Tina Connolly - Ironskin

Yes, here he comes, see him smile at the face I create for him, see him shyly extend his sketchbook for the pretty lady to see.…

Oh, he will do just fine.

Dream. One thousand years ago.

I am the Fey Queen and I am here. Through storm and change and wind and you and all that is to come I will be here forever. You may reject me, but you cannot stop me. You will be part of my always and ever, a leaf of my tree, a dress of the season, a blink of eternity falling in a slow blinding crash.…

No, says Jane. I won’t let you, no. No no no.

I am Jane.

I am Jane I am Jane I am Jane I am …

When she awoke there was white sunlight on her body. She sat up and her head rang. “Edward?” she said.

But no one was in the room.

She patted her head where her hair itched—there were no bandages there. Either Edward hadn’t done that part or perhaps he’d never started her face at all. She didn’t know if she was ready to look in the mirror and find out.

But she would have to look sometime. Jane levered herself to the floor and wavered there until the dizziness subsided. She remembered having strange dreams, but the only fragment that was clear was a moment when someone accused her of coercing Edward. Compelling him.

Like the fey.

Deep inside she swore to herself that she would never do it again. She had not known she was doing it to Miss Davenport. But she had known she was coercing Edward. Once was enough for a lifetime.

Her feet seemed steady, so she inched along to the first door, stepped out into the workroom.

A breath. And she would turn and face that mirror, accept what she had chosen for herself.

And then a woman screamed.

Jane stumbled through the workroom, catching only glimpses of a messy workbench, a new mask hanging, things she hardly registered as she flew downstairs on stumbling feet. Dorie. Dorie.

The front door was open, but Cook stood just inside of it, blocking her way. “You won’t be wanting to go out there, lass.” She peered down at Jane and her kindly face went white.

“Jane,” Jane said. “I’m Jane.”

Cook’s hand crept to her apron pocket and suddenly there was a feyjabber in her hand.

“I am, ” said Jane. The newness of the mask was making her dizzy and she desperately wanted to lie down, but she had to find Dorie.

The feyjabber wavered. Who had screamed?

“You know me,” said Jane. “You told me the story about your sister, remember? ‘May you be born plain.’ ”

The older woman’s lips trembled. “Would that you had listened.”

A sudden bear hug from a small girl knocked her off balance. Dorie had flung herself through the door and knocked Jane backward. “Mother!” cried Dorie.

“I was so worried when I heard the scream,” said Jane. She drew back. “What did you call me?”

“Pretty lady,” said Dorie. “Mother.” She hugged Jane harder and her affection billowed up bright and strong.

Jane put a shaky hand to her face. It was cold and smooth and when she ran her fingers along her cheek it was unscarred and whole. Confusion—if her cheek was unscarred, how was she still sensing Dorie’s feelings without the benefit of the fey curse? Was she immediately, full-on using the mask in the same way she’d used her curse? But that confusion seemed a minor detail compared to being called “Mother.”

“Where’s a mirror?” Jane said to Cook, but Cook frowned.

“Don’t know that you’ll be wanting to find one.”

The one on the landing, Jane suddenly remembered, and she led Dorie toward the garret, to the stairs where the mirror suddenly rushed out at you. Her steps faltered the closer she came.

No bandages, as she’d felt. But he had finished. The thin red line encircled her face where he’d finished his surgery.

But it was not the mask she’d seen last night—the beautiful version of her with the chipped forehead. “Dorie,” she said. “Whom did your doll look like?”

“Mother,” said Dorie, and Jane nodded, her gut cold as stone.

She had the face of the Mother doll.

Of the Fey Queen.

“Stay inside,” she told Dorie, and she ran down the stairs, pushing past Cook and out the back door, rocks stinging her bare feet. Everyone from the house had hurried out and stood, openmouthed, hands to hearts or mouths.

A fey hung in the air on the back lawn by the Maypole, a swirl of blue-orange light with an imaged face like the Mother doll, the fey Jane had seen in the clearing.

The Fey Queen.

Advancing on Nina.

Jane shouted at the crowd: “Get back inside!” and they looked at her, startled, as if trying to figure out who she was. Only a few of them obeyed.

But the Fey Queen listened. Instantly dropped Nina and shot through the air to Jane. Hung there in front of Jane, reflecting her new face back to her.

“You’re not taking my body,” Jane croaked.

“Made for me,” the fey said.

“He wouldn’t…” But the proof was on her face.

“Was your. Purpose here.” The swirls tightened; Jane felt the mental effort as the fey switched into a more human way of speaking. “He’s done it before.”

“Dorie’s mother…,” said Jane. But what had been nagging her about Edward’s story finally hit home. “She died almost five years ago. But Dorie is nearly six.”

“ I am Dorie’s mother,” hissed the fey. “That form was just the bearer. I needed a body, so I found him a town girl, someone silly enough to be pleased by the master’s notice. Once I helped him seduce her, she was ours. A strong body, even in death. I kept that body a year before the villagers noticed the stink. Your live body will last me much longer. Decades, before it wrinkles and I kill it.” Pitiless eyes. “Once you’ve been the consort of the Fey Queen, you’ll do anything to regain that.”

“You lie,” said Jane desperately. “He has a conscience.”

“A conscience, bah. A human thing, and he is practically one of us. He was with us years and years, after all. You have seen his hands, yes? How he can sculpt beauty out of earth? We did not gift him with that. This is a talent worthy of the fey if ever there was one.”

“But he loves me,” Jane said softly, and somehow all that was left in the words was the wishful thinking of a silly girl. “I love him.”

The Queen sent a wave through her that somehow she knew was the fey equivalent of ostentatious yawning. “In one sense, you shall be with him,” the Queen said. “The other form is nice enough, but yours is the one designed for me. I have seen what you are made of, you know. Your mind will accept my patterns very nicely. We will go together well, after you succumb. I will have it.”

Then the blue-orange advanced on Jane, and Jane was too despairing to run, for the proof of what the Queen said was all too visible. He had given her the Queen’s face, and there could be no other interpretation of that.

She had no defenses, none, and then suddenly there was a wall of iron in front of her and the Fey Queen was crashing into it.

“Run,” said Poule, and she shoved her back toward the house, lifting her makeshift shield at the Queen.

Of course the Queen could go around iron, even a large piece of it, but the brief moment of surprise at hitting it dead on stunned the Queen so she only hung flickering for eight, ten seconds, before she could move again. Jane moved her nerveless feet faster and faster, flung herself over the iron threshold just as the Queen pounced on her ankles and came up with only air.

Rage in her head, from the Queen, then enticement. Lust, love, lulling, luring Jane to step back across that threshold and out into the open.

Jane slammed the door. She flung herself to the floor, on top of her hands, and though the compulsion seized her till she wept, she had just enough strength from all her work with the fey curse to keep her hands curled under her belly, her knees drawn to her chest.