Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  “Big,” Alice said succinctly.

  Tam looked disappointed, as if he had hoped for something else. He took off his explorer hat and ran his fingers through his hair, settling it back into place. “Well, let’s see how the wyvern egg is coming along.”

  “Like iron and copper and silver, all mixed together,” Alice said, staring at a point over Dorie’s head.

  Tam jumped on this. “How many claws do they have?”

  Alice stared off into the wall as if actually examining basilisk claws. Even Dorie, with her long experience of fey matters, was unnerved by it; she wanted to turn and make sure there was not, in fact, a basilisk behind her.

  “Four,” Alice said finally.

  Tam sucked in breath. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and began making notes. “Do they have a forked tongue?” he said. “Are they in pairs, like wyverns? Can you see eggs?” He drew breath. “Alice, Alice. Where do you see them?”

  Alice focused on Tam. “Through the mountains,” she repeated. “The men chase the basilisk through the mountains. It’s a mother basilisk.”

  Tam scribbled this all down in great excitement.

  “Why does it matter what her basilisks look like?” said Dorie.

  Tam’s pencil point broke. “Criminy,” he said with feeling, and pulled out his penknife to fix it. His eyes were bright with discovery as he explained to Dorie, “Because if you look at the National Portrait Gallery at the famous wyvern paintings, most of them have three toes. Like wyverns.”

  “So?”

  “So if my theory is correct, it means those people never even came close to seeing a real basilisk. They looked at Rodanthe’s technical drawings of dissected wyverns and they extrapolated from there.” He flipped furiously through his notebook and spread open the pages to show Dorie. She leaned over his shoulder, trying not to let their nearness affect her. She was Dorian, Dorian, Dorian.

  There was a long list of dates in the notebook, with notations. “Writings and paintings about basilisks crop up in clusters,” Tam said. “But there are other mentions of them, too, which obscure the true data. A lot of people claim to have seen them. But there’s really only one person who we can probably verify as true, and that’s Sir John that I was telling you about. Because he took the whole carcass to the king in 1656, and loads of people wrote about that. Plus it was on display long enough for Kent to see it, to paint his famous picture of Sir John and the Basilisk—but the fourth claw isn’t really obvious in the picture, unless you’re looking for it. And then Hoglarth came along sixty years later, and he painted the other famous picture due to the nubile maidens in it, but that basilisk clearly has three toes. Everyone copied that, or they copied Rodanthe’s wyverns. But I went to the gallery, and the Kent painting has four toes. Do you see?”

  “Um,” said Dorie, trying to assimilate this rundown of basilisk art history. The baby had finally stopped screaming and there was silence from the front room, as if the others were listening in on this lecture. She wondered what on earth they would make of it.

  “It can’t be coincidence,” said Tam. “I think her visions are of real events. And I think it’s verification of my theory that the four-toed basilisk sightings, in art and writing, are the real sightings. Not the hundred-year blindworm.” With his sharpened pencil he struck through the misleading dates, scribbling down numbers next to the pattern that emerged. “Ninety-seven.”

  “But you don’t have any basilisk sightings in the last century. You crossed them all out.”

  “Add 194 to the last sighting in the eighteenth century,” he said, “and—”

  “This year,” breathed Dorie as he wrote it.

  “That’s why I’ve been looking for them. And why I’m inclined to believe the signs Mills mentioned—the disruption in patterns of the small creatures. And now … her.”

  Alice had resumed rocking, shaking her head, drawing back in on herself. The noise in the front room began again as the large man apparently joined the next round of cards.

  “Is this what Colin was like?” Tam said to Dorie.

  “No,” said Dorie. “His curse was hunger, is all.” The only other ironskin she had met was Jane, and she couldn’t tell him about Jane. He was looking at her, so excited, so curious, so dear, and she should tell him about Jane. Not here. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would tell him. “Your blacksmith wasn’t like this, was he?”

  “No.” Tam gently touched Alice’s shoulder. “Hey. You’ll be all right. As soon as we put this stuff on, you won’t have any more visions.”

  “No more basilisks then,” Dorie said in a low voice.

  He looked troubled. “I wish I could ask her many more questions, of course. But it’s not right to leave her like this. No matter what I could find out.”

  Dorie nodded. She did not know what else to say, for she had her own strange feelings about changing the girl. Certainly the girl was not living a normal life. But then, neither was Dorie. She had chosen once to give up her fey side. She wasn’t going to do it again. Was the girl able to make that choice? Where was the line between curse and part of you?

  As Dorie sat and watched, the egg started rocking, the little wyvern raring to go. Woglet clambered all the way out of the handbag and perched on the handles, warbling at the egg in encouragement.

  Colin burst through the curtain, mouse dangling by the tail. He dropped it in the little wyvern cage. “Am I on time?” Alice turned her fragile face up to him, smiling, and for a moment, a real person broke through the confusion and visions. He knelt and pressed her hand. “I’ll be here to help you,” he said.

  With a series of smart taps, a chick burst through, a pugnacious tilt to his shoulders. “Hey, little guy,” Dorie said. “Hey, Buster.” Under Woglet’s watchful eye, she shepherded the baby wyvern into the cage with the mouse. He spat misty air at Dorie’s fingers as she nudged him along. Once inside the cage, the mouse caught his full attention, and he paid no attention to Dorie closing the door behind him. He had a crooked tail that flapped as he zeroed in on the mouse.

  Tam had scooped up the eggshell and was carefully scraping out the goo with his copper spoon.

  “Do you want to do this?” Dorie said gently to Alice.

  Hand in Colin’s, she nodded and closed her eyes.

  Dorie and Tam looked at each other. Dorie rocked back on her heels as Tam leaned in.

  “I’ll take the lead on this,” Tam said. Despite not knowing that Dorie was part-fey, he still sensed her ambivalence to changing the girl’s fragile state. Apparently he was more sure of what would be right for the girl—that what would be right would be to get rid of the fey. And it was true—then she would be able to think for herself. Dorie just did not know.

  She sat on her hands and watched as Tam smeared the goo around the girl’s neck and down her spine, erasing all traces of the fey inside her.

  Chapter 9

  ALL THE THINGS WE HIDE

  Dorie is fourteen, and so is Tam.

  Tam trusts no one, but he trusts her. When you have been fooled by someone disguised as your father, you are slow to believe anyone else. He opens up to her about the things he cannot at school. At school he is self-contained and distant, but it’s known he can hold his own in a fistfight, so they let him alone.

  Which is good, because his choice of subject matter doesn’t help him stay under the radar.

  Tam reads fey tales. All of them: Beauty and the Fey Beast, Rose-Red and Violet-Blue, Bluebeard, Queen Maud and her Pirates, everything. He reads the ones that humans wrote; he reads the ones that dwarvven wrote. And when he is visiting Dorie in the country, he goes around to the old women in town and drinks their chamomile tea and listens to them spin out the stories they knew from their childhood. He has heard some new ones this way, and he ambles home, staring past his spectacles into nothing, and tells them to Dorie. Dorie’s heart beats the most then, for it is as if he is telling her stories about herself. Dorie’s father always stops himself if he starts to talk about the fey
, and Jane thinks telling the old tales gives them a power they shouldn’t have.

  But Tam tells her, tells her all of them, and they soak into her bones.

  It is one of these tales that goes with her into the forest.

  It is one of these tales that leaves Tam there.

  —T. L. Grimsby, Dorie & Tam: A Mostly True Story

  * * *

  “You get paid every two weeks,” the accountant said patiently. “That’s perfectly reasonable to work with your budget.”

  “Except it’s taken me long enough to find a job that I’m behind on my rent,” said Dorie, trying to sound calm and not desperate. It was Friday morning and the black clock above the accountant was inexorably ticking onward. “I have till noon to pay it. Isn’t there any way to get an advance—just this once?”

  “It sets a bad precedent,” said the accountant. “Do you know how many bar tabs we’d be covering for you boys if we did that?” She shook her head with an air of finality. “I’m sorry.”

  Dorie trudged down the hall, wondering if she would have looked more fiscally responsible as a girl. Or if the female secretary would have had more compassion for one of her own gender.

  No use second guessing. Tam had kindly offered to take the wyvern chick from last night, so that possibility was out. Really, if she didn’t want to be homeless, there was only one option left. Malcolm. And she would have to filch one of their three remaining eggs from Tam’s incubator, and how could she possibly explain that to Tam?

  “Dorian,” exclaimed Dr. Pearce, giving her a hearty slap on the back. “Well done, old chap. First time out, and you and Tam brought back a better haul than anyone else.”

  Dorie nodded, then said hopefully, “Yes, and I was wondering if I could get my bonus for those.…”

  Dr. Pearce looked vague. “Oh, I’d check with Elsie in accounting. She rules the roost, you know—whatever she says goes.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder and steered her down the hall. “But look, you must know about our little anti-fey treatment by now, yes? We’re making a protective solution from each wyvern egg you chaps bring back. One egg stretches to protect about twenty-five people. There’s a long waiting list as you can imagine, but Tam told me about your little sighting of the fey yesterday. We need to get the two of you safe and protected. You’re our two most valuable naturalists.”

  Dorie tried to demur. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. I always have been.”

  He stopped and eyed her seriously. “Now, Mr. Eliot. You know as well as I do that this isn’t just about your safety, but the safety of everyone in the lab, in the city. If you or Mr. Grimsby were to be … compromised in the field, we would all be at risk. Tam tells me you think the first egg is going to hatch day after tomorrow, and you seem to have an eye for these things. So let’s see, that’s Sunday—the boys in the lab will make up the protective solution right away—so Monday morning we’ll have you and Grimsby treated straight off. Sound good? Good.”

  Dorie smiled uncertainly as Dr. Pearce strode off down the hall.

  She was outside Tam’s door. She didn’t have one of the copper medallions, but the door was ajar, and she gently pushed it open to the sound of arpeggios.

  Tam was standing on his desk, directing a whistled aria at a spiderweb. He broke off as she entered, leaning down to make a penciled note. “You wouldn’t think there’d be a connection between wyverns and house spiders,” he muttered, running a spiderwebby hand through his hair. “Maybe all fauna just really like the Midsomer Suite.…”

  Dorie came in and shut the door behind her. “I need to borrow the incubator with the other three eggs,” she said. “For, um. Tests. Before tomorrow.”

  Tam pointed a distracted finger at where the incubator was hidden behind a pile of papers. Just like that. “Let me know what you turn up.”

  She couldn’t do anything but nod mutely. He trusted her. Oh, heavens, he trusted her.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday, isn’t it?” said Tam. Dorie nodded. “Well then. We’ll take all four wyvern chicks back to the country and try the catch-and-release with unbonded woglets.” His eyes lit up behind his specs. “Such an opportunity. Do you mind if we poke around and see if we see anything matching that girl’s stories?”

  About the basilisk, he meant. “Why not?” She picked up the incubator and moved to the door. She had promised herself last night she would tell him today. She should tell him now, before she left with those eggs in tow. Because he trusted her. “Buster still doing okay?” she said instead.

  “Quite belligerent,” Tam said. “Only acknowledges me with hisses. Unresponsive to whistling, but he liked the piano.” He looked somewhere past the spider, unfocused. “I suppose if tomorrow is Saturday, today is Friday?”

  “It must be.”

  “If you’re sure the next egg won’t be ready till dawn, then I’m going to be out late tonight.” He did not look at her.

  “No, dawn tomorrow it is,” Dorie managed. He must be meeting Annika. For a late, late date. Her heart sank to her ribs. “See you then.”

  He whistled as she left the room, eggs in tow.

  * * *

  She couldn’t take an egg to Malcolm Stilby. She couldn’t.

  But what else was she to do?

  At eleven-thirty Dorie left the lab and walked all the way to Malcolm’s, fire raging over her choices. At the end of his block she stopped, sat down on a bench. She was a traitor if she took him an egg—a traitor to the Crown, to the fey, to the ironskin. To the wyverns. To Tam. To herself.

  But if she didn’t take him one she was a traitor to Jack, who didn’t deserve to lose her apartment over Dorie’s moral conundrums.

  She stood, walking briskly toward the front door before she could change her mind. She was at the bottom of Malcolm’s steps when she stopped again. Woglet cooed on her shoulder, rubbing her ear, and she reached up to pet him. Her fingers skritched behind his wings and he burbled, and she knew it was no use. She couldn’t go through with it.

  She turned, and as she did, the door opened and the tall butler from the day before gestured her inside. Inside she could clearly see Malcolm Stilby.

  Rage smeared his face at the sight of her wyvern, and as quickly was gone.

  But Dorie knew what she had seen. She backed up a step.

  “Come in, come in, Mr. Eliot,” he said. “I want to discuss with you the small matter of your picture in the newspaper.” His voice held implicit threat and she took one more step away.

  “You can discuss it with me on the front step or not at all,” she said gruffly, trying not to let her voice shake. There was no way she was going in there, especially not with a baby wyvern and three eggs. Oh, why had she even tried this?

  “Mr. Eliot, be reasonable,” Malcolm said. He came to the doorstep, wrapping his lounging robe tighter. Given that it was now lunchtime, she wondered if he ever changed out of it. “I am a perfectly understanding man. I do not own you, nor any of those who work for me. No contracts, no penalties like the Crown would impose. I just am curious why, if you were not interested in bringing me the … items we mentioned, that you would have come to me at all. I very much dislike the idea that someone is spying on me, you see.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Dorie. With an effort she remained calm, careless. A sure-of-himself young man. “This was an accident,” she said, pointing at Woglet. “I was trying to bring you an egg I found, but he hatched before I could get back into town.”

  “Ah,” Malcolm said. He looked calmer now—pulled a loose cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “You have to forgive me, Dorian. I heard an odd tale this morning from one of my other boys. Some drunk man came wheeling into a tavern where they were last night, going on about a couple of boys who’d just healed his daughter with some sort of flying lizard egg. But I suppose, come to think on it, I saw your picture with the wyvern in the paper on Wednesday morning, and this is Friday. So your wyvern could hardly be from the egg that hatched last night.”

  “No, it couldn’t,” s
aid Dorie. “Obviously.” She was relieved that she had had Woglet in the purse when they entered Alice’s flat last night. Angry at the girl’s father. Colin had sworn the family to secrecy—they had been there to help! And now …

  “Well then,” Malcolm said. “Were you coming to bring me something?” He nodded at the incubator in her hand.

  “Uh, no,” Dorie lied quickly. “I was just on my way out to the forest for the day to try again. Coming to ask you if you knew anything about, um”—she threw out the first creature that came to mind—“basilisks?”

  Malcolm laughed. “Find me a basilisk and you can ask for the moon. They’ve been extinct for three hundred years. Wishful stories in that Fey Tales book to the contrary.”

  “Oh,” said Dorie. She thought back to her conversations with Tam. “I heard there was a basilisk skeleton somewhere. In some collector’s house.”

  Malcolm nodded. “Malformed wyvern, the scientists say these days. I think they’re wrong. It’s the real deal—just long dead. I mean, some people used to wonder if they hibernated. Because they would disappear for decades, and then be spotted, and then disappear. But this is my profession, to know what’s out there, eh? And I think two centuries without a basilisk seems like no more basilisks. But I’m always willing to be proven wrong … in this sort of matter, anyway. Hey, do you want me to unload that wyvern on your shoulder? Rate’s a good deal less than an egg, but he looks like a pretty healthy specimen.”

  “No, I’m good,” said Dorie, taking one more step away. “I’m actually hoping he can help me find more eggs.”

  Malcolm snorted. “Good luck with that,” he said. His eyes narrowed as she turned to go down the stairs, and she wondered if she had really covered her tracks. “Oh, Dorian,” he said, as she reached the bottom. “Do let me know if you need any help, won’t you? I’m always happy to organize a team to go into a prime location.”

  She swallowed and nodded.

  And as soon as she could, she blended into a crowd with her best don’t-look-at-me. Looked over her shoulder all the way back to the lab.