A Masquerade of Spiders

Chapter One: No One's Daughter

On the dais, the executioner pulled out a small knife, no larger than a fruit knife. He began to ceremoniously sharpen it, filling the air with a quick sequence of swishes.

"Isn't that the vintner from Thalmina?...He's no criminal," an old lady wearing a tattered grey frock was saying to her granddaughter who replied with a firm shake of her head.

"They say Dieder makes the best wine this side of the Tal," someone else said. I hurried away as he admitted that he could hardly afford a bottle.

I continued to move, but no matter where I turned, the whispers continued. They all knew the truth, that this executionwas nothing short of murder. Just like my parents, any one of them could fall through the cracks created by the nobles' squabbles.

I stopped short when I saw Fedebell, my father's best friend, standing not a foot away from me, with his eyes strangely glossy and his shoulders hunched. His son, Yaaqov, was closely beside him. They were both looking at the dais where the executioner was laying down his sharpening rod. They hadn't seen me.

I shouldn't have come here. There were too many risks. But I just couldn't abandon my own parents.

I backed away slowly, worried that any sudden movement would cause Fedebell and Yaaqov to look my way.

At the dais, the executioner was making a show of testing the weight of his sharpened blade.

I bumped into someone loitering behind me and turned to mutter an apology. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, wearing a faded brown cloak with the hood pulled up to cover his face.

But I saw up his hood.

I saw the well-defined, clean-shaven line of his jaw, the contour of his pink lips and the lower edge of his mask crossing the bridge of his nose and curving around the shape of his high cheekbones. A jagged gold line with little diamonds studding each cleft.

Gold and diamonds—a high ranking lord snooping among the People.

I pushed through the crowd to get away from him. His presence meant nothing good here. I managed a glance over my shoulder, chiding myself for making it so obvious that I had seen something I wasn't supposed to see—again. But he wasn't following me. Whatever business he had, I prayed it was too pressing for him to make a detour.

I looked up at the dais just as the executioner began to cut away the straps holding my father's mask.

A sharp pain twisted my gut. It dawned on me, at that moment. This was real. It was happening, it was truly happening.

They were going to die.

There was a ringing in my ears, my head felt light, the bodies of the people standing closely around me became distant.

"No, no, papà, I can't do it, I can't leave you," I pleaded with them last night during that dark hour when it became apparent that it was only a matter of time before the lord's men would come upon us like wolves in the woods.

"Marin is depending on you, Yael," papà had said. "You have to flee. You have to live."

I knew, from the moment that I saw what I saw when they took my sister, I knew what would happen. But I didn't understand why the lords had chosen to tear us down. Why my parents? Why Marin? Why me?

Tears wet my mask. I was helplessly frozen. I wanted everything to just stop, to open my eyes and for all this to have never happened.

There was nothing I could do. There was no way to save them.

I couldn't save their lives, but, as irrational and dangerous as it was, I had to give them one final honour.

I drew a shuddering breath, peeling my eyes off the dais.

Executions weren't just for the common folk. They weren't just a way for the Lords' law to lay out how severely and swiftly criminals were dealt with.

They were a form of entertainment. And the ones who had so much leisure in their lives they could watch death for sport were first and foremost the Lords themselves.

The nobles' areas in the square were sectioned off by thick silken rope and flanked by guards. Even in my stolen merchant's mask and matching dress, I wouldn't be allowed to pass into the noble pens without an explicit invitation.

But the fickle hearts of the Lords played to my advantage.

Some didn't favour the idea of being closed in a pen like animals. These clusters of Lords stood to the edges of the crowd, holding themselves apart.

I spotted four young noblemen with blades at their hips, standing together and eying the crowd like butchers watching pigs.

Not good.

Another group towards the west of the square consisted of two ladies and two lords who stood tightly together along with six burly guards. I looked away.

Finally my gaze settled on three lords and a lady watching the unmasking while their servants held up platters of little pistachio cakes dusted with a fine layer of powdered sugar.

They maintained an almost carefree manner, talking and laughing as if nothing more serious than a puppet show was taking place before them.

I made myself look at the dais as I wove through the crowd to get closer.

My father and mother sat as bare-faced as newborns. The skin around their eyes and over the bridges of their noses was milky compared with the rest of their chestnut complexion—time had painted its own mask on them. My own parents—I had never seen their full faces before.

Everyone was watching. Watching and waiting.

My father's eyes darted, to and fro, searching for the spectre that would come for him. He wasn't the kind of man to hide what he felt. Now, in his last moments, as strongly as he had shown his love to mamma, Marin—and to me—he showed everyone his fear.

But my mother, in contrast, looked at the pink hues of the dawn sky, seemingly at peace. It was an expression I knew so well, the tranquility she forced on herself when faced with a crisis. I took after her. I had the ability to push down everything I felt, to hide my heart and mind behind a mask of my own making.

"If you want to save your sister, we're not your parents and you're no one's daughter," my father had said.

The hush in the square started to fray. The spectres took, at the very least, fifteen minutes to appear. No one could hold their breath waiting for so long. I carefully moved towards my chosen group, trying to learn as much as I could about them from afar.

My eyes landed on a noblewoman standing dejectedly at the side of the group. Her mouth was twisted in displeasure. Her companions were pointedly ignoring her.

Resisting the urge to reach into my skirt pocket and touch my knife, I continued towards her.

I found a mark.