Copperhead

by Tina Connolly

  “Your family?” Rook said. He kept pace with her as they walked up the street, letting her manage the words in her own way. The houses were bigger here on the other side of the park, more porches and columns and windows … but still that blue, all that blue.

  “Me,” Helen said. “My father died several years before the war. My brother, Charlie … near the end of it. Jane was in the city, trying to heal herself. I wasn’t very nice to her at the time, I’m afraid. It felt as though she’d abandoned me.” Helen hadn’t thought through this in years. At least, not while awake—sometimes the dreams slipped her back through time and she woke aching with regret for a vanished past. It didn’t matter if she thought about it or consciously didn’t think about it, it was all still there. That lost feeling of being thirteen and alone in the house with Mother, who was slipping further away each day despite all of Helen’s efforts to bring her back.

  “By the end, there was nothing left. Everything was mortgaged to the hilt or sold off. But I heard about a new doctor in the city. I went to him and begged. Well, he agreed to payment in installments.…” Helen trailed off. The night was cold and wet. The cloud cover blocked out the stars. Perhaps it was not clouds but smoke from the factories at the river, she thought, choking the sky.…

  And these few sentences were more than she had said in years. She could not do any more, not just yet. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

  There was silence for a time. Then Rook said, “I grew up not knowing my father. Of course I was taller than everyone else. But havlen is an insult. Half-thing.”

  Helen looked at him, shocked. How had she seen him and not known? She had to recalibrate. This man was only half-human. And half-dwarvven. Alistair would never approve. Copperhead would never approve. He couldn’t possibly be a member, then, unless he was a dwarvven spy, and in that case he had just carelessly handed a big secret to the wife of one of the top party members.

  “I started out by punching everyone who called my mother a vile name. After a while I got a name for it.”

  “I would have figured you for the class clown type.”

  “When they finally threatened to throw me out of school for good I became the class clown instead. At least it’s a time-honored position, in dwarvven society. Like being a writer. Being a joker. It gave me a tenuous place.”

  “It’s so much easier to talk of fun things,” Helen said. The way was getting steeper and it was hard to laugh. “If you talk silly then no one asks prying questions.”

  “So let’s talk of terrible theatre some more,” Rook said, but Helen heard a bite in his voice that made her ask, “You didn’t stay the class clown?”

  “Who does,” he said, “when war comes?” There was a moment when the moon caught his eyes and she looked right into him and saw that there was a thing, a some-thing, a black dark thing. But then his eyes glinted with a grin once more and he said, “Now, you may talk of cabbages and sealing wax and everything else Dodgson wrote of, but we are done with secrets.” He suddenly seized her arm and pointed to the footbridge they were nearing. “Have you ever climbed on a bridge rail in the middle of the night in November?”

  “No!” Helen said, suddenly laughing, and Rook seized her arm, calling, “Race you,” and pulled her up the street, as if the race were the two of them together, against some other, unknown opponent. The cold night was sharp in her throat and her heels skidded on the wet pavement, but she laughed, fast and fierce, giddy with the run.

  The bridge railings turned out to be stone ledges, and there was a fair amount of blue fey draped over them.

  “Mm,” said Rook. “Perhaps we won’t climb these railings.” He looked at the blue. “No, I wanted to climb something.” He reached down and peeled away a large swath of blue with his gloved hands.

  “Rook!” she cried, hurrying toward him—then stopped, for her face was still bare.

  He let the blue fall over the edge of the bridge. “Go home, little fey,” he said. “Shoo.” The blue glow slid down into the black night and vanished.

  “Rook,” she said again, shocked. “Do you have iron in your gloves?”

  “No,” he said, and peeled another piece away. “It’ll be safe for you in a minute. Hang on.”

  “But … you’re touching them. You saw what happened today, to that man.…”

  “Yes,” he said. “And yet the odds are very much against that. Or perhaps I like to live dangerously.” He saw her expression and said, “Look, as much as I dislike the fey, a little piece isn’t going to harm me. You do know what the old fey tech that you humans used to trade for was made from, don’t you?”

  Helen shook her head.

  “Pieces of fey,” he said. “All your bluepacks that used to power things. Bits of split-apart fey. It was a punishment for them. They don’t like being torn apart like this.” He gestured around the city at the swathes of blue. “Whoever their new leader is, they’re strong enough to make it stick.” He dropped another piece over the edge. “Anyway, the small bits aren’t aware of much. It’s not till you have a whole fey that you have problems.”

  “Well, I do know that much,” Helen said. “But aren’t you afraid there could be a big one hiding among these little bits?”

  “I know,” Rook said, peeling off another piece. “But I am watching, and I am quick on my feet.” He dropped the bit of fey over the edge. She could see that they did not fall all the way into the water, but lazily drifted along just over it, looking for a new spot to rest. He looked over the edge, watching it go. “It doesn’t matter what I saw today. They are still not the race I fear.”

  Helen did not say anything to that, because she knew which race he meant.

  Humans.

  Rook was havlen, so he was part-dwarvven. And Copperhead hated the dwarvven nearly as much as the fey, though she never could figure out why. Humans and dwarvven had been allies, once. The dwarvven did not like the fey, either.

  “Well,” said Rook. “If they knew what we’ve planned for them…”

  “Humans?” Helen said sharply.

  But Rook just waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Gallows humor, that’s all,” he said. “If we knew what they’ve planned for us … we’d be in just as much trouble and misery.” He pointed to a yellow poster, curled around the nearest streetlamp and visible in its golden glow. “Your Copperhead is getting higher in the capital’s ear every day.”

  “They’re not my Copperhead.”

  “Just married in, eh?”

  She looked coldly at him.

  He put up his hands. “My tongue always takes me too far,” he said.

  “Or not as far as you’d like?” she said, which made him laugh and pulled the moment back into something funnier than perhaps it should be. After all, what did he mean by plans?

  They started walking again, off the bridge and into Alistair’s neighborhood proper. There were more streetlamps here, and everything was more neatly maintained, making the bits of blue fey particularly jarring, like mold on bread. Her fingers were quite cold in her gloves.

  “So you’re half-dwarvven, and the dwarvven hate you, but you’re working with them,” Helen said, seeing if she could tease any more information out of him.

  Rook looked at the night sky. “I’m always making up,” he told it.

  Helen did not know what for, but she knew what sort of a voice that was. That voice of always making up for leaving Charlie, leaving Jane, leaving Mother. Did Jane ever use that voice for leaving her? “To whom?”

  “To myself.” He closed those laughing hazel eyes and suddenly no part of him looked lighthearted and fun. With his eyes closed she suddenly saw the worry lines around his eyebrows. Saw the tight way his jaw set, as if it could do hard things. “When you have been willing to kill once, you see,” he said, “it is assumed you will be willing to again.”

  She could not say something lighthearted to that, so she said nothing. It was a peculiar moment, to go from a man you had talked to about dancing and th
eatre to thinking: This man has killed. Is he a different man now? He is the same man, but I know something about his past that casts a long shadow over his future. He will always be a man who has killed.

  They were walking up the gaslit street and at the cloud-shrouded moon she said: “The payment to the doctor was so huge, the day so far off … I simply couldn’t ever meet it. I became more and more desperate. More skilled at dividing my life into two pieces. No one must know. I had taken it on to be responsible and important and clever, like Mother and Father and Jane, who were all gone, you see, and I was going to solve it in the same way. By myself. Of course I never was going to be able to meet the payment, and I suppose the doctor must have known that all along. As it drew nearer, he sought me out. Dropped hints of other methods of repayment.…

  “I had hoped I could make the payments. But at some point you miss one and then the payments start escalating. I would come up with grand plans—there are always grand plans—for paying it off. I would make dresses for wealthy ladies and sell them. Things I could never accomplish because I would have to have money to buy the fabric in the first place. Or somehow—never quite satisfactorily explained how—I would get a second position, filling in for other nannies and governesses on their days off. But the thought of spending even more time with intolerable, spoilt children was … intolerable.

  “For all my grand plans, what ended up happening was I would go down to the tenpence dance hall to drown my misery. Women no charge, you know. And the more you promise and flirt, the more men buy you coffee and pastries and bring you little tokens like scarves and so on. I became very good at promising and flirting. I mean, it’s my natural bent anyway, I suppose. We can’t all have high-minded skills.

  “And there I was in a white dress with a green sash and I met Alistair.” She smoothed her lilac gloves over each finger, feeling the outline of the manicured nails below. “I’m always making up for not going into battle,” she said. “For not helping to kill the fey before they killed Charlie, and through him Mother, and nearly destroyed Jane.”

  Rook stopped there on the sidewalk. They were half a block from the house, Alistair’s house. The gaslight flickered in the wind. She was watching the unreadable words on his face, so she didn’t notice his hand move until it was there, brushing one copper curl off of her cheek. Then it was gone, leaving her stomach with a funny bottomed-out feeling and the thought that perhaps she had just imagined his hand moving and it was only the wind.

  “Never be sorry that you could not kill,” Rook said.

  Ice formed on her breath as she stood there, until gold light came on in the windows of her house, and panic rose up. Helen turned from him then, and walked, faster and faster till she was racing up the stairs to her door, wind pulling water from her eyes. She tugged open the front door and hurried in but she had to look back. Rook was still there, a slim black outline in the cold.

  Rook. Rook.

  And she turned.

  Alistair. Alistair.

  The foyer was faintly lit with the light from the open door to the games room; the smell of a wood fire drifted down the hall. She closed the front door silently behind her. The air in the tiled foyer was chill and damp. She could try to make it to her room. She could confront him now and get the lecture over with.

  Or perhaps she could brazen it out, though her cheeks were red-pink with cold, though the cold rose off her in waves. Still. Why not? She stripped off her coat and outer things, shoved them under the hall table, and glided on stockinged feet down the cherrywood floors of the hall to peek inside his games room.

  Alistair was drunk.

  He was by the fire, which glinted off his curls. His long legs were propped on the table on a pile of newspapers; his hand hung loose over the leather club chair with a partial glass of whiskey in it.

  Just as quietly, Helen began to tiptoe away. But not quietly enough.

  “That you, doll?” said Alistair.

  Helen crept back in. She was going to brazen it out, wasn’t she? Be a good liar, like Tam had said he was. A lump caught in her throat as she thought of the boy stuck with Grimsby and the men tonight. Was his father even now filling that small head with tales of rage and revenge?

  “I wondered if you were still up,” Helen said.

  He stared moodily over his glass into the fire. “All white she was. Is. Still,” he said. Yes, very drunk. “But we dragged Grimsby away from there.”

  “To get drunk?” she said. The words just slipped out.

  Alistair sloshed to his feet, arm over the top of the chair to look at her. “Yes, to get drunk,” he said, making his point with a waving finger. “You wouldn’t deny him that, would you? Course you would, coldhearted witch, no fun at all…”

  Helen was stung by this sudden attack. “Don’t I go to all the parties with you?”

  Alistair waved this away. “Not what I mean. Your sister, always looking at me as though I weren’t fit to black your shoes. As if I hadn’t rescued you.” He cupped his hands and opened them in an expansive gesture, spilling the rest of the whiskey onto the shining floor. Bitter alcohol scented the fire-warmed air.

  Helen did not care to talk about this, and particularly not with this version of Alistair. “You should go to bed,” she said. “I’ll send George in to clean.”

  “Bed?” he said. “You don’t tell me when to go to bed. Unless you’re coming.”

  “No, thank you,” said Helen. She prepared to make her escape, but his voice rose a level and stopped her.

  “You don’t tell me what to clean,” he said, and opened his hand, letting the whiskey glass smash to the floor.

  Now Helen did back up a step.

  “You should have heard them all last night,” hissed Alistair. “Talking about your sister. My fault for taking her in. My fault for not throwing her on the street immediately. Your connections. Dragging us down.” He advanced. “Insinuating I can’t run my own household.”

  Helen’s heart beat wildly. Social drinking she could understand; everyone did it. Sometimes you accidentally drank too much and regretted it the next day. But not these frightening rages—and they had been coming more and more frequently. Her hand felt along the doorframe for something to shield herself, but there was nothing, and she was exposed in his glare as he advanced.

  “Stop it,” she said, but Alistair reeled on her, flush with drink.

  “Where have you been?” he said, and there was a keen edge to his words.

  “Out,” Helen said. Her hands trembled as she turned, but she would not cower in front of him. She had made her choice. He had been charming and handsome and sure and she had thought she must very probably love him. And it had made so much sense … hadn’t it? Jane had her career, her plans, but Helen had nothing except her face, and that face was supposed to land her her fortune. Which was Alistair Huntingdon, her charming white knight coming to save her.

  His face reddened further as she turned away. “Out with that man on the street? That … dwarf?”

  Helen froze, the ugly slur ringing in her ears. He had seen them.

  Alistair’s smile was cruel. He had her. “Yes, I saw you. Barefaced and brazen, out walking with Grimsby’s pet dwarf,” he said. “Did he tell you he’s an informant for us? Where’d you find him—when you sneaked off to find Jane? Or were you slumming with the dwarves? Mixing, mingling, rutting?…”

  “Don’t suppose it’s any of your business,” she said, and felt the country drawl that irritated him slip out.

  She was cold and he was hot. He grabbed her wrist and sleeve, stumbled as she jerked. A button tore off as she pulled away, as she slipped and fell on the polished floor. Her hand skidded on the broken whiskey glass.

  “I paid for you,” Alistair spat. “Paid for your face.”

  Helen closed her eyes, clutching her injured hand to her chest, wishing she could close her ears against the torrent of abuse that flowed from his lips. Accusations, true and fair, she knew like a knifepoint in the ribs. Her eyes
opened on that thought, that even if they were true and fair it hurt, it hurt, and she could not stand it. She clutched the copper necklace he had given her so tightly, her cut palm painful against the cold snake heads.

  He was ranting and everything Frye had confessed to poured into her thoughts. Helen stared at Alistair and thought, You will apologize now. You will tell me you still love me. That things will be all right.

  She did it more on a miserable whim than anything. More on a fragile wish that things could be as they were. As she had seen him when she first met him, that shining white knight. Wielding the fey power to change someone was hard; Jane had said so frequently. Frye had said she studied for a long time.

  She did not expect Alistair’s eyes to go glassy as she clutched her necklace, willing him to change. For him to turn and say, “Forgive me, Helen.”

  Chapter 8

  THE HYDRA STRIKES

  Helen backed up a pace as he moved closer, stumbled, sat down in the leather club chair.

  “I am being too harsh,” Alistair said, and again, “Forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive,” Helen said automatically, for wasn’t this what she had wanted? Alistair leaned in, half-smiling, and yet … some hesitation, some lurch in his walk recalled that dead farmer, a mask for a fey.

  “I love you,” he said. He dropped to one knee beside her and took her hand, a simple, caring gesture. “I have been too busy to spend time with you recently. We should travel together. Get out of the city for a while. You always wanted to see Varee.”

  “I have,” her voice said, but her head shook, no no no. His fingers closed around hers. Trembling, shaking, she said: “They have beautiful fashions.”

  “We will buy you mountains of dresses.” But that was something Alistair would say. He was not ungenerous. He liked to see her beautiful, beautifully attired. She was being silly. Alistair was being thoughtful. It was what she had wanted. “We will pick out exactly the sorts of things you like.”