Copperhead i-2

by Tina Connolly

  He took the glass from her hand, dropped it into the bemused hand of a fat dwarvven man standing by the wall. Next her hand, fingers lacing through hers, and Rook drew her in. Their eyes met, level, equal. He was light and lithe and deft in the dance. A touch here, there, and they were moving in time together around the floor, his fingers subtly guiding, hers subtly suggesting.

  The detachment was leaving her now. She was suddenly very there, very present in his arms, very there for his uncharacteristic silence. He looked at her thoughtfully, and Helen looked back as if she had nothing to hide, because she could no longer think how to hide it.

  “Funny us meeting like this,” she said. It was meant to be a joke, and yet it slipped out without breath, and he let it hang there too many seconds to still sound like a joke.

  Music, the sort that lifted you around and around, violins and piano, a heartbeat rhythm pounding faster, stair-stepping higher. A familiar refrain worked into the melody, repeating itself, and her fingers beat it out upon his shoulder as it came round again.

  It did not matter how many dancers were in the room, they were alone as the melody went round and round, climbing to a finish that was heartbreaking in the way it triumphed and broke apart, fading away like dying applause, everything wonderful has just happened and now it is over, over, over.

  Her heart pounded the echo of the finished music, racing without a song to follow.

  “Helen,” he said, and took her hand tightly, so very tightly. Everything was a blur of color around her. She only saw him, and beyond him, like an afterimage, a mirage, a girl in a white dress with a grass green sash.

  “Helen,” he said, again, seeking for more words, but she knew the future of all the words he would say.

  “Don’t,” she said, and she freed her hand from his grasp. She pressed one finger, two to his lips.

  Rook caught her hand before she could pull away, slip away like the tale of the girl who has to flee the dance at midnight, leaving behind one fey-blue shoe. “Isn’t there something I can do,” he said in a low voice. “I must be able to … to free you.”

  “No one can help me,” she said. She tugged against his grip. “I must go.”

  “But.”

  “No,” she said, and turned on him. “You must never speak this. Not even think it to yourself. That is how you can help me.”

  She saw him see the fire in her eyes, and think of something, and not say it. But then he opened his mouth again.

  “You will not speak,” she said, and the words came out too fast, too fierce, in an attempt to stop him from saying anything that could crush her fragile will. “I am a grown woman who has made rational choices and you dishonor me by suggesting that I have made poor ones.” Let him wriggle out of that.

  He opened and shut his mouth. Then: “Mrs. Huntingdon, I will do as you tell me. I had sooner destroy my left hand than disobey.”

  A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. “Only left?”

  “Dwarvven are generally left-handed. Didn’t you know?”

  “Perhaps I should have guessed from the backward way they dance.”

  “Come, not fair.”

  “No, not.”

  The music stopped completely then, and there was a great banging of spoons on glasses. The crowded room grew silent. Helen turned to see the source. A woman stood at the front of the room—clearly an official, a leader. She had a coronet of grey-black braids and the air of someone who was used to being listened to. “Friends,” she said softly, and they all grew stone-still.

  Her manner was calm, her posture straight. She looked around at everyone as she spoke, meeting the eyes of her people. “The dwarvven have had a rough road to travel in recent years. Tonight was a hard event to have happen, here on the doorstep of our home. The careful work of Nolle and her team, working under the most adverse conditions, helped to ameliorate this terrible accident.” She did not call it an attack, Helen noticed, and there were murmurs from those in the crowd who disagreed with her. The woman raised her hands. “Now is not the time for argument. Now is the time to honor the two men we lost tonight.” She named them—the trolley driver and a passenger—offering a couple sentences about the kind of men they were, biographies that sounded truthfully funny about the men’s strengths and weakness, rather than grandiose overstatements of their worth.

  There was silence for a moment, remembering.

  “And now,” she said, “I ask that you take your places, as I have reports from Tumn that policemen are advancing on the bookshop. To … investigate the accident.”

  “Where were they during it?” shouted a young man from the crowd.

  “We will meet them calmly,” said the woman, “and only if they cannot be turned away with words will we fight. The dwarvven are always ready.”

  Helen looked around and saw what she meant. Men and women were rolling back sleeves or unbuttoning dress shirts to reveal the ever-present chain mail that dwarvven always wore. She did not know much about dwarvven custom, but this she did, as it was nominally fashion. The dwarvven always wore chain mail. It tended to be symbolic—just a touch here or there. The unrolled sleeves and unbuttoned shirts were equally symbolic, exposing their chain mail wristlets or chokers. They were ready to fight, just like their ancestors.

  Across from her a hardened-looking man had removed his whole shirt to show he was in chain mail from head to toe. He casually held a knife in his hands. Her heart thumped into her throat at the sight of it. It didn’t matter one whit that he was shorter than Helen—she knew she wouldn’t stand a chance against someone like that.

  She looked around again and thought, how could I have possibly dismissed the dwarvven as symbolic a moment ago? She was as insensitive as Copperhead. She saw warriors, saw hard glints in their eyes, off their mail. She backed up a step into Rook, whirled to face him.

  “I must go. Go get Jane. Get her out of here,” she said.

  “I will walk you there.”

  She nodded and did not protest that he had agreed to leave her, for she did not like the way that angry eyes met hers, as if all her work tending the wounded was nothing, set against her race. Perhaps it wasn’t.

  They hurried out of the dance room, among the sea of dwarvven going to their places to be ready against whatever might come. It was dark in the halls and they were jostled, and he took her hand to pull her along the route he had memorized.

  She winced as he seized the bandage. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go. “I didn’t realize your hand was hurt in the accident.”

  “I wasn’t—it’s nothing,” she said, pulling away, but he stopped and gently took her hand and she did not pull away again.

  “How did it happen?” he said in a low voice. His fingers ran gently over her palm in the dark. There were shouts and clanks as the dwarvven hurried around them.

  “It was nothing,” she said. “Just a broken glass. It wasn’t intentional.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “Yes,” Helen had to admit, and they did not need to say who he was.

  Rook’s fingers tightened on hers, not painfully but completely, so that she felt every bit of the palm of his hand wrapping hers, covering it. “I said before that you wouldn’t fit in in dwarvven society,” he said. “That they are closed to outsiders. But at the same time, we don’t care about certain things the humans find important. The conventions of human society are meaningless.”

  She tried to say it simply, frivolously, but the blood pounded her ears and her mouth ran dry. “Such as?”

  “Marriage,” he said.

  “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes,” Helen said, and even managed a light laugh. “I know married dwarvven.”

  “Certainly we marry,” he said. “But we also unmarry. No dwarvven woman would stand that behavior for a minute.”

  Helen pulled away, set off down what she thought was the right path, so he would have to follow. “So now I am weak-willed and cowardly?”

  Rook caught up with her, and i
n a low voice, though in truth none of the men and women hurrying past were listening, he said, “I think divorce is difficult to attain for humans, and any sensitive person would shrink from the public scrutiny it would entail. I am saying, among the dwarvven, no one would particularly care what paper you had or didn’t have that said in what state some human courts found you to be.”

  It was true. Divorce was a nasty process. She would have to go before men in wigs and convince them that Alistair was drunk and brutish. And they would be friends of Alistair, and they would laugh at him for not being able to control his wife, which would make him worse-tempered and not change anything for the better. And then, if the best happened and they granted her her plea (out of some moment where they were sympathetic to Alistair for having to put up with her), then, then, she would have nowhere to live, would be ever after unhirable to work with children and would have no way to support herself. The rest of her life would be squalid and short, and would probably involve mooching off of Jane, who was in little better situation. Helen didn’t even have a cow to barter for room and board.

  But what if Rook was suggesting what she thought he might be suggesting? (No, he hadn’t said it. But imagine for a moment.) Her heart beat that yes, then, she could just run off, but her brain, that sad pathetic lump of organ that she continually tried to coax into working better … well. It said what then, Helen? What then. You go to live with Rook. You think you love him. You think he (might, might) love you. Just as you thought Alistair loved you. And if he changed, what then? Now you can’t get any job, not just not one working with children, but no job at all, for you have been living in sin, and they would see you as little better than a prostitute, and all society would be barred to you. Well. Perhaps you could live in Frye’s garret for a couple weeks. But then she, too, would kick you out, like Alberta said she did when she grew tired of having company.

  They left you. The people you loved always left you.

  “I would have nowhere to go,” she said, and in that space he said:

  “You would have me.”

  They were near his quarters then; she recognized the brick wall in the dim glow of his flashlight. And she dropped his hand and pulled back and said, “You do not mean it.”

  “I do.”

  “You think you do. But I would be a burden to you. And besides. You promised you would obey my wishes. What happened to all the business a few minutes ago about your left hand?”

  “Difficult to stick to,” Rook said with a faint laugh.

  But Helen rose up, her thoughts ballooning out as large as the room, encompassing everything, and she said in a way that would roar and echo, “You don’t even know me. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  He opened his mouth, but she went past him like an ocean.

  “I changed my husband,” she said. “I manipulated him. I took the power of my face and I changed him. Now what do you think of me?”

  “What do you mean, changed him?”

  Helen touched the chin of her perfect face and said, “With this I changed him.”

  “You mean the fey allure?” said Rook. “It makes people be drawn to you, want to like you, sure. But it isn’t your fault beyond that. You didn’t change him.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said, and she told him exactly what she had done to Alistair.

  A strange light came into his eye. She recognized it as the same way she had looked at him after the trolley crash. Diffidence. Suspicion. Trying to pull back, trying to let go. She saw all those things, and she saw, too, that she could change him as easily as she had changed Alistair and the thought of it made her gasp, miss a beat.

  “What else?” Rook said.

  “You,” Helen said, and it came out all strangled-sounding. Was she worried that he would leave her? Well then. She could make it so he never could. And she looked at his dear bright hazel eyes in the light of the flashlight, dimmed now with worry, with concern, with trying to let her go and failing and trying to understand what she was saying. “I could change you,” she said. “I could make it so you thought I was the most wonderful woman in the world.”

  “I do,” he murmured, and she gasped, and laughed, and steamrollered over that:

  “The most sensible woman, then. I could change you and you would not know you had been changed. I could fix you.”

  He shook his head at her. “But you wouldn’t.”

  “No,” she said wildly, and clutched his shoulders, startling them both. “You don’t understand. I could have already done it. You wouldn’t know. What if I made you follow me. What if I made you protect me that night on the trolley. What if I spotted you at the Grimsbys’ the night this all started and said, you, you will do this thing for me and turned you then.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” Rook said. “You didn’t.”

  She looked at him. “Help me,” she said, echoing what she had said to him three nights ago when she had thought he was Alistair in the confusion after the lights went out. And he had.

  His hazel eyes looked lost.

  “You can’t be sure,” she said. “You never will be sure. That would poison us even if there could be an us.”

  “I wouldn’t let it,” he said.

  She laughed at him—a dry, brittle sounding thing—and drew back. “Go, find your dwarvven warrior and stand at her side,” she said. “I must take Jane to safety before your people turn on her.”

  “Helen,” he said and one hand, two, seized her shoulders, so lightly.

  “I fixed him,” she said, raising her hands as if to escape. They landed on his chest; she tried to make them obey her, and push him away, but they only lay there. “Don’t you see, I fixed Alistair. Everything will be all right.” Her voice rose in hysteria, drowning Rook out. “He will be all right, forever and ever, for he can be fixed, he can be like you, I can make him be whatever I want—”

  In pure disbelief he said, “Be like me?”

  She stumbled over her rising hysteria, incoherent babble, “I didn’t mean, really—”

  Rook pulled her close and kissed her.

  It felt like flying, like falling. Like being taken over by the fey. Like dissolving from her own self, which she knew she shouldn’t want but oh she did.

  And then there were shrieks and shouts, and everything went pure white, white with intense light. Floodlights shrieked through the tunnels. Their moment was torn away.

  Rook grabbed her fiercely and quick and intense he said in her ear, “Listen, you don’t know. I was supposed to—they wanted me to kill—”

  “Who, Grimsby? You’d be doing everyone a favor, almost—”

  “Listen, Helen. No. All of them. They wanted me to kill all of them. All the men of Copperhead. That was what I was doing as a double agent. Not just spying.”

  She stared at him in disbelief, her lips forming the single word “Alistair” to his silent, unreadable expression. The floodlights swept over them as humans in black stormed down the stairs, through the halls. Shouting, running, chaos. The barricade had fallen.

  Rook shoved her behind him and shouted in her ear, “Behind the quilt!” and then she was through the entrance into his bedroom and the door was closed behind her, and he was gone. Jane and Tam stood there, blinking at her. Tam was bleary-eyed but awake. Jane was vacant.

  “Come on,” Helen said, and, grabbing their things, flung aside the brown quilt to reveal the hole in the wall. It was very short, and she could see lights just beyond it—a drop-off. “Hopefully not too far down,” she muttered, but she was sure Rook wouldn’t have sent them through it if they were all going to break legs.

  She lifted Tam up, and he slithered through and called back, “It’s fine; come on!” and so shortly they were all through and then pounding down an escape tunnel marked by red sigils, splashing down tunnels and ducking under grates. They were met by other dwarvven children and elderly at various intervals, caught up in a sea of them running to safety, until at last they reached the point where the old sewer tunnels h
ad poured into the river. The thin water trickled past the grate, out into the cold of the rushing river. There were narrow steps there leading them up to safety, and they scrambled up and tumbled out into the snowy dark at the waterfront, by the statue of Queen Maud.

  The freezing air was bracing after the tumble through the tunnels. Helen kept a tight grip on Jane and Tam, searching through the confusion for a way out, a way somewhere.

  Helen saw Nolle in the midst of chaos, calmly directing refugees to a line of barges. A small smile warmed her face as she saw Helen. “We’d been planning for this eventuality,” Nolle said. “The dwarvven are going home. Every last one. Leaving the city for good. But I wanted to thank you.”

  “I hardly did anything,” protested Helen.

  “You stood with us,” Nolle said, “and I think you will in the future. I will not forget my debt.” A short nod and she turned back to her work. “Goodbye.”

  Helen pulled Jane and Tam through the crowd, out of the way. If everyone was going to insist on believing the best of her, she might have to actually live up to it.

  “Where are we going?” said Jane absently.

  “Frye’s,” Helen replied, and they tramped through the snow.

  It was only during that cold black walk back to safety that she finally let herself think about the moment that had just happened, ever so briefly before everything ended. Not the moment itself. She couldn’t quite think about that; it was too fine, too vivid. But the moment before, the moment when she rattled everything off hysterically, when she had said she could make Alistair be like Rook. Helen closed her eyes against her mouth’s foolishness. For then there was the moment after to deal with, too, when Rook said what he had been sent to do.

  Rook was supposed to bring them all down. Alistair included.

  But he hadn’t, had he? Was that for his conscience’s sake? Or was it for her, all for her? And what did that mean, what could that mean—that he cared for her? Or that he didn’t? Helen did not want Rook to kill, nor did she want Alistair, despite all his faults, to be killed. But she couldn’t make it work out in her head. Rook had come to the meeting planning to bring Alistair down, and then, having met Helen, decided Alistair should live, and thus Helen and Alistair stay happily married for all time.…