Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  With effort, Jane let that comment fall away like water against an oiled coat, did not let it touch her. “The masks are a problem,” she said.

  “You have one. Hardly fair to accuse me of—oh, I don’t know, whatever you were going to accuse me of. Vanity? Self-indulgence? You try being the younger sister to someone who always has the moral high ground.”

  Jane burst out: “But you were there for Mother! Don’t you know how I’ve regretted that?” Charlie and her mother, the two old guilts twined together.

  Helen looked sideways at Jane, fingers opening and closing on her skirts. “Jane,” she said, pleading. “You don’t know how it was.…”

  There was a sudden softness to the mask—was this a way back into understanding, after all? Jane groped for words.

  But she could not find them quickly enough. Helen’s face fell; she turned away and muttered to herself, “I suppose you can’t expect an ironskin to understand what it’s like, being thrown to the wolves with nothing but your face, nothing but your face, nothing.”

  Jane’s blood ran cold as Helen dismissed her as ironskin. Helen had remade herself in the city, with or without the new face. Jane tabled the danger of the masks for a moment and tried a different tack. “Helen,” she said. “The mask … it’s almost like it gives me more power. Like … a fey.”

  “Fey beauty, not fey itself,” said Helen. Nervous laugh. “Don’t be so paranoid.”

  “Hear me out for once. Accept that I know things.”

  Helen looked around at the empty parlor, dressed up with vases of early roses for the evening’s event. “If I tell you … don’t tell, oh, she wouldn’t tell, would she, but, you see. There is something different since I got this. Like the walls are pushing in, don’t you remember, doesn’t she remember that?” Her sentences muddled back and forth as she worked herself up, as if Jane were hearing spoken words and internal thoughts all tangled together.

  “No. Tell me.” Jane remembered Nina saying of Blanche Ingel “jumpy as a cat since the surgery,” remembered poor Nina’s lost and hollowed-out face. She felt much more tenderly about attacked Nina than she ever had about Nina alive.

  “I hear things chittering,” said Helen. “Like something is around me. Everywhere, just out of sight.” She nodded around the room. “Behind that hideous painting of Alistair’s mother, or under the piano there, or slithering under the green baize on the card table. Or that blue—oh, why would Alistair taunt me with that fey-blue pillow!” In hectic, feverish motions Helen seized the pillow and buried it underneath the sofa, out of sight. Sank back to her seat.

  Silence from shocked Jane, and Helen rushed on:

  “Tell me you feel it, too.”

  “No…,” said Jane. “Not except for a brief moment when I first awoke.”

  “You think I’m mad, I know she does think it,” said Helen. “All the same, I remember you after the war sometimes. That was quite different, but sometimes … that’s how I feel.”

  And suddenly Jane remembered five years ago, remembered waking up with her cursed cheek at home, in her bed. “The striped wallpaper swimming in to meet me,” she said. “Everything had a voice, and it was all after me. And everything Mother did seemed amplified tenfold—her endless weeping. Her anger at me for losing Charlie.” Sharp the memories came—she had known that anger though Mother had tried to hide it; she had fled from it. Yet it had twisted inside her, and taken root, and grown.…

  “It’s mad, isn’t it?” said Helen, suddenly sharp and direct. “And yet that’s what I think of. You, before you left us, the way you seemed then. And yet my face is not a curse—oh, Jane, tell me what I’ve done.”

  Jane took Helen’s hands. “I tried to seal off my curse and that didn’t work. I peeled off the iron and started to work with it. I gained power with it, and now with this mask I have even more. You can do that. You must do that. You have to learn to be strong and fight with what you wear, or … the fey will take you over … alive.” The thought sparked a vivid memory of crouching inside the door that morning while the Fey Queen attacked poor Nina.

  Helen jerked away, was suddenly up behind her chair. Her saucer of tea clattered to the floor and broke amber across the patterned rug. “It’s them, isn’t it. It’s them I hear crackling through the walls. They’re coming, they’re coming—”

  “Be calm!” said Jane. “Yes, they are a danger, but you can learn to fight it. You and all your friends, you must try. We have fey in our bodies now, and we can learn to use it to defend ourselves, or we can be victims.”

  Helen sneered at Jane. “Then you’ve made yourself in danger, too, haven’t you? Bet she’s sorry now, wouldn’t she rather be ugly and safe—”

  “But I wasn’t safe,” said Jane. “I had it all along.” And suddenly she thought of all those ironskin who were also in danger. She would have to get to Niklas and let him know. And Dorie—she had to find out what had happened to her little girl. There was too much to do to hide in Helen’s house another minute.

  She stood, gathering her skirts and wits, and said with some asperity to Helen, crouching behind the chair, “Oh, buck up.”

  The butler swept in, then, with Gertrude behind him. Triumph from Gertrude: “There, I knew you’d upset her! You don’t understand what she needs—”

  The butler ignored the drama and said: “A visitor to see you, Miss Eliot. A Miss Poule.”

  * * *

  Poule drove them through the city in Edward’s old car, calmly maneuvering around the horses and holes that clogged the streets, the farther they got from Helen and Alistair’s part of town.

  “They can get into fey substance,” said Poule. “All that is fey substance.”

  “Yes,” said Jane, for it was what she’d figured out. “Tell me—is Dorie all right?”

  Poule shook her head. “Every time I thought I saw her, she vanished. No telling whether that’s Dorie.…” Or something in Dorie, she did not say.

  Jane’s heart twisted, thinking about it. Perhaps she should have grabbed the little girl, stolen her away. She could be here right now, safe on Jane’s lap.

  “You’re no safer here than in the country,” said Poule.

  “You’ve said as much,” said Jane.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Poule, “is that they could’ve taken you, or any of the ironskin over at any time. They didn’t have to wait for Edward to put on the masks.”

  “They could,” said Jane. She had been thinking about the moment in the clearing, when the fey had seemed to invade and reject her. “But they wouldn’t take over ironskin, unless that was the only option. They’re drawn to beauty. I was practically unclean to them.”

  “Huh,” said Poule. “A thousand centuries of trade with them, and yet I’ll never understand the blasted things, I guess.”

  “But what is fey substance?” said Jane. “The curses, the bluepacks—are they the same? Is it like spider silk?”

  “Well, that’s the part the dwarvven did seem to have right. Speaking of trade, you see. The fey have a complicated punishment system that I don’t even want to know about because the little I do know is deeply disturbing. But all the fey tech we have—the blue lights, cameras, your mask, everything—is essentially little pieces of a split-up fey. Not big enough to be a full entity that can think and act on its own. But a bit of captured and divided substance. The fey themselves.”

  “Heavens,” Jane said faintly. Her fingers touched her new face. Edward had a bit of the actual fey in his hands. The clay must have fey worked through it. And those bombs—little torn-off bits of themselves, coiled around the fire and the shrapnel, to attach like leeches to the victim.

  “When the time of the punishment is over, all those little split-up pieces are automatically released. A thousand lights—or what-have-you—die at the same moment as all the pieces of fey rush back to form one whole fey again, back in the forest.”

  “So all the time we were trading with the fey, they were selling us—bits of themselve
s?” said Jane. The thought made the hair on her arms stand on end.

  “Yes,” Poule agreed. “I’d take a good old-fashioned turn on the dwarvven rack any day over that kind of punishment.”

  Poule stopped the car outside the gated entrance to Niklas’s forge, and Jane said: “But why did you come all this way to get me? Why really?”

  The short woman twisted her grey braid away from her face, considering her words. “Because,” she said finally, “because we don’t have a solution to this. And we need one.”

  “And…?”

  “And it’s going to come through you. You’re the only one I know of who ever bested the fey at their own game. Edward used the fey in his hands for six, seven years, and I’m telling you you have to be bloody strong to do that and not go completely off your rocker. The dwarvven have experience blocking fey wiles in general. But you’re the first to take their curse and turn it against the blasted things. I don’t say you’re special—”

  “Thanks,” Jane muttered.

  “—only that you figured out how to do it, and that’s got to be the key somehow to stop what they’re doing. Else—”

  “Else what hope do we have against them,” said Jane. “Edward’s probably done a hundred people by now. And naturally, all rich and well placed, or they wouldn’t have had the money to do it.”

  Poule nodded, then looked inside Niklas’s compound. “Is he trustworthy?”

  “Yes,” said Jane, and she pulled the handle.

  This time it was Niklas himself who came to the gate, erect and striding despite the singlet of iron she knew was underneath the black leather. Suspicion grew on his face the closer he got. “If it’s charms you’re after, you’d better see one of the fancy shops in town.” His eyes darted between them as if he could not decide who needed more puzzling out, but then finally they stayed on Poule and he said, slowly, “You’re one of the dwarvven, ain’t you now?” He pronounced it nearly as well as Poule.

  “Half,” said Poule.

  “Don’t hold with half-bloods myself,” he said. “You don’t know where you stand then, do you.”

  He seemed twice Poule’s size, but the woman merely folded her arms and looked up at him, considering. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You do that ironskin that doesn’t work.”

  Jane interfered. “Please, Niklas, let us in. I’ll explain everything.”

  “I know your voice,” he said, unlocking the gate. “But that face—it seems like something I know but wish I didn’t.”

  Jane squeezed inside before he could change his mind. “I’m Jane,” she said, “and I’m wearing the Fey Queen’s face.”

  * * *

  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. Sh
e 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.