Faces by E.C. Blake Page B

better-off sections of Tamita.
Well, the Lady’s father
was
a builder
, Mara reminded herself. She wondered what the village had looked like when the Lady had arrived there as a teenager.
Surely not like this. She really has made a difference in their lives . . .
    Even as she thought it, she rounded the corner of a tall stone house and found herself no more than twenty feet from the Lady herself. Mara gasped and ducked back behind the corner, heart pounding. Fortunately, the Lady had had her back to her. After she’d caught her breath, Mara peered around the corner again to see what the Lady was doing.
    Arilla stood in the middle of a small courtyard, peering up, hands outstretched, at the house directly opposite Mara. Hamil stood beside her, along with others she recognized as belonging to the Lady’s Cadre.
    A flare of red light made Mara flinch before she realized she was seeing magic, not fire. The red glow encased the building opposite for an instant. The grinding sound of stone on stone filled the air. Then, both the glow and the sound abruptly ceased.
    Around the Lady, three of the villagers sank to their knees, heads bowed, just as she had seen all of them do when the Lady had stopped the avalanche from destroying the camp.
She took magic from them
, Mara thought.
Why them, and not the wolves?
    Then she realized that, for maybe the first time since she’d met her, the Lady had no wolves with her.
Where has she sent them?
Mara looked around uneasily. She still didn’t know exactly how the Lady used the wolves’ eyes.
What if they’re hiding all around the village as spies? What if one of them is watching me now?
    And then she got a shock as she realized she
was
being watched—but not by a wolf. Hamil, who had not been affected by the Lady’s draw of magic, had turned his head and was looking straight at her.
    She jerked back behind the house, heart pounding again. She waited for a shout, for the Lady to come around the corner of the house, for something to happen . . . but nothing happened at all except that she heard voices going away from her. She peered around the corner again as carefully as she could.
    The courtyard was empty.
    Mara took a deep breath, and hurried on.
    She managed to avoid being seen again until she reached the easternmost bridge. The village streets didn’t exactly bustle anywhere, compared to Tamita, but there were still a score or more villagers out and about, because shops stood at both ends of the bridge: baker, shoemaker, candlemaker, tailor. But at least the Lady wasn’t in sight.
There’s no reason the villagers should be surprised to see me
, she told herself. They
don’t know the Lady told me not to come down here.
    It still took her a minute or two to work up the nerve to step into the open, from the narrow space between the tailor’s and the baker’s, and walk toward the bridge, an elegant stone arch erected, no doubt, by magic. The village seemed too small to need three bridges: Mara suspected the Lady had built them in tribute to her father, and the thought made her feel closer to the Gifted young girl the Lady had once been.
If I’d known her then, we might have been friends
, she thought.
With the same Gift in common, the same fears . . .
    ...the same enemy . . .
    The villagers turned to look at her as she strode toward the bridge. She slipped the hood back from her face and gave them bright smiles. No one smiled back. She couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but they didn’t look afraid. In fact, they looked . . .
    Hopeful?
    Now why would she think that?
    As she crossed the bridge, she met a woman coming the other way. The woman stopped dead, mouth open. “Hello,” Mara said.
    The woman’s mouth clicked closed. “Hello,” she said. “I . . . you’re . . .”
    â€œMara Holdfast,” Mara said.
    The woman stepped