Ironskin (31 page)

*   *   *

It took a good while to calm Niklas down, and even then he was fixated on the bit of fey that he had let walk through his door. “You say the last woman went mad. I believe it’s not just from the whole fey entering her, but from the piece of fey clinging to her face.” He clanked a metal prybar against his hand. “We must rip it off before it destroys your soul.”

“No!” She eluded him. “It’s the same thing, Niklas. This mask, or my cheek. It’s all the same. Either way they can come for me.”

Poule stepped in front of Jane, stared up at the big blacksmith. “And they can come for you, too.”

This stopped him.

“If there’s fey in you, they can take you over alive,” Jane said from behind Poule’s shoulders. “That’s what your curse is. A little bit of fey, attached to your body till you die. But you can use it against them, if you work at it. If you remove the iron and practice. You can use it as defense.”

“Remove the iron,” he said. “I bet this is the fey in you telling me to do that. Bet you’re already all fey, and I invited you in—”

“Hush,” said Poule. “Lay off Jane. This paranoia’s not the blacksmith I’ve heard about on family retreats deep in the
dwarvven
compound.”

“Heard about.” He grunted, stared at Poule.

Unperturbed by his gaze, Poule helped herself to a stool at his workbench and hoisted Dorie’s gloves out of her bag. “I’m working on a mask myself,” she said. “A rather special one. I hear you’ve got a tar suspension, and I also hear you’ve one of the finest minds for iron solutions outside of the
dwarvven
.”

Niklas grunted. “That’s as it may be.” His sharp eyes flicked to the mesh cloth that formed the gloves.

“’Course, if you can’t let go of your preconceptions, I can head back to the country now,” said Poule. “Otherwise, we might have some skills to trade.”

She held out a glove and after a pause, Niklas took it. He sat down at his bench and turned it over in his hands, examining the way the metal-threaded cloth moved and folded.

Several minutes passed in utter silence, but Jane felt the air in the room change, felt the dynamic shift as Niklas went from suspicion to grudging acceptance.

Poule winked at her. “You’d better get back to the party.”

“You’re all right then?” said Jane. “Niklas?”

Niklas grunted, not looking at her. But that had always been so.

Poule pressed bills into her hand for a hansom. “I’ll be back by midnight,” she said.

*   *   *

When Jane reached the house, the party was in full swing. It seemed an age since she’d seen the May Day preparations in the country—what, only yesterday morning? But where Silver Birch had been rustic, with its old-fashioned maypole and few guests, Helen’s house was sharp and polished. And crammed. Everyone who was anyone was there—Jane decided Helen must have hand-delivered the invitations, to let that fey glamour wash over her invitees.

Jane saw more than one fey face, now that she was looking for them. The Prime Minister’s wife. A duchess. A woman on the arm of a lord, who Gertrude whispered had been a dancing girl.

The Miss Davenports were there, too, and their eyes slid over Jane and refused to acknowledge her presence.

But they were the only ones. Jane was pulled into dance after dance, caught around the waist by eager male hands and swung in and out in gay, captivating rhythms. She was in her plain day dress of the day before, wrinkled and smudged from her journey—and yet it didn’t matter, for she had that face, and the face made whatever cloth she wore look like gold.

The adulation caught her, unsettled her, swung her in a dance between laughter and tears, but the boys seemed to find even her tears beautiful, and more than one gentleman made a giddy proposal of elopement to her. Jane accepted them all, for why not? There was only this one night in the bubble, for even though Jane did not know how it would all end, she knew like a hanging in the morning, it would.

It was the blackest hour of the night before she felt it.

Like Helen had said, that chittering under the wallpaper, and more, Jane thought, a sense of a growing storm, of funnel clouds in the nice fine ballroom, of that moment when every hair on your arms stands up and is electrified by the sky.

A fey in the house, that house without iron.

She felt it and suddenly the blue-orange blur seemed to be everywhere, homing in on the pretty ladies, the women with masks. The fey swooped back and forth, and suddenly there was blue in front of her eyes, and she was under attack.

But this fey was not the Fey Queen.

This was some ordinary fey, and she was pale in comparison with the Queen’s heat, and she was weak in comparison with the Queen’s murderous rage.

The fey beat against Jane’s face, and Jane, feeling less and less like a victim, drove it back with the satisfying beat and thump of squashing an insect. It fell away, rattled. Left for an easier target.

She looked up and into her current dance partner’s eyes with fierce triumph, and then saw where the fey went next.

Helen.

The fey was drawn to her like she was a flame, a beacon. Its orange-blue light swallowed up the air around her and behind that masky blush of perfection Jane saw Helen’s eyes scream.

Helen beat at the air, but that didn’t matter to the fey. She screamed, which mattered to Jane. No, that wasn’t just Helen screaming, it was Jane as well, shouting, “Fight back, fight back,” and then thumping on Alistair’s arm and saying, “Do something, damn you!”

He folded, blubbering. “I can’t, you don’t understand, I can’t.”

The last time she stepped between a fey and her brother, she sacrificed half her face. And her brother still lay dead of fey shrapnel on the black ground, and the only thing Jane could do after it was all over was stab a feyjabber into his heart and drive the fey out. And then her sister had resented her ever after, for daring to do what Helen could not.…

All that whirled through her head in an instant as the blue-orange light darkened with intent, whisked through Helen and into her. The other swirls of blue flicked outward and dissipated.

The light died in Helen’s eyes, flickered up pale and glassy—but it was patently no longer Helen. Edward had said that by the time Poule extracted the fey from Blanche she was an imbecile.

But maybe Poule hadn’t been fast enough.

Jane moved into that open space around Helen, fingers coiling around the feyjabber in her pocket.

Blanche Ingel had been occupied for five or six hours before Poule jabbed her wrist. Whereas Dorie had only had a fey inside her for less than a minute, and she’d recovered.

Jane plunged the feyjabber into her sister’s forearm, driving it into the vein. Helen shuddered, her eyes rolling back in her head. Dark red blood welled up around the spike.

And then, a noise like shrieking, only inside her head—and from the looks of it, the guests heard it too. Fey death, she knew, though she had not felt it in five years.

Helen fell to her knees, slumped to the floor. Her iron-stuck arm fell limply to the side, but the crazed look in her eye died away, and her eyelids closed as if in sleep, exactly as Dorie’s had in the forest.

Jane prayed Helen would also wake as Dorie had, but she couldn’t stay to find out.

“Don’t stand there,” she shouted to the rest of the party. “Find iron, protect the others! Send for a doctor! And you,” Jane commanded Alistair. “Bind her arm above the wound and don’t remove the spike.” He was stunned, and he looked as though he was an instant from weeping, as soon as he processed the shock. Jane stooped and, clamping her thumb onto the vein in Helen’s arm, repeated her orders to one of the more capable-looking servants.

“Helen,” he murmured. “My little Helen.”

Jane took his hand and placed it on Helen’s arm. “Hold tight until they return,” she said, and he looked through her with scorched eyes, but nodded, and held.

“Don’t leave us,” he said, but Jane stood and looked down at him, huddled over her unconscious, fey-beautiful sister.

“Stop all the doors in your house with iron,” she said. “Bar all the windows. Don’t let anyone beautiful enter or leave.”

Chapter 18

SHARDS

Poule drove like a maniac. Jane hung tight as the old motorcar whipped along narrow bumpy lanes and tried to reassure herself that the
dwarvven
were mechanically clever. The car was practically an extension of Poule, for all that the short woman was sitting on a tufted cushion and had put on special driving shoes with soles as thick as Jane’s outstretched fingers.

The house was dark when they reached it. It was well past dawn, and yet the grey fog clung to the moor, wrapping the house in smoke.

“After Nina, the party cleared itself off,” Poule said, though Jane knew that part. “I sent Cook and Martha home to their families.
He
wouldn’t budge.”

Jane remembered the story he had told of the damaged beast-man, lost without the girl who stayed away longer than she’d promised. Remembered, too, her own words: “If they all left you, I should still be here, and stay by your side.…”

And yet she had run.

When they all had left him, she, too, had run.

“I’ll take the grounds,” said Poule.

“Thank you,” said Jane.

“It isn’t much safer,” corrected Poule. “Wait till you see the front door.”

The front door was off its hinges, the iron screen door ripped up and torn aside. The grotesque doorknocker hung, tilting, knocking an echo against the door in the wind.

Jane stepped inside.

“Edward?” she called. “Dorie?”

Her footfalls echoed through the velvet curtained foyer. The mahogany curtain to the damaged rooms had been ripped away, and it now lay in a crumpled heap, all Jane’s steam-cleaning undone. She stepped over it and through, winding her way up toward his studio. Her calls echoed back only silence.

The black and broken house felt abandoned, as if it had not been lived in for two centuries, and semihysterically she wondered if she had stepped into the clutches of the fey her first day on the moor, and all that had happened here had been a fey-drugged dream, where she had talked to imaginary pretty ladies and scavenged mushrooms and berries in place of Cook’s chocolate croissants.

Through the cobwebs she went, her feet smearing dust on the stairs. Up and to the studio, where the tiniest noises of life crept around the open studio door. A small voice, talking. A giggle.

Dorie was sitting on the floor of Edward’s studio, hair lit by a stray sunbeam. Her dress was smeared with dust and something that looked like jam, but she looked safe and healthy. In fact, she looked very like the picture of Dorie as Jane had first seen her, making her Mother doll dance among the motes of dust in the sunbeam.

Unlike that first day, though, she was talking to it. Full sentences narrating the morning life of a five-year-old (“I made my own breakfast, I ate all the jam,”) and that gladdened Jane’s heart.

Dorie broke off when she saw Jane, beamed at her and said, “You came back.”

“Yes,” breathed Jane. “I came back.”

And then it struck her what was odd about the picture, for Dorie was playing with her old doll, the doll that had been destroyed by Dorie herself. Jane had dropped the porcelain shards in the small red room, and later picked them out of the dense carpet one by one, and carried them to the dustbin, dropped them in there with the two blue glass eyes.

Jane took a step back and said, “Dorie, what—”

—and then the doll dissolved into smoke, rose into the air and reformed, and suddenly Jane was staring at her new face, again.

Jane’s hand went right for her feyjabber, but she’d left it sticking out of Helen.

“You are back,” the Fey Queen said. “Your choice is made.”

“The choice to destroy you.” Though she had no idea how.

“The choice to be with Edward, no matter the sacrifice. I understand.”

“The choice,” Jane forced through dry lips, “not to be a victim. Not to be on the run, and not to let you drive me from the few people left in this world whom I care about. Who care for me.”

“A battle you can never win,” the Queen said, “for who can compete with the fey? Now that you creatures voluntarily attach us, you do not even have to be killed. The forms are cleaner, they live longer. A whole human lifespan, I expect, unless we are discovered. My subjects have slowly been slipping into place around the city. Ready to enact change from within. With Edward’s help, we will win this war yet.”

“Help,” said Jane. “You really call it help when you were the one directing his hands; you were the one clouding his mind? But never mind that. The Great War is over, and you’ve lost. If you really thought you could win,
you’d
be taking over one of those well-positioned women. Not the governess in a tumble-down shack in the countryside.”

“Edward has access to everyone. If you think a leader cannot direct her people from a sheltered seat, you are mistaken. Besides,” and she sent a tendril of orange warmth to flicker through Dorie’s hair, “this is where my child is. My small-part-of-me.”

“Your child who can’t live in either world—”

“Who can live in both.”

“You would use her, as you used Edward—”

“If she and Edward are useful to me, do I love them the less?” She glimmered at Jane. “But I weary of maintaining this human form when the real one is present, and more comfortable to wear in your polluted world. I weary of talking like a human without a human mouth and brain to do the heavy lifting. I weary.”

She dissipated into blue-orange light and then a rage like fire swept across Jane.

It was the attack, finally the true attack, and no Poule there to fling iron in front of her. The Fey Queen was trying to slip in her body through the front door of her face.

But it wasn’t as strong as she had expected. Jane pushed back, blazing hot herself, pushed back and beat the Fey Queen from her body.

The Fey Queen hung in the air in front of her, paler than before, the imaged face only a sketch over colored light. “You. What?”

But Jane knew. “I have had fey substance in me for the last five years. I am not as helpless as you think.”