“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.
But there was more to credit to his account. Alistair had saved her from her own foolishness once. No matter how he found her, that he might have thought she was easy prey—still. In this moment she could give him the benefit of the doubt and go by the bare cold facts of the matter, which were that he had paid her debt then—and just now he had saved her life.
He had been a terrible husband, would have been a terrible father. But these things he had done.
“You tried,” she said, carefully and clearly, because that much she could say.
He breathed then, and relaxed, as if everything had been waiting for that one benediction. The wrinkles on the map of his face smoothed out, relaxed.
Then he was gone.
Helen released his hand and laid it gently on his body. His wedding ring was tarnished, but still there, on his finger. Gently she tugged her own off and placed it between his fingers.
Perhaps he had loved her after all, in his fashion.
Helen knelt beside the still body and wept for them both.
Epilogue
It was a fine May morning, crisp yet sunny. Helen kneeled on the wooden pine floor, pinning hems in place on a pair of slim-fitting trousers. “A little more ankle,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
The model—Alberta—grinned. “As long as you let me wear this to my gig for the evening. Will I turn heads!”
“Midcalf then,” said Helen. “As long as you’re going to wear slacks, you might as well go whole hog.”
The door jingled and Helen called over her shoulder, “Just a minute!” She bent back to her hem. “Bring it back first thing in the morning and report word for word on what the audience said. I’m thinking this might be a summer hit, for the brave. Of course I’ll have to source more of this twill.…” Helen looked up at Alberta, who was staring over Helen’s shoulder with a peculiar expression. “What?”
Helen turned around and saw, silhouetted against the bright spring light flooding her shop, a lithe man in close-fitting black.
She dropped all the pins.
“I’ll just be off then,” said Alberta, and she vanished behind the curtains that led to the shop’s back door.
Helen hastily bent to pick up the silver pins. “So what brings you here today?” she said over her shoulder. “Looking for something custom?”
“You could say that,” the man said. He moved silently toward her until he passed beyond the sunlight and his face resolved into Rook. Or it would have, had she been looking at him, and not resolutely at the pins, which required a lot of concentration to pick up. “No pleasant greeting for an old friend?”
“I always appreciate it when my old friends come to see me,” Helen said. Her heart pounded, but she would match him coolly, using dry words like pleasant and friend. “Some of them didn’t like it that I opened a shop. Some of them didn’t like it that I went back to my old name.”
“But they weren’t really your friends anyway,” Rook said.
“No. No, I suppose they weren’t.” She smiled up at him then, a smile that threatened to turn warm. “And really they are very few anyway. The Hundred all come, and what The Hundred do, everyone does. And that includes Frye, and she wears my designs onstage, and then they all come. They all have to come, to keep up.” She dropped her pins into a box. “We’re setting fashion here, whether they like it or not. They don’t shape trends anymore. We do. Frye does. The Hundred do, and so many of The Hundred are doing things, you know.”
“I know.”
He was so still in the middle of the room and she could not think what he was doing there. If he wanted to see her, why hadn’t he come six months ago? Why was he here now, to break her routine, her newfound sense of self? But perhaps he had a new girl; he always did, didn’t he? And perhaps that new girl wanted the designs that the fashion-forward were wearing. Helen had seen many men from the old days. Even Hattersley had slunk in here, not meeting her eyes, to purchase a bias-cut slip skirt for Betty.
Helen adjusted the folds of a sundress on a mannequin. “Did you want to see some clothes?” she said. “Something for someone in particular?”
“No,” Rook said, and she almost smiled, but then he said, “Yes. Show me your favorites.”
“Well,” said Helen. She pulled a somber navy dress from a rack and said, “This is what I wear when I want to convince Tam’s school that his foster mother is serious and appropriate.”
“I had heard that,” he said, though he did not say how. Frye, perhaps, and that made her upset that someone she knew had seen him, shared details about her life with him, and still he had not come. “I’m glad.”
“So are we,” she said, and added, “I’ve gotten quite the education on magical snakes.”
He fingered a beaded belt hanging from a hook, not saying anything.
Helen did not know how to respond to silence. She pulled a bright green sundress from a hanger and held it in front of her, smoothing down the pleats. “This is all mine. People need something a little frivolous these days, you know? Spring’s here—almost summer. No more curfew. No more fear.” She knew the green offset her copper curls, and she looked for his reaction.
He made a noncommittal noise and turned away.
Frustrated, she tried a more direct approach. She moved to a mannequin in the shop window and directed his attention to it. “I’m rather fond of this one, with all the seed pearls. But it fits very tiny. Some of the dwarvven have stopped in, now that they’ve trickled back to the city, but it’s out of their budgets I suppose. I really need to cut one of them a deal on it—Nolle, perhaps—she repaid her debt by bringing me customers, you know. Is she dwarvven?”
“Who, Nolle?”
“The girl you’re picking this out for.”
Rook looked moody. “No. She’s not.” He pointed at the seed pearls. “Isn’t that one expensive?”
“Yes,” Helen admitted. “I sank rather a lot into it. And then accidentally made it so small that everyone who can afford it looks at it and feels guilty about the second high tea they had, but that doesn’t do anything for the dress. It doesn’t get sold.”
He glowered around the room, his hazel eyes dark. “I suppose it’s not just that dress. You’ve sunk a fortune into this place.”
“Perhaps,” Helen said, “but in fact it’s very calculated costs, this dress notwithstanding. Turns out I have a head for such things.”
“I’m not surprised,” Rook said. “I always thought you could move mountains.”
“I expect to recoup the initial investment within two years,” Helen said, “but even if I don’t—” She stopped and looked at him sharply. “Is that what this is? Are you in here worrying about how wealthy I am now?”
His hazel eyes were sharp with misery. “I knew this was a mistake,” Rook said. “I need to be going.”
“Look,” Helen said. “I may have inherited a fortune so large you could fill all your bathtubs with large bills and roll around in a scandalous fashion. But that doesn’t change me.”
The joke did not make him laugh. “You’re just being kind to me,” he said, sounding grumpy. “You can’t help it, I suppose. The fey glamour.”
She had never seen him like this. Her heart beat faster. “Fey glamour?” she said.
“Yes, whatever you do I’ll interpret as nice, because I’m bewitched. If I get
too uppity, then as you said before, you could change me so I’ll leave you alone.” He glowered. “You already told me to leave town with the rest of the dwarvven. Practically threw your purse at me to get me to go. And here I am looking for another excuse to be under your fey spell.” He turned. “I suppose I’d better leave now, before I embarrass myself further.”
Helen swallowed hard and did not move. In a voice a little too high she said, “I suppose you object to my freckles, is that it?”
He was at the doorjamb, the iron-free doorjamb, and then he stopped. Slowly he pivoted on his heel. “Your freckles?” he said. Something sharp and alive crackled all through him, a hint of his former self.
“And the bump on my nose,” she said.
“What bump?” He took one step back to her. Two.
“Jane’s been doing us one by one. Freeing the little bits of fey. Didn’t you know? They deserve their chance to go home.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” he said. The spring sun slanted through the window, the dust motes sparkled in the air.
“You know, I find it highly unflattering that one viewing of Miss Eglantine Frye in a performance could make you rush all up and down the street buying flowers, but for someone you’ve actually shared a highly inappropriate dance of the Shadow with, you don’t even check in to see if she’s recovered from a murderous fey attack.”
“Dear Miss Eliot,” Rook said. He was near enough now for her to smell that faint hint of sandalwood. “I believe you told me I do many things badly.”
“Such as?”
“Dancing, for starters.”
“And?”
“And maybe this.” He kissed her.
When she came up for air she said, “No, perhaps not that.”
“Not that? Well, apologizing then. Probably that.”
“And being late for things,” Helen said. “And willfully misinterpreting my concern over your getting home as evidence that I wanted you to go there.”
“That was very badly done,” he conceded. “But not this?” He kissed her again.
A little bit later she said, “Well. I suppose that might need some practice.”
“But you’ll teach me?”
“I might,” she said.
Rook’s eyes were level with hers and the old gleam was in them. She smiled, mischievously, and turned him around till she was behind him, one hand on his waist, one hand grasping his, looking past his dear face through the open door into the clear sweet sunshine.
“Dearest Rook,” Helen said. “May I have this dance?”
Acknowledgments
The grandparents:
I got pretty lucky in grandparents, but I would especially like to dedicate this to the memory of my grandmother. She was whip-smart, an autodidact, chic, feminist, witty, political, a lover of theatre and the arts. She loved traveling, and she took me to the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis (Raggedy Ann & Andy!), to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (circus toys!), to a Wayne Thiebaud retrospective in Kansas City (all those delicious painted cakes). At their house I first read The Annotated Alice, Saki, and Ogden Nash. I miss her dearly—I wish I would have traveled with her more, after college—and I like to think she would have liked many of the moments in this book, particularly when The Hundred pour in with hatpins.
The thank-yous:
The wise and insightful K. Bird Lincoln and Katherine Sparrow for reading the first draft; Cassie Alexander and Anatoly Belilovsky for heroically answering medical questions (any oddities remaining are thoroughly my own); my dad for asking a lot of tactful questions about discrepancies in the third draft; my mom and Eric for taking the toddler every time I needed to finish yet … another … draft; Anne Brontë, whose work I so greatly admire; Kij Johnson and the CSSF novel workshop for invaluable advice for future novels; my agent, Ginger Clark, for all her wisdom and excellence; everyone at Curtis Brown for theirs; my editor, Melissa Frain, for her keen eye and general fantabulousness; Alexis Nixon, Susannah Noel, Irene Gallo, Larry Rostant, and everyone else on the Tor side for their support, attention to detail, and many et ceteras; all the bloggers, reviewers, podcasters, interviewers, and every single person out there who helped me share Ironskin; the incomparable Tinatsu Wallace for sculpting me a miniature half-mask in silver to be my lucky charm on tour; my dear friends at the St. Helens Book Shop; the wonderful librarians and booksellers who welcomed me at PNBA; and especially a tremendous thank-you to the bookstores who so graciously hosted me on the Ironskin tour—the Raven in my hometown of Lawrence, Barnes & Noble in Oak Park, Mysterious Galaxy in Redondo Beach, the University Bookstore in Seattle, and, of course, my beloved Powell’s Cedar Hills right here in Oregon.
April 2013
Portland, Ore.
About the Author
TINA CONNOLLY lives with her family in Portland, Oregon, in a house that came with a dragon in the basement and blackberry vines in the attic. Her stories have appeared all over, including Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and her debut fantasy novel, Ironskin, was nominated for a Nebula. She is a frequent reader for PodCastle and narrates the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake. In the summer, she works as a face painter, which means a glitter-filled house is an occupational hazard.
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