The Man Behind the Mask. Christine Rimmer

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СКАЧАТЬ this was when—that you went to the Vildelund?”

      “Didn’t I say in my letters?”

      I shook my head. They were postcards, actually. There had been three of them. What can you write on a postcard?Hello, how are you? I’m fine. Wish you were here…

      Brit said, “I went to the Vildelund in early September.”

      “And at that point you still hadn’t met Eric?” “Nope. He was a hard man to meet. When he returned from his quest to find Valbrand, he came to Isenhalla just long enough to report to my dad that he was certain Valbrand was dead—and then he rushed off to the Vildelund, where he’d been hanging out ever since. I wanted to hear the story of what happened to my brother from Eric himself.”

      “So you flew there and…”

      “The plane crashed.”

      I stopped snipping to stare. “With you in it?”

      “That’s right. My guide was killed.” Her blue eyes, right then, looked nearly as haunted as Valbrand’s. “I was knocked out when we went down. I came to in the wrecked plane. The guide didn’t. The crash broke his neck.”

      I sighed. “Bad, huh?”

      “Yeah. Real bad. I crawled from the wreckage to find the renegade waiting. He shot me. Eric found me and took me to the village where his sweet aunt Asta lived. Asta took care of me until I got well. And eventually, I found my brother—right there, in the Vildelund.”

      “With Eric?”

      “That’s right. For a long time, Valbrand wasn’t…ready yet, I guess you could say, to come back here and deal with everything he’s dealing with now. He’d made Eric promise to stay with him in the north until he could bring himself to come home.…”

      Our eyes were locked in the mirror.

      It was a good opening. The right place to ask a few questions about her brother—and maybe even to tell her the way I felt. But she looked away and the moment got by me.

      I finished trimming. I’d taken some off the sides, in layers, to give it more lift. I worked in a little styling gel, then grabbed the blow dryer she’d set on the counter for me.

      “I love it,” she announced when I turned the dryer off. She fluffed with her fingers and turned her head this way and that. “It always looks fuller when you do it—now for the pedicures.” She dragged me into the enormous marble bathroom, where we soaked our feet in the sunken tub and then took turns in a paraffin bath.

      She did me, then I did her, long sessions with a pumice stone and deep foot massage. We yakked the whole time. For polish, she had a rack full of Urban Decay, great colors with Goth names: Asphyxia. Freakshow. Gash. I chose Pipe Dream, a nice barely-there shade. Brit went for Toxin, a sort of Easter-egg purple that didn’t fit the name at all.

      We wandered back to the bedroom, dropped our robes and stretched out on the bed, where we continued to whisper to each other.

      Brit said she doubted she’d ever finish any of her novels now. That was how we’d met—a shared interest in writing. She’d started nine or ten books. About halfway through, she’d always get tired of them. She’d start something else or real life would beckon.

      She grinned. “There’s a lot going on here in Gullandria. No time for scribbling, if you know what I mean.”

      “Maybe later, huh? It’s not like you don’t have plenty of years ahead of you to get back to it.”

      She made a noise of agreement, but her eyes had doubts in them. Whether the doubts were about her ever writing again or the number of years ahead of her, I couldn’t have said. I almost asked.

      But she’d already begun the story of her adventures in the north. She’d stopped a rape and met a cousin she hadn’t even known she had. And she’d lived among the Mystics. Eric’s aunt, the one who had nursed her back to health, was a Mystic. The Mystics lived simply, by the old Norse ways. Eric was at home among them; Medwyn had been born a Mystic and Eric’s mother had, too.

      She pulled a heavy silver chain out from under her pajama top and showed me the disc-shaped serpent pendant I had noticed the night of the ball. “My marriage medallion,” she said. “Among the Mystics, for each newborn son, they create a different medallion. This one was made for Eric. He wore it as a child. He gave it to Medwyn when he turned eighteen. And Medwyn gave it to me—as Eric’s chosen bride…”

      I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. There were those moments when she’d get going on some part of the story and, out of nowhere, her voice would trail off. Her eyes would shift away.

      I didn’t push her. I figured what she didn’t say was probably none of my business.

      She wanted to know how my writing was going.

      I told her I’d finished my fourth novel—a murder mystery with a female bounty hunter heroine. I was already thinking series. “And lately, I’ve been raking in the rejections.”

      We both chuckled. It was a private joke with us. The more rejections, the closer to that first sale. She asked about my job in a boiler room, selling office supplies—toner, pens, inkjet paper, you name it—on the phone.

      I groaned. “That was so last summer. I’m on to bigger and better things now. A Mexican restaurant on Pico.” Actually I wasn’t a hundred percent sure the job would be there when I got back. But such is the life of a struggling artiste. “Early shift,” I added. “Try not to be too jealous.”

      “I am doing my very best.” She was grinning. And then she wasn’t grinning. “Dulce…” I knew by her sudden change of tone, by the shadows in her eyes, that something bleak was coming. “Last night, at the ball, I noticed you and Valbrand really hit it off.”

      I made a sound that could have meant anything. “Um?”

      “Well, I, um…” She was having real trouble getting around to it. I kept my mouth shut. Though I loved nothing so much as finishing other people’s sentences, right then, I made no attempt to fill in the blanks. She tried again. “That’s the first time I’ve seen my brother dance, did you know that?” I shook my head. She looked so sad. “They say he used to love to dance.…”

      At that moment, I was absolutely certain that she knew how I felt—and that she was going to warn me off him. It was all there, in her worried blue eyes.

      And yes, I’m aware that reading minds is not dependable, that you’re just too damn likely to get it all wrong. A girl should have sense enough to go ahead and ask.

      But I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to hear her tell me how he was not the man for me.

      It wasn’t as if I didn’t already know.

      “I’m so grateful,” she said quietly, “that he’s back with us. But how can I tell you? Dulce, he’s…damaged, you know, by what happened to him? And I don’t just mean his poor face. He’s never going to be like your average guy.”

      “What, exactly, happened to him?”

      She СКАЧАТЬ