Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  Dorie and Tam looked at each other, wonderingly. “Well,” she said at last. “Maybe they’ll come back for that.”

  Meanwhile, you never passed up an opportunity for free food, so she slithered down the tree and poked around until she found some purslane and a double handful of wild strawberries. She was never quite certain which of the three hundred varieties of mushrooms were perfectly safe, so when she found a clump, she resorted to the trick of letting her fey side take over, her fingers exploring the caps and stems in a faint blue glow that she shielded from Tam. Edible, her fingers said, and she gathered a few and sat down by Woglet’s tree, rubbing the dirt off of them as they watched and waited. She offered one to Tam, but he peered at it through his spectacles and demurred. He had never been as good a forager as she, and he was wise not to trust a strange mushroom if he couldn’t identify it for himself. He did take her up on the offer of strawberries, and she poured half of them into his cupped palms. They sat companionably, their fingers red with juice.

  It was so nice just sitting with him, like back in the old days, that she almost told him then. Almost said who she was, almost transformed to prove it. But she looked at his solemn face behind the glasses and did not. Tam of old was so slow to trust. And yet here he was, eating strawberries with her like they were old friends.

  Perhaps it didn’t hurt that she had started the introduction by saving his life.

  The lie was a big knot in her chest, but after seven years without him she couldn’t bear to give him up so soon. Just one more day. One more adventure.

  Tentatively, feeling him out, she said, “So … what if we could make up for this somehow? What if…” She took a breath. “What if there were a few ironskin left, that could be helped by the eggs?”

  Tam pondered. “A few like three? Like a hundred?”

  “Like twenty.”

  “I suppose they could apply through the lab for aid, but I’ll warn you the lab isn’t into charity.”

  “I figured as much,” Dorie said. “It seems unlikely that help would come from that source.” She watched Woglet poking around and purring, while waiting to see if Tam would come to the same conclusion she had. It was much cooler up here in the mountains, under the forest canopy. The glints of summer sun that filtered through were pleasant instead of merciless.

  “You think we should help the ironskin,” Tam said slowly. He laughed ruefully. “Forget just saying I disagree with things. This would get us locked away for years.”

  “So that’s a no?”

  He looked at her. “You’ve only been there one day and you’re already pointing out where I’ve fallen into the slippery slope of just paying attention to my research and nothing else.” He cocked his head. “Who are you?”

  But she was spared from answering this by a rush of silver wings. “Duck!” she shouted.

  They took cover in the low trees and brush the best they could, Tam shielding them with his jacket. There were suddenly silver wings everywhere, crackling and snapping as the wyverns turned and swooped. Great fighting yodels broke out all around them, screeches and shrill calls, and the occasional bolt of errant steam shot past.

  “Is this about us or him?”

  “I think they’re here to protect Woglet!” whispered Dorie. “They don’t know from what.” The wyverns settled in a loose circle on the trees around them and she held her breath. It was a beautiful sight—all the curved silver bodies arranged in the branches. They seemed to be waiting for something, looking from one to the next. Finally, one wyvern swooped down to where Woglet was, and the others purred in unison. Dorie almost leaped out to protect her hatchling, but Tam grabbed her arm, and she remembered in time what they were doing. She waited, watching, until she saw the bit of dirty tape on the grown wyvern’s chest. It must be his parent, then—mother or father; who could tell? It had a darker silver marking like a mustache and she decided to consider it the father. He glided in for a landing and settled on a branch near Woglet’s nest, cooing in a distinctive pitch.

  Woglet jumped to his feet. His purr took on a yodelly flavor. With a snap his wings fully extended into a fighting display.

  Dorie did not recognize this behavior. Well, she did, but she didn’t expect it from day-old wyverns reunited with their parents. Woglet circled the nest, wings puffed up to make himself look larger. “You called your dad,” she whispered. “What did you expect?” But Woglet did not seem to know what to do with the wyvern he had called. The instinct of being a lonely woglet in a nest and summoning a protector was one thing. What to do with a large wyvern on your doorstep was another.

  The parent wyvern, who had initially been welcoming, now became wary. Had it made a mistake? Was this some other, unrelated chick? The coos took on a more irritating whine. The father cocked his head from side to side, peering at the forest floor. Then he jumped out of the nest and glided down, claws extended to snatch a vole. He launched back to the nest, live vole extended to Woglet.

  Woglet looked sideways at the vole. He lifted one foot, then the other.

  Then he jumped and glided all the way down to Dorie, burying his muzzle in Dorie’s elbow.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she asked the wyvern, and it wasn’t really rhetorical.

  “That’s done it,” muttered Tam, as several more wyverns came down to explore the two humans crouched in the bushes. Woglet trotted out, rearing to a fighting position, and Dorie frantically grabbed him around his little warm belly, tucked him into her armpit where he yodeled unhappily. She did not want Woglet’s attack posture to get him killed. The father wyvern glided down and looked at all of them inquisitively. It made the distinctive coo one more time. This time Woglet spat.

  Dorie looked at Woglet, now cuddled in her arms, then looked up at the father. The father looked at Woglet, Woglet looked at Dorie, and Dorie looked at the adult wyvern. They stayed like that for a long time before Woglet’s purrs turned into snores.

  At that, the father wyvern seemed to decide it was official. He launched himself off the ground and into the air, all the other wyverns following behind. They tore through the trees, Dorie and Tam taking cautious steps behind them, through piles of blackberry bramble that had not been cleared for decades. Silver wings led them on through the struggle, and then all at once, the trees and bushes suddenly cleared away and the two found themselves at the top of a tall ravine. The wyverns swooped down and then up, curving around the mountain, and settling into a distant clump among the trees on the cliff face.

  They watched the dark silver blur coat the side of the mountain, disappearing one by one as they blended into the mica-flecked rocks and silvery grey scrub. Woglet launched himself from Dorie’s shoulder, circled around once, and flew back, as if waiting for her to hurry up.

  Tam looked at Dorie, a challenge behind his spectacles, man to man. “How good are you at climbing?”

  * * *

  It was a nasty hot trip down, picking their way through the thorns and scree. Woglet mostly flew around their shoulders, though once he spotted something he wanted to eat and flew off to nab it. For a hatchling with no parental guidance, he seemed to be getting the swing of things.

  They made it to the bottom, where the summer remnants of a creek ran past in the sun. Feywort was running wild all along the creek, and she said, “Wait a minute,” and used her little knife to gather a double handful for Colin’s friend. It was flowering this time of year, and usually you could see the little blue bells of the flowers running up and down the mountain. But not this year. Just bare swathes of grey rock in its place. Feywort apparently was scarce, then, but where was it going? Unless it, too, was falling victim to the changes that were affecting the swallowtails and snakes Tam had seen.

  They forded the stream at the stones, stopped at the other bank to let the wyvern drink. Dorie cupped her own fingers in it to have a swallow herself, but the water, which was generally clear and potable even in summer, was sharp and tingling on her fingers, and she let it fall away. She usua
lly did not bother to bring water with her any more than food, and she swallowed against the dryness that tickled her throat.

  “Pressing on,” she said, and they began their way up the other side of the ravine, weaving through the birches and evergreens. This side of the ravine was still in the tail end of morning shadow; a welcome relief from the summer sun. And then—

  “Wait,” Tam said quietly, putting a hand on her shoulder. He pointed way down the ravine, down to the south.

  There were fey there.

  The blue drifted along the scrub in the ravine, disappearing in and out of the foliage. With her half-fey heritage, she never felt the instant dread you were supposed to feel. Despite everything, Dorie was filled with a sense of wonder at the sight of her wilder kin.

  “They look so innocent,” Tam said quietly as the blue flickered on past and vanished.

  She shifted uneasily. “Tell me the stories you’ve learned about the fey,” she said. “The strange ones. The ones nobody knows.”

  “A long, long time ago, the fey and humans were not at war,” he said, starting to climb again. “Never exactly allies, but not at war. You know there was trade until before the Great War?”

  She nodded.

  “Long, long before that, there’s stories of humans and fey living in close quarters intentionally. The fey would invite humans into the woods—not kidnap them. The humans would return a century later, enriched by the trade. Or so they say.”

  “Go on,” Dorie said. She hooked her arm around a birch, hefting herself upward. She never needed nor wanted help climbing, but it was funny not to have someone offer. Restful.

  “There’s a very unusual story that I only ran across once,” Tam said. “Most of the stories are repeated, changing from town to town. You can sift out the kernel of truth that the story grew from. But this one I only heard once, from an old woman in the northernmost forests, who was said to be fey-touched herself. Neighbors claimed she had lived two hundred years—spending one of those centuries with the fey.”

  “What did she say about it?”

  “She was evasive on the subject,” he said, looking off into space. Finally he added, “But that’s common. She said that this was an old story among the fey themselves. That even to them it was a myth, an ancient rumor. Their story goes that there’s more than one world. That major events create a bend, a fork, and worlds splinter off.”

  “Wow,” said Dorie, trying to wrap her head around the idea.

  “I recorded the story and forgot about it,” Tam said. “I ended up not including it in the book—there wasn’t room for everything, and I’m more interested in the stories that mention animals, so I focused on those. But then I was talking with someone from the physics lab and he happened to mention this thought experiment they have—something called the Multiple Worlds theory. It’s the same idea.”

  “Wow.”

  “Except there’s one more wrinkle. I pulled the story out to look at it. As far as the fey are concerned, the theory is only applicable to them. If you don’t know, back when we were using bluepacks for everything, they didn’t work the farther you got outside the borders. Like you go to Varee and poof, your flashlight is dead. Fey only live in this country—fey power only works here, too. Which is strange, but it was never fully explored. Perhaps there’s a central point in our country—perhaps a larger concentration of fey in the middle somewhere that affects individual fey, perhaps all the fey draw their power from some central nexus—I don’t know.”

  “Okay.”

  “So this fey story claimed that these world turning points only come about due to them—due to large changes in their history. Now, solipsism is nothing new. And how would they know how many worlds there are? Except the story says there is a link between the worlds. Sort of like the nexus that spiders out from the heart of our country, there is a central point between the worlds that they can access.”

  “So the fey can know more about these other worlds? But then surely there’d be more stories about this idea.”

  “Right. The story implied it was hard to cross over. Because—and mind you, this is the only story I’ve ever run across about this—the story says that, millennia ago, that’s how the fey got here. That they spanned out from one world that had them in it and they crossed over to a few other places, including here.”

  “An origin story,” breathed Dorie.

  “If you like,” said Tam. “Like all origin stories it leaves out as much as it explains. Where did those first fey come from in the other world?” He shrugged.

  “Did you ever talk to the old woman in the north again? After you heard that this was a real theory from your physics friend?”

  “I tried to, but it wasn’t until a year later. She had passed on.” Tam sighed. “These stories are being lost all the time, due to the fact that people think of them as fey tales. And sure, does the story of the beautiful sleeping princess with the good fey and the bad fey fighting over her tell us much about anything? Well. Mores, perhaps. That even the fey can disagree. But then you happen on something like the story about the wyvern eggs and that’s a major breakthrough right there.”

  “It makes you wonder what else you could learn from spending time with them,” said Dorie. She had done just that for several summers. But she had been interested in her own story, in what she could do, and had not thought to press them for their myths. When had Tam thought to do so? Had it started when he was with them?

  “It’s not always worth the price,” he said somberly. “Don’t think I’m hogging my sources, but I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”

  They came up out of the ravine and he put a cautioning hand out. “Look.”

  Above them, several dozen wyverns soared. Silver wings flashed, and yodels trilled at irregular intervals, like demented birdsong.

  “The real question is how we get some eggs away from them,” Tam said in a low voice. “I know you’re good, but are you fifty-some-watching-wyverns good?”

  The real problem was she wasn’t one-human-watching good. She couldn’t phase blue with Tam there.

  “We passed a sort of cavelike thing as we climbed,” Dorie said. “You take Woglet—if he’ll go—and the pouches and stay there. I’ll bring you eggs and you protect them.”

  “It’s hardly fair for you to do all the dangerous work,” Tam protested.

  “I can’t get any eggs with Woglet,” she pointed out. “Not to mention that your arm is still recovering from the steaming.” She grinned. “You can fight your legendary basilisk when we find it.”

  “Deal.”

  Woglet was in fact leery of this new arrangement, but once he found a garter snake hiding in the back of the cool little cave he settled down to investigate that.

  Tam safely out of sight, Dorie made her way to the cliffs and began to climb. She didn’t dare put the eggs in her stomach again—one baby wyvern was enough. So she actually did need Tam to stay behind in the cave.

  She was lucky. It was a good time of year and there were a number of nests with clutches of three and four eggs. Wyverns were clean animals, but this many together at once left a faint acrid tang to the clearing. Still, better than petrol. Dorie phased in and out of blue, slowing and speeding up her timesense to get close to the nests. She was getting pretty good at avoiding triggering the wyverns’ gaze. In the end, she was able to get eight eggs without taking more than one from each nest, and she brought them all, one at a time, back to Tam, who wrapped them up and coddled them in his portable incubator. Another benefit to bringing Tam into this—she would not need to have Stella rig up something for her. With eight eggs carefully packed into the incubator, they had run out of padding—no one had ever gotten more than three at once, as Tam kept saying—and the wyverns were getting restless, so they left.

  They retraced their path, tramped up and out of the ravine, hot and dirty. Woglet had gone from flying back and forth like a crazed bat to sleeping curled on Dorie’s shoulder, tail in a chokehold on her neck. His tri
angular head poked snores straight into her ear.

  “When do you think they’re going to hatch?” said Tam.

  “Two to three days for most of them,” Dorie said, “except that there’s one that’s going to hatch tonight, probably midnight-ish. So either we sit around at the lab tonight with that one, or—”

  “Or we take it to an ironskin,” Tam said. He took a deep breath. “Do you know one we could help?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My contact does, anyway. Through him we can reach all of them. I was thinking…” She hesitated, then pressed on. “Four for us, four for the lab?” Besides the symmetry, the bonus for bringing in eggs, split between her and Tam, would then just cover the rent.

  “We’ll already be heroes for bringing home four on our first day out,” he mused. “They’d never guess that we found eight.” He looked up at her and nodded, decision firming his face. “Let’s do it.”

  They agreed to meet at ten and pressed on, talking through the logistics for their secret adventure. It had all gone so well that she thought maybe now was the time to tell Tam the truth. It had been just like the old days—the two of them on some grand and glorious expedition, bringing home twigs and birds’ eggs. Except now the twigs were feywort and the eggs would cure four more of the ironskin. They were in dirty sweaty harmony, and she looked sideways at him and found him grinning. Perhaps something of the same thought was going through his own head, for he said, “You know, Dorian, this has been a really good day.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It has.” And then suddenly added, “Let’s not tell anyone about their nesting place, shall we? I don’t want them to be disturbed.”

  “Of course not,” he said. She beamed and then her smile fell as he added, “Well, Annika. But other than that.”

  “Right. Annika.”