Ironskin (30 page)

But she was shocked enough to drop the last of the chestnuts on Helen’s nice clean floor when she saw Helen.

Chalk it up to another thing she should’ve known, she thought. Helen’s hints about Alistair finding a solution, Edward mentioning that he’d seen her sister …

Helen was beautiful.

Fey beautiful.

Chapter 17

PRETTY LADIES

Helen was having yet another party.

Jane sat curled on a couch in the front parlor, turning over the morning in her mind as servants whisked past, dusting and setting up flower vases and carrying beaten carpets in and out. The emerald horsehair couch was slick, and her feet kept sliding off.

The mask had not fully sealed at the edges, and it itched. It was not obvious unless you looked closely—with her fingers Jane felt the ridge running from her hairline around her jaw and back—but the itching, plus the knowledge of whose face it was, made her want to hook her nails under her chin and tear it away.

Which did not seem like the best idea.

There had been tons of houseguests at Helen’s wedding; today there was only one, and it was that Gertrude person who had told Jane to study art. She came in and out with Helen, who didn’t seem to want to be alone with Jane—or, even, alone.

At last when they came in again, Jane swung her feet to the floor and commanded them: “Sit.” She poured lukewarm tea from the service at her side and passed a cup to Helen.

“Ooh, aren’t we high and mighty,” said Gertrude, mimicking a city servant’s accent.

Jane was interested to realize she didn’t particularly care what Gertrude thought. That was a bit of a sea change, wasn’t it, how she had talked to the Miss Davenports, told Blanche Ingel what to do, made decisions.… She turned the full effect of her beautiful face on Gertrude and saw the other woman redden.

She could get used to this.

“Helen,” Jane said gently. “I have to talk to you about the … art … you received from Edward.”

“No art,” butted in Gertrude. “She went on holiday is all, don’t you see how relaxed she looks?”

Helen did not look relaxed to Jane’s informed eye; she looked peaked and jittery, a thin and frightened version of herself. She sneaked glances at Jane’s different, fey-enhanced face, in between looking sharply around the room as if someone were going to jump out from behind the curtains.

“I know the truth,” Jane said to Gertrude. “I’m sure you’ve been an asset at all Helen’s balls and parties, but you don’t need to cover up with me.”

“What parties?” said Gertrude in genuine confusion. “This is the first in a fortnight, and aren’t we excited? That’ll show them who was idiots to shun you.”

Jane looked at Helen, confused. No parties? But the letters had been of nothing else.

Helen dropped her head. “I need to talk to my sister,” she said to Gertrude. “I will come find you, after.”

“Oh,” said Gertrude. “Well, I—oh.”She rustled from the room while Helen plucked at her skirts, folded them into tiny bunches, dropped them again.

“No parties,” said Jane. “You’ve had a much harder time fitting in than you let on.”

“It was fine at first,” said Helen, still looking at the voile of her skirts. “But they closed off against me. You weren’t here, Jane. I did hardly anything, but this girl Annabella took a dislike to me. She had wanted Alistair, you see—even with his drink and horses and cards and all that. She started slyly putting me down at every turn, and her friends had to choose her over me—and she has a great many friends.” Her hand touched her jaw in a now-familiar gesture, that moment of touching where you and the mask met. “I needed something to trump her. Your Edward was so kind.”

With effort, Jane let that comment fall away like water against an oiled coat, did not let it touch her. “The masks are a problem,” she said.

“You have one. Hardly fair to accuse me of—oh, I don’t know, whatever you were going to accuse me of. Vanity? Self-indulgence? You try being the younger sister to someone who always has the moral high ground.”

Jane burst out: “But you were there for Mother! Don’t you know how I’ve regretted that?” Charlie and her mother, the two old guilts twined together.

Helen looked sideways at Jane, fingers opening and closing on her skirts. “Jane,” she said, pleading. “You don’t know how it was.…”

There was a sudden softness to the mask—was this a way back into understanding, after all? Jane groped for words.

But she could not find them quickly enough. Helen’s face fell; she turned away and muttered to herself, “I suppose you can’t expect an ironskin to understand what it’s like, being thrown to the wolves with nothing but your face, nothing but your face, nothing.”

Jane’s blood ran cold as Helen dismissed her as ironskin. Helen had remade herself in the city, with or without the new face. Jane tabled the danger of the masks for a moment and tried a different tack. “Helen,” she said. “The mask … it’s almost like it gives me more power. Like … a fey.”

“Fey beauty, not fey itself,” said Helen. Nervous laugh. “Don’t be so paranoid.”

“Hear me out for once. Accept that I know things.”

Helen looked around at the empty parlor, dressed up with vases of early roses for the evening’s event. “If I tell you … don’t tell, oh, she wouldn’t tell, would she, but, you see. There is something different since I got this. Like the walls are pushing in, don’t you remember, doesn’t she remember that?” Her sentences muddled back and forth as she worked herself up, as if Jane were hearing spoken words and internal thoughts all tangled together.

“No. Tell me.” Jane remembered Nina saying of Blanche Ingel “jumpy as a cat since the surgery,” remembered poor Nina’s lost and hollowed-out face. She felt much more tenderly about attacked Nina than she ever had about Nina alive.

“I hear things chittering,” said Helen. “Like something is around me. Everywhere, just out of sight.” She nodded around the room. “Behind that hideous painting of Alistair’s mother, or under the piano there, or slithering under the green baize on the card table. Or that blue—oh, why would Alistair taunt me with that fey-blue pillow!” In hectic, feverish motions Helen seized the pillow and buried it underneath the sofa, out of sight. Sank back to her seat.

Silence from shocked Jane, and Helen rushed on:

“Tell me you feel it, too.”

“No…,” said Jane. “Not except for a brief moment when I first awoke.”

“You think I’m mad, I know she does think it,” said Helen. “All the same, I remember you after the war sometimes. That was quite different, but sometimes … that’s how I feel.”

And suddenly Jane remembered five years ago, remembered waking up with her cursed cheek at home, in her bed. “The striped wallpaper swimming in to meet me,” she said. “Everything had a voice, and it was all after me. And everything Mother did seemed amplified tenfold—her endless weeping. Her anger at me for losing Charlie.” Sharp the memories came—she had known that anger though Mother had tried to hide it; she had fled from it. Yet it had twisted inside her, and taken root, and grown.…

“It’s mad, isn’t it?” said Helen, suddenly sharp and direct. “And yet that’s what I think of. You, before you left us, the way you seemed then. And yet my face is not a curse—oh, Jane, tell me what I’ve done.”

Jane took Helen’s hands. “I tried to seal off my curse and that didn’t work. I peeled off the iron and started to work with it. I gained power with it, and now with this mask I have even more. You can do that. You must do that. You have to learn to be strong and fight with what you wear, or … the fey will take you over … alive.” The thought sparked a vivid memory of crouching inside the door that morning while the Fey Queen attacked poor Nina.

Helen jerked away, was suddenly up behind her chair. Her saucer of tea clattered to the floor and broke amber across the patterned rug. “It’s them, isn’t it. It’s them I hear crackling through the walls. They’re coming, they’re coming—”

“Be calm!” said Jane. “Yes, they are a danger, but you can learn to fight it. You and all your friends, you must try. We have fey in our bodies now, and we can learn to use it to defend ourselves, or we can be victims.”

Helen sneered at Jane. “Then you’ve made yourself in danger, too, haven’t you? Bet she’s sorry now, wouldn’t she rather be ugly and safe—”

“But I wasn’t safe,” said Jane. “I had it all along.” And suddenly she thought of all those ironskin who were also in danger. She would have to get to Niklas and let him know. And Dorie—she had to find out what had happened to her little girl. There was too much to do to hide in Helen’s house another minute.

She stood, gathering her skirts and wits, and said with some asperity to Helen, crouching behind the chair, “Oh, buck up.”

The butler swept in, then, with Gertrude behind him. Triumph from Gertrude: “There, I knew you’d upset her! You don’t understand what she needs—”

The butler ignored the drama and said: “A visitor to see you, Miss Eliot. A Miss Poule.”

*   *   *

Poule drove them through the city in Edward’s old car, calmly maneuvering around the horses and holes that clogged the streets, the farther they got from Helen and Alistair’s part of town.

“They can get into fey substance,” said Poule. “All that is fey substance.”

“Yes,” said Jane, for it was what she’d figured out. “Tell me—is Dorie all right?”

Poule shook her head. “Every time I thought I saw her, she vanished. No telling whether that’s Dorie.…”
Or something in Dorie,
she did not say.

Jane’s heart twisted, thinking about it. Perhaps she should have grabbed the little girl, stolen her away. She could be here right now, safe on Jane’s lap.

“You’re no safer here than in the country,” said Poule.

“You’ve said as much,” said Jane.

“What I don’t understand,” said Poule, “is that they could’ve taken you, or any of the ironskin over at any time. They didn’t have to wait for Edward to put on the masks.”

“They could,” said Jane. She had been thinking about the moment in the clearing, when the fey had seemed to invade and reject her. “But they wouldn’t take over ironskin, unless that was the only option. They’re drawn to beauty. I was practically unclean to them.”

“Huh,” said Poule. “A thousand centuries of trade with them, and yet I’ll never understand the blasted things, I guess.”

“But what
is
fey substance?” said Jane. “The curses, the bluepacks—are they the same? Is it like spider silk?”

“Well, that’s the part the
dwarvven
did seem to have right. Speaking of trade, you see. The fey have a complicated punishment system that I don’t even want to know about because the little I do know is deeply disturbing. But all the fey tech we have—the blue lights, cameras, your mask, everything—is essentially little pieces of a split-up fey. Not big enough to be a full entity that can think and act on its own. But a bit of captured and divided substance. The fey themselves.”

“Heavens,” Jane said faintly. Her fingers touched her new face. Edward had a bit of the actual fey in his hands. The clay must have fey worked through it. And those bombs—little torn-off bits of themselves, coiled around the fire and the shrapnel, to attach like leeches to the victim.

“When the time of the punishment is over, all those little split-up pieces are automatically released. A thousand lights—or what-have-you—die at the same moment as all the pieces of fey rush back to form one whole fey again, back in the forest.”

“So all the time we were trading with the fey, they were selling us—bits of themselves?” said Jane. The thought made the hair on her arms stand on end.

“Yes,” Poule agreed. “I’d take a good old-fashioned turn on the
dwarvven
rack any day over that kind of punishment.”

Poule stopped the car outside the gated entrance to Niklas’s forge, and Jane said: “But why did you come all this way to get me? Why really?”

The short woman twisted her grey braid away from her face, considering her words. “Because,” she said finally, “because we don’t have a solution to this. And we need one.”

“And…?”

“And it’s going to come through you. You’re the only one I know of who ever bested the fey at their own game. Edward used the fey in his hands for six, seven years, and I’m telling you you have to be bloody strong to do that and not go completely off your rocker. The
dwarvven
have experience blocking fey wiles in general. But you’re the first to take their curse and turn it against the blasted things. I don’t say you’re special—”

“Thanks,” Jane muttered.

“—only that you figured out how to do it, and that’s got to be the key somehow to stop what they’re doing. Else—”

“Else what hope do we have against them,” said Jane. “Edward’s probably done a hundred people by now. And naturally, all rich and well placed, or they wouldn’t have had the money to do it.”

Poule nodded, then looked inside Niklas’s compound. “Is he trustworthy?”

“Yes,” said Jane, and she pulled the handle.

This time it was Niklas himself who came to the gate, erect and striding despite the singlet of iron she knew was underneath the black leather. Suspicion grew on his face the closer he got. “If it’s charms you’re after, you’d better see one of the fancy shops in town.” His eyes darted between them as if he could not decide who needed more puzzling out, but then finally they stayed on Poule and he said, slowly, “You’re one of the
dwarvven,
ain’t you now?” He pronounced it nearly as well as Poule.

“Half,” said Poule.

“Don’t hold with half-bloods myself,” he said. “You don’t know where you stand then, do you.”

He seemed twice Poule’s size, but the woman merely folded her arms and looked up at him, considering. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You do that ironskin that doesn’t work.”

Jane interfered. “Please, Niklas, let us in. I’ll explain everything.”

“I know your voice,” he said, unlocking the gate. “But that face—it seems like something I know but wish I didn’t.”

Jane squeezed inside before he could change his mind. “I’m Jane,” she said, “and I’m wearing the Fey Queen’s face.”