Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  The look in Helen’s eyes made Jane falter. As if there was an old hurt in them that had never healed. As if, deep inside, Helen blamed Jane for going into the battle that morning when Helen could not. But that couldn’t be right.

  “I have a history of cowardice and foolish decisions,” said Helen. She untangled the garnets of her elaborate collar and patted the chains back into place. “That’s all I have, Jane. I have to plan for the future knowing what I have inside me—plan around my own folly. I’m being very sensible and independent like you, you see? It’s just that when I do, it comes out—oh, it’s a muddle.” She gave up on the tangled collar. “You won’t understand.”

  “I might…,” said Jane, groping for lost ground. How could you avoid old wounds when you didn’t know they existed? Yes, Jane had been there with Charlie, but Helen had been there while Mother wasted away, and Jane had still been huddled at the foundry, lost in rage and self-pity. Should Jane blame Helen for that instead of herself? As Helen said, it was a muddle. No, she didn’t blame Helen for running off to marry Alistair; she just didn’t always understand her, and at this minute that gulf seemed very wide indeed.

  “No, you won’t.” Helen patted Jane’s cheek, sending out more gardenia from her perfumed wrists. “Ooh, your mask is so cold. But I suppose it’s the only thing that stops you from being angry with me all the time. If you hadn’t found that foundry, I’d have had to live with a fey in truth. Now kiss me, Jane, and promise you’ll come again to see me. Or stay forever and always. But at least come.”

  “I promise,” said Jane, and now her tangled thoughts were derailed by Helen’s mention of living with fey. Of course! She should visit the foundry and ask Niklas for advice.

  A man’s hand fell on Helen’s shoulder—a curly-haired man smiled down at them with all his perfect teeth. “Don’t forget to return and see us,” said Alistair. “We’ll find you a man yet.”

  “She’ll return,” said Helen, forestalling any rebuttal by Jane.

  “Excellent,” said Alistair. “Now Helen, my sister wants to know if you’ll join her for a round of hearts.”

  Helen kissed Jane’s cheek. “Write to me,” she said, squeezing Jane’s hands, and then she was gone, whirling away in a froth of copper curls and fluttering pink skirts.

  * * *

  Down in the heart of the city the air was thick, a tangle of river smells and factories. Dead fish and new machinery wove a thick miasma that lay along the river like a wool shawl drenched in a storm. Jane closed the door on her reluctant driver and walked down where the streets were too narrow and filled with carts and waste to drive an actual car.

  And yet despite the smells, the dirt, this area called to Jane, plucked at her with strings of warm memory. She had spent half a year here after the war, half a year broken and raging. The worn heels of her old boots slid on the wet cobblestones. It was always wet here, and always slimy, too, as if whatever they were spewing from the factories was welling up through the ground, through stone-scaled roads, coating the paths and walls and sky. It had not been so long since the air had been clean down here, she knew. Since the heart of the city didn’t automatically mean pollution. But need for the bluepacks had begun to outstrip supply a generation before the war. Factories sprang up like cattails along the banks, and the dirty coal that poured into them—chokepack, it was sometimes derisively called—slowly began to poison the home of the poor.

  There were rough men down here in the grey sooty air, and ladies in loose red dresses, but if they looked at her, if they saw her face, they merely nodded. Something uncoiled within her at this, at the memory of this. The ironskin were familiar here, and no one startled at the sight of her. And the ironskin belonged to Niklas, and that was a community of sorts, and one you didn’t mess with.

  Then, too, perhaps they merely saw in her someone who’d had enough trouble for one lifetime. Maybe they felt guilty; maybe they chose easier targets. A host of maybes that Jane didn’t know, so she just walked to the foundry, head held high and veil flung back so everyone could see her iron.

  There was a high fence around the place—an iron fence, of course, and Jane gave the bell clapper a mighty tug and set it to ringing with sharp clanks. Through the bars the foundry loomed, its sooty walls as familiar as the day she left. The yard around it was a patchwork of dirt and brick, heaped with salvaged iron, slag—everything Niklas or the kids could drag home for cheap or free. A thin knobbly boy with an ironskin leg hobbled unevenly to the gate, tugged down the heavy iron bar, and let Jane slip inside.

  “Thank you,” she said, and looked down at his thin frame while he studied her with curious eyes.

  The ironwork was crude here. Niklas didn’t believe in fancy flourishes, even if he had time for them. Except for Jane’s mask, which had had to be hammered to fit her shape if it was to do any good at all, his work was cast iron from roughly carved molds, designed to fit as many as possible and therefore fitting no one perfectly. The boy’s leg was covered from ankle to knee with two pieces of iron, fitting around his calf like a clamshell, and lashed in place on either side with leather ties. The bottom tucked into a boot that someone had tried to adjust to keep the weight of the iron from digging into the top of his foot. The ironskin was too big for him, meant for him to grow into, and the excess space was taken up with rag padding between the iron and the shin.

  She wondered what his curse was. Ironskins always wondered what each other had, and yet she would not rudely ask, as Mr. Rochart had. But the boy volunteered, as forthright as his curious stares at her face. “I got hunger,” he said. “No matter how much I eat it’s gone and I’m still hungry. Afore Niklas set me up it made me little sisters all hungry too an’ drove me mum off her head. So I told you mine and that’s polite, so now what you got?”

  “Rage,” said Jane. Hungry rage, that could take a crumb of irritation and turn it into a banquet. Like the sharp orange fire she’d felt at Gertrude that morning, when Gertrude’s only real crime was thoughtless stupidity. Perhaps someday it would incinerate her entirely; Jane would go up in a sheath of orange flame. She did not say any of this to the boy.

  “Rage,” he repeated. “That’s fierce, ain’t it?” He pondered, weighing the merits. “I guess I’d rather be hungry and have my leg all tore up. I’m used to it, see.”

  “And you have ironskin from Niklas to help,” said Jane, gently prompting.

  “Right. Niklas.” He shrugged a thin shoulder at her, motioning her toward the foundry. “C’mon, I’ll take you to him.” The boy limped quickly over the uneven bricks, using a crutch to take the weight off the heavy iron leg. At the threshold he turned and gave the impudent greeting favored among the lower classes during the Great War, and since. “Stay out,” he said.

  Jane crossed the iron threshold, proving she was no fey. He grinned and jerked his thin body away from her, into the workshop.

  There had been more kids here, once. More misfits like Jane, scarred and lost, scarred and orphaned, scarred and rejected. But the number had dropped with time, since the last fey had vanished five years ago. This boy must’ve held out for those whole five years—his family must’ve held out, too—till an ironskin saw him and sent him here.

  Five years ago. Niklas’s work might be less, but the scarred still wandered in, Jane knew. She wondered if his task had only gotten harder with the passing years—the number of people might be diminished, but their emotional pain was surely greater, as they’d lived with their anger or fear or pain for five years, and not known its cause.

  She walked through the crowded workshop, remembering. She had only stayed here six months, after the hospital and before that first governess job. She had been too devastated by the loss of her brother, her mother’s illness, and by the inexplicable and terrifying rage that filled her, to think of this as home, or even a refuge, or anything except the place where she was one moment, and then the next moment. Perhaps that was the skill she had learned here, to make one minute follow the next, like makin
g one foot follow the other, leading yourself out of hell by only thinking about one foot touching the ground and the other foot rising. Step by step, moment by moment, back into the land of the living.

  The boy paused ahead of her. “It’s an ironskin,” he called out, and around that turn in the workshop she saw Niklas. He was just as she remembered: tall and broad, his cropped black beard striped with grey, and the curious dwarven-manufacture work glasses he wore fitted around his eyes like the crystal facets of spiders. He wore close-fitting hoops of iron in his ears, iron bands on his wrists. An iron circle hung from a string around his neck. String for safety reasons—if the hoop got caught on something, it would snap long before his neck would. She did not know if the iron charms worked, as clearly none of them were touching his veins, but she knew that he had always worn them since the war, would always wear them, and that gave her comfort.

  He glanced up at her, then back down at his work. He was making a mold of a leg, gouging the wood with a sharp chisel, and apparently it was more interesting than saying hello.

  The boy shrugged at her, as if to say, “That’s Niklas, what can you do?” then scampered off as quickly as his leg would let him.

  “It’s Jane,” she said. “Jane Eliot.”

  “I’d recognize that face if it were forty years instead of four,” he said.

  The wide back doors were opened for the light, and the river smell mingled with the hot iron and burnt wood. There, she had huddled on her first day, as if she were six and not sixteen. There, she had met a boy with despair running across his breastbone and understood what it was like to be on the other side. There, she had stood when Niklas brought the cooled mask from his desk, and showed her how to wrap the padding in place, slide it over her cheek, adjust the leather straps.

  Niklas’s heavy hands turned the mold back and forth as his chisel slipped along the contours. “What did you come back for?”

  She remembered the driver waiting at the gate and said, “I don’t have much time. But I know someone who needs your help.”

  “Where’s the scarring?” said Niklas.

  She stalled before the part he wouldn’t believe. “Niklas,” she said. “You’ve seen a lot of curses.”

  “That I have.”

  “Do you know of one that doesn’t hurt the people around the person? Like mine makes people angry, and the boy who let me in—his makes people feel starving. Do you know of one that doesn’t cause pain?”

  “Where’s the scarring?” Niklas repeated.

  Jane shook her head, admitted it. “There is none. None visible.”

  He looked up from his work. “What makes you think there’s a curse at all?” he said, reasonably enough.

  Jane clasped her hands together, to stop them from shaking as she described it. It was ridiculous how strongly the girl still affected her, even though she’d worked with Dorie every day for several weeks now. “She can do … fey things,” she said. “She makes pictures out of light. And she can move objects around.”

  Niklas clasped the iron at his throat, as if to ward off her mere words. His voice rumbled, deep, angry, and he leaned toward Jane as if he would shake her. “Then this woman is a fey,” he said. “A fey in disguise. Where did you meet her? She must be destroyed.”

  Jane started. “Oh, no!” she said. “No, no, no. This is a little girl. Her mother was the one cursed, while the girl was unborn. It’s affected her strangely, that’s all. And I have to figure out a way to stop it. I thought maybe you would have heard of somebody else like this.”

  She had forgotten the effect of his work glasses up close. She felt pinioned in their faceted gaze. “There’s nobody like this,” he said. “A fey could take over a dead child’s body as easily as an adult’s. You need to reveal her for what she is and destroy her.”

  Jane pushed the billowing panic back down at his words. He couldn’t possibly be right. It was all wrong to come see him. He was too fixated on what he thought he knew to be true, and now Dorie could be in danger. She made her voice very calm. “Listen carefully,” she said. “The girl is five years old and has lived with her family and the servants that whole time. You know perfectly well that fey-ridden bodies last no longer than a year, tops. Thus the old story about King Bertram’s lover, who started to stink, but the King couldn’t be convinced of that. This girl is human, but because of the circumstances around her birth, the curse is different. I still need a way to help her. Just as you helped me when I needed it.”

  The fanatic tension in his posture slowly died. He gestured at his furnace, at the bars of pig iron, the empty casting molds. “How can I send you back with ironskin if she doesn’t have a scar to cover?”

  Jane exhaled, tension unwinding. “That’s my problem,” she said. “One of them. I’d hoped you would have an idea.”

  “Short of welding her into a solid iron box?” His face twisted in a way that said it was only half a joke. When Jane did not move, he said, “Well, since you won’t be put off. I do have something. Something new.”

  He turned from his workbench to rummage around a thick wooden table piled high with slates covered in notations, papers, scraps of metal, stubs of lead, links of chain, and coils of rope—Jane wondered if that desk had changed at all since she’d been there four years ago. No, nearly five, now.

  “Ah. Here,” he said. He picked up a small, greasy looking jar containing a brown-and-black substance.

  “What is that?”

  “Tar,” he said. “Tar with flecks of iron. I’ve tried it out and it works almost as well as the ironskin itself. It’s horrible stuff and gets on everything, but you might find you can use it to find her weakness. The fey point of entry.”

  “Maybe I could,” agreed Jane, awed by the possibility. She turned the jar around in her hands. Even the outside was tacky to the touch, smeared with bits of iron-flecked tar Niklas hadn’t managed to scoop into the jar. “I remember you had a theory that the location of the curse might influence the type of curse—that similar curses cluster on similar parts of the body. I know you haven’t encountered one like hers … but do you have a suggestion of where to put the tar?”

  Niklas closed his fingers around iron, his expression closed off. “Say again what she does,” he said.

  He listened attentively as Jane told him everything she could remember. “You say she often waves her hands when she’s making things happen. Or looks in that direction, which sounds like her eyes or her mind. I’d try one of those three.”

  Jane shuddered. “Tar in her eyes?”

  Niklas shrugged. “If she is fey, maybe it’ll kill her off for you.”

  “If the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch,” Jane said wryly. She slipped the jar into the pocket of her dress. Took the few bills she’d brought inside and stuffed them into the iron cauldron Niklas used as a bank.

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye, while saying gruffly, “I guess you have a job now and that’s only right.”

  “And I didn’t when I came, and you helped me anyway,” she said. “You don’t know how much that meant to me.”

  Niklas shrugged, picked up a hammer, started pounding on an iron bar that didn’t look like it needed pounding.

  She knew that the gruffness, the dismissal, was only his manner. A side effect, perhaps, of the howling depression he’d once confessed to her was his curse. The outline of his shirt caught on the iron underneath, the tough cotton snagging on the metal ridges, the hang of the leather jacket deformed by the iron chest that squeezed him like a vise, as if a tighter cinching could drive out the poison. She remembered the shape of that rigid corset from when she’d tried to hug him goodbye. Old Ironsides, one of the boys had called him, trying to make an affectionate nickname for the man they worshiped.

  But Niklas didn’t take to affectionate nicknames. And the name was never mentioned in his presence again.

  The boy appeared in the doorway. “Hey miss, there’s a man says you’re gonna miss your train.” He shouted around
Niklas’s banging, slipping his words in with the familiarity of practice. “He says if you don’t come quick there may not be a car when you get there, as some hoodlums looked int’rested in dismantlin’ it.” A grin showed what he thought of the driver’s worries.

  Niklas did not stop pounding the iron bar with his hammer, though Jane turned again, said, “Thank you, Niklas. Thank you.”

  There was maybe a half-nod in return.

  “All right,” she said to the boy, pressing a coin into his hand. “You take care of him, right?” The boy nodded, his sharp chin bobbing, his knobbly fingers shutting tight around the coin.

  Jane clutched the jar in her pocket. She hurried through the door of the workshop and out the gate, hurried into the impatient orbit of the worried driver, leaving the foundry of the ironskin behind.

  * * *

  Jane’s thoughts flew back and forth as the train clattered into the country station. First Helen and her new, utterly foreign society. The cruel rumors about Mr. Rochart and Dorie. Then—the paste might work, the paste might work. She could try it on Dorie the very next morning—starting with her hands.

  As long as Dorie could touch iron without injury.

  Iron was the only thing that stopped the fey. The rules had been hard to pin down—still were inconclusive—because the fey didn’t take well to capture, after all. Besides, the war had gotten so tied up with superstition, as soldiers draped themselves in lucky iron charms—it was hard to tell what did and didn’t work.

  But one thing seemed pretty firm.

  If a fey took over a dead body, that fey could be killed. An iron spike—a feyjabber—directly into an artery destroyed that fey forever.

  Iron weakened fey, barred fey, wounded fey—it was why the iron mask on her cheek kept the fey curse from crossing the barrier and spilling out into the air, infecting others. If Dorie’s talent was similarly a foreign part of her, a fey parasite on a human host, so to speak—then it should work. But was Dorie more human … or more fey?