He thought harder. He could remember taking off the mask many times, but he couldn’t seem to remember anything he did when he wasn’t wearing it.
Reynard’s heart pounded as he clutched at his mask.
“Why can’t I remember?” he mumbled. “Why can’t I…?”
He had always assumed that his lack of childhood memories was from some sort of amnesia resulting from a blow to the head or a childhood illness. But as he scanned his memories, it seemed like there was too much missing. He couldn’t even remember his own face!
Why hadn’t he realized any of this until now?
The door to his room suddenly loomed before him; he hurried the last few steps. “I have to take it off,” he muttered to himself and he stepped inside his room. “I’ll know who I am if I take it off,” he said as he swiftly shut the door behind him.
His hand shook as he gripped the mask. For a moment he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to remove it, but this fear was unfounded—it came loose easily in his hand.
Reynard removed the mask.
The horses whinnied happily at Raquel’s approach. They were hitched near the carriage at the underground docks, and they obviously didn’t like being stuck in that tunnel. They were very happy to see someone familiar carrying a bucket full of oats. They nuzzled Raquel’s long hair and cheeks.
“Come on now, Dragunov. That’s enough.” Raquel rubbed the horse’s nose. For the past two days, she had fed them in the morning and evening with fodder from the islanders. The horses were so pleased that they went against their training, which coached them to avoid making unnecessary gestures toward their masters.
After she spent a few minutes patting the horses, Raquel opened the door of the carriage and rummaged around. After a few minutes, she had a stack of ten notebooks. She sat on the floor and started to read.
“Now,” she mumbled. “Where was that bit about experiments and observations regarding limits in mental capacity?”
Each page of the notebook was completely covered in tiny print. Raquel scanned the pages quickly, but she turned each one very carefully. The notebooks were a keepsake from her mother Carol. More importantly, at the moment, they were her sorcery.
Carol had taken great pains to record every spell she knew, including top-secret information about military attack magic, unfinished spells developed and abandoned by the Jade Squadron, and even some spells she’d formulated on her own. After Carol’s death, Raquel used the notebooks to learn more about magic than her mother had had time to teach her.
The word “confidential” in red ink caught her attention. Without moving her eyes from the page, she reached for the lamp next to her to get a better look. Her hand grabbed nothing but air.
“You’ll ruin your eyes if you read in the dark.”
She looked up at the giant figure of Berkens standing above her. A man was sprawled on the ground nearby; he was probably the guard who had been sent to keep an eye on her, but Raquel hadn’t been paying enough attention to know for sure.
Raquel smiled vaguely at the big priest. “Hello, Mister Tanhoglio,” she said. “How have you been?”
“Call me Berkens. Hey, do you know what’s going on with this island?”
“What do you mean?”
Berkens crossed his arms and furrowed his eyebrows. “Well, for one thing, the whole place is full of tunnels. There’s some kind of giant hole in the middle of the island with some sort of construction going on there. Do you know if it’s possible for one sorcerer to do that much construction work?”
Raquel frowned. “It’s possible to do excavation work with a spell called Fenrir, but there’s no way a single sorcerer could activate it. If an average sorcerer has a capacity of one, it takes a combined capacity of five for sorcerers to cast that spell. Even if Reynard was from the Jade Squadron, there’s no way he could have a capacity five times that of the average sorcerer.”
“Does that mean there are other sorcerers hiding somewhere around here?”
Raquel touched her chin. “I have no idea why they’d want to hide. All the people I’ve talked to claim that Reynard is the only sorcerer on the island, and I can’t imagine why anyone would lie about that. I guess it’s possible that there were other sorcerers who either died or left the island.”
According to Reynard, there were an additional two hundred members of Blasphemers’ Garden who didn’t live on the island—they traveled the continent like missionaries, searching for comrades who had suffered Mauserist oppression. Reynard supposedly made occasional travels off the island himself.
Raquel paused. “But if there were no other sorcerers to begin with…”
“There he is!” a voice rang out through the cave.
“Damn. That was quick.” Berkens frowned. Several armed men stomped down the stairs toward the dock, shouting and pointing at the priest.
“Did you break out of jail, by any chance?” Raquel asked.
Berkens gave her a confused look. “How did you think I got out?”
“I assumed you’d made peace with the islanders and they let you go.”
Berkens gave a wry smile. “Not likely,” he said as he ran to the floor’s edge. “I’ll see you later, I guess.” He dove headfirst into the water.
By the time the men had reached Raquel, Berkens had disappeared.
“Dammit!” one of the men cursed. “He got away!” He looked over at Raquel, who stared absently at the spot where Berkens disappeared. He grabbed her by the collar.
“I knew it!” he snarled. “You two are working together, aren’t you? You’re a Mauserist spy!”
Raquel remained completely calm. She was aware that, unlike the older islanders, the inexperienced and hot-blooded youths of the island were deeply suspicious of the Casulls for not picking a side. “Gray area” was a term that clearly weren’t very familiar with.
“If I was working with him,” Raquel said, “wouldn’t I have run away too?”
“Don’t talk back to me!” The man raised a hand to hit her, but froze.
Raquel had quietly and calmly raised her right palm to his face. For a sorcerer, that simple motion was akin to a fighter drawing his sword.
“I don’t really want to fight you,” Raquel said, “but I don’t want to be hit either.”
The man let go of her shirt and backed away quickly.