The structure might have been the castle; she wasn’t entirely sure at this point. Everything was so different when she saw it up close, as if magic, distance, deception, or simple misperception made her vision completely unreliable.
The stone walls towered over her, rough and unpolished. The door in front of her was large but not fancy, hewn of rough wood dark with age. She imagined it was a servants’ door, an impression borne out by the creatures that entered and exited at irregular intervals. Many of the creatures appeared to be some species of Fae, like the fairy she had so grievously injured but much larger and apparently flightless. They wore an interesting variety of clothes, and after nearly an hour of noticing the repetition in their attire, Claire realized that many of them were probably wearing uniforms.
One Fae wore rich gold fabric with a slithery sort of texture; it draped over his shoulders like a second skin, highlighting his sharp clavicles and finely drawn musculature. The cloth was drawn tight around his narrow waist with a belt of glinting silver set with clear stones that reflected rainbows. Claire wondered whether he was a servant or a prince, until he looked upward with a nervous flinch of his shoulders and hurried inside. She decided he must be a servant; no Fae prince would scuttle like a frightened mouse into the shadows.
Quite a number of the servants wore shapeless cloth tunics belted with rough leather. More interestingly, they wore cloths over their heads. A dark cloth was draped over the sides and back of their heads, and it was tucked under the edges of a soft, nearly featureless mask.
The masks were white with generous holes through which the wearer could see out. They appeared to be gently shaped to a vaguely humanoid shape, with a soft bump for a nose, rounded spaces for the cheeks, and dainty pointed chins. The mouth was a small circular hole in the mask itself; Claire imagined that the wearers were saying “Oh!”
What should she do? No one who had entered or exited the palace looked particularly human, but some of them were approximately her size.
She licked her lips and waited for her moment.
Finally a servant slipped inside, leaving the door to close behind himself, or possibly herself; Claire sprinted across the short intervening distance and slipped in just as the door closed.
The servant turned to her with a startled cry.
Panicked, Claire reached for the servant’s face, intending… well, she wasn’t quite sure what she was intending. Probably something ineffectual, like slapping a hand over the servant’s mouth.
The servant stumbled backward, throwing a hand upward as if to ward off a blow, and Claire tripped on the long robe, falling forward. They landed in a tangle of limbs, the servant whimpering, flailing, trying to crawl away, elbowing Claire in the side of the head.
Sparkles erupted behind Claire’s eyelids, and she flailed in response. “Quiet!” she hissed, grasping at the servant’s robes. “I’m not going to hurt you!”
Her hand caught suddenly on the servant’s belt, and she pulled, trying to keep the servant from getting away. The servant, small and lithe and terrified, thrashed like a hooked fish. Claire cried out as a pointed elbow hit her on the bridge of the nose. A sudden clonk thudded in her ears, and the servant abruptly went limp.
The servant had thrashed so hard he, or she, or it, had struck his head on the stone floor.
Claire carefully let her fingers relax, wincing at the pounding headache just behind her eyes. The servant didn’t move, and now that the body was still, Claire felt how small it was, how thin and fragile, like a small-boned eleven year old. It was impossible to tell whether the motionless body was male or female without invasive groping, and Claire whispered, “Are you all right?”
Nothing.
The hallway, or tunnel, had some sort of faint ambient lighting from the top of each wall, but the sparks dancing behind Claire’s eyes were much brighter. Her groping fingers followed the lines of the clothes upward to narrow shoulders, to cloth bunched around the neck, to the mask. Soft breaths came through the holes at intervals, which reassured her. She couldn’t find any sort of attachment mechanism for the mask.
She hesitated, but then the thought of another servant entering the hallway and sounding the alarm helped her decide. She ran her fingers around the edge of the mask again, still unable to find any method of attachment. Frustrated, she pulled on the mask itself, one hand on each edge.
To her surprise, the mask came off in her hands.
The servant was still wearing a mask.
In the dim light, Claire squinted from one mask to the other, frowning. The servant looked exactly the same as it had a moment before, thin body sprawled helplessly on the floor, masked face upward toward Claire. She leaned forward, trying to look into the eyeholes, but the shadows made it impossible to see the servant’s true face.
Claire had an odd thought, looking into the depthless black of the servant’s eye holes. Perhaps there’s nobody in there at all. She gasped in terror and sat back, her heart thundering.
She licked her lips and pressed her fear down, balled it up into a knot and tied it neatly, then put it aside. I don’t have time to panic right now, she told herself.
She studied the mask in her hands. It was indeed made of some fine, soft cloth, and kept its shape by starch or magic or a plastic mask form beneath the cloth. Claire smiled, momentarily amused to imagine a fairy king using glue to stick fabric onto a plastic mask, but then the smile faded. The mask had no texture of starch, and no weight of plastic; it was as fine and light and featureless as air.
With a deep breath, Claire placed the mask over her own face.