Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

* * *

  Dream.

  I am the Fey Queen, and Edward is at my command. When I tell him to go, fetch, stay, he does. I have complete power over his hands, his body, his soul.

  But I would not command him to do evil, Jane thinks, I would command delightful things. Draw me a picture, I say. Paint a portrait of you, me, Dorie all together on the back lawn, with gold sunlight glinting from our clothes and hair. You swing her around till she is nothing but laughter. Show us how happy we are.

  Dream further back. Go to somewhere in the middle of the Great War.

  I am the Fey Queen, and I have lost Edward, I have let him go, he has won his freedom in a game of wits. (I did not pay enough attention to him; I was planning battles.) I am angry, but I do not show it. Instead I smile with blinding beauty and I grant him a gift. A special gift, the use of his hands, those sensitive artistic hands. And I tell him his hands will do grand things, and I will come to him and show him how.

  No, thinks Jane. I will not be a part of this, of your plan to force Edward to give you the world. Did I coerce Edward to give me that face? Did I command? Then I was wrong. I reject this side of me, of what I could be, of what I might have been.

  Are you certain? Look what you could be, with me.

  Yes, says Jane. I am certain.…

  Show me more?

  Dream further back. Twenty, forty—sixty years.

  I am the Fey Queen and I am listening. My people tell me that human factories are polluting our woods, destroying our homes. But another fey has an idea. We will distract the humans by solving their problems before them. Fey will run their mechanical horses, heat their habitat, power their nighttime suns. They will have no need to invent, to destroy us.

  Yes, it is clever and it will work for now. But it will not work forever. The humans will go back to their factories eventually, and then … there may well be war in our future. Within the next century, I suspect.

  Oh, it depresses me, and I need distraction. A small child wanders through the woods, red-faced from another fight with his father. I have watched him often. He cheers me with his drawings; he is the cleverest, sweetest, brightest boy. He will be gifted by my presence, for humans age more slowly in our company; three years seem as one. (A gift for us, too, or he would be over in a blink.)

  Yes, here he comes, see him smile at the face I create for him, see him shyly extend his sketchbook for the pretty lady to see.…

  Oh, he will do just fine.

  Dream. One thousand years ago.

  I am the Fey Queen and I am here. Through storm and change and wind and you and all that is to come I will be here forever. You may reject me, but you cannot stop me. You will be part of my always and ever, a leaf of my tree, a dress of the season, a blink of eternity falling in a slow blinding crash.…

  No, says Jane. I won’t let you, no. No no no.

  I am Jane.

  I am Jane I am Jane I am Jane I am …

  * * *

  When she awoke there was white sunlight on her body. She sat up and her head rang. “Edward?” she said.

  But no one was in the room.

  She patted her head where her hair itched—there were no bandages there. Either Edward hadn’t done that part or perhaps he’d never started her face at all. She didn’t know if she was ready to look in the mirror and find out.

  But she would have to look sometime. Jane levered herself to the floor and wavered there until the dizziness subsided. She remembered having strange dreams, but the only fragment that was clear was a moment when someone accused her of coercing Edward. Compelling him.

  Like the fey.

  Deep inside she swore to herself that she would never do it again. She had not known she was doing it to Miss Davenport. But she had known she was coercing Edward. Once was enough for a lifetime.

  Her feet seemed steady, so she inched along to the first door, stepped out into the workroom.

  A breath. And she would turn and face that mirror, accept what she had chosen for herself.

  And then a woman screamed.

  Jane stumbled through the workroom, catching only glimpses of a messy workbench, a new mask hanging, things she hardly registered as she flew downstairs on stumbling feet. Dorie. Dorie.

  The front door was open, but Cook stood just inside of it, blocking her way. “You won’t be wanting to go out there, lass.” She peered down at Jane and her kindly face went white.

  “Jane,” Jane said. “I’m Jane.”

  Cook’s hand crept to her apron pocket and suddenly there was a feyjabber in her hand.

  “I am,” said Jane. The newness of the mask was making her dizzy and she desperately wanted to lie down, but she had to find Dorie.

  The feyjabber wavered. Who had screamed?

  “You know me,” said Jane. “You told me the story about your sister, remember? ‘May you be born plain.’”

  The older woman’s lips trembled. “Would that you had listened.”

  A sudden bear hug from a small girl knocked her off balance. Dorie had flung herself through the door and knocked Jane backward. “Mother!” cried Dorie.

  “I was so worried when I heard the scream,” said Jane. She drew back. “What did you call me?”

  “Pretty lady,” said Dorie. “Mother.” She hugged Jane harder and her affection billowed up bright and strong.

  Jane put a shaky hand to her face. It was cold and smooth and when she ran her fingers along her cheek it was unscarred and whole. Confusion—if her cheek was unscarred, how was she still sensing Dorie’s feelings without the benefit of the fey curse? Was she immediately, full-on using the mask in the same way she’d used her curse? But that confusion seemed a minor detail compared to being called “Mother.”

  “Where’s a mirror?” Jane said to Cook, but Cook frowned.

  “Don’t know that you’ll be wanting to find one.”

  The one on the landing, Jane suddenly remembered, and she led Dorie toward the garret, to the stairs where the mirror suddenly rushed out at you. Her steps faltered the closer she came.

  No bandages, as she’d felt. But he had finished. The thin red line encircled her face where he’d finished his surgery.

  But it was not the mask she’d seen last night—the beautiful version of her with the chipped forehead. “Dorie,” she said. “Whom did your doll look like?”

  “Mother,” said Dorie, and Jane nodded, her gut cold as stone.

  She had the face of the Mother doll.

  Of the Fey Queen.

  “Stay inside,” she told Dorie, and she ran down the stairs, pushing past Cook and out the back door, rocks stinging her bare feet. Everyone from the house had hurried out and stood, openmouthed, hands to hearts or mouths.

  A fey hung in the air on the back lawn by the Maypole, a swirl of blue-orange light with an imaged face like the Mother doll, the fey Jane had seen in the clearing.

  The Fey Queen.

  Advancing on Nina.

  Jane shouted at the crowd: “Get back inside!” and they looked at her, startled, as if trying to figure out who she was. Only a few of them obeyed.

  But the Fey Queen listened. Instantly dropped Nina and shot through the air to Jane. Hung there in front of Jane, reflecting her new face back to her.

  “You’re not taking my body,” Jane croaked.

  “Made for me,” the fey said.

  “He wouldn’t…” But the proof was on her face.

  “Was your. Purpose here.” The swirls tightened; Jane felt the mental effort as the fey switched into a more human way of speaking. “He’s done it before.”

  “Dorie’s mother…,” said Jane. But what had been nagging her about Edward’s story finally hit home. “She died almost five years ago. But Dorie is nearly six.”

  “I am Dorie’s mother,” hissed the fey. “That form was just the bearer. I needed a body, so I found him a town girl, someone silly enough to be pleased by the master’s notice. Once I helped him seduce her, she was ours. A strong body, even in death. I kept that
body a year before the villagers noticed the stink. Your live body will last me much longer. Decades, before it wrinkles and I kill it.” Pitiless eyes. “Once you’ve been the consort of the Fey Queen, you’ll do anything to regain that.”

  “You lie,” said Jane desperately. “He has a conscience.”

  “A conscience, bah. A human thing, and he is practically one of us. He was with us years and years, after all. You have seen his hands, yes? How he can sculpt beauty out of earth? We did not gift him with that. This is a talent worthy of the fey if ever there was one.”

  “But he loves me,” Jane said softly, and somehow all that was left in the words was the wishful thinking of a silly girl. “I love him.”

  The Queen sent a wave through her that somehow she knew was the fey equivalent of ostentatious yawning. “In one sense, you shall be with him,” the Queen said. “The other form is nice enough, but yours is the one designed for me. I have seen what you are made of, you know. Your mind will accept my patterns very nicely. We will go together well, after you succumb. I will have it.”

  Then the blue-orange advanced on Jane, and Jane was too despairing to run, for the proof of what the Queen said was all too visible. He had given her the Queen’s face, and there could be no other interpretation of that.

  She had no defenses, none, and then suddenly there was a wall of iron in front of her and the Fey Queen was crashing into it.

  “Run,” said Poule, and she shoved her back toward the house, lifting her makeshift shield at the Queen.

  Of course the Queen could go around iron, even a large piece of it, but the brief moment of surprise at hitting it dead on stunned the Queen so she only hung flickering for eight, ten seconds, before she could move again. Jane moved her nerveless feet faster and faster, flung herself over the iron threshold just as the Queen pounced on her ankles and came up with only air.

  Rage in her head, from the Queen, then enticement. Lust, love, lulling, luring Jane to step back across that threshold and out into the open.

  Jane slammed the door. She flung herself to the floor, on top of her hands, and though the compulsion seized her till she wept, she had just enough strength from all her work with the fey curse to keep her hands curled under her belly, her knees drawn to her chest.

  From outside came Nina’s voice, shouting no, no, no, and there was nothing Jane could do, for the compulsion still pulled her like a string pulls a top to its apex, plucking her with the fey call, and with her own human guilt, for despite not adoring Nina she did not want her to be consumed by the Fey Queen.

  The compulsion died even as the door opened and Poule slid around it and into the foyer.

  “Nina…,” said Jane.

  “You’re not to go out there, you hear?” said Poule. “For all she has Nina, she’d drop her like hot iron if she could have you.”

  “Just jump from one to the next?” said Jane. Who could stand against that?

  “I don’t know,” said Poule. “I’ve been turning over the event with Blanche and I think perhaps the fey are stuck in a body till it dies. That’s why that other fey tried to force Blanche to slash her wrists with a silver knife. It knew it was discovered and was trying to win free.”

  But the Queen had entered Dorie, and left, thought Jane. She entered me, while I was asleep. Jane could not quite buy Poule’s slim hope.

  “It’s curtains for Nina, but at least the Queen’s trapped there for a while,” continued Poule. “She’ll either have to use the body or destroy it, and she’ll have to get full control of it to destroy it. Nina’s stronger than Blanche ever was.”

  But Jane slumped to the floor, hardly listening.

  “He would’ve given me to her like … like a thing, a toy, a body for her. For her to be with him.”

  Poule’s eyes were gentle. “You can’t be trusting anything a fey says.”

  “He assumed no one would miss me. Like the village girl.” She rounded on Poule. “That must have been true. Dorie had to be born out of a human form. How did it happen? Just like she said? Is that who he’s been paying off all these years?” A thought flashed through her mind. “That man at the carriage house that day—the girl’s father, it must have been.”

  “Before my time,” said Poule. “Let’s have you lie down in your room. You can talk to him when he returns from the forest.”

  Jane stumbled to her feet. “I can’t see him. I can’t see him ever again.” Her fingers flew to the edges of the mask. “And this face, this face, get it off of me—”

  Poule clasped her hands, pulled them away. Worry was in her voice as she said, “You’ll hurt yourself. Don’t do that.”

  “But I can’t have it, I can’t.”

  “I’ll think of something,” promised Poule. “Or Edward will fix it himself.”

  But that was the wrong thing for Poule to say if she wanted Jane to calm. She drew back from Poule, her eyes flooding. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Jane. Jane!”

  And she ran from her, ran out the side door to where the party guests were hurriedly throwing their trunks and dresses willy-nilly into their carriages and motorcars, rousting their idle groomsmen and chauffeurs, fleeing.

  Jane jumped onto the running board of the Davenports’ motorcar. It was over-full, stuffed with the family and with another gentleman who had come by train and didn’t want to wait for a hired hand to take him to the station. “Please,” said Jane. “Are you going to the city? Please, you must take me with you.”

  “There’s no room,” said the mother, but the elder Miss Davenport, the one who had let Dorie go into the forest, looked into Jane’s clay-ringed eyes and said “Squeeze in here.”

  Jane wasted no time stuffing herself in, could not even find it in herself to care that she was half on top of the girl, pulled the door closed on their skirts as the motorcar was peeling out down the mud road and away, away from Edward.

  * * *

  The Davenports’ goodwill (or in the elder Miss Davenport’s case, guilt) extended only so far. Jane walked the fifty-three blocks from their house to Helen’s, alone with her thoughts. The afternoon sun was hot on her shoulders and the top of her head, and though she had nothing with her—not even money—she was also glad she had nothing to carry.

  It felt quite strange to be on the streets without veil or mask. People stopped to look at her, and Jane was shocked over and over again to realize that they were staring because she was beautiful. She looked longingly at a roasted-chestnut stand as she passed, and a gentleman in a well-brushed suit ran after her and begged her to accept a striped bag full of them.

  Jane accepted, an unfamiliar smile crossing her lips, a smile that apparently made the nice man blush and hurry off.

  So she was not surprised when the butler at Helen’s house dropped his respectable demeanor and said, when she told him her name, “Never Helen’s sister?”

  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.”