Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  Jane was sorry that the only window with a screen looked onto the forest, but regardless, she needed air. She rose to crank the window open, and then, down among the black cedars and thorny locusts, she saw it.

  A glimmer of blue light, streaked with orange.

  Chapter 9

  THE MISSES INGEL

  Even as she saw it, it vanished, and then there was only pre-dawn blackness, leavened by thin moonlight. Jane stared into the forest, her eyes wide open and scanning. Had she really seen that? Surely it was just a trick of her nightmare carrying over, showing her fey where none existed.

  Jane put a hand to her chest, uselessly trying to slow her heart through the touch of her fingers. She reasoned with herself. The fey had not been seen for five years. Why would one appear only when she was sleepless in the dead of the night? It was ridiculous. She had only imagined it. Wound up from her nightmares, her eyes insisted on seeing danger where there was none, lights where only blackness reigned. She turned off the fey-tech light, watching.

  There.

  No. Yes?

  Jane grabbed her dressing gown and hurried down the side stairs by her room, out the side door. Well before she got to the back of the estate she was wondering what she hoped to accomplish by running outside without shoes or clothes or even a feyjabber. But that didn’t stop her feet from flying.

  She stood twenty feet from the forest, panting and searching the woods for more blue light. She didn’t dare take a step closer into the darkness than that. She studied the edges of her vision as the moonlight glimmered off leaves and dew and played havoc with her sight and nerves. Had she really seen anything? And what about the last time she was out at dusk—had she really heard the sharp bzzzt of fey then, or was this house just getting to her?

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Jane spun to see Poule standing there, her sturdy form solid and black in the night. Moonlight lit her grey hair silver, spun itself along the length of the dingy red quilted dressing gown the woman wore. Picked out the glints of metal at her wrists, and a lump in an inside breast pocket such as Jane had seen the first day, and taken for a blackjack.

  Jane backed up, as if she expected the odd butler to kneecap her and haul her back. “I thought I saw a fey,” she said. The grass was wet and cool on her hot feet.

  Poule’s grey eyebrows disappeared into her hair. She went toward the forest line, closer than Jane, leaned forward as if scenting the air. The night was quiet around them. Then she shook her head and returned to Jane. “They’re not there now.”

  Jane’s heart thumped at the turn of phrase. “But you think they were? It’s not just my imagination? They’re supposed to be gone.”

  Poule’s eyes held no comfort. “The fey won’t ever be completely gone, and you know that deep inside, don’t you? Know it as well as we do.”

  We? “I guess I do,” Jane said reluctantly. She felt exposed by Poule’s assessment of her, and questions wrote themselves in the furrows of her brow.

  “You don’t have your mask on,” the short woman said.

  Jane realized that just as Poule said it, automatically tilted her head forward to let her hair swing over her cursed cheek.

  “You’re leaking, I think,” Poule continued. “It’s odd, feeling it from you. Usually it’s just around the fey that you become bombarded by feelings not your own. Feelings you don’t want. At least for dwarves—humans certainly aren’t that perceptive, or you’d have been able to spot all those humans taken over by fey long before the bodies rotted and gave it away by the stink.” She gestured back at the forest. “I can’t swear if the blasted blue-things were there before or not, but I don’t scent them now.”

  Jane wasn’t sure how to interpret this barrage of information, but her tongue found tactless words before her brain had caught up and said: “A dwarf? You’re a dwarf?” Immediately she realized how rude it was to ask, as rude as asking someone what their curse was.

  It was the first wry grin Jane had seen on the old woman, and it made her seem less threatening. “Half,” she said. “I’m havlen, which translates as a half-thing. We aren’t very kind to those who stray from the mountains, you see.”

  Now that Jane knew the woman’s lineage, she wondered how she could have missed it. It also explained the glints of metal she’d seen at Poule’s wrists. “Do dwarves really wear their mail all the time?” she said. “Doesn’t that get uncomfortable?”

  “Well, not all our mail,” said Poule. She slid up the arm of her dressing gown to show that the chain mail wristlets only covered her forearms. “You can make a concession to fashion without going whole hog. But tell me what you need for Dorie’s gloves.”

  “What?” said Jane. The prying made her tongue rude. “How do you know about the gloves?” She turned back to the forest, watching the black branches sway in the wind.

  Poule shrugged. “There are eyes in the walls. A little bird told me. Pick one.”

  Jane cringed against the being-watched feeling that she hated. How could she trust anybody when they refused to trust her?

  Poule rubbed the back of her neck beneath the iron grey hair and stared wordlessly into the forest. Finally she said, “Have you seen him go in there?”

  Jane thought she had seen—but she had no proof. Stubbornly she matched Poule question for question. “Why would he do that?”

  Poule looked at Jane with a fierce black eye. Her gaze seemed to effortlessly pierce the veil of hair to the scarred flesh beneath. “If you see him go in, tell me immediately. Promise.”

  “I can’t promise anything,” said Jane stubbornly. She didn’t know if Mr. Rochart really went into the forest, but she wasn’t sure she trusted Poule any more than anybody else in the house. Her duty was to herself, then Dorie, then Mr. Rochart, in that order, and she wasn’t about to make any promises she didn’t know the meaning of.

  The dwarf looked at her as if she knew what was passing through Jane’s head. Snorted. Then turned and tromped back into the house, her loose grey hair swinging silver behind her, her slippers leaving darker impressions in the dewy grass. Behind her she called, “Do you want linseed oil or not? Come and get it, if you’re getting it.”

  The night was empty when you were alone. Jane hurried after before she could be left at the boundary of the woods. The last ray of sunlight didn’t mean very much when there was no sunlight at all.

  Jane followed Poule on another winding route, an echo of following Martha into the attic. Except this way led to a small white door, partway into the abandoned wing. It was all quite dark, but Poule flicked open a small electric torch that was not the blue of fey technology, but rather a warm yellow light. Jane kept thinking she should really go get her shoes, but it seemed like if she left now she would never see Poule again, and this opportunity would vanish like the master of the house.

  The white door opened to a descending circular staircase. Poule’s voice floated back as they picked their way down. “The iron paste for Dorie’s hands is clever,” she said.

  “It’s not that clever,” demurred Jane. “A man in the city gave me the paste. I didn’t think of it.”

  “Yes, but you tried it on her hands. Why her hands? I mean, Dorie’s curse isn’t exactly the same as yours, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said, thinking about the first question. “It felt right, I guess. But her curse isn’t the same at all.” She shook her head, recalling what she had told Niklas. “No visible scar, no obvious drawback … Is it because it happened before birth? Because she was unborn when her mother was taken over by the fey?”

  But the staircase stopped there, opened up on a hallway. The walls turned to living rock that oozed water into channels on the floor, and so Poule’s only response was, “Mind the mushrooms.”

  Several steps down the quiet stone passageway was a wide, red-painted door, the bottom two inches painted with a thick off-white paint that Jane guessed to be some sort of water repellent, for when the floor flooded.

 
; As Poule opened the door Jane heard a mechanical whirring inside, like the sounds heard around Niklas’s foundry. A familiar sound, a homey sound. The large set of rooms on the other side of the door was a studio like Mr. Rochart had, except here in the cellar, down in the damp and dark. Poule pulled on a cord and switched on a glass light that burned with the same warm yellow of her torch.

  “Is that fey technology?” said Jane, surprised.

  “Of course not,” said Poule, but she didn’t look offended. “Pure electricity; runs off a generator that’s the pinnacle of dwarven achievement. Or at least the pinnacle of my achievement. I do a sweat-ton to keep this old house moving, you know.”

  The swinging yellow light picked out odds and ends of tools and machinery that littered the room: pipes and glass jars, and in the corner a bed and dresser on a metal platform that lifted them clear of possible floods or spills.

  Jane stood, not knowing where to go, but Poule motioned her to a beautiful little table made of twisting metal and wavery green glass. Jane stared at it as she sat down. Dwarf trade had been at its height two hundred years earlier, when Queen Maud favored the dwarves and kept them around her court. On her sudden death, her nephew, King Philip, declared the dwarves immoral and possibly regicidal, and they’d packed up from the court and gone home. Trade for the durable, beautiful dwarven craftsmanship had crawled to a halt.

  But the dwarves had still been inventing and designing. The table was clearly made by dwarves, and just as clearly it was no style that she had ever seen before. In human terms, it was priceless.

  And it was laden with the crumby remains of teatime, a small oil can, and two screwdrivers.

  Poule cleared these away, wiped down the table with the hem of her dressing gown. She sat down on the other chair, and Jane realized then how large she felt on her own seat. Poule was perhaps halfway between average human-sized and average dwarf-sized, which was why she could pass for simply a very short woman. The chairs and table were clearly made precisely for her—precisely by her, possibly—and it was just enough of a height difference to raise Jane’s knees above her hips and put her off-balance.

  “If this were full-sized you could sell it for a fortune,” Jane said. “Er. Human-sized.” She bit her tongue.

  Poule snorted. “Haven’t you humans learned to stop buying from ‘the other’? That’s what got you into this mess in the first place. Buying all that blasted fey technology instead of continuing to develop your own.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me,” said Jane. “You should have seen the terrible state of the trolleys when I started looking for a job. It was about six months after the war, so just when the rationing of the biggest bluepacks had finally run out. Practically nothing was running.” This was a good topic for an enjoyable rant, and clearly Poule agreed. “I’d grown up hearing about the incredible culture and technology in the city, you know, but by the time I got there, it had practically ground to a halt as the bluepacks all died, one by one. The factories, the trolleys, the cinemas—no one could run anything.”

  “You’d sat on your arses and let the fey run your lives,” said Poule. “And now you have to start from square one. That’s why the dwarves never went down that road.”

  “We’re not all as smart as the dwarves,” said Jane. She felt a moment of kinship with the short woman as Poule laughed in appreciation. Here they were in the black cold basement of Silver Birch, dank and damp under the damaged wing, and yet … perhaps this woman could be a friend. Or at least … an ally?

  But Poule turned the force of her attention back to Jane. “I feel your rage,” she said.

  “I know,” said Jane shortly. She swung her hair to cover her cheek again. “It’s why I wear the mask.”

  “I mean I feel it extra now,” said Poule. “You got angrier when I talked about the fey.”

  “Yes,” said Jane, annoyed. She had a strong urge to wriggle away from the examination.

  “So you were less angry before,” Poule said patiently. “Not enough that humans would notice the difference in how they feel around you. Sometimes they feel cranky—sometimes crankier. They don’t know how to put it aside regardless. But like I said, dwarves are more perceptive. I feel the shifts.”

  “You can put it aside?” said Jane.

  Poule nodded. “Not all of it. But it’s a matter of thinking about what you’re feeling and separating it out from what you should be feeling, if you take my meaning. Get rid of the feelings that aren’t yours. Find your composure. Dwarves can do that a little—it’s bloody hard, but it’s something we practice, for dealing with the fey.” A short, hard laugh. “Some of us have had a lot of practice.…” She trailed off. “Well. If sometimes you are just a little shirty and sometimes you are flying-off-the-handle, rip-roaring mad—then you do have some control over it, don’t you?”

  Jane thought back. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “when the fire rages up against my mask I feel it. Like a hot orange flame. And then … and then I try to make it go away. Imagine the fire going out. Like it’s being dowsed with water or something. Or Helen used to stroke my arm and I would imagine it rubbing out the fire.” She looked up at Poule. “But I didn’t think it was really doing any good.”

  Poule nodded thoughtfully. “You might continue trying it,” she said. Her calm assurance made Jane think she should take this woman seriously. Poule leaned back in her chair. “Now, tell me. What do you want for Dorie?”

  “Ironskin,” said Jane, unconsciously touching her bare cheek.

  “What you have wouldn’t work on hands.”

  “I know,” Jane said. “I’m going to make some gloves that have the iron tar inside. I found some linen in the attic. Now I need the linseed oil to paint the linen and turn it into an oilcloth, so I can make a sandwich of the fabric that has the tar inside it.” She sighed. “Hopefully that will stop the tar from leaking out, because tar’s been getting on everything and I’m sure it’s frustrating Martha no end, though she only looks at us and shakes her head.”

  Poule drummed her fingers on the table. In the swaying yellow light she had a funny self-satisfied look, like she was bursting to tell Jane something. “What about a fabric that has iron wires woven through it? A sort of mesh.”

  “That might work,” Jane said slowly. “I had thought of chain mail, but it would be too bulky. But can you make wires thin enough?”

  “We do back home,” said Poule. “We draw the wires thin enough to crochet. Some people use them to make jewelry—a different take on iron charms. Which—who knows if they work—bloody superstition if you ask me. Well. I’ve been experimenting with these iron threads to see what applications they might have against those blue brutes. The iron mesh cloth has potential.”

  “It might work,” agreed Jane. “It might be even better than my idea—no tar to leak through. Do you have a sample of the cloth?”

  By way of answer, Poule reached under her chair and pulled out a cotton bag. “A cloth and a bit of spare time on my hands,” she said. From the bag she pulled a small pair of long mesh gloves and slid them across the green glass tabletop to Jane.

  “Oh, how perfect…,” breathed Jane. She touched the metal-threaded cloth. It was supple enough to move with fingers, like a second skin. Yet it seemed like the iron was woven closely enough to keep Dorie’s talents suppressed. The gloves fastened up the side with little iron clasps, so it would be possible to wriggle Dorie’s hands in.

  Poule pulled the gloves away from Jane’s touch. Leaned back in her chair, flicking her grey hair behind her. “The question is: what do you want to pay for them?”

  Jane fumbled. “I’m sure Mr. Rochart will pay you what you need, when I tell him.…”

  Poule’s eyes were friendly but firm, the creases set in a way that recalled stone. “I don’t make the rules,” she said. “That’s the one thing about both the fey and the dwarvven”—and Jane clearly heard the foreign tongue as Poule pronounced the word in her own language—“there’s certain rules. An
d one is that everything has a price. Everything between your world and ours has to be fairly bought and paid for.” She flipped the screwdriver between nimble fingers like a worry stone. “And it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m havlen, a half-thing. Some things still apply.”

  Jane said nothing, thinking through her history, attempting to come up with a suitable answer before she let her tongue say something foolish or insulting. The fey drove dreadful bargains, seeking your talent and life and anything that truly mattered to you that they could get; they sealed deals you didn’t know existed.

  Whereas no such reputation existed for the dwarves, though they were sometimes said to be cold and miserly. “Wouldn’t give you a smile you hadn’t paid for,” was a common saying about the oft-surly folk. They traded their fine engineering and design for things of the surface: fruits and wheat and wool. Jane had none of these things.

  The dwarf leaned back in her chair. Her dressing gown shifted just enough to show that whatever she always carried in her breast pocket had a hard rectangular outline, and like a flash Jane knew what it was.

  The one surface culture dwarves shared with humans, that the dwarves were known to love with all their fierce, passionately intellectual hearts. Wasn’t that why so many of the court poets had been dwarves, until Queen Maud’s death put an end to the days of civil friendship?

  Books.

  The dwarves loved books. They read them in vast, devouring quantities, and they wrote them, too—in their electric-lit caves alongside their molten metal and their turning gears the dwarvven scribbled out great gothic tragedies, pouring out their hidden romantic souls into tales of forbidden love and secret temptation, blood-soaked mysteries and swashbuckling pirates.