Christine Rimmer - The Man Behind the Mask

“Got it.” I was yawning, too. “We should get some sleep.”

She yawned again, this time full out. “You know, you’re right.” She closed her eyes.

I swear she was deep in dreamland instantly. I could have been, too. But you ought to try sleeping with Brit. Restless is too mild a word. She tossed and turned and groaned and kicked me repeatedly—all while utterly dead to the world.

Eventually, clinging to my pillow at the far edge of the bed, I drifted off, too.

Someone was shaking me. “Go ’way…” I grumbled, batting at the hand that clutched my shoulder.

“Dulce…” Brit’s voice.

I opened one eye. “Huh?”

“Gotta go. Back soon.” She was already halfway out of the bed.

I sat up, swiping a swatch of tangled curls back from my face, blinking against the bedside light that we’d never bothered to turn off. “What time is it?” The clock beneath the lamp said 3:10. “Ugh.” I fell back to the pillows. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

“I just… I have to see Eric.” Her face was positively glowing. “What can I say? It’s love, you know? I didn’t want you to wake up and worry when you saw I was gone.…”

I grumbled something unintelligible, turned on my side and shut my eyes again. I was asleep so fast, I didn’t even hear her leave.

The hidden door through the mirror in my sister’s room began to move. I doused my palm-size flashlight and stepped back into the shadows.

Brit came through, wearing a pink robe and absurd fat pink bedroom slippers. She shut the secret door, turned and saw me there. I was all in black, including the smooth mask of perfectly tanned karavik skin that covered my face.

She gasped, then shone her light hard in my eyes. “Valbrand. What are you doing here?”

“Keeping watch.” I had my arm across my eyes, guarding my night vision. “Shine the light away.”

She did as I asked, then reached out a tentative hand to me. Trusting her as I did few others, I allowed her to brush the side of the mask, which fit my face like another skin—one both flawless and without expression.

“Is this really necessary?” She meant the mask. In her eyes there was great sadness.

I saw no reason to answer her. “What brings you into the passageway at this early hour?” I knew what, of course. “Eric?”

“I miss him. Love’s like that.”

“Ah.” They were happy, my youngest sister and my bloodbound lifelong friend. This pleased me. Behind the mask, I smiled.

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a little at the chill in the passageway, and sent me a look of dawning suspicion. “It’s Dulcie, right?”

I did not so much as blink. “I fail to grasp your meaning.”

“You’re here in the passageway, by the secret entrance to my room, because Dulcie’s in there.”

I hadn’t known. But my foolish heart beat faster to hear it. “Dulcie. Your friend…”

“Yeah, duh. Like you have trouble remembering who she is.”

“You are angry with me.”

Her eyes grew tender again. “No. Never. I just… I saw the way you looked at her the other night. And the way she looked at you. Valbrand, you do have to ask yourself, where can it go?”

Nowhere, I silently replied. It was a truth I fully accepted. “We shared a dance.” I sketched the most casual of shrugs. “It means nothing.” And it didn’t, not in the greater scheme of things. I had felt something powerful when I looked in Dulcie’s eyes, and experienced a thoroughly shaming physical response to her. But it was of no consequence, I kept telling myself. And I would hardly have occasion to see her again. I asked my sister gently, “You object to my dancing with your friend?”

“No. No, of course not. It’s only…she doesn’t have an inkling of what we’re up against here. I don’t want her involved. I want her to enjoy her visit to Gullandria and I want her to fly home safe and sound the day after the wedding.”

“And so she shall. As for tonight… I knew a strange foreboding. It caused a restlessness within me. I looked in on Eric. And then, unbeknownst to him, on our father. I checked on Elli and Hauk.” Elli was our sister and Hauk was Elli’s husband. “Hauk woke, of course. He saw it was I and rose to speak with me briefly, vowing that all was well with them and their unborn babe. After that, I came here to assure myself that you, like the others, were undisturbed.”

“I’m fine. Honestly.”

“Good, then.”

“Eric’s awake?”

I chuckled. “Go to him. Find out for yourself.”

She came closer, laid her hand on my arm and brushed a quick kiss against the mask. “Don’t hang around in the passageways all night. Please?”

“You mustn’t concern yourself with me.” I touched the device on my belt. “I’ll signal if I require your aide in repulsing intruders.”

She made a scoffing sound. “Valbrand, you’re a little overboard on this, don’t you think? Nothing suspicious has happened in months.” Her pretty lips curved down in a scowl. “Not since that SOB Sorenson escaped us.” My sister had a special enmity toward the traitor, Jorund Sorenson. Before we found him out, Sorenson had pretended to be her friend in order to get close enough to try to kill her. “There’s no reason for you to—”

I put a gloved finger to her chattering mouth. “Go. Remind my friend what a fortunate man he is.”

“Will you go back to your rooms? Get some sleep? Nothing’s going to happen here, in the palace, in the middle of the night.”

I took her by the shoulders and turned her gently toward the waiting corridor. “Go.”

She sent me one last fond, exasperated glance over her shoulder before she hurried off down the gleaming stone hallway.

I watched until she’d turned the corner, and then continued watching, until the light from her lantern faded to nothing.

Utter blackness. It was good. Soothing to the formless anxieties I’d been experiencing that night.

I ducked back into the alcove a few feet from the now-invisible entrance to my sister’s rooms and, for a while, I simply stood there, arms crossed over my chest, surrounded by darkness, lulled by the gift of blindness, velvet black all around me…

Yes. I confess. I was thinking of the redhead on the other side of the looking glass. Thinking how simple it would be: to press the spot that would open the wall, to step through the glass.

I pictured her sleeping, wild coils of red hair poured over white pillows. Myself, the handsome prince I once was, bending close for the kiss that would wake her from her dreams…

It was but a fantasy.

In the world of reality, it never could have been—and it would never be.

Once, as a man who dedicated his life to his country and to the sacred duty to someday earn the throne, I could not have allowed myself a dalliance with a commoner from California. Not such a commoner as she, in any case—one with stars in her eyes and true love on her mind.

That would have been wrong. Cruel.

In the months since my return home, I had come to realize that the man I was on leaving had been vain, one who preened in pleasure at his handsome face and lean form, at his very goodness. And yet, all vanity aside, I did strive, in those earlier days, to be a better man. If I gave love casually, it was only to women who gave it back in kind.

Now, since the horror, I gave no love of any kind.

Everything was changed. Without and within.

My father insisted we could simply continue at the point where we had left off, that I should resume pursuing my former goal. That I would still one day be king.

I knew differently. I would never be king. I lived on for one purpose only. To root out and destroy the threat to my family.