Masks Read Online Free PDF

her parents. But she didn’t dare tell them the truth.
I’m just late developing my true Gift
, she thought. She glanced down at her flat chest.
Just like I’m late developing, period. It will come. And when it does, I’m sure I’ll see red-gold, just like I said. The Gift runs true in our family. My father said so.
    Still, she had trouble sleeping that night, and as a result, overslept. Late the next morning she came yawning down the stairs in her thin nightdress to find a Watcher standing like a shadow on the landing by her father’s workshop. Her heart skipped a beat.
He knows I lied to the Tester!
But though the Watcher’s blank black Mask turned toward her, eyes glittering behind the eyeholes, mouth set in a stern frown, he said nothing. She hurried past him, feeling naked. At the bottom of the stairs she glanced back. He was still staring at her.
    She went about making breakfast for herself, heart still beating fast, listening for the heavy tread of the Watcher’s feet on the stairs, but he stayed where he was. It wasn’t until she was holding two slices of bread on a toasting fork over the fire that he descended, and he wasn’t alone: with him came a woman wearing flowing white robes and a Mask of green. She had no idea what kind of Gift that represented.
    The two passed into the front room without a word to her, and a moment later she heard the door open and close, releasing them into the street. She breathed a sigh of relief, pulled the hot toast from the fork, and was sitting at the table spreading butter and jam when her father came down the stairs. He wasn’t wearing his Mask, though she knew he would have donned it while the visitors were in the house. She frowned up at him. “I didn’t expect to run into a Watcher on my way to breakfast!” she said accusingly.
    Her father laughed. “Special delivery,” he said. “I ran short of magic last week. A lot of Gifted to make Masks for.” He smiled down at her, blue eyes twinkling in the early morning sunlight streaming through the window above the sink. “Masks you’ll soon be helping me to make.”
    Feeling a pang of lingering guilt, Mara took a big bite of jammy toast and pushed the plate bearing the other slice toward her father. He waved it off. “No, thanks, I already ate.” He sat down across from her and watched her.
    “What?” she said nervously, uncomfortably guilty under that gaze.
    “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just thinking how wonderful it will be to have my beautiful daughter as my apprentice, and how relieved I am everything worked out all right.”
    She gave him a shocked look. “You said both you and Tester Tibor were
sure
I’d see red-gold!”
    He grinned at her. “I might have been a little more reassuring than I was assured,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “I admit that I did worry a
little
bit that you might not have the right kind of Gift.”
    Mara felt another pang of guilt, but she said nothing.
It’ll turn out all right
, she told herself.
It has to
.
    “I’m already thinking about
your
Mask,” her father continued. “I know it’s still two years away, but . . . well, I want it to be special. Copper for a Maskmaker, of course. But for decoration . . .” He frowned in thought.
    “It’s strange to think that in two more years I’ll be wearing a Mask,” Mara said.
    Her father smiled at her. “Scared?”
    “A little.” Mara wiped crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand. “I mean . . . what if it . . . changes me? I like who I am. I don’t want to be someone different.”
    Her father sat down across from her and leaned forward, forearms on the table. “It won’t,” he said seriously. “The Masks don’t change you. They just show what’s inside you. The magic that’s put into them—that
I
put into them, on behalf of the Autarch, and once you are Masked, you will, too—protects us all. You’ve learned all this in school.”
    “Because of the Rebellion,” Mara said. She