed them to be nearly indistinguishable from each other when cloaked. She had other interests than catching a spouse, but that hadn't prevented her from enjoying herself at the Keep.

  Mel's people, the Masks, were public servants, born and bred arbiters, and the source of simultaneous awe and fear. Masks rarely married, although some partnered to raise offspring. Children like Mel were brought up in an atmosphere of intense scholarship. They made it their mission to study the people and customs of any place known, anywhere. Masks lived in seclusion. A message arrived by roundabout means, passed from one hand to another, when a Mask was required for arbitration, or a task. A Mask could be requested to mediate a small-scale problem, such as a wealthy family's feud or divorcing nobility, or for a larger one, such as a land dispute or war. And although they lived apart in their own settlement, no one ever put much effort in trying to find them. Their hypersensitivity to others' thoughts, feelings, and motivations generally made people uncomfortable. When they traveled on tasks, their full cloaks, covered faces, and official medallions granted them safe passage in their duties.

  Mel's full name was Ley'Amelan, the prefix Ley meaning "of the mask" in the old language of her people. The second half of her name signified a type of wild forest rose that smelled like cinnamon. It embarrassed her. She called herself Mel, for short, even at home. The rose was a pink and orange color that matched its aroma and obstinately grew at the base of trees where very little sunlight reached it. Her mother insisted it suited.

  "What do you miss about your home?" Rav suddenly asked her.

  "A decent pair of shoes," said Mel, deflecting the question. Rav was her first real friend outside of the Mask community. Most people feared Masks, so Mel preferred to let Rav think she was like any other woman at the Keep. While Mel clearly didn't fit in here, she didn't exactly fit at home either, so she was enjoying this new friendship while it lasted.

  "These clothes are very confining," agreed Rav. In their first night in the dormitory, Rav's simple, flimsy undergarments and nightclothes had shocked the other women. They whispered uncharitably about the poverty of Rav's homeland, but Rav was proud and reminded them of the simple fact that it was much hotter there. Mel had stood apart, inwardly amused.

  "But always, you joke," Rav chastised.

  "Joke? It's no joke. These are ridiculous things," Mel said. She stuck out her foot for emphasis. The thin cotton slippers, meant to be worn for one day only and then disposed of, were stained with grass and nearly worn through after one afternoon of flutterby. And the formal shoes were worse, tall platforms on which they were required to balance and yet move with grace. Walking took concentration, and dancing? . . . Nearly impossible.

  "Me, I miss the sky," Rav said, gesturing upward dismissively at the bluish leaves with her lean brown arm. "The great big, orange sky in the morning. I wake up, lift the door to my ya'tuvah, and walk right out into the open under the sun." Rav said it as if it were a simple stepping out of a tent on an overnight campout, but Mel knew the elaborate shelters could house as many as three hundred people, especially for a prominent family like Rav's. They might have begun as nomadic tribes, but as their wealth increased over time, so had their possessions and everyday conveniences.

  "Isn't this enough sky for you?" Mel said mildly.

  Rav rolled her dark eyes, the whites standing out starkly against her dark skin. "A sky isn't a thing over you like a roof." She searched for words. "A sky is like the inside of your mind. It should never be too low." Her hands gestured expansively, long brown fingers and smooth skin stretching wide.

  "Well, you'll be home soon," Mel said, trying to lighten the mood, trying to retreat ever so slightly from the ebb and flow of interaction. Of all the people at the Keep, she was most at ease with Rav. Now, Mel was thinking about her own home, a small stone cottage also in a forest like here, but green and warm, with the clearing near her house where she could run from one side to the other at a full sprint in fifteen minutes of full sunshine. Mel's kind didn't need to run, but it was one of her greater pleasures. The flex of muscles, the impact of feet on dirt, the rush of blood under her skin. She loved it. If a Mask could be said to love anything.

  The two reached an opening in the hedge maze where there were benches and a vine-covered arbor. Mel had caught and held in her hand the blue leaf that Rav picked walking into the maze. While the leaf was outwardly blue, its veins were, in fact, a dark puce color, the purplish-brown of blood, almost. Life, moisture, and air still circulated through the veins as she held it in her hand.

  "So which one is it?" Mel asked her friend. She arched an eyebrow up at the walkway behind them and the observing young men. "Rally, I'd bet. He's quite interesting, isn't he?"

  Rav's teeth flashed in a wide smile. "I can't hide anything from you, can I? He's got a lot of qualities that I . . . admire."

  "Lean. Good teeth. Fine stock," Mel goaded playfully, dropping the leaf. She watched it twirl its way to the ground. She walked a few steps to better catch the scent of a fruit blossom in the breeze. The fruit arbor was on the other side of the Keep, but the air currents swirled clockwise from the west and into the hedge maze. Outside the maze, Mel could feel the boredom settle Rally's pulse on the upper walkway. He'd been watching the entrance to the hedge long a
fter she and Rav had disappeared from sight. She was tempted to tell Rav the feeling was mutual, that Rally returned Rav's interest, but it wasn't her place to intervene regardless of their friendship, even as a gift.

  Rav smiled again. "All this waiting around. This fine-tuning of the manners. I understand its purpose, especially if I want my family to get along in the world. Things change. Herds die out." She shrugged her shoulders, dark brown against the white dress. "But it's very indirect. It makes me impatient."

  "You'd rather buy your bull at the market and go home." Rav's pulse quickened somewhat, and Mel laughed because she'd finally been able to embarrass her friend.

  "You yourself have not made a selection? No one pleases you, Mel?"

  Mel shrugged. "There are plenty of pleasing ones." And there were. She'd spent many afternoons with some of them, always arranged in strategic groups with other women. She loved observing them. Who made the other flush with pleasure or trip over her words? She was entirely entertained by it, but felt very little compulsion to participate other than to appear to participate, to hide her true disinterest, to blend in.

  "But not one for you?" Rav looked puzzled. The slight narrowing in the corner of Rav's eye told Mel she was treading on fragile ground with her friend. With some regret, Mel retreated from the truth and smiled.

  "I do like the tall one." She randomly settled on a young man who matched her height and coloring, dark brown hair and fair skin. She'd already marked several times how tall, golden Pei looked at this man.

  And instantly, Rav relaxed and nodded. "Then I will see you dance with him on the final night."

  Mel arranged her face to show complicit pleasure, thereby closing the matter. Though, in the end, it was uncomfortable to be duplicitous with a friend.

  "Meanwhile," Rav continued, "we'll keep ourselves very busy until we are released into the world again. We'll take a carriage to town. I need to buy gifts for my little sisters or they will be very angry with me. I've been away from them for months. For the first time in their lives, they haven't had me there."