Patricia Briggs: Masques

Instead of the tall, white-blond woman that the ae’Magi had purchased to decorate his great hall with her extraordinary beauty, observers would see a snowfalcon as rare and beautiful, the ae’Magi had told her, as his slave, but not so controversial. Some people, he’d told her, licking blood off his hands, disliked slavery, and he disliked controversy.

He’d decorated the room around his slave for his own amusement. Disguising her as a rare predator was simply a joke played upon the people who’d come here for entertainment.

A chime sounded, announcing new visitors. Aralorn hugged herself as the ae’Magi greeted his guests with a warm smile. He’d smiled that same smile last night while he’d killed a young boy and stolen his magic.

The stone floor had been red with blood, but it wiped up cleanly, and only someone able to sense magic might notice the pall that unclean death had left. Or not. The ae’Magi was the lord of mages, after all, and they could only use their powers to the extent he allowed.

She was scaring herself again—that was really not useful at all. Biting her lip, Aralorn gazed at the dancing nobles in an effort to distract herself. She matched names and countries to the dancers’ faces with the ease that made her the valuable spy she was.

The ae’Magi had killed an old man, an old man without a spark of magic—human or green—about him and used the power of the death to turn the walls of the great hall a sparkling white. “An illusion,” he’d told her. “It takes some power, and I don’t like to use my own when I might need it at any time.”

That had been the first night. On the second, he’d brought a man—one of his own guardsmen. With that blood, the ae’Magi had worked some magic so foul that the taste of it lingered on Aralorn’s skin still.

The boy had been the worst. Only a child, and . . .

Dozens of the rulers of the kingdoms of the Anthran Alliance were present. Some of them had been members of the Alliance for centuries, others were newer than that. The Empress of the Alliance wasn’t here, but she was six, and her guardians kept a sharp eye on her lest any of her subjects decided to make her cousin the new empress instead. Just because they were allied didn’t mean they were loyal subjects. The squabbles among the Alliance helped keep the coffers of Sianim full.

Gradually, she managed to replace the boy’s dead eyes with dates and politics, but she still paced her cage restlessly. It wasn’t just the horror of her discovery of exactly what kind of man held the power of the ae’Magi that kept her from sitting down—it was fear. The ae’Magi scared her to death.

There was a kaleidoscopic quality to the dance: the brilliant colors of the rich fabrics twisting around and around only to stop, rearrange themselves, and swirl into motion once again. More like a clockwork than a dance populated by real people. Perhaps it was a side effect of all the magic. Or maybe it was deliberate, the ae’Magi amusing himself. He liked to make people unwittingly do his bidding.

She saw the Duchess of Ti and the Envoy of the Anthran Alliance dancing cordially with each other. Ten years ago, the Envoy had had the Duchess’s youngest son assassinated, sparking a bloody feud that left bodies littering the Alliance like a plague.

The Envoy said something and patted the Duchess’s shoulder. She laughed gaily in return as if she hadn’t had the Envoy’s third wife killed in a particularly nasty manner only a month ago. She might have thought it a clever ruse designed to put the other off guard, but the Envoy was not particularly politic or clever. Aralorn wondered if the effect of whatever spell the ae’Magi had apparently cast upon his guests was specific to them and whether it would last beyond this evening. Just how powerful was he?

When the musicians paused for a break, people crowded around the Archmage, Geoffrey ae’Magi, drawn to his twinkling eyes and mischievous grin the way butterflies surround the flowering coralis tree. When a butterfly landed on the sweet-smelling scarlet flower of the coralis, the petals closed, and the flower digested its hapless prey over a period of weeks.

There were some times when her penchant for collecting trivia wasn’t an asset.

Like the coralis, Geoffrey ae’Magi was extraordinarily beautiful, with blue-black hair, high cheekbones, and the smile of a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

Aralorn had been in his presence before. The Spymaster liked to use her in the rarefied society of which the ae’Magi was a part because she knew how to negotiate it without betraying herself. She’d attributed the wave of magic that surrounded him to his being the most powerful mage in the world. His beauty had stunned her at first, but it hadn’t taken her long to decide that the attraction lay in his gentle warmth and his self-deprecating humor. Four days ago, Aralorn, like every other woman who’d ever laid eyes upon him, had been more than half-enamored of him.

Aralorn turned her gaze away from the ae’Magi and back to the room. While she’d been watching the Archmage, someone had stopped next to the pillar nearest her cage.

Leaning lazily against the polished pillar, a short, square-built young man wearing the colors of the royal house of Reth also observed the throng: Myr, Prince—no—King now, of Reth. His face was strong-featured, even handsome in other company. There was a stubborn tilt to his chin that he’d inherited from his paternal grandfather, a formidable warrior and king.

It wasn’t his appearance that caught her attention; she’d expected that he was the person from whom the ae’Magi had been hiding his slave. It was the expression of distaste that briefly crossed his face as he looked at the crowd, remarkably different from the vacuous smiles that everyone else wore.

He shifted unexpectedly and met her gaze. He looked quickly down, but then began to make his way through the edges of the crowd toward her cage. When he reached the platform, he tilted his head down so that no one could read his lips, and asked in a low tone, “Do you need help, Lady?”

Shocked, she glanced quickly at the mirror that covered the back of the cage. The ae’Magi’s illusion of a snowfalcon stared back at her indifferently.

She knew that Myr was no mage—he wouldn’t have been able to conceal that from her, not with her mother’s blood in her veins. Green magic could usually hide from the tamed stuff that the more human mages used, but the reverse was not true. Still, there was no doubt that he saw a woman and not the rare bird the ae’Magi showed his guests.

Rethians believed they were the descendants of an enslaved people who had risen up to kill their masters. They were taught at their mother’s knee that to take another human and own him was evil beyond comprehension.

Even so, even for the King of Reth, it was a bold move to offer to help one of the ae’Magi’s slaves to escape. There were a lot of mages in Reth who owed obedience first to the ae’Magi and second to the king—obedience enforced by their own magic. To move against the ae’Magi could spark a civil war in Myr’s kingdom. His offer was heartfelt and showed just how young this new king was.

Perhaps it was his rash offer that appealed to her or that she had been born Rethian and part of her still thought of Myr as her king. In any case, she answered him as herself, and not the slave that she played for the ae’Magi.

“No,” she answered. “I’m here as an observer.”

There were rumors that the ruling family of Reth had occasionally produced offspring who were immune to magic. There were stories, and Aralorn was a collector of stories.

“A spy.” It wasn’t a question. “You must be from either Sianim or Jetaine. They are the only ones who would employ women to spy in as delicate a position as this.” Women were important in Reth, and they were far from powerless politically. But they didn’t go to battle, didn’t put themselves in danger.