Tina Connolly - Copperhead

“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 in 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.