Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  Knowing full well she shouldn’t, Jane edged Nina’s door open. A little—and then more, searching the spill of moonlight on the unmade sheets. She unwound her veil, and both her eyes and some unknown sense confirmed it point-blank.

  No one was in Nina’s room.

  Jane shut the door and found herself walking down the hall, away from her own room, toward the stairs that led to the studio. Knowledge of what she should do didn’t seem to have any effect on the fact that she wanted to know.

  She wanted to know if Nina was really in his studio, and if so, exactly what that meant. Was Edward really performing some secret surgery on Nina in the dead of night—or was there another, more obvious explanation for what went on behind closed doors after midnight?

  What exactly had he meant by the things he had done wrong?

  Was Nina one of the unforgivable things? Blanche?

  It would be smarter not to know, not to torture herself with the truth. It certainly was none of her business. It was very off-limits.

  And still she found herself climbing the stairs to stand at the door in the attic, an open door into a room lit with rectangles of blue moonlight.

  She went softly into the room.

  His worktable in the center of the room was crowded with his mask-making supplies—clay, metal tools—and a white wet towel covered his latest work. The clay bucket next to the table was nearly empty, its wooden shell containing only an inch of blue-black water.

  She put her hand to the wet towel, wondering what she would see—a beautiful Nina? The grotesque version? Or more heart-wrenching still—herself, her whole self?

  Her fingers trembled on the cloth, and then out of the corner of her eye, under the side door—she thought it was the moonlight, too, but no, that was light, the blue of fey-tech light.

  He was there.

  Jane left the cloth, slipped silently across the room to the door. Ever so quietly, before she could even think about what she was doing, she slid it open.

  It took a second to resolve the scene in the small white room, and then she did. Edward, in white coat and mask like a surgeon, bending over the face of an unconscious woman wearing black satin. The scalpel in his fingers gleamed in the blue light.

  On the wall hung one mask, a beautiful mask.

  Nina.

  Chapter 15

  MAY YOU BE BORN PLAIN

  Surely he could hear her heart racing. But he didn’t turn, didn’t look up.

  Edward ran his scalpel around the woman’s face, as close to the hairline as possible. Just before the ears and just under the jawline. Then he worked underneath the flap of skin with a spatulate tool until he could peel the face up and away. It hung up around the nostrils and eyelids and he had to fiddle with it until it lifted away completely.

  The woman’s face—Jane could hardly think Nina in connection with it—was horrifying underneath. All red like a war victim—Jane shut her eyes. When she forced herself to reopen them, Edward was settling Nina’s skin back into place.

  But no, not skin.

  A mask.

  A clay mask, matte white and opaque and sculpted by a master craftsman.

  From Jane’s angle, the clay mask did not blend with the rest of the woman at all. It was rigid, dead white. Unthinkably unlike human skin. Edward picked up a delicate brush, thick with glue, and began to attach the mask to the red scalp line, the red neck. He pulled the woman’s skin, the skin of the mask, as he bound the two together. Despite his orders to the contrary, the window was open to the night, and the sheet draped across the wooden table fluttered in the breeze.

  His hands—no, that wasn’t just the blue-lit room—his hands were faintly blue. Jane made some sound, too tiny to be a gasp.

  Slowly he turned and looked through her. She backed up one step. His eyes—she had never seen them like this. They were glassy, filmed over as if she were seeing them through stagnant lake water, through layers of mold and algae.

  The blue in his hands died, till Jane could almost doubt that she’d seen it. A small zip, a pop. And then he was looking at her, and the glass in his gaze was gone, and he was not smiling, but he was there.

  “How long have you been standing there?” he said.

  “Long enough,” Jane said in a low voice. “Long enough to see you peel a woman’s face back like the skin off a rabbit. You’re no artist. Nor a surgeon. Surgeons can’t do what you just did.” Her hands clenched, went instinctively to where she’d once kept a feyjabber at her side. “You’ve got fey technology.”

  This wasn’t like Dorie, who couldn’t help it.

  He was in league with them.

  Edward turned back to his work, running his fingers along Nina’s cheek. He seemed to be searching for what to say.

  Dazed, she thought: This must be what it means, his hints, his allusions. The presence of bluepacks in this household, to run our lamps and motorcars and machines, long after everyone else’s have died.

  He is working with the fey.

  From the table he picked up a fine sandcloth, began brushing away pilled glue and blood. “You will leave me now,” he said. “You will exit my life. You will denounce me to the world.”

  Her breath caught, hearing not command in his tone but sharp regret, an envisioned future. “Not that,” she said. “Never that.”

  “You will make your excuses then, and leave us.”

  “An invented dying aunt,” said Jane, and she seemed hardly to have the breath for the words. Her feet took her two steps closer, one step back—she froze there, watching as he gently teased the mask’s eyelids in place with a long tool like an ice pick. One word, that she hoped would bring her closer and not farther away.

  “Why?”

  Why do you have this skill, why are you using it, why. Tell me, tell me why, and in that telling let there be some measure of explanation that will make it okay, will make it so I don’t have to hate you, don’t have to pick up my stone-still feet and run to my sister in the city.

  Why.

  In that silence she seemed to hear him swallow his fear. Then the words rolled out, deep and velvet, above the woman in black with the frozen white face.

  “Once upon a time, a long time ago,” he said, “back when the waters were low and calm and the stars were hardly hung in the sky, there was a young boy who wanted to be an artist. The fey were different in those days, back when the air was clean and the sky blue. More substantial. They had bodies, especially when they were in the forests, and they did not need to steal forms from mankind. They were as dangerous then as they are now … but they were reclusive. They rarely attacked unless provoked, and so they were like recluse spiders, or copperhead hydras—you hardly heard of them unless you happened to live right at the edges of the forests where they walked. And then you knew how not to provoke.”

  And you provoked them, thought Jane, for around the flowery description of a long time ago she heard this fey tale like heartbeats in her throat. My father was cold and I was lonely. I went into the forest with my sketchpad. I sketched beauty.

  “Well, go on,” said Jane when he stopped. “What sort of things provoked them? Back then.” The roughness in her voice broke against the spell his words were weaving, fell away.

  The ice pick coaxed eyelashes from the clay lids. “Great beauty. Great artistic talent. Passion. There used to be a saying in the towns near the fey, though it was forgotten long before the wars—”

  “May you be born plain,” breathed Jane along with him.

  “Yes.” His voice rolled on, filling the room with the long-ago world. She closed her mouth, certain her words would derail him from the only way he could get through this story. It had to be distant, it had to be a fantastical tale to spin itself out of a pile of horrid truths and a story of me. Me, I lived this.

  “Some average men set up trade, of a sort, with the fey,” he said, “and many curious things were brought over to ease human existence. Blue-lit fey technology replaced human invention, and it never occurred
to the men who traded for bluepacks to run lights and cameras that everything had its own price, its own story.

  “Scalpel. No, that one.” She came just close enough to hand it to him, then backed away. He slid it into a nostril of the mask, cleaning up the edges.

  “Now, this boy was not from the forests.” He was a small boy who rattled around a too-big house. “He knew little of the fey, hardly any of the tales, and so he wandered into the woods, sketching birds and animals.” He was talented for a such a small boy. His birds seemed as though they would startle and take to the air. “And when a beautiful shimmering woman appeared, he sketched her. When she invited him home for dinner, he accepted.

  “Gauze.” He pressed it under the woman’s ear, wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Regret dripped from him like the beads of sweat.

  “Go on,” Jane said softly. She had heard these stories. The tales of the travelers who ate a golden apple hanging from a tree in winter, drank water from a cup held by a beautiful woman.

  Ingested something belonging to the fey.

  The sleeve had left a pink streak on his forehead. He bent over the woman again, his voice dropping. “But when the young boy tried to go home, the Queen held fast to the fey inside of him, and he could not depart. The Queen had chosen him for her consort. Now those whom she chooses are sometimes let go, back into the world, many years later. Decades. When their families have long since turned to dust. When her attention has finally turned to a new … toy.” He dropped the pinkened gauze into a metal can. Studied his patient. “Again and again, the story is the same. The consort is let go, and paid, in some fashion, with a gift for serving the Queen all those years.” He spread his right hand wide, as if contemplating the fey gift lurking in his fingertips.

  Then he blew skin dust from the woman’s forehead and turned to face Jane. For the first time he appeared to study her.

  Only then did Jane realize that she had never rewound the veil after peering into Nina’s room. She felt shock from him at seeing her bare face when he did not expect it—how did she know his shock, when his expression did not change?

  More, how did she know the myriad things she suddenly seemed to know about him, and her mind raced back through the day, hearing what he didn’t say in his story just now, knowing each breath and feeling in the forest, feeling him touch her as she fell and thinking calmly—he loves me—mind racing, saying, that was all just today, today when I was without iron, today I knew that, today—

  “Is Dorie still all right?”

  “Yes,” said Jane.

  His shoulders moved—the tiniest bit of relief. Quietly he said, “Come, see how Nina looks.”

  Mind whirling, Jane forced herself to approach the table, to focus. Her first thought was that the work seemed surprisingly fake—the mask was dead white, the line where it had been glued into place clearly visible, outlined in a thin strip of red. Nina’s eyes were open and staring, though she remained unconscious. They seemed to be set a long way behind the mask.

  “What do you think?” He touched Nina’s chin, delicately. “It will blend into her own skin very shortly. I will bandage it for now to keep it together, but in a couple days, you won’t see those lines. She will look as though she was born that way.”

  “She will be very beautiful,” admitted Jane. She could admit his talent as an artist. And yet … “She looks … fey.” She remembered the face floating in the forest.

  “Where do you think our notion of beauty comes from?” said Edward.

  “Do you think so?” said Jane. “Somehow that’s more disturbing than anything else.”

  The white mask glowed palest pink at the corners of the cheeks. Paint? Or life, slowly filling the clay? Jane’s breath caught at the beauty Nina would have, and she thought: I could be that beautiful. But in the next instant—no. No, all I want is to be normal … and I still want that.

  She saw him at work, she was shocked, she was repulsed. And yet it did not lessen the fierce desire.

  Normal, she thought, like a hunger in her belly. He could make me normal.

  Edward brushed aside another fleck of dust, picked up a roll of bandages, and started securing the woman’s face. “So you see,” he said, “why Dorie must not give in to that side of her nature. I fight against their gifts, and fail. Just like I once fought against the Fey Queen’s hold and failed. There is great evil in that failure.”

  His eyes were shadowed again, even in the bright workroom light. She felt his pain, clutching deep in his chest. More—she really did feel it. She was sure of that now. She could feel his shame as if it were her own, and it was only just now, since she had removed the iron from her fey-cursed cheek. She put a hand to her bare red cheek and found it was blazing hot.

  The shame of … letting others suffer for his mistakes? His daughter, but first … his wife. Fey-bombed and taken over while pregnant. A wonder Dorie had survived. “And then,” she said in a low voice, “the Fey Queen returned.”

  A short nod confirmed that horror. “Dorie must not give in to her curse,” he said. “Almost six and can’t dress herself? No. She must be strong.”

  Jane was going to say that strength wasn’t the issue—that bottling up wasn’t strength, a whole host of things she was discovering this last week, this day, now. She put that aside to convince him, she must convince him that her way was right. She swallowed. “The Fey Queen told Dorie she was her mother.” Something niggled at the back of her mind about that but she ignored it in favor of listening to the emotions that were suddenly rampaging through Edward, trying to sort out the cacophony she was hearing. “If I help Dorie learn how to use her fey gifts, then she’ll be able to defend herself if the Fey Queen tries to take her away.”

  “To defend herself,” he said, and hope lit his whispered words. “To be strong where I was weak.…” He laid the bandages on Nina’s breast, and suddenly his eyes and insides were all aflame. “Tell me more about what you and Dorie have done together.”

  “Well, we’ve practiced diverting things out of the air. In case a fey bomb were thrown at her. I don’t know why a fey claiming to be her mother would do that, but…” She trailed off, confused by his nearness, by the heat that billowed up inside him as he came toward her, nearer, nearer, one foot nudging hers now, now he stood right there, and it was not something that had ever been going to happen in this timeline, it was so not this Jane that she could hardly breathe.

  He gently touched her chin, and when she did not jerk away, he drew his fingers down her ruined cheek. “Doesn’t it hurt you when she uses that cursed side of hers?”

  Her cheek flamed where his finger touched it. “Not so much as I expected.” Speaking and breathing seemed impossible; she was overwhelmed by her discoveries, by him. “That’s what I think is so important. That if we let the poison run out … it doesn’t stay inside and fester and make us die a slow, lingering death.” He ran his thumb along her bottom lip. “So … I think our work … is important.…”

  Edward bent his head and kissed her. The new sense of him seemed to draw extra fire into her, fire that had been born in his body. Like drinking in the heat that he carried. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see whether he closed his. With her eyes closed, she was just Jane, on any branch of time.

  Then there was air around her mouth and she breathed.

  “Your work is very important,” said Edward. “I want you to be able to do it to the best of your ability.”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned in, kissed her again, again. “I will get you anything you need.” A flicker of something dark—and frightened?—shuddered through him, and when she opened her eyes she realized his were now open. Watching her ruined face. Warmth and ice ran through him so intermingled that she could not tell what he felt, what he wanted. She stepped back, dropping his hands from her own.

  The woman on the table was still and silent. Her unearthly beauty filled the room. The woman, the room, Jane, were cold, cold, but Edward’s heat could drive a
ll that away. She knew what she wanted. For that one moment she set aside all knowledge that there was something about her he feared and put a daring hand to his belt loop. “Close your eyes and kiss me again.”

  He obeyed. His lips touched hers and heat poured into them. She drowned, was engulfed, immolated.

  But something rocked his body—tension, fear—and she realized there was noise from below, from the darkened house. Pounding on the outside studio door, short heavy footsteps bursting through—Poule. Jane stepped back from Edward, but not quickly enough for the quick-witted dwarf to miss the truth, she knew.

  Poule’s eyes darted around the room, taking everything in, fell on Edward within a single heartbeat. “Come quick,” Poule said. “The kitchen. It’s Blanche.”

  Edward turned for the door, pausing only long enough to say to Jane: “Stay here with Nina. I don’t want her to be alone when she wakes up.”

  Then the two of them were pounding down the stairs and Jane was alone, trembling emotion crashing through her body, swaying her tired feet. Jane looked down at the unconscious woman. She was so stiff and silent—it was all wrong for Nina to be silent, quiet, powerless.

  Despite his orders, Jane could not stay in the studio. She was propelled irresistibly after him, after Edward who both wanted and feared her. Softly down the stairs, clutching her robe around her. In the hallway to the kitchen she moved like a ghost, her bare feet quiet and cold on the scarred stone floor.

  Voices. Edward, calming; a woman, sobbing and spitting words.

  Jane crept closer, until she stood concealed in the shadows of the hallway.

  Blanche Ingel stood in the kitchen like a crazed Shakspyr heroine, all in white with unbound hair. Her left hand, the one she had cut on a thorn earlier that evening, streamed blood onto the floor. Her right hand held a silver knife.

  “Get it out, get it out,” she cried, but it was her eyes that frightened Jane. They were glassy and wild.

  They were like Edward’s had been in the studio.