Tina Connolly - Ironskin

“Well, that’s the part the dwarvven did seem to have right. Speaking of trade, you see. The fey have a complicated punishment system that I don’t even want to know about because the little I do know is deeply disturbing. But all the fey tech we have—the blue lights, cameras, your mask, everything—is essentially little pieces of a split-up fey. Not big enough to be a full entity that can think and act on its own. But a bit of captured and divided substance. The fey themselves.”

“Heavens,” Jane said faintly. Her fingers touched her new face. Edward had a bit of the actual fey in his hands. The clay must have fey worked through it. And those bombs—little torn-off bits of themselves, coiled around the fire and the shrapnel, to attach like leeches to the victim.

“When the time of the punishment is over, all those little split-up pieces are automatically released. A thousand lights—or what-have-you—die at the same moment as all the pieces of fey rush back to form one whole fey again, back in the forest.”

“So all the time we were trading with the fey, they were selling us—bits of themselves?” said Jane. The thought made the hair on her arms stand on end.

“Yes,” Poule agreed. “I’d take a good old-fashioned turn on the dwarvven rack any day over that kind of punishment.”

Poule stopped the car outside the gated entrance to Niklas’s forge, and Jane said: “But why did you come all this way to get me? Why really?”

The short woman twisted her grey braid away from her face, considering her words. “Because,” she said finally, “because we don’t have a solution to this. And we need one.”

“And…?”

“And it’s going to come through you. You’re the only one I know of who ever bested the fey at their own game. Edward used the fey in his hands for six, seven years, and I’m telling you you have to be bloody strong to do that and not go completely off your rocker. The dwarvven have experience blocking fey wiles in general. But you’re the first to take their curse and turn it against the blasted things. I don’t say you’re special—”

“Thanks,” Jane muttered.

“—only that you figured out how to do it, and that’s got to be the key somehow to stop what they’re doing. Else—”

“Else what hope do we have against them,” said Jane. “Edward’s probably done a hundred people by now. And naturally, all rich and well placed, or they wouldn’t have had the money to do it.”

Poule nodded, then looked inside Niklas’s compound. “Is he trustworthy?”

“Yes,” said Jane, and she pulled the handle.

This time it was Niklas himself who came to the gate, erect and striding despite the singlet of iron she knew was underneath the black leather. Suspicion grew on his face the closer he got. “If it’s charms you’re after, you’d better see one of the fancy shops in town.” His eyes darted between them as if he could not decide who needed more puzzling out, but then finally they stayed on Poule and he said, slowly, “You’re one of the dwarvven, ain’t you now?” He pronounced it nearly as well as Poule.

“Half,” said Poule.

“Don’t hold with half-bloods myself,” he said. “You don’t know where you stand then, do you.”

He seemed twice Poule’s size, but the woman merely folded her arms and looked up at him, considering. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You do that ironskin that doesn’t work.”

Jane interfered. “Please, Niklas, let us in. I’ll explain everything.”

“I know your voice,” he said, unlocking the gate. “But that face—it seems like something I know but wish I didn’t.”

Jane squeezed inside before he could change his mind. “I’m Jane,” she said, “and I’m wearing the Fey Queen’s face.”

It took a good while to calm Niklas down, and even then he was fixated on the bit of fey that he had let walk through his door. “You say the last woman went mad. I believe it’s not just from the whole fey entering her, but from the piece of fey clinging to her face.” He clanked a metal prybar against his hand. “We must rip it off before it destroys your soul.”

“No!” She eluded him. “It’s the same thing, Niklas. This mask, or my cheek. It’s all the same. Either way they can come for me.”

Poule stepped in front of Jane, stared up at the big blacksmith. “And they can come for you, too.”

This stopped him.

“If there’s fey in you, they can take you over alive,” Jane said from behind Poule’s shoulders. “That’s what your curse is. A little bit of fey, attached to your body till you die. But you can use it against them, if you work at it. If you remove the iron and practice. You can use it as defense.”

“Remove the iron,” he said. “I bet this is the fey in you telling me to do that. Bet you’re already all fey, and I invited you in—”

“Hush,” said Poule. “Lay off Jane. This paranoia’s not the blacksmith I’ve heard about on family retreats deep in the dwarvven compound.”

“Heard about.” He grunted, stared at Poule.

Unperturbed by his gaze, Poule helped herself to a stool at his workbench and hoisted Dorie’s gloves out of her bag. “I’m working on a mask myself,” she said. “A rather special one. I hear you’ve got a tar suspension, and I also hear you’ve one of the finest minds for iron solutions outside of the dwarvven .”

Niklas grunted. “That’s as it may be.” His sharp eyes flicked to the mesh cloth that formed the gloves.

“ ’Course, if you can’t let go of your preconceptions, I can head back to the country now,” said Poule. “Otherwise, we might have some skills to trade.”

She held out a glove and after a pause, Niklas took it. He sat down at his bench and turned it over in his hands, examining the way the metal-threaded cloth moved and folded.

Several minutes passed in utter silence, but Jane felt the air in the room change, felt the dynamic shift as Niklas went from suspicion to grudging acceptance.

Poule winked at her. “You’d better get back to the party.”

“You’re all right then?” said Jane. “Niklas?”

Niklas grunted, not looking at her. But that had always been so.

Poule pressed bills into her hand for a hansom. “I’ll be back by midnight,” she said.

When Jane reached the house, the party was in full swing. It seemed an age since she’d seen the May Day preparations in the country—what, only yesterday morning? But where Silver Birch had been rustic, with its old-fashioned maypole and few guests, Helen’s house was sharp and polished. And crammed. Everyone who was anyone was there—Jane decided Helen must have hand-delivered the invitations, to let that fey glamour wash over her invitees.

Jane saw more than one fey face, now that she was looking for them. The Prime Minister’s wife. A duchess. A woman on the arm of a lord, who Gertrude whispered had been a dancing girl.

The Miss Davenports were there, too, and their eyes slid over Jane and refused to acknowledge her presence.

But they were the only ones. Jane was pulled into dance after dance, caught around the waist by eager male hands and swung in and out in gay, captivating rhythms. She was in her plain day dress of the day before, wrinkled and smudged from her journey—and yet it didn’t matter, for she had that face, and the face made whatever cloth she wore look like gold.

The adulation caught her, unsettled her, swung her in a dance between laughter and tears, but the boys seemed to find even her tears beautiful, and more than one gentleman made a giddy proposal of elopement to her. Jane accepted them all, for why not? There was only this one night in the bubble, for even though Jane did not know how it would all end, she knew like a hanging in the morning, it would.