Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  “It’s all right, Blanche,” Edward soothed, and he tried to reach in and grab her knife hand without getting cut himself.

  Poule stayed back from the woman, nostrils flaring, scenting. She circled around them and then said, “Back away, Rochart. It’s fey.”

  Shock pooled Edward’s face. “No—she’s alive.”

  “There’s a fey inside her for all of that.” The two looked at each other with grim faces, and in the shadows Jane’s own face was surely white.

  A fey in a live human. Such a thing was possible? It turned her world upside down.

  “I don’t know if it’s making her go mad or what,” said Poule. “Is she trying to cut it out with that knife?”

  “It’s not iron,” said Edward.

  Poule agreed. “Then we need to find some.” She wrestled a steel butcher knife from the butcher block, held it up.

  Jane tumbled out of the shadows, gasping. “Wait! You’ll kill her!”

  “The iron doesn’t have to go in the heart, just a line to it,” said Poule.

  But Edward agreed. “No. It’s too risky. And we don’t even know for sure if what you suspect is true.”

  “You’re wasting valuable time,” warned Poule.

  “Come here, Blanche,” called Edward in a soothing voice. “Come here.”

  Blanche looked slightly less wild; she drifted toward Edward. Her arm raised—

  “Pull him back!” shouted Poule to Jane, and Jane did, even as Poule lunged for the woman’s knife arm and twisted it behind her back, causing the knife to drop from her fingers. Blanche’s face smeared with pain, and Jane’s breath caught, for despite her new beauty Blanche had always seemed kind, and they were hurting her.

  “You didn’t have to do that to her,” said Edward, but Poule just grunted.

  “You did her mask yourself, and you’re under her spell. Blasted humans.” She wrestled Miss Ingel toward the side door, and Jane and Edward hurried after. The screen at the door was sturdy, repaired just that afternoon by Poule. Poule opened it and pulled Blanche out onto the lawn. The iron door banged closed.

  “Stay inside and call to her,” said Poule. She released the woman and stood there, short and hefty and ready to tackle her again at the least provocation.

  “Blanche,” crooned Edward. “Blanche, come to me. Come to me.”

  The woman tottered forward, back to the door.

  “Go on,” whispered Poule. “Touch it.”

  “I forbid you entrance, Blanche,” said Edward in a low voice. Through the mesh, Jane saw Blanche’s eyes film over white, and she swerved away from Edward, from them, and Jane could not tell if she avoided the door on purpose or because she truly could not go through it.

  Poule was many things, but nimble on her feet was not one, and Blanche easily darted past her and took off down the back lawn toward the forest. Her white nightgown disappeared into the trees and was gone.

  Jane and Edward joined Poule on the lawn. Poule’s face was pale. “There’s definitely fey in her,” she said. “Fey in a living woman. But how—and when?”

  They were all frightened by the how. Fey taking over the fey-bombed dead was bad enough. If the rules had changed, no one was ever safe again.

  But the when—a chill of realization coiled in Jane’s chest. “She was in the forest tonight,” she said. “I know she was, because she cut her hand on the thorn trees.”

  “We’re going after her,” said Edward. “Poule, suit up. Jane, you’re in charge. Keep checking on Dorie.”

  The two disappeared back into the house, toward Poule’s basement suite to get iron, Jane supposed.

  “Tell me what you suspect…” floated back from Edward.

  Jane stayed by the door, bitter thoughts flooding her. She had invited fey in all unknowing, and the possibilities chilled her marrow. She turned and found a figure in black satin crouching behind her. She stifled a yelp.

  The woman with the beautiful face wavered. “Where is Edward?”

  “An emergency,” said Jane. “He had to go somewhere. Are you feeling all right?”

  Nina put a hand to her new face. The roll of half-finished bandages hung from her chin. “I feel so strange.” A sense of lost drifted out from her.

  “It’s the new face,” said Jane. “I suppose you’ll feel normal soon. A couple days. Like Blanche.” Blanche Ingel, who might never be normal again.…

  Nina laughed and for a moment her eyes came through the mask, for a moment the mask seemed a real face. Then they died back and the whole of her face looked unreal yet again. “Oh, Ingy,” she said. “Tried to pretend that the hot springs gave her such invigoration, revealed a beauty she always possessed. But it won’t fix her marbles. She’s as jumpy as a cat nowadays.”

  Nina had said something to that effect the first day Jane met her, she remembered. “Since she had the surgery?” said Jane. “Aren’t you worried, then?”

  Nina laughed again, the loose bandage swinging. “We’re cut from different cloth. She’s weak, born to her state—I had to fight for mine with tooth and décolletage. No silly paranoia will catch me.” She leered at Jane. “Besides, we both know the real reason she keeps coming back for ‘checkups.’ Now, where’s Edward?”

  Edward and his endless supply of beautiful women. Inhuman, irresistible. Even Nina’s mask was captivating—Jane had to force her eyes not to linger on the turn of brow and line of cheek. She was suddenly sure it was all true, all of Nina’s insinuations, all that the gossip said. He must have been intimate with all of them, for that’s what real fey glamour did to you, and each of the women had a touch of that spellbinding, unstoppable allure.

  All of them. The Prime Minister’s wife, whom he pretended to laugh at. Blanche. Nina. He denied any involvement behind their backs, but surely he turned around and mocked Jane behind hers. Nina probably knew all her secrets.

  “Gone, I said,” said Jane. Nina lifted eyebrows at Jane’s sharp tone. No wrinkles appeared in that white forehead. “I’d go lie on the table upstairs if I were you. He’ll be back in the morning.”

  “That might be what you’d do,” said Nina. “I’m going back to my room for celebratory drinkies. If you see any of the young men, send them my way. In fact, maybe I’ll go find them myself.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jane. She took Nina’s shoulder, propelled the woman back toward her room. Nina went quietly, mostly because she was still loopy, Jane thought. She jumped from topic to topic, played with her swinging bandages, and generally screwed Jane’s already taut and screaming nerves to the edge. Jane put her in her room with a sense of profound relief. “Stay in there till morning,” Jane said. “Or else.”

  “Or else, or else,” mocked Nina. But she shut the door, and Jane drew a silent breath of hope that Nina would go to sleep.

  Jane paced the hallway for hours. Her legs grew tired, a knot in her belly sickened with exhaustion, but she could not sleep any more than she could fly. Edward loved her, hated her—but no, put that aside yet again, and concentrate, Jane. What was the truth about her fey curse?

  Something about her fey curse was also a gift—when not blocked by iron, she could sense emotions as keenly as if they were her own.

  In the forest, Edward had felt for Dorie through his hands, as if they were showing him the path. (Don’t think of Edward.) His fey gift, capable of more than he knew.

  And Dorie herself. Also fey-cursed, and strongly, too … but possibly capable of withstanding a fey takeover.

  For that’s what had happened in the forest, hadn’t it?

  A fey had entered Dorie, just as one had entered Blanche. Had entered Jane, but had left of its own accord. Dorie had fey inside her, Blanche had fey in that mask on her face. And Jane? Jane just had her curse. The fey curse.

  Her head flew up with a start, realizing what the three of them had in common.

  The fey substance. Call it a gift, call it a curse—it was both. The fey could not gift without cursing—and they could not curse without gifti
ng.

  The fey substance lacing her skin gave her these fey traits—emitting anger, sensing emotions. And more—her curse was affecting people less than she feared, because she was learning to control it. Imagining herself as water was not a silly visualization, but a true manipulation of the substance on her cheek. She was doing what Dorie did, in a far less skillful way.

  But the fey substance still had one great drawback, a new wrinkle that no one had ever known.

  The fey-cursed were vulnerable to the fey themselves.

  The fey had never taken over live bodies before—only the shrapnel-flecked bodies of the dead. Because fey bombs were meant to kill. Because humans with fey substance in them tended to be dead.

  But they had never had all these live bodies with fey smeared over them, upright and walking around. And Jane wasn’t thinking of the bedraggled and outcast ironskin, though it was true they were equally vulnerable.

  The masks.

  The masks that those women bought, that Edward put on. A hundred highly placed people, each of whom had turned herself into a host for a parasite: a silver birch waiting to be strangled by mistletoe.

  Jane went to the window and looked through the mesh screen onto the back lawn. The maypole glinted in the first light of dawn, its orange and red ribbons hanging loose around it like a flame.

  May Day. A time for celebration.

  And all the guests who could be coaxed (the girls, mostly) would dance around it, never knowing that on several of their faces lurked a ticking time bomb.

  The exact same substance that scarred Jane’s own cheek.

  Fear riddled her heart, and with it, determination. It didn’t matter whether she was ugly or beautiful—she was just as in danger.

  So she was determined to be normal. That desire had not lessened one whit. She would have the face she was meant to have, the simple whole Jane face. Perhaps the desire for normal was tangled up in her desire for Edward. Perhaps she was no better than the women who would change their face “as easily as a dress.”

  If wanting to be herself was wrong, then so be it.

  For once she was going to have exactly what she wanted.

  Numb and taut, Jane went through the black early morning to his studio. She made her way to the workbench she had passed by earlier—her hand went to that cloth, thrown over his current project.

  She stood there, fingers trembling.

  Nina had called her new face pretty.

  But what sort of pretty did she mean?

  Jane almost fled. Almost was sick, almost ready to smash the mask without lifting the cloth.

  She lifted the muslin.

  Jane knew what she had feared when she saw it. Her own face stared up at her, white and pale, black eyes hollowed out.

  But not her own face. Ten—a hundred times more lovely than her own face. Beauty that any girl would die to possess.

  He had done a masterful job. She would be more lovely than Blanche, than Nina.

  As beautiful as any fey.

  Chapter 16

  MAY DAY

  “With a face like that, all men would be at your feet,” said Edward.

  She whirled, finding him there, a black hole of absent moonlight. Pale, drawn, enervated. Sagging, sad, but the fierce words still came to attack him: “I didn’t ask for all men. What demon possessed you to make this?”

  “You do not want to know.”

  “I know all too well.” His warmth versus his chill—oh, she knew. She picked up the mask and shoved it on her own face.

  The inside of the mask was cool on her skin. Sensuous, molding—like skin itself rather than cold clay. She peered out at him and it was like looking through binoculars the wrong way. Everything seemed distant, cut off. “How do you like me now?”

  His eyes were invisible. “I like you as you are.”

  She could not hear in his voice whether that meant “before” or “now.” Could not feel it, either. She was turned all upside down by the clay on her face. It seemed to thrum with implied power, but differently than her curse had, so that she would have to recalibrate everything she knew.

  She turned past him to the mirror at the end of the room. Her eyes looked out from behind the mask. Her own visage, yet transformed. Enduring. Only her frightened eyes marred its regal beauty.

  He came up behind her, slid a hand to her waist.

  She could not move from the mirror.

  “You think I mock you. You think I want you to be other than you are.” He drew his fingers down the cheek of the mask—she felt it as a coldness that slid over her real skin, her damaged skin. “How could you not?”

  “When the proof is right here.”

  “I used to be a fine artist,” he said. “I used to find beauty in what was. Now I sculpt every mask and it turns fey under my fingertips.” He pulled the mask from her face and she cried out as her reflection appeared again. And hated herself for the agony her own reflection stirred.

  “I tried to form your face. Your face, undamaged. Yet the clay twisted under my fingers, edges where there should be none, roundness where there should be none—remaking your face into some horrid fey ideal. Turning a pretty human face to grotesque parody.” He tossed the mask to the worktable, and its forehead chipped. “I had no idea what I’ve become.”

  Hardly thinking, she reached to him, ran a comforting hand on his back. “Ssh,” she soothed, like she would Dorie. “It’s all right.” But her words didn’t reach the coldness that seeped out of him again, thick and strong.

  “I lose time when I work…,” he said, his voice trailing off. “At first it seemed no more than an artist’s reverie, such as I often had in my youth.…” He balled one fist into the other. “Their gifts are poison, Jane! Miss Ingel…”

  Jane formed the word on numb lips. “Dead?”

  “We found her in the clearing. Poule stabbed her wrist—iron in any line to the heart works, she said. She killed the fey, but it was too late for Blanche. I fear she will be an imbecile forever.”

  Shock and horror. “It could wear off? Dorie woke from it.”

  “The only good—nay, wonderful—thing of the day.” But he shook his head. “Dorie has gifts Blanche did not. I fear the worst.”

  “It could be.…” She picked up her face, held it to her chest. What was she risking?

  The nearness of his body was suffocating. “The fey are drawn to beauty.” Warmth, towering over her.

  She could hardly breathe. She wondered if Edward had some other fey glamour besides the ability in his hands. “They are drawn to themselves,” she gasped out. “I am at risk either way.”

  He spun at that, spread his hands as if seeing them for the first time. Was he realizing that he must also be at risk? The fey gift lurking in his hands—that too must be the same fey substance as all the rest. The masks, the curses—even the bluepacks? And what was that substance, anyway? Something they grew, gathered? Or spit out, perhaps, like a spider produces silk.

  “Yes,” he said, and he folded one hand in the other as if he no longer knew what to do with them. “You are at risk.”

  “Give me the new face,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I won’t do that to you. The risk—”

  “Is the same,” she said, touching her cursed cheek. The imagined pond evaporated into anger. “I have borne the risk for five years, so tell me why the hell I shouldn’t get the reward? And besides. If you use your fey skill to reverse fey damage, wouldn’t that be setting something right?” Steel held her up. For once she was going to get exactly what she wanted, and damn anybody who told her she wasn’t right to want it. “I resent being labeled a victim.”

  “I don’t think of you as a victim. As a survivor.”

  “I resent having had something to survive. I resent the five years I spent letting fey emotions seep into me, send me down this life that is not mine. Five years their curse has grown into my soul until black rage and shame seem a vital part of me. One I cannot tear out by the roots, no matt
er how much calm I project. I resent that, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  The fire died; the coldness was in her body, too. “No. You can’t. Not you, with your … collusion.”

  “My daughter—”

  “A daughter is a separate part of you. You can project your sorrow onto her. You can go out and be free of her for hours at a time.”

  “No.”

  She opened her eyes and studied the pain in his. “No, you’re right. I can’t understand yours anymore than you can understand mine. There. I resent that even in our war scars we are separated.” She held the mask in front of her face. “I resent being alone.”

  He seized her hand and fire leaped inside of him. “Jane, my love. No. Do not ask this of me. If I were to lose you…”

  Her anger threatened to crumble, her heart trembled at the caress of his words. Her words were fluttering steel. “You said you owed me. The day I pulled you back from the forest.”

  He leaned in as if he would kiss her again and she stopped him. She would never kiss him again with these lips.

  They stood there, and then finally she said softly, “If we are both in danger, at least let me head into battle with my own face.”

  Deep inside a small voice said: Beautiful Jane is not you any more than scarred Jane is. Can you really pretend your motives are pure?

  She could not, but she was out of the necessary will to walk away. Her hands closed around the iron-threaded cloth Poule had given her, but at that moment her focus was so hot and pure that she knew she had no need of it. She stood there and told him silently: Give me my face.

  He started to protest, but then she saw that glassy white swell in his eyes, as her command raged forth, just as it had against Miss Davenport.

  Give me my face.

  Give me my face.

  Silent and unseeing, Edward took the mask with the chipped forehead from her. She turned and marched to the door at the other end of the room, though her ankles shook her stride.

  He made her lie down on his table.

  He laid one fey-cursed hand on her forehead and one hand on her heart and then the small white room shifted into dreams.