Free Masks and Shadows by Stephanie Burgis Page B

The voices cut off. A listening silence replaced them.
    A cold wind blew at Anna’s back as she picked up her skirts and fled back to her own room and safety.

    A minute later, a small figure in plain, unfashionable English attire appeared at the end of the corridor. It was the man known to his traveling companions as Edmund Guernsey, the nervous little English tourist.
    Guernsey’s face was cold and set. His eyes darted back and forth as he walked down the corridor. When he thought he heard a whisper of sound, he paused and listened intently at the wall.
    But the voices had silenced before he’d arrived, and the rain had washed the bloodstains from the floor.
    Guernsey walked down the corridor, shook his head, and moved softly on, through the darkened byways of the palace.

    Friedrich shivered in the cold rain. His eyes were finally starting to adjust to the blackness after ten minutes of standing outside, and his head, unfortunately, was clearing rapidly. He’d much preferred intoxication.
    His chilly fingers twitched convulsively, flipping the note over and over again in his hand. It consisted of only one line, in a tidy black script: Meet me outside the opera house , followed by the usual mark. Whoever had written it, he’d been an arrogant enough bastard to take for granted that his order would be followed, without even bothering to give a time for the damned appointment. If Friedrich had to wait another hour or two before the devil showed up, the other officers would all see him standing like a fool as they tromped back to the barracks, across the grass. Of course, by then he would have already turned into a bloody icicle, so perhaps he wouldn’t even care.
    The hell with it . Friedrich turned to leave—
    â€”And froze as he heard the telltale crunch of heeled shoes against the shell-lined path in front of him.
    â€œLieutenant Friedrich von Höllner.” A dark figure moved through the shadows, so voluminously greatcoated that he could have been either a fat man or a skeleton. “Brother Friedrich.”
    â€œAh . . .” Friedrich crumpled the note in his clenched hand as the dark figure came to a halt five feet away. The rain was finally easing, but that was no help after all. A black, beaked carnival mask covered the whole of the man’s face, which was doubly shaded under the voluminous hat that hid his hair. The sight should have been grotesque—even ridiculous—but in the black stillness of the night, with even the rain disappearing into an eerie silence . . . it wasn’t. Instead, it brought back far too vivid memories of cloaks and darkness, memories Friedrich had been fighting all day.
    He swallowed hard as they rose up once more. “About that—that night—you know, I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Not at all.”
    â€œNo?” The dark head cocked in polite curiosity.
    Panic crawled through the bottom of Friedrich’s stomach. “So what I mean to say is . . . is, I’m sorry to give you extra trouble, but—”
    â€œOh, you haven’t given us any trouble, Brother Friedrich. Not at all. In fact, you’ve made our task much, much easier.”
    â€œUm.” Friedrich took a gasping breath. Don’t think about those singers, don’t even let him hear you thinking . . . “I just think—I think you’d better leave me out of your plans, though, really.” He smiled weakly and stepped back, slipping the crumpled note inside his coat. “I wouldn’t be any good at them anyway. I’m not the right sort.”
    â€œNo? Then what sort are you, Brother Friedrich?” The black shape slipped closer. “Are you the sort who takes sacred oaths only to break them? Or are you the sort who sells his wife’s virtue for an easy fortune?”
    Friedrich gasped. “I didn’t—that was Sophie’s idea! She and the Prince—”
    â€œThe sort who gambles away so much