Masks Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the Testing chamber swung open, and Tester Tibor stepped out, lips curled in a smile behind the mouth opening of his yellow Mask. “Come in, Mara, come in.”
    Mara let go of her father’s hand and stepped into the darkened room. Everything was just as she remembered, except the pedestal on which the bowl of magic rested seemed much shorter.
    “Now,” said Tester Tibor. “Ready?”
    Mara nodded.
    The Tester lifted the lid of the basin.
    Mara stared into it, heart beating fast, and her breath caught in her throat.
    “Which color is strongest?” Tester Tibor said.
    Mara didn’t know how to answer. She’d been frightened she wouldn’t see the red-gold of Enchantment, the color that would mean she could be a Maskmaker. She’d worried that her Gift would have faded, as they sometimes did, so that although she might be able to see magic, she wouldn’t be able to make much use of it: that was, after all, what had happened to her mother, whose Mask of pale blue proclaimed her to be Gifted with Healing, but whose Gift was so weak she could do nothing with it and thus had not been called upon to use it in the service of the Autarch.
    What had never occurred to her, because she had never heard of such a thing, was that she would see
exactly what she had seen as a six-year-old
: the basin filled with seething, swirling colors, every color of the rainbow and every combination between, breathtakingly beautiful . . . but
wrong
. At thirteen, she was only supposed to be able to see one color, maybe two.
Is something wrong with me?
    “Go on,” the Tester said. “You can tell me.”
    Mara swallowed. She thought her heart might burst right out of her chest, it was pounding so hard. She knew she should tell Tester Tibor the truth, but what would that mean to her dream of being her father’s apprentice?
    Faced with the rainbow maelstrom of colors, she thought back to what her father had said . . . and lied. “Red,” she said. “Well, more like an orangey red. Red-gold, I guess you’d call it?”
It’s not a
total
lie
, she thought.
I
can
see those colors.
    Just a lot of others, too.
    “Excellent,” the Masker repeated, making a mark in a small leather-bound notebook. “And as I expected. These things usually run true.”
    “My father is hoping . . . I can be apprenticed to him,” Mara said. Her heart was pounding.
He’s going to figure out I’m lying. He’s going to find out . . .
    “Pre-apprenticed, certainly,” Tester Tibor said. “Of course, it may still be that you do not have the Gift in strong enough measure, something which cannot be determined until you are Masked and allowed to start using magic yourself. But you answered with such confidence, I think that’s unlikely.” He gave her a big smile, teeth flashing behind his Mask. “Congratulations.”
    Mara managed a small smile, though she thought she might be sick. She turned and went out to join her father, who was waiting in the hallway.
    “A happy result all around, Charlton,” Tester Tibor said to him. “You have a new apprentice!”
    Her father whooped and gathered Mara up in a huge bear hug. Mara hugged him back, but inside her mind wailed,
What’s wrong with me?
    It wasn’t too late. She could still tell the Tester the truth, tell her
father
the truth. She knew that was what she
should
do. But then she thought of the Autarch, trailed by the silent Child Guards, the Autarch who could snatch her away from her father tomorrow if it would suit his purposes, and she said nothing.
    “Let’s go home and tell your mother,” her father said, and she nodded mutely, took his hand, and left the Place of Testing.

TWO
    Changes
    M ARA’S MOTHER WAS AS THRILLED as her father had been by the apparent success of her Test, and cooked a special celebratory dinner of fresh fish and mashed redroots. Mashed redroots were Mara’s favorite food in the whole world, and yet they tasted like ashes in her mouth that night. She didn’t like lying to