Chapter 82: Masks

I told Carol at noon, when she woke.

She came down to the little kitchen in Ignatius's old green coat with her hair still in its festival pins, and she was humming. Carol never hums. She sat down at the scrubbed table, and Helena put a cup in front of her without asking, and she wrapped both hands around it and smiled into it at nothing.

I let her drink half of it first. Then I told her.

All of it. The eleven. The white masks with no mouths. Half past two until nearly four, at the east range wall, watching the fountain. Loki shaking his head. Fenrir's hackles. The line going out through the arch like a flock of birds turning.

She listened without moving. When I'd finished, she put the cup down.

"You kept it," she said. "All night. And this morning. Until I woke."

"You asked for the night. I said yes."

Carol looked at me across the table for a long time. In the middle, I felt her open her door all the way, the way you'd open a window in spring, and the warmth that came through it was a different warmth from the night before. Not dancing-warm. Older than that. The kind we had when we were three, at the stream, holding all those stolen gods together with our hands joined.

"Thank you," she said. "I'd have spent the whole night looking at the east range wall."

"That's why."

"I know that's why." She picked the cup up again. "Now tell me why Loki said not yet."

* * *

Loki told her himself. He came into the little kitchen at half past twelve, with his pine-smoke tea, and sat backward on his chair, and Thor sneezed from the garden door, where she'd been eating a pear.

"Edric Vale," said Loki.

Everybody looked at him.

"Tamar told Garrick. Garrick told your father. Your father told me, over cold tea, at three in the morning, because he tells me everything at three in the morning. It's when I'm most bearable." He turned his cup around. "When raiders came to this coast in the war, they sat out on the line and counted. How long until the bell rang. How many boats came home. How many men ran down to the harbor wall with swords. And then they came back on the third day and hit exactly where the counting said was weakest."

"And Edric sent the boats out fishing," said Carol slowly. "And sat on the wall with a line. And let them count to nothing."

"Exactly." Loki pointed his apple at her. "Those eleven weren't there to take anybody. Not last night. They were there to count. Where's the giant girl in the cloak. Where's the dog. Where's the juggler. Where's the brother. Where's the sky." He took a bite. "If Garrick had come off the barracks wall, or Thor off the fountain, or me off the steps, they'd have counted us. Every one. How fast we moved. Which way. Who went first." He chewed. "So we didn't move. We let them count a festival. A lot of people dancing, and a dog having his ears scratched, and a juggler being paid in coppers."

"They'll come back tonight," said Ignatius quietly.

"Yes."

"On the masked night."

"Yes," said Loki. "When everybody's face is hidden. When they can stand anywhere they like, and nobody will look twice. That's why they came on the second night in masks. To see who'd notice." He looked at me. "Garrick noticed. And didn't move. That's the best thing anyone did all festival, and nobody will ever sing about it."

* * *

Iselle came through the Concordia gate at one, with Roderic. My father had sent for her. When I described the masks, she went white to the lips, and her right hand closed, and stayed closed.

"No mouths," she said.

"No mouths. Just two eyeholes."

"White. Smooth. Like an egg."

"Yes."

Iselle opened her hand. Slowly. On purpose. It took a long time.

"The Hushed," she said. "That's what they're called in the golden city. Nobody says it loudly." She sat down at the end of the bench. "They're Kessavel's. His own. Not branded, like the doorkeepers. Sworn." She looked at the table. "Everyone in Kethra takes the Little Oath at seven. I am held. I hold. But the Hushed take the Great one. When they're grown. In the Temple of Oaths, in front of the first link on its cushion." Her voice had gone very flat and careful, the way it goes in lectures. "They swear him their faces. And their voices. They never speak again. Not one word. Not to anyone. Not for the rest of their lives. Except his name."

Nobody said anything.

"They don't feel anything," said Iselle. "That's what people say. They gave it all to him with their voices. They don't feel cold, or tired, or afraid. They don't feel anything except what the oath tells them to." She looked up. "When I was little, I used to see them in the corridors of the palace at night. Standing very still, outside doors. Nobody ever told me what they were waiting for."

"Kip," said Caitlin suddenly.

Everybody turned. She was standing in the doorway to the back stair with her blue book under her arm. I don't know how long she'd been there.

"Kip saw them," said Caitlin. "Last night. I didn't know what they were, so I didn't write it down. But he went very quiet around half past two, and he held his wrist. The one with the line on it." She looked at Iselle. "He said it had gone cold. He said he'd tell me why tonight."

* * *

I went down to the parade ground at three in the afternoon, when the students were all asleep and the lanterns hung dark on their lines, and the old ground was empty except for a groundskeeper raking the paths.

I wanted to stand where they'd stood.

It's a thing I can do now, since the Orselle fold. Read a place, the way Elenos reads people and Damar reads stone. Not much. Not deeply. But enough to feel the creases left behind when somebody's stood somewhere a long time, the way you can see the shape of a sleeper in a bed after they've got up.

I went to the east range wall, where the light hadn't reached. And I stood there, and listened. And then, because I always do now, before I do anything, I asked the place: May I?

The ground said yes. Old ground usually does. It's been asked so rarely.

And under the grass, all along the foot of the east range wall, in a long curve, I felt something cold.

Not in the air. In the earth. Small. Hard. Pressed down deep into the turf, where nobody raking the paths would ever find it. And then another, ten paces along. And another. And another.

I knelt down and put my hand flat on the grass, and reached for Damar's stone-hearing, which he lent me in the autumn and which I've kept, the way Carol and I keep everything we're lent. And I listened down into the ground.

Iron.

Eleven small pieces of black iron, pushed down into the earth. Each one exactly where one of the masks had stood. And they weren't in a line along the wall, the way the masks had looked from the barracks. They were in a ring.

A great ring. All the way around the middle of the parade ground.

And at the very center of it, where all eleven of them pointed, like the spokes of a wheel, was the fountain.

* * *

I tried to fold.

I don't know why. Instinct. I wanted to see the ring from above, from the roof of the east range, all at once. So I reached for a fold, the easiest thing in the world for me, easier than breathing, and opened it.

It didn't open.

Not wouldn't. Couldn't. It was like putting your shoulder to a door you've walked through ten thousand times and finding it bricked up on the other side. The fold started, and stopped, and folded back on itself with a feeling like biting on tinfoil, and I was still kneeling on the grass with my hand flat on the ground.

I stood up and walked thirty paces away from the iron, back toward the barracks wall, and tried again.

That one opened. Easily. The way they always do.

I walked back into the ring and tried again.

Bricked up.

I stood in the middle of the old parade ground at three in the afternoon, with the groundskeeper raking the paths and the dark lanterns swaying overhead, and understood what they'd been doing the night before. Not just counting.

Measuring. Laying down a floor.

Something that would stop a fold. Something that would stop me.

* * *

I folded home from the barracks wall, from outside the ring, and drew it on the little kitchen table with a piece of chalk.

A circle. Eleven marks around it. The fountain in the middle.

Then I drew what I'd felt on the iron, as well as I could. Each piece had something cut into it. Tiny. Deep. Letters, I thought, though I couldn't read them; I'd only felt their shape through the earth, the way you feel the shape of a coin in a pocket. Closed letters. Heavy at the bottom. Like little fists.

Iselle looked at them for a long time with her lips moving. She didn't need her black book.

"Here held," she said at last. "That's the first. And the others are the same, all eleven, only one word changes on each. Here held. Here held. Here held." She traced the circle with her finger, not quite touching the chalk. "Together they'd make one sentence. All the way around." She stopped. "What stands within is held. What is held does not pass."

"Does not pass," I said slowly. "That's why I couldn't fold."

"A fold is a door," said Iselle. "Eleanor says so. And it's a ring of locked doors." She looked up. "Nothing in that ring can go anywhere it doesn't walk on its own two feet. Not by fold. Not by lightning." She looked at my father. "Not by the fast way, either. I don't think. If you went in as lightning, I think you'd come out as a man."

My father looked at the chalk ring for a long time.

"And they'll close it," he said. "On whoever stands in the middle."

"On whoever stands at the fountain when it wakes," said Iselle. "Yes."

* * *

The letter had come that morning, while Carol was still asleep. Mary brought it down. It was on the college's good cream paper, with the college seal, and it was very polite.

The Masters of the College of Concordia request the honor of the Lady Carol Grey's presence at the fountain at midnight on the third night of the Festival of Lanterns, to cut the first line, as is the custom for the college's most honored guest. The Masters were moved by her dancing on the first night and would consider it a great kindness.

It was signed by the Senior Master. It was also signed, underneath, in a cramped, careful hand, by Master Ashby.

"Ashby," said Roderic. "The one who asked Iselle if she'd always read oath-script."

"The one who marked me again," said Iselle.

"The one," said Io, who had come up from Concordia at noon with her shoes in her hand, "who sat on the college board for eleven years voting against every girl I put forward. And then last autumn, very suddenly, stopped." She looked at the letter. "I thought he'd mellowed. I was rather pleased."

Nobody said anything.

"It doesn't mean he's bought," said Carol quietly. "It might just mean somebody suggested it to him. At dinner. Very kindly. He's vain enough."

"It might," said my father.

"Or he might have had a sack of flour on his doorstep," said Loki. "It's been that kind of winter."

* * *

Carol said yes.

I want to be careful about how I tell this, because everybody argued, and everybody was right, and in the end it was still hers to say.

My father said no first. Thor said no loudly. Ignatius didn't say anything at all, which was worse. Seraphina said she'd stand at the fountain herself, and Carol said no, you won't, and Seraphina said watch me, and Carol said Sera, he has a son, and that ended that.

And then Carol stood up in the middle of the little kitchen in Ignatius's old green coat and said what she'd said the night of the page.

"He's set a table," she said. "If I don't sit at it tonight, he'll set another one. Somewhere else. Somewhere we haven't found the iron under the grass. Somewhere you're not all standing around it, ready." She looked at my father. "Tonight we know where it is. We know what it does. We know when. We know how many links. We know he can't fold me out and you can't fold in." She took a breath. "We'll never know that much again. Not before. Not like this."

"Carol," said my father.

"I'm asking you," said Carol. "I'm not telling you. I'm asking. You can say no. And if you say no, I won't go. I'll go back up the stairs and sit in my tower." She held out her hand to him. Palm up. "But I'd like to go. With all of you. And see what he's built. And break it."

My father looked at her hand for a very long time.

He counted. I watched his lips.

Then he put his hand in hers.

"Yes," he said. "With all of us."

* * *

The third night of the Festival of Lanterns is the masked night.

Everybody wears one. That's the custom. Plain or painted, paper or wood, feathers or none, it doesn't matter, as long as your face is covered. Because the third night is the night the lines are cut, and the lanterns go up, and nobody is supposed to know whose want is whose. You dance with strangers. You don't say your name. And at midnight, the most honored guest cuts the first line at the fountain, and then everybody cuts the rest, and four hundred wants go up into the dark together.

We wore masks too. Mirelle made them, all afternoon, out of stiff blue paper, with eyeholes cut with her lamp-scissors. They were very bad masks. Everyone wore them anyway.

Carol's was white.

That was her idea. Plain, smooth, oval. Two eyeholes. No mouth.

"If they want to look at a white face all night," she said, tying it on, "they can look at mine."

* * *

The masks came at ten.

I didn't see them arrive this time either. Nobody did. But Caitlin counted them.

She'd asked my father for a job, and he'd given her the one she was best at. She stood on the east range steps beside Loki with her blue book open and a pencil, and while four hundred masked people danced under four hundred blue lamps, she counted the ones who didn't.

Ten o'clock. Eleven. East range wall. Where they stood before.

Half past ten. Fourteen. Three new ones by the fountain.

Eleven o'clock. Twenty-two.

"They're more than the iron," she said to Loki, very quietly, without taking her eyes off the grass. "There are only eleven links. Why are there twenty-two?"

Loki looked at the white masks, standing very still among the dancers, scattered all over the parade ground now, not in a ring.

"Eleven to hold the chain," he said. "And eleven to hold the people who come to help her."

* * *

Kip came and stood beside her on the steps at a quarter past eleven, in a brown paper mask that Mirelle had made too small. He was holding his left wrist with his right hand.

"It's cold," he said. "It went cold at ten. Like last night."

"Tell me," said Caitlin. She didn't stop counting. "You said you'd tell me."

Kip looked out at the white faces among the dancers.

"The man who gave me the bottle," he said. "In Orselle. Three years ago. In the square, at dawn, when I was sweeping." His voice was very quiet. "The first time, he was wearing one of those. White. No mouth. He didn't say anything. He just held out the bottle and a coin, and put the cloth in my hand, and pointed at the plate. And I was frightened, so I did it." Kip swallowed. "The next week, he didn't wear the mask. He just looked like a man off a ship. But I always knew it was him. My wrist used to go cold when he came across the square."

Caitlin stopped writing.

"Is he here?" she said.

Kip looked at the white masks for a long time. At all twenty-two of them. Then he lifted his hand, very slowly, and pointed. At one standing by the fountain. Shorter than the others. A little stooped.

"That one," he said. "I think. His left shoulder's lower than his right. It always was."

Caitlin wrote it down. Then she reached over, without looking at him, and took his cold wrist in her free hand and held it, and went on counting with the other.

* * *

At half past eleven, there were thirty-three.

Iselle saw it first. She was standing with Roderic under her own lantern, by the bench, both of them in Mirelle's bad blue masks. She'd been watching the white faces all night with her right hand open at her side, so that she could feel it if it started to close.

At half past eleven, it closed.

"Rod," she said. "Look at their hands."

He looked. Every one of the thirty-three white masks had something wound around their right hand. Something dark that caught the blue lamplight. Something that hung down between their fingers and swung, very slightly, when they turned their heads.

A short length of chain.

"They're not here to watch anymore," said Iselle.

* * *

At ten minutes to midnight, the Senior Master rang the bell.

The music stopped. The dancing stopped. Four hundred masked faces turned toward the fountain.

And Master Ashby, in a mask of gold paper, came down the east range steps with a silver knife on a cushion, and walked through the crowd to the fountain, and turned, and held it out toward the edge of the parade ground. Toward a girl in a plain white mask, with Ignatius's old green coat on, standing with her family.

"The Lady Carol Grey," he said. His voice shook only very slightly. "If she would do us the honor."

Carol looked at the knife.

Then she looked at all of us. At my father, with his hand already open at his side and the sky gone very, very still above us. At Thor, with her cloak thrown back and her hammer in her fist. At Seraphina, whose tea had started steaming in its cup at nine o'clock and never stopped. At Ignatius. At me.

Through the middle, she said I'm going to sit at his table now.

I know, I said.

Keep your door open.

Always.

And Carol Grey walked out alone across the blue grass of the old parade ground, through four hundred silent masked faces, toward the fountain, and the ring, and the thirty-three white masks with chains in their hands, and took the silver knife from Master Ashby's cushion, and stepped up onto the rim of the fountain, and reached for the first line.

And under the grass, all around her, in a great ring, eleven small pieces of black iron woke up.