Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  Jane prayed Helen would also wake as Dorie had, but she couldn’t stay to find out.

  “Don’t stand there,” she shouted to the rest of the party. “Find iron, protect the others! Send for a doctor! And you,” Jane commanded Alistair. “Bind her arm above the wound and don’t remove the spike.” He was stunned, and he looked as though he was an instant from weeping, as soon as he processed the shock. Jane stooped and, clamping her thumb onto the vein in Helen’s arm, repeated her orders to one of the more capable-looking servants.

  “Helen,” he murmured. “My little Helen.”

  Jane took his hand and placed it on Helen’s arm. “Hold tight until they return,” she said, and he looked through her with scorched eyes, but nodded, and held.

  “Don’t leave us,” he said, but Jane stood and looked down at him, huddled over her unconscious, fey-beautiful sister.

  “Stop all the doors in your house with iron,” she said. “Bar all the windows. Don’t let anyone beautiful enter or leave.”

  Chapter 18

  SHARDS

  Poule drove like a maniac. Jane hung tight as the old motorcar whipped along narrow bumpy lanes and tried to reassure herself that the dwarvven were mechanically clever. The car was practically an extension of Poule, for all that the short woman was sitting on a tufted cushion and had put on special driving shoes with soles as thick as Jane’s outstretched fingers.

  The house was dark when they reached it. It was well past dawn, and yet the grey fog clung to the moor, wrapping the house in smoke.

  “After Nina, the party cleared itself off,” Poule said, though Jane knew that part. “I sent Cook and Martha home to their families. He wouldn’t budge.”

  Jane remembered the story he had told of the damaged beast-man, lost without the girl who stayed away longer than she’d promised. Remembered, too, her own words: “If they all left you, I should still be here, and stay by your side.…”

  And yet she had run.

  When they all had left him, she, too, had run.

  “I’ll take the grounds,” said Poule.

  “Thank you,” said Jane.

  “It isn’t much safer,” corrected Poule. “Wait till you see the front door.”

  The front door was off its hinges, the iron screen door ripped up and torn aside. The grotesque doorknocker hung, tilting, knocking an echo against the door in the wind.

  Jane stepped inside.

  “Edward?” she called. “Dorie?”

  Her footfalls echoed through the velvet curtained foyer. The mahogany curtain to the damaged rooms had been ripped away, and it now lay in a crumpled heap, all Jane’s steam-cleaning undone. She stepped over it and through, winding her way up toward his studio. Her calls echoed back only silence.

  The black and broken house felt abandoned, as if it had not been lived in for two centuries, and semihysterically she wondered if she had stepped into the clutches of the fey her first day on the moor, and all that had happened here had been a fey-drugged dream, where she had talked to imaginary pretty ladies and scavenged mushrooms and berries in place of Cook’s chocolate croissants.

  Through the cobwebs she went, her feet smearing dust on the stairs. Up and to the studio, where the tiniest noises of life crept around the open studio door. A small voice, talking. A giggle.

  Dorie was sitting on the floor of Edward’s studio, hair lit by a stray sunbeam. Her dress was smeared with dust and something that looked like jam, but she looked safe and healthy. In fact, she looked very like the picture of Dorie as Jane had first seen her, making her Mother doll dance among the motes of dust in the sunbeam.

  Unlike that first day, though, she was talking to it. Full sentences narrating the morning life of a five-year-old (“I made my own breakfast, I ate all the jam,”) and that gladdened Jane’s heart.

  Dorie broke off when she saw Jane, beamed at her and said, “You came back.”

  “Yes,” breathed Jane. “I came back.”

  And then it struck her what was odd about the picture, for Dorie was playing with her old doll, the doll that had been destroyed by Dorie herself. Jane had dropped the porcelain shards in the small red room, and later picked them out of the dense carpet one by one, and carried them to the dustbin, dropped them in there with the two blue glass eyes.

  Jane took a step back and said, “Dorie, what—”

  —and then the doll dissolved into smoke, rose into the air and reformed, and suddenly Jane was staring at her new face, again.

  Jane’s hand went right for her feyjabber, but she’d left it sticking out of Helen.

  “You are back,” the Fey Queen said. “Your choice is made.”

  “The choice to destroy you.” Though she had no idea how.

  “The choice to be with Edward, no matter the sacrifice. I understand.”

  “The choice,” Jane forced through dry lips, “not to be a victim. Not to be on the run, and not to let you drive me from the few people left in this world whom I care about. Who care for me.”

  “A battle you can never win,” the Queen said, “for who can compete with the fey? Now that you creatures voluntarily attach us, you do not even have to be killed. The forms are cleaner, they live longer. A whole human lifespan, I expect, unless we are discovered. My subjects have slowly been slipping into place around the city. Ready to enact change from within. With Edward’s help, we will win this war yet.”

  “Help,” said Jane. “You really call it help when you were the one directing his hands; you were the one clouding his mind? But never mind that. The Great War is over, and you’ve lost. If you really thought you could win, you’d be taking over one of those well-positioned women. Not the governess in a tumble-down shack in the countryside.”

  “Edward has access to everyone. If you think a leader cannot direct her people from a sheltered seat, you are mistaken. Besides,” and she sent a tendril of orange warmth to flicker through Dorie’s hair, “this is where my child is. My small-part-of-me.”

  “Your child who can’t live in either world—”

  “Who can live in both.”

  “You would use her, as you used Edward—”

  “If she and Edward are useful to me, do I love them the less?” She glimmered at Jane. “But I weary of maintaining this human form when the real one is present, and more comfortable to wear in your polluted world. I weary of talking like a human without a human mouth and brain to do the heavy lifting. I weary.”

  She dissipated into blue-orange light and then a rage like fire swept across Jane.

  It was the attack, finally the true attack, and no Poule there to fling iron in front of her. The Fey Queen was trying to slip in her body through the front door of her face.

  But it wasn’t as strong as she had expected. Jane pushed back, blazing hot herself, pushed back and beat the Fey Queen from her body.

  The Fey Queen hung in the air in front of her, paler than before, the imaged face only a sketch over colored light. “You. What?”

  But Jane knew. “I have had fey substance in me for the last five years. I am not as helpless as you think.”

  Deep down inside she knew that the Queen had not used all her force the first time. Jane’s proud words were only that—the last-ditch words of a victim.

  No, not a victim.

  A defeated warrior is not a victim.

  Jane bent her knees, steadying herself, readying herself.

  The orange light deepened, blotting out the blue, and there was sneering in that vibrating voice. “Only means I could have taken you anytime, you with fey on your cheek. Except you were hideous.”

  “You caused it.”

  “The original purpose of the fey bombs was to hook our substance into you so we had an entrance to slip into your dead forms and use them. By accident we discovered that the living maimed made more suitable, if more disgusting, bodies. Once we figured out how to attach small bits of our substance to you without killing you, we understood we could take you over alive.” She swirled. “Of course, the
re was still the problem of taste. My people wouldn’t wish to live a deformed life like you had. Hideous, disgusting … a half-life.”

  “It was still a better life than you’ll ever have,” said Jane softly, for here at the last she knew it. “Mine was real.” It was real and I fought for every piece of it, she thought, and those other Janes that didn’t happen wavered in her sight.

  “Do you think we like taking over your forms?” said the Queen. “All we want is our fair share of the land again. We lived in peace until you started to ruin the world. We gave you pieces of ourselves to get you to stop—but you humans never stay satisfied for long. Soon enough the factories were blazing once more, as if we had done wrong by granting you all your wishes. We were forced to fight.” The orange light was red now, and a thrumming crackled through the air which made it hard to think.

  “Not forced,” said Jane. “You and I, we chose to fight.” She had chosen to make a stand for her village. She had chosen to stand with Charlie. And that Jane who had not been touched by war, that Jane who had never understood what it was to stand up and fight for herself, thinned out, turned insubstantial.

  There was roaring in her ears, and the Fey Queen’s words seemed to enter by the base of her skull.

  “The first step was infiltration, which Edward solved for us. The second, to get rid of all of you. Oh, you ridiculous thing, see how you stand, so frail, against me. If you think your tiny bit of fey can stop me, you’re a fool.”

  And then the Fey Queen reared back and attacked again, and this time it was like a wave crashing over Jane, thick and hot and thrumming with power, and her slim defenses crumbled as the Fey Queen rushed into her body.

  From a far-off distance the door opened. She was dimly aware of her own voice crying “Edward!”—but whether it was her or the Fey Queen calling through her lips she did not know.

  “Edward, my love, my thanks,” said her voice again, and now she knew that was the Fey Queen, crackling through Jane, erasing her like a sponge crossing a chalkboard, rewriting the slate with the Queen’s thoughts, words, ideas.

  From a long way off she saw terror on Edward’s face, despair. He was losing someone he loved, but Jane couldn’t bear to hope that person was her. If he had to make a choice between Jane and the Fey Queen, Jane shouldn’t give a fig for her own chances. That was what the Fey Queen, laughing, was telling her now, deep inside and all through her marrow.

  It was up to her. The warrior.

  The Jane who had chosen to be here.

  Jane sent all her will into her fingers, still her own fingers, and dug her fingernails into the red line that surrounded her face. The Queen recoiled in surprise, and Jane used that tiny moment to summon all her internal strength, to compress the crackling, questing tendrils of the Queen back into the fey substance that Jane wore. With the lesser fey, Jane had been strong enough to shut it out completely. The Queen was far too powerful; but if Jane could just push her past a certain point, just into the mask only …

  Push and shove, till her will met the Queen’s at the razor-thin line where the fey-infused mask met her blood and bone. Jane was all Jane; the mask was all fey.

  And then Jane tore.

  The mask wanted to adhere, but she pulled on all its edges, ripping the attack away. Surely it must hurt, but her adrenaline and fear were too high to notice. The new face peeled off, popping away from her eyelids, nostrils, lips. Slowly the fey was torn from her body.

  And as she tore she lost all her strange fey sense. All knowledge of Edward’s feelings died away. Jane threw the fey-ridden mask from her and as it hit the floor it shattered into a million pieces.

  “Jane!” Edward cried. He fell on his knees before her, cupped her face with his blue-lit hands, healing her. “Jane, stay with me, Jane, Jane…”

  But using his gift was his undoing, because the disoriented Fey Queen went rushing from the mask into Edward, Edward who had fey thrumming in his fingertips, and Edward stiffened and lurched, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  “Edward!” cried Jane. Time slowed for her then, and she saw everything through a blue-and-white haze of fey light.

  He was putting up a fight, she realized. For the first time.

  His decades spent with the Queen had not left him as unprepared as Nina, as Blanche. The Queen’s blue light went through the studio garret like waves as she poured herself into Edward in pulses of force.

  Edward staggered toward the window and with a great effort lifted it up, tore it from its nailed roots into the sash. The iron nails stuck through the wood, long and spiked.

  Yet there was enough space around the nails that an agile man could climb out and through, could squeeze past the iron to dash his brains on the flagstones below.

  Then the Queen would be free to try again. To enter someone weaker, more docile. Was this the Queen trying to sacrifice Edward? Or Edward trying to sacrifice himself, preferring to die rather than be the Fey Queen’s pawn ever again?

  Jane saw both possibilities flickering before her and she ran to Edward, even as his shoulder hefted the pane high and he placed his hands on the windowsill. His eyes as he turned—oh, those beloved amber eyes were thick and glassy as he fought the Queen for dominion over his own body. Her own face stung, but no more, her trauma held at bay by Edward’s momentary touch.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to Jane, and then he drew his shoulder back from the window. Drew back the support, and the window, free and heavy with iron, fell. It slammed into his fey-cursed hands, and blood welled thick and fast from the cut veins and broken bones of his pierced palms.

  His neck corded in pain, he slumped to his knees beneath the sill, hands caught above him, iron in his blood.

  There was a noise—or maybe it was only a feeling, a feeling of shrieking. All the air in the room crackled and Edward’s cowlick jumped on end. The air seemed to rush into Edward and implode with a sharp bang, so that Jane’s ears popped and her vision blinked blue and white.

  And then—nothing. The air cleared out and the room colorized.

  The Fey Queen was dead.

  Dorie ran to her father, threw herself onto his chest, and he gasped with pain. But he was alive, alive, and the glass in his eyes slowly receded. He levered himself to his feet, and his face was wet and streaked, and he was quite caught by the window, speared through his broken, mangled hands.

  But alive.

  Jane sunk to the floor, spitting clay dust that tasted like iron. The last of Edward’s fey touch on her face receded. Everything was red—but of course, that was just blood. Just blood. And then the pain rushed in at last, and she groped for one of Edward’s work cloths, put it to her face, where it instantly soaked itself. She was dizzy, and this was no good. “Dorie,” said Jane. “Run for Poule. Quickly.”

  But the short woman appeared at the door, panting, taking in the situation. In her hand she held something white and metal, ovoid, and she beat a path to Jane, holding it up to Jane as she ran.

  It was the beautiful Jane mask with the chipped forehead.

  But different.

  It was criss-crossed with a web of threaded iron, iron that went above the clay, through the clay, behind the clay. The fey substance in the mask was both exposed and trapped—iron ringed the mask’s edges, outlining its eyes and lips in metal.

  “Dorie,” Poule said, from a distance. “I’m hoping you can do something your father could.” She nodded at Jane: Yes?

  “Yes,” said Jane, and Poule pressed the mask to her face. Iron and clay? No, iron and skin, it would be soon enough. This was true ironskin at last. It was cold and stiff and yet felt like an old friend, warming to her touch. She could feel the power of the fey substance inside, already sensing the emotions in the room, feeling waves from Dorie, sadness, confusion, determination. This time she would not spurn the blessings of that curse.

  Dorie reached up to Jane’s face, and her tiny hands molded the mask as if they knew instinctively what to do. Jane’s face throbbed, stung, but th
e blood running down her neck slowed to a trickle as Dorie fitted the mask in place. Even the pain lessened. Dorie was saving her.

  “Help me to my feet,” said Jane. Dorie stood still while Jane put weighty hands on her shoulder, standing. Together they moved to the window where Edward still hung, pinned, and then Jane and Poule freed him. He sunk to the floor, defeat written all over him despite their victory over the Queen. His nimble, beautiful hands hung limp.

  If Edward could mend faces with that clay, surely she had enough fey substance in her to do that now herself.

  She pressed the fey-infused clay to his wounds and saw it start to mend, saw the broken bone wiggle under its touch, straightening. It thrummed under her fingers, and she felt suddenly what power that was, to mold something into the shape of life and have it walk and breathe.

  “No,” he said, and jerked his arms away, rubbing the blood and clay from his limp hands on his shirt with a gasp at the pain. The thrum died. “I am not strong enough to hold their gifts, Jane. I am not as good as you.”

  “But your hands…”

  And they fell to his lap, trembling, even as Poule ran to his worktable for cloth and gauze and scalpel, and he said, “You were always too good for me, Jane. The Queen never really let me go—just sneaked into me after she returned me, manipulating me—and I refused to believe it. She ruined that poor village girl. And now I have not even a home to offer you, for not only do I have no talent, I no longer have any skill at all. For who knows when these shall mend, if ever.” The amber eyes were delirious with pain; he stared past her, half-blinded by it. “Now I am quite dependent on your goodwill and stubborn nature, you see?”

  Quite helplessly, she laughed, a short distraught cry. “Of course, sir. You always were, you know.”

  “No, no.” Heavy sigh. “I will not take your pity, Jane. You are too kind to leave if I do not make you. But you must.”

  But the cold words didn’t fool her any longer.