Copperhead
Page 26
No, she could not speak. All her cleverness had deserted her.
But she could be the hawk, all muscle instinct and focused fury.
“Come on,” Alistair said. “We can still reclaim our place. Just let’s go on home before anyone sees. We’ll meet up with Grimsby later. He’ll make it out okay; he’s like a fox.”
“I am not going home with you,” she said, carefully, precisely. “I am not going to your home ever again.”
The color faded from his face as he saw that she meant it. She registered that in the back of her mind, that she had chosen a life of trouble and chaos and public ordeal … and freedom. It blossomed in her mind that if she made it out of here alive, she would have freedom.
And then, because there seemed only one thing left to do, she moved to the center of the room and picked up the last remaining funnel. She would not be like poor Millicent—she hoped. Because she would be both the source and the wielder of the power.
And she moved to the copper hydra that ran it all, and placed one hand on it, even as she placed the funnel on her face.
She was plunged into that waking dream again. But this time she was moving among it herself. She wondered if poor Millicent had felt that before she vanished, that she was a figure on this alien landscape, as she touched every corner of the city at once and they all fed to her eyes and ears and mind.
She could see the fey that controlled Mr. Grimsby in this maelstrom. The self-styled Fey King. He was out there, and he had pieces of himself all over the city, not just in Mr. Grimsby’s face and her necklace. He was in other fey faces. As Tam said, he was in every single one of those hydra pins and necklaces. Before the advent of the iron masks, he had been able to dip in and out of a handful of well-placed people—and now with the copper pins there were another few hundred he could use as eyepieces to the whole city. It was how he had gained so much power so quickly. How he had risen to prominence and caught the ear of the Prime Minister. He must have planned long ago for this, seeding the clay given to Rochart with bits of himself. He was everywhere.
Helen felt it all, and her thoughts ranged across the city. It was something. But it was not enough. She could not reach out to stop the Fey King, who was moving rapidly, connecting pieces of fey out there into nets that pulled and tensed. She felt what she had before in the warehouse, that sense of the bits of fey trying to coalesce, and as the tension grew stronger and stronger she felt the power growing behind it, a sense of stored energy as the grid of fey that lay all over the city crackled alive, joining together in one massive grid of power.
He was definitely not combining all the fey to destroy them.
She saw all those images as she had before, and she tried to focus to where a particular part of the city was becoming strongly blue.
<
She could see the blue in that part of the city, lying along grass and sidewalk and embankment, and the air around it hummed with electricity, hummed like she was able to hear and see a downed wire from the trolley. A bird flew too close and was zapped, fell to the ground with singed feathers.
Helen froze as she saw what he was doing. What he had been planning to do all along, since he had forced the fey six months ago to split and begin settling over the city, lying in wait until he would be ready to use them all at once. He was pulling all the fey into one massive grid of power that would trap the entire city in a single charge.
He would kill all the humans. Once the net was finished. He had gained enough power from the women he had drained to go everywhere. They would reach out and electrify everyone.
But the women were detached now, and the Fey King hadn’t gotten the entire hundred he wanted, and he was slowing down. Helen saw that, and she saw that he would have to make choices.
And she just needed a little boost.
She dropped the funnel to the floor, because she saw she didn’t need it. It had helped her figure out how to focus, but she was her own power no matter how it came. With her now-free hand she pulled the necklace from her slacks pocket, that had the little bit of the Fey King in it, and touched it to the copper.
The blue wriggled free of the copper hydra. Then melted in.
In the maelstrom, Helen seized the bit of fey before it could find the rest of the Fey King, and rode its tail as it zoomed to him, bouncing around his multiplicity. He was frightening and dense in the imaginary world, strung out across the city, bloated and gathering blue.
But it was only a little boost, and it was not enough. She had control over the machine, but not over him.
Electrified blue she said to the warehouse at large, I need more power.
And they came.
Of their own free will they came, those few of The Hundred who were left. Frye and Calendula and Alberta and Louisa Mayfew and Agatha Flintwhistle, they all came and put their trust in her, put funnels to their faces, and fed her their power.
Helen pulled on them, pulled just a little, pulled not too much, pulled on them until she was stronger than the Fey King, because each of the little pieces of fey in the women tenuously connected to their own larger selves out there in the grid, and those fey did not like the Fey King either. Those larger bits of fey came, tunneling through to Frye and Calendula and Desirée, six of them, ten, twelve. They came and came and together, together, they were all stronger than the Fey King, and Helen could put out her hand and crush him.
He gathered all his strength, but it was not enough.
Because as the rest of the fey saw Helen’s group massing, they flocked to her, away from the Fey King’s grasp. <
<
He whimpered.
He cried, there in the blue, and in the warehouse Mr. Grimsby curled into a ball and sobbed.
Helen stopped, and everything she had ever not done flashed before her eyes.
If I had gone into battle to save Charlie, perhaps, I, too, would be someone who had killed, she thought. Jane is someone who has killed, and I am the one who stayed with Mother and tended to her while she let herself slip away. No matter how much there needs to be one who stays, the one who stays will always regret not going, and perhaps it takes a particular kind of strength to both stay and bear up under having stayed.
I am still not going to be one that kills. I am never going to be one who has killed.
Directly to the Fey King, so they all could hear, she said: “If I let you go, will you promise to go back to your homes in the forest and never fight us again?”
It flung itself around inside her mental grasp, screaming.
She waited, patiently, waiting for the tantrum to wear itself out. I can and will choose not to kill, she thought, and the heady rope of power thrummed around her. She felt a new kind of power settling in place somewhere in the back of her skull, the feeling that she could make and own her decisions, and that people could decide for themselves whether or not they liked them. It didn’t matter to her anymore. When you ended up with great power you had the responsibility to not abuse it, but you also had the responsibility to use it, if that was necessary. When Queen Maud turned back the Armada, did she worry about what the Armada would think? And now Helen had the power, and even though she had a lifetime of bad judgments behind her, still, perhaps it was time to trust that she had learned something from them.
But perhaps she didn’t mind threatening death, for a good cause. The Fey King had quieted down and so Helen said, “If you do not promise, I will kill you all now.” The large mass of blue on her side thrummed in dismay.
It grew cunning. “I am only one leader. What if they break their promises after I am gone?”
“Fey live a long time,” she said, as if bo
red by the whole discussion, though her heart pattered through her chest. “Make them all swear, for all their lifetimes.”
It raged again, but then it quieted down. There was a thrumming, and she felt the question go out, through her, through all the women, into the fey that carpeted the city. There were no words, but they said in the way that bits of fey said it, <> <> <> and she heard in that how glad they were to be going home.
“Then go,” she said, eager for all of this to be done, and through her the word went out and they all picked up. She sent her vision out to the ends of their reach and she could see the whole city, the blue lifting, peeling back from stone and step, lifting, going, going. They joined up with each other as they flew, bits of fey finding their counterparts in mad joyful rushes, and she could feel through that extension of power how glad they were to be back with themselves. The fey leader had a lot of power, she realized, to make them split like that and keep them that way. She remembered Jane telling her how in the old days the fey that ran all the bluepacks were little bits of fey, a punishment system. Is that how the self-styled Fey King had made his order stick? Presented making them split up and cover the city as punishment for not winning the war?
As the blue joined together the blue aura dimmed, because it was made up of them, and they were leaving. She suddenly worried whether the command would extend to the bits of fey in The Hundred’s faces, but the women were detaching themselves one by one now from the funnels, and they looked fine, and Helen herself felt fine. Perhaps it was because those bits were solidly embedded in the humans; perhaps it was because their punishments dated from the time of the Fey Queen, and therefore some unknown quantity of time had not yet been served. She did not know, but she was not ready for those bits to be gone quite yet.
The fey were at the edge of her range now, ecstatic, flying home to the forest. Helen thought that perhaps humans did not really need to worry about the run-of-the-mill fey, as long as there was not a leader hell-bent on making them do something it was not in their nature to do.
She thought, too, that the real thing was that you had to both try to do right, and then deal with the fallout, whatever it was. Strength was not something that happened in a moment, but a sustained note that you held over time. She gestured to the rest of the dozen to detach, which they eagerly did, leaving the warehouse at last, going home.
Helen herself let go of the copper hydra and stood quietly in the warehouse, feeling the power go, feeling herself become only and wholly herself.
She was feeling pretty good about the decision to bargain with the Fey King rather than obliterate him.
And then Grimsby attacked.
Chapter 15
BLOOD AND COPPER
Helen was flung back against the wall with the force of the Fey King’s power. Everything splintered, fractured. She was pushed aside and soon she would be no more.
And then as quickly as the attack had come it was gone and her mind was clean and clear. Rook was standing over Grimsby with a steel dagger, its point poking the soft flesh of his neck.
The tall man with the snake eyes cowered, blubbering. She saw the man he had once been: a weak drunkard, now pitiful and crying. Inside him raged the fey, sharp and cunning, choosing to let the human take control for the sake of those tears.
Rook’s knifepoint did not waver.
“No,” Helen said. “He’s not worth it.”
“He would have destroyed the city,” shouted Rook. “Sometimes things are worth it.”
She thought he might be right, but at the same time, she had seen his face when he told her about his past, his present, about the indentured servitude of spying that went on and on and on, all for the mistake of being born havlen. It was not right that this man should bear any more guilt. “No,” she said, and slammed Grimsby back, hard, into the wall away from Rook. He was hooked into the machine still, and so she still had access to the little power he had left, in addition to her own. He could never be stronger than her.
“You lied,” she said, and she was vast and blue. “I thought your kind had to keep promises.”
“You heard what you wanted to hear,” sneered the Fey King, and oh misery perhaps that was true. All the fey had promised except this one. But she was not going to waste time in self-recrimination. If she had to have a blot on her soul, so be it. Sometimes you had to bear up under things.
The fey from the city were all gone, but she seized all the power from Grimsby himself, sucking it through the machine and into her until he was nothing, an ordinary man with a bit of fey remnant, cowering in the warehouse.
“You can’t hold me forever,” he said weakly. “You have to let go or keep me inside you.”
Helen could feel the power of the Fey King thrumming inside and realized he was right, and that further, she knew how strong the Fey King was. He would wear her down and take her over if she was foolish enough to think she could hold him.
But there were not only two choices. She could contain him in iron, she thought. Forever. “Rook, get that iron cage. We’ll put him in there for now and then get handcuffs.” She pointed at Grimsby, motioning him toward one of the hundred cages. “Push him in the minute I say go.”
Snarling, Grimsby backed up. At the mouth of it he stood, and she had to leave the door open to let the fey completely back into him. “Watch him,” she said, and then she let the power unspool, going back, back, back, until Grimsby was starting to stand, whole and healthy and hale.
He started to lunge, and she shoved the last bit back into him with all her might, shouting, “Go!” but he leapt at her.
He leapt at her with a sharpened copper pipe in his hand and she hadn’t thought to counter for anything like that, and it was coming at her, and Rook was still turning, still hurrying, but it would be too late, too late.
Then a heavy bright shape flashed in front of her, an iron stake held high. It bore Grimsby down to the ground, and she saw then that the iron stake was held in two canary yellow gloves. The copper and the iron flashed; the bodies rolled over and over in a tangle before Helen could fully register that the dark shape was Grimsby, and the bright one was Alistair.
“Let him go,” Helen shouted, and Rook, who had no weapon, plunged in to try to pull Alistair free. Long after, she remembered that.
Rook shouted in pain and her rapidly beating heart threatened to break, a bright hot thing that would shatter at any minute.
But this was not the battle in her hometown. And that was not Charlie.
And then Alistair shouted, a shout of victory, and as Rook pulled him out of harm’s way she saw the sharp iron spike lodged in Grimsby’s ribs, heard the shriek, felt the universe expand and collapse as the self-styled Fey King inside shredded out and dissolved, obliterated.
He was safe. They were safe. She looked down at Grimsby’s body and wondered how it had felt to be Grimsby, to be slowly eradicated over time. To know, like Jane, what was happening. To not be able to fight your way out. To lose your wife, your son. To vanish.
“Helen,” Rook said quietly.
She turned, heart willing him to be okay. But he was. He was kneeling, and his hands rested quietly on Alistair’s shoulder.
“Alistair,” she said brokenly, and she dropped to her knees on the hard cement beside him, as Rook backed away, one silent shake of his head signaling everything that was already obvious.
The sharpened copper pipe had sliced through his gut. She knew, she remembered from that battle, about belly wounds, and even if she didn’t, only a fool could stand and look and smell and expect something besides what was going to happen.
Alistair breathed faintly, his eyes closed.
Helen took his left hand in her own. Her fingers trembled as she closed around it.
“Rook,” she said then, and looked up at him with anguished eyes.
Rook looked somberly at her for the space of a heartbeat. Then in a low voice, jagged and slow, said, “I will leave you,” and turned, and wal
ked down the long echoing warehouse toward the door. All that work of splitting herself with the blue fire and yet now was when she felt split in two. A piece of her walked out the warehouse door with Rook, into the icy November night, and somehow she knew it wasn’t coming back.
Gently she held her husband’s hand, and listened for his breath.
His eyes flickered, opened halfway. “Did she get out of harm’s way?” said Alistair. His voice was so thin, like wind shaking the dry leaves.
“Who?” said Helen. He was so white, so clammy-pale.
“Jane,” he said. With pauses between the words that grew longer and longer, he said, “I sent her. A warning.”
Helen couldn’t figure out what he meant, but his eyes held hers, pleading for her to understand without further words. The cold damp of the warehouse floor seeped into her knees. Then realization. “The death threat.” Cut from liquor labels.
“To save her,” Alistair said.
Helen crushed his hand between hers, as if by doing so she could keep him from dying before help arrived. “You sent it,” she said.
A little smile. “Not a coward,” he said. “Tried?”
There was a great rushing void of grief inside for this man who had tried to break away from his friends, his vices, after all. Too little, too secretly. But he had done one thing. He had tried to keep Jane from playing into the hands of Grimsby, and starting down this terrible path. A foolish, ridiculous thing.
“You tried,” she said to that taut body, but there was no air in it and he could not hear her. She could see him, past all his vices and depravities, him, Alistair, living on the map of his face. His skin was a hundred years old, but the last bit of life in his body lived right there on it, waiting for Helen to tell him he tried, that it was okay, that he could depart from this world in some sort of peace.
She couldn’t make it okay. Couldn’t make everything he had done or failed to do vanish, like clouds parting in the sky. But she could tell him he tried, for it was true, though sad and touching that at this moment all he could think of for proof was a frightening torn-paper note.