Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  Jack busied herself with her sketchpad, looking tactfully away from the boy and his stiff leg, but Dorie stared openly. “What’s wrong with your leg?” she said.

  The waiter looked up, perhaps surprised that someone was speaking directly to him, and not about him or past him. He appeared to be early twenties like them, with a wide, friendly face, and a thatch of ginger hair. “Just a brace, miss,” he said. He scooped up Jack’s empty fish plate. “Can I bring you something else?”

  “An iron brace,” countered Dorie, for she had seen it where it rested in his boot top.

  “Dorie,” hissed Jack, meaning, this is not appropriate human behavior.

  Dorie flushed. She had only added a little bit of her fey side back into the mix this morning. Was that enough to undo seven years of trying to be human? “My stepmother wore iron for a long time,” she said softly to the boy. “Usually when people wear iron there’s a reason.”

  The waiter looked surprised to be having this discussion, but not angry. Perhaps a little sad. He lowered his voice, glancing from side to side. “If you know what iron’s for, miss, you know they don’t like me talking about it. If I want to keep my job, that is.” He raised his voice to normal pitch. “Would there be anything else then?”

  Dorie put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to help.”

  He smiled ruefully. “After twenty-odd years living with it? You’d deserve a medal, you would.”

  “Just tell me,” said Dorie. “What’s yours?” What’s your curse, she meant.

  “Hunger,” he said simply, and limped away.

  Jack raised eyebrows at Dorie. “What the heck was that?”

  “He’s ironskin,” Dorie said quietly. It was the old name for those who had been wounded in the Great War two decades ago. Hit by fey shrapnel that contained a bit of fey—which left behind scarring and a curse on the victim that could only be contained by iron. Her stepmother, Jane, had been scarred on her cheek and cursed with rage. Rage that infected others if she didn’t cover it with iron—rage that infected Jane if she did. The poor boy must be hungry all the time. And two decades of it! There were not many ironskin left that she knew of. But the ones left had lived with their curses a long, long time.

  Jack shuddered. “Could you fix him the way you fixed your mom?” she said in a low voice.

  Dorie shook her head. “I wish. My father and I did that together and he doesn’t have the ability anymore.” Besides, her mother still had fey in her face, so that had hardly been a perfect solution. Dorie rubbed her fey-tinged fingers, wishing she could wash away the guilt she felt at the sight of the boy. Every day she found something new about the fey-human rift to feel guilty about. If the fey hadn’t driven humans away from the forests, the old cures wouldn’t have been forgotten. If the humans weren’t polluting the rivers, the fey habitat would still be pristine. And now add the ironskin to her list of things to fix. She sighed. “Where were we?”

  They were interrupted by an extremely tiny, extremely curvaceous blonde with a ponytail lugging over a stool from the wall, climbing up it, and plunking herself down next to Jack. The movement made Jack’s gin teeter precariously near the edge of the heavy wooden table, and Dorie imperceptibly scooted it back with a mental nudge.

  “Stella!” said Jack, squeezing the girl’s shoulders. “You made it.”

  “Soooo many bed sheets to wash,” groaned the girl. “I swear it’s doubled in the last month. And during this heat wave, too! My hands are like sausages. Wrinkled red sausages. May I?” She swooped down on Jack’s gin and took a hefty swallow. She took her ponytail down and fluffed her hair till her heavy bangs fell in a curtain over one eye, causing her to go from laundry girl to glamour girl in a blink. “Much better,” Stella said, and yawned. “The hospital laundry will be the death of me.”

  “The hospital laundry plus calculus tutoring plus your maths degree will be the death of you,” said Jack.

  “Plus modeling for you,” said Stella. She had a thin cardigan draped loosely on her shoulders for modesty in the streets—now she shrugged it off to reveal a white sleeveless button-down and coral choker. “Even though you don’t pay me.” She pulled out a lipstick that matched her choker and slicked it on.

  “Yes, but I let you sleep on the job,” said Jack. “I bet those teenagers you tutor can’t say the same.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Stella. “I think I can factor in my sleep now.” She yawned again and smiled at Dorie. “How were the interviews?”

  “Ugh,” said Dorie, and ran through the story one more time, this time with many more drunken asides from Jack. “At least the boy at the Queen’s Lab came right out and told me that I wasn’t going to get the job because I was female. The first two kept stringing me along while they tried to talk me into bed.”

  “And then—this,” said Jack. “Well. Metaphorically.” She held up the cartoon for Stella, who laughed appreciatively.

  “So the Queen’s Lab boy flat out told you they wouldn’t hire a woman for daaangerous field work,” mused Stella, lingering sarcastically on the word. “Everything else was perfect.”

  “As far as I know,” said Dorie.

  “So all you have to do is be a boy,” Jack said. She was quite happily drunk now.

  Stella clapped her hands, flipping her heavy bangs out of her face. “Yes, a boy, a boy! I did it for a lark at a fancy dress party once. Everyone was supposed to come as someone famous, you know, and I didn’t want to be the twentieth Queen Maud. So I wrapped my chest in cloth and tied back my hair and came as her very tiny pirate. It was oodles of fun. I bet we could do you no problem and you’d make a fine figure.”

  Dorie laughed and waved this off. “And then what, I go back to the Queen’s Lab and pretend I didn’t sic a wyvern on him?”

  Stella pondered. “No, you’d have to go somewhere else, I suppose. Unless your lab director happens to be nearsighted I don’t think you could quite pull that off.”

  “Ditto hot tea man and spider collar man,” said Jack.

  “Unless you could change your face,” said Stella.

  Across the table Jack raised an amused eyebrow at Dorie. A sharp shudder ran from Dorie’s heels to her head. She could change her face. Jack had seen her do it. Dorie hadn’t done it in years—not since she was a child and playing some practical jokes that went too far. She had determined when she was fifteen that she would put away that fey side of her for good. No more pranks, no more mischief. No more dancing lights or moving objects or shape-shifting.

  Of course, she hadn’t managed to keep that vow today.

  “Nose putty,” said Stella thoughtfully.

  “A chin wart,” said Jack.

  “Glasses,” said Stella.

  “Is there anyone else you haven’t pissed off?” said Jack.

  “There is one person,” Dorie said slowly. “It’s not really a real position. And everyone knows not to go over there if you’re a girl, because he’s a perv. So I didn’t talk to him or anything.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Wild animal fancier named Malcolm Stilby,” Dorie said. “Pays piecemeal for anything you’ll bring him. The boys were always doing it to fill in the gaps during school. Bar tab too high? Find Malcolm a winged squirrel.”

  “What does he do with them?”

  “Sells them to collectors, mostly,” said Dorie. “But these aren’t pets—they aren’t used to being in captivity. They sicken and die even if he gives the collectors proper instructions, which I’m sure he doesn’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to work for him even if I were a boy, unless I didn’t have any other options. But even if I could disguise myself as a boy, I wouldn’t have a degree or any recommendations, so I couldn’t go back to the places I was today. So that really would leave Malcolm, because of…”

  “The rent,” finished Jack.

  “The rent,” agreed Dorie. “Say, why don’t you sell a dozen paintings tomorrow, and then this will be academic? I can mooch off of
my rich artist friend.”

  “If I sell a dozen paintings,” said Jack grandly, “you can mooch for the rest of the year.”

  Behind the saltshakers Dorie suddenly saw Stella’s fingers clutch the table. The front door flew open behind Jack. Three men all in black burst through. Their faces were covered, but their hands were bare. They held up their palms, flashing the same silver sigils that Dorie had seen on the hands of the boys at the lab. An oval with a circle inscribed inside, like an eye. The pub went silent as the men peered around for their target. Then a clatter from a table behind them as some university boy tried to run for the back exit. The men were on him in a second.

  Two of the men pressed their bare palms to his skin—one gripped his arm, one his neck. They bore the boy down to the wooden floor. The third whipped out a fine mesh net that twisted copper and silver in the dim light of the bar. Dorie could not get a fix on it. The third man spread the mesh over the boy’s face and then added his palm to a spot on the boy’s chest.

  “What is this?” whispered Dorie, but Jack put a silent hand on hers. Hush.

  The boy squirmed under their grip. Then abruptly, went limp, his head lolling at an unnatural angle. His skin grew paler and paler as a fine blue smoke coalesced between his mouth and the mesh. Working with more care now, the men gathered the mesh around the smoke, trapping it. But no, not smoke—Dorie knew all too well what must be escaping from the boy’s dying body.

  A fey.

  The boy slipped from under the men’s fingers as they concentrated on the mesh; he fell to the floor in a silent heap, bleached white. The blue fully trapped, one man packed away the mesh in a copper container; another threw the body over his shoulder.

  Noise resumed as the men pushed out into the mild summer night.

  Dorie’s hand on her ale was shaking the glass. She was not sure if it was rage or fear. She put her hands under her thighs just in case and turned to Jack. “What. Was that.”

  “The silvermen have been everywhere since that Subversive Activities Act snuck through over the winter hols,” said Jack. “You’ve been shut up inside working so hard the last half-year. And then out in the country all the weekends on your research. I’m not surprised you haven’t seen it.” Her dark eyes held meaning: I didn’t want to scare you.

  “Oh, but there’s nothing to worry about,” said Stella blithely, stealing one of Jack’s fried potatoes and gesturing with it. “That boy was as good as dead already. Those silver hand things of theirs only work on fey that have taken over bodies. Not regular people.”

  “I see,” said Dorie. “And what, exactly, are the fey doing back in the city?”

  But she was met with blank looks from her two friends.

  “I think we need another round,” Jack said at last.

  Dorie agreed that this was a good idea. Still, it was a long time before she felt comfortable enough to take her hands out from under her thighs and drink her ale.

  The conversation turned to Jack’s gallery opening on Tuesday night—Jack made the two of them cross hearts and swear to attend—then to Stella’s summer classes, gossip about mutual friends. Though they had all been at the same prep school, they had been on different paths for the last several years—Jack and Dorie had just finished their degrees at the nearby art institute and an elite women’s college, respectively. Stella was at the main university—one of two girls in the math department—and still had another year left, due to a gap year spent working as a governess.

  After yet another round of stories about someone who had been told she couldn’t have the job because she’d just get married and have babies, and someone else who was using her political science degree to governess for a toddler, Dorie suddenly burst out, “It’s like nothing’s changed. My stepmother is always saying you can do anything and you just have to get out there and show them. But then what do you do when you just hit that brick wall?”

  “But so much has changed,” Stella said. “Heck, ten years ago women couldn’t even be at this university, even if ninety-nine percent of my classmates look at me like a statistical anomaly. And that’s not even counting that time a couple decades ago where they stopped letting dwarvven in for a year.”

  “You’re doubly blessed,” said Jack.

  “Five years ago Jack couldn’t have gone to her art school,” continued Stella.

  “Trailblazing, as usual,” said Jack. “The first year we had separate life drawing classes for the women, where the male models kept towels draped modestly over their naughty bits.”

  “But somehow it’s okay for the boys to draw naked girls all day.”

  “Finally there was a big revolt—”

  “—led by a certain young lady named Jack—”

  “—that involved a sudden surprise confiscation of all the towels,” finished Jack. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” said Dorie. “The more things change…”

  “The more they don’t,” rejoined Stella. “Hey, did you hear Madame Martine ran off with our geometry teacher?”

  “No! Remember his ear hair?”

  “The ear hair! Remember the nose hair!”

  Jack bought more rounds until the tenner ran out, and Stella called for one more, that Dorie declined. Unsteadily she rose to her feet. Maybe Simons and the world in general were right. You couldn’t do anything as a girl, a girl who had to slink around for fear of being noticed. But if you had another option … were you wrong to try it? What if you could change things from the inside? “I think I’d better head home and crash,” Dorie said.

  “I’ll come,” said Jack.

  “No, no, you two stay and have fun,” said Dorie. She knew that was what Jack really wanted to do anyway. Besides, Dorie needed to be on her own for this. She hadn’t done it in years. Seven years, to be exact. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  * * *

  Dorie sat cross-legged in the tiny top-floor flat she shared with Jack. She rather liked living with an artist—though the flat was crammed full of canvases, jars of brushes, turpentiney rags, and so on, its fire-hazardy disarray reminded her of home. Her father had been a sculptor, once. His hands were stiff from a long-ago accident, but he hadn’t been able to give up his artwork entirely. He painted in oils on the top floor of their drafty house, and the studio was crammed with the same sights and smells as here.

  Moonlight streamed through the thin sheet Jack had hung for a curtain. The window was open to the cool summer night, and the breeze blew away the lingering heat in the apartment.

  Dorie went to her room. Pulled out a locked box of copper she kept secreted at the bottom of a trunk. On a long necklace hidden inside her blouse was the copper key. In seven years, she had not opened this box till this very morning, when she had cracked the lid a fraction and slid the tips of her fingers inside, hoping somehow it would bring her luck.

  She unlocked the copper box now, flipped open the lid with enough force that it clanged against the outside of the box. The dense concentrated blue seemed to vibrate with its stored energy. Light streamed onto her face, her chest, her hands.

  Her light. Her self.

  Her missing half.

  Perhaps she had always known that, once she tasted the addiction again, there would be no turning back.

  Dorie plunged her hands into the box.

  Chapter 3

  COMPLETE AGAIN

  How do you live with half of yourself missing? Is it like the pain of losing a brother, a child? How can you stand to diminish yourself, and then bear up under that self-punishment for seven years? The only possible answer is that it must be an atonement.

  —Thomas Lane Grimsby, Silverblind: The Story of Adora Rochart

  * * *

  The blue flooded through Dorie, plummeting her, ricocheting from finger to knee to ear to toe. She felt powerful, alive. She felt as if she had been a covered plant, coiled and white without the sun. She felt as if she had had a seven-year-cold that dampened her taste
and smell and touch. She felt as if she had not truly breathed in a long, long time.

  In wonderment she stretched out her hand. The little pranks this morning were nothing now—jostling a teacup, nudging a bolt to fall. She had been able to do those things as a child. Now she crooked a finger and her entire bed on its heavy wooden frame sprang lightly up to the ceiling. Strange, hysterical laughter burst forth, and the bed wobbled in her mental grasp, the bedclothes sliding off and knocking over the apple crate that doubled as her bedside table. The thump of the box falling, her books sliding, registered only from a distance. Her ears and eyes were buzzing with the joy and blue that surged through her, and she made the bed right itself and spin a circle that tangled with the thin curtains, ripping one of them free.

  A banging on the door recalled her. The cross, wheezy voice of their landlady: “What are you two girls doing in there?”

  Hastily Dorie set the bed down—mostly in the right place—and ran to the door. She was shining blue with her self, her self, how she loved her whole self, and she stopped as she reached her shining blue hands for the doorknob, stopped herself and said as meekly as possible, “I’m sorry, Miss Bates, I knocked over a table on my way to bed. It won’t happen again.”

  “See that it doesn’t” was the rejoinder, but slow footsteps indicated the landlady was shuffling away. Dorie could hear the footsteps all the way down the stairs, all the way to the landlady’s rooms, and she wondered how she had managed to track anything in the forest in the last seven years. Why, she had hardly been alive!

  Dorie closed her eyes and breathed, trying to calm herself. There was a reason she had asked the fey how to extract her fey side, how to lock it away. She could not be trusted with the power. If she was going to do this, she had to hope that she had learned some measure of self-control in the last seven years. No, more than hope. She pounded a blue fist into her palm. She had to be damn well sure.