There was a clear track that the others must have been using—well, perhaps not clear to ordinary eyes, but as clear as a paved highway to Dorie. A flash of silver wing up ahead—she was close. She crouched to wait, to watch. There was a clump of wild sorrel by her feet, and she absent-mindedly plucked a handful of the sour leaves. It was definitely time for second breakfast. She had found the wyvern, but she still needed to find his nest. Silently she moved closer still—
—and the wyvern, alerted by who knows what, startled just enough to flit several trees farther on. It peered around, head cocked and angling with some sixth sense.
Damn.
Dorie sighed and rubbed her forehead. She still hadn’t decided if she could really go through with taking that odious man a live wyvern egg. A live wyvern egg whose contents just happened to be deadly to half of her family tree. But the amount he was paying for one single egg would exactly cover their month’s rent. And that would buy them a whole month, in which Jack might sell some paintings after her gallery opening tonight, or Dorie might find another job with her newfound boyness.
So, first things first, she had decided. Better see if she could put her money where her mouth was and obtain an egg at all. Decide once the egg was in her grasp what she should do. Maybe there was a third option she hadn’t seen yet. Once she got the egg—if she got the egg.
But she was pretty sure she could. Especially now that she had her fey talents back.
Dorie’s half-human, half-fey heritage made for an interesting mix of abilities. It was hard for true fey to hold a human shape for more than a few minutes. That was why, during the Great War two decades ago, they had killed humans with fey-infused shrapnel—then slipped in to reanimate the dead bodies. Most people died from the poisoned shrapnel. The few that hadn’t—the ironskin—often wished they had. Later still the fey had figured out a way to purposefully attach part of themselves to living humans—and take them over.
Dorie couldn’t take over anybody at all—not that she wanted to. But with her fey side back, she could change herself.
And more than just shape-shifting into Dorian. She could make herself be more like the smoky blue fey of her ancestry.
She did so now, thinning her substance until she was part blue, part human. Only half there on the ground. It was as far as she could go … but it should be far enough to get her close to the wyvern. It was like slipping into an old, familiar bathrobe. In this half-state she could get close to creatures everyone else only dreamed of getting near. She had frequently watched wyverns as a kid—just never tried to snatch their eggs.
The world went fuzzy as she thinned. Colors changed and mutated—some perceptions expanded; others went dim. She waited now until the wyvern calmed down enough to hop a few more trees over, finding its mate and changing places on the important eggs.
Dorie could now sense humans at a distance near the edges of the forest, fuzzy warm red blurs around the edges of her sight—though her senses were no longer quite the same as a human’s. “Sight” was an approximation. There were fey, too, blue and cold and deeper in. She could vaguely “hear” them talking with each other on some wavelength that wasn’t quite like human sound. Not that fey really talked. It was more like feeling.
But the key perception that changed, she remembered now, was her sense of time. Fey were ancient, and they did not sense time in quite the same way as humans. Everything sped up around her, while she slowed. She had the patience necessary to move quietly up to the wyvern, one centimeter at a time, not disturbing its quiet nesting.
She stopped a few feet from it, her body half-tangled with a tree, watching. Wyverns had been thought extinct before the Great War, but in recent years more and more of them had been spotted. She could not figure out how the researchers at the Queen’s Lab had discovered the properties of the wyvern eggs, but the information was certainly moving quickly through the city, to judge by Malcolm. So much for Simons’s puffed-up sense of secrecy.
Dorie watched the wyvern move and rustle, first slow, then fast, as she drifted in and out of the fey time sense. The morning ticked on. Any moment it would stand to stretch, spread its wings, sit back down. It was the perfect time to slide in with all the grace and speed of the fey—grab and be gone before it even noticed.
It started to stand—she pulled on her fey half, slowed all her senses down to a halt. Moved with sudden speed to the tree, where as it stood she saw that it had a clutch of three eggs. Good. She did not want to take its only egg. Her fingers slipped through the air, grasped one of the eggs, warm and slightly rough in her hand, pulled it free of the nest. A rush of glee spread from her fingertips, trickled up to her spine with an electric tingle, a mad rush, and she grinned. She was doing it. She was alive. Everything was brilliant.
It sensed her.
She was, after all, only half-fey, and it turned to stare at her with those liquidly hypnotic eyes. Adults were much darker than the babies; its pewter scales glinted like steel, like polished stone. Dorie felt as caught as a rat or bird. Surely she could break free from this, she thought, and yet somehow she did not want to. Her hand was half-hidden by the nest and she could not tell if the wyvern knew she was clutching its egg or not. Through tremendous will she slowly moved her hand holding the egg down to around her belly, where the pouch would be when she phased back in. It was like moving through molasses. Her mind lingered on the fact that wyverns were said to be related to basilisks, who supposedly had been able to kill you with a glance.
The wyvern cocked its head, studying her, watching her feeble attempt to get away. But it did not pounce, and she thought perhaps her fey side was standing up to the strain of its hypnotism. She did not know how long they stayed there, locked in connection with each other, neither one able to definitively make a move.
But the wyvern had more experience in the matter. It moved closer, its three iron grey talons creeping over the nest—and then something else caught its attention. A red blur that her fey senses knew meant human, creeping up from the side, hand ready to go into the nest. The red blur was … whistling?
Quicker than any human the wyvern’s head turned, the steam boiling out in an arc toward the human’s face.
Quicker than any human Dorie took that split second of the broken connection to move, to throw herself on the explorer who was about to get his face melted.
The searing-hot steam shot directly over her head as the two of them fell. She lost all her feyshift as they tumbled, cracking down hard on branches and bushes. Her hazy human impressions told her only that it was some guy she was falling hard on, some guy with a foraging pack that was now digging into her ribs as they finished landing, tangled in a clump of some sort of low but very poky evergreen. She closed her eyes against the prickles and rolled, not daring to feyshift to ease her way. Then she sat up, pulling green things out of her collar and looking desperately around for the egg. It was not in her hand.
From the middle of the bush came an oath so mild it could hardly count as one. “Criminy,” said a woozy male voice. It put a lot of feeling into it, however.
The danger past, the prickles present, Dorie stood, thoroughly annoyed that someone was bungling her mission. “That was my egg, dammit,” she said. She needed it, and this clod was probably some idiotic bounty hunter competing with her for Malcolm’s money, certain he could pay off a sizable bar tab doing the impossible. The wyvern was standing now, wings spread, rocking back and forth and ready to shoot another bolt of steam if need be. She smacked the branches of the evergreen aside to see who had interrupted her quest, ready to lay a round of scathing abuse on the boy in the bushes—and froze. Her mouth opened with surprise to say—“Tam?” and then she saw how he clutched his arm, and she forgot to say anything at all.
She sunk down next to him, supporting his shoulders as he tried to sit up. He was looking at his reddened forearm, already blistering from the steam, and she took the opportunity to feel delicately all around the back of his skull, checking for lumps or
blood.
“Criminy,” he swore again, and she swallowed to keep from laughing, or perhaps crying, because that had been the most he would swear the last time she had seen him—when he was fifteen.
Seven years ago.
Tam looked straight at her. His wire-rimmed glasses were bent and dangling on one ear, and his wild mop of hair had escaped his hat. “You don’t have any butter on you, do you?” he said. “It’s good for burns.”
“No,” she said, and bit off a laugh. Only Tam would ask her for butter in a forest.
He grabbed her arm then and said intently, “You saved my life. Thank you.”
So many things crowded her thoughts to say to him that what came out was the most banal: “I could find you some calendula for that burn, but you’d still have to steep it.” Her face flamed as he let go of her arm, for he didn’t recognize her. And surely he would, any moment, as soon as the shock wore off. And then … what? Would she be forgiven, the stupid things you did as kids forgotten? Or would he turn and go, and avoid her at every family event ever, and she wouldn’t see him for another decade? Tam straightened out his glasses and retrieved his hat. He bent back to his arm, his battered old explorer hat (surely not the same one from back then!) now tipped down and shading his eyes. It rather floored her how he could look all grown up and still just the same, that same sweet, studious boy she had played with for so many years. She had seen pictures of him now and then—they were cousins in name if not one bit in blood—but not him. Not in the flesh.
Tam carefully peeled his damp cotton sleeve back from the rest of the burn, and she made a small noise in her throat at the sight. “Oh yes, calendula incantata,” he said. “It is fairly good.” He looked vaguely off into the distance. “Usually I burn myself on the toast and then butter is handiest, you see? Criminy.”
“You can swear around me,” Dorie said. “I don’t mind.”
“I never quite got into the habit,” Tam said absently. “My father didn’t care for it.”
Dorie snorted. “What, when you were five?” His parents had both died when he was young, and she couldn’t imagine his adoptive father, Rook, caring about swear words.
The vague look faded as he peered at her intently through his wire-rimmed glasses. “Yes, when I was five. How did you know that?”
Dorie was starting to feel annoyed that he still didn’t recognize her. The stress of waiting for his reaction was weighing on her. Get it over with, already. Besides, how could he not know her? Seven years or no, she knew—much to her chagrin—that she still looked like that perfect china doll she had as a child. Blue eyes, pink cheeks, blond ringlets that grew back overnight even if she dyed them green and shaved half of them off … unconsciously her hand went up to touch one of those ringlets … and stopped. “I am a fool,” she said in a low voice. “A complete fool.”
Tam poured a bit of water over the blisters, then took a clean cloth from a pouch at his waist and began to cover the burn to keep it protected. “It’s not your fault. I was testing out this story I ran across that wyverns could be tamed by whistling. Man swore up and down that his grandfather used to walk right up to full-grown wyverns by whistling the Danse in E Minor from the Midsomer Suite.” He laughed ruefully. “It probably was a bit risky. Anyway. Rather my arm than my face, and I have you to thank for that. In a moment I would have been steamed pudding.”
Oh no, it wasn’t that she had aged. It wasn’t anything like that.
She was shaped as Dorian.
Dorie plopped down on the forest floor next to Tam, took the cloth that he was vainly trying to knot with one hand. “Let me,” she said. Her heartbeat slowed as she realized she was safe for a moment, that she could learn about what he’d been doing without risking finding out that he still hated her. Above them the silver wyvern settled back into its nest, not steaming them, but still on guard. Dorie carefully wrapped the cloth around Tam’s forearm, her fey-enhanced senses picking up the scents of clean sweat and dirt. He had his sleeves rolled up and it was clear that, despite the spectacles and the absentminded professor air, he was rather more muscled than he had been at fifteen.
To distract herself from that she cast around for some small talk, and came up with: “Whistling?”
He answered her with a very creditable performance of a tricky bit from the well-known suite. The wyvern did, in fact, settle down, though it kept a watchful eye on them. Tam looked thoughtfully at it. “The thing is, there’s often something to these old wives’ tales,” he murmured, and he pulled a faded leather journal from his vest pocket and began scribbling. “If I hadn’t been rummaging around old attics in ancient crumbly houses, I wouldn’t have my current job.”
“Which is…?” said Dorie, but she knew the instant he said it.
“Field work. For the Queen’s Lab.”
Dorie barked laughter. So she had seen him yesterday—it wasn’t wishful thinking playing tricks on her. Tam looked sideways at her. “Nothing,” she said. “Only I applied there”—ah, best not to mention yesterday. “Awhile ago,” she finished. “After University.”
“It’s tough to get in,” Tam agreed. “They only wanted me for my book—thought I was too scatterbrained for the field. I had to produce two copperhead hydras and a winged squirrel before they believed I could do the field work, and they still think I’m going to bolt into the nearest attic at a moment’s notice.” He shrugged ruefully. “Which I might.” He looked up at the wyvern, which was watching them intently. “Still doesn’t help me with wyvern eggs. I don’t know how anyone does it without getting fried to a crisp.”
“They kill them,” Dorie said bluntly, going off what Malcolm had intimated.
His kind face darkened. “Barbaric, troglodyte, stupid, stupid fools,” he said, and he infused the epithet with enough venom to make it sound like a swear. “There’s not an infinite supply.”
Dorie shrugged. The topic made the blood boil in her veins, and she was unsurprised that it would do the same to Tam. She sat down, straightening out her boy’s field jacket. There was a strange little lump in her belly.
His eyes narrowed behind his specs. “That explains how Henderson suddenly started coming back with more eggs. I told him it wasn’t a contest.…” He suddenly pounded the ground with his good hand, his eyes growing wild. “I should never have taken this job. I need the freedom to pounce on whatever I find. And here they have me with a minder and metrics and—” His eyes unfocused as he stared off at something she couldn’t see. “The woods are strange lately. First I saw a flight of purple swallowtails, and they’re usually much farther north this time of summer. Then a clutch of yellow garter snakes I’d never seen before. That kind of pattern disruption is one of the signs, and yet—” He broke off. “Have you seen anything … big … recently?”
Dorie shook her head. “But I haven’t been here recently.” She ran her fingers over the lump in her belly, feeling it out.
He shook his head. “Old Pearcey is all ‘wyverns wyverns wyverns’, but I’ve half a mind to skive off wyvern-hunting for a day and whistle up the fey to ask them about it.”
Dorie started at that. “You would … talk to the fey?” she said. “Willingly?”
The wyvern was restless, and Tam whistled again before he answered, something slow and mournful from the suite. “Sometimes more willingly than others,” he said, staring up the mountain. “But I don’t blame the fey for that.”
Behind him, Dorie flushed again, and her fingers felt hot and numb. Any thought that she would reveal herself to him, that she would find he had forgiven her, was gone now.
He was obliquely referring to her.
To the summer seven years ago when she had traded him to the fey.
It did not matter that she had been fifteen, that she had not meant it all to go the way it happened. It did not matter how much she had tried to atone since then. What mattered is that unforgivable things were unforgivable.
Dorie listened to his melody until it ran out, and she thought o
f just turning and running. Seven years was not enough time to face up to this. But Tam turned before she could make any kind of decision, and in a normal voice he said, “At any rate, the lab would never know. After all, everyone knows it takes scads of time to track down eggs.”
The distraction shocked her from her fugue. That’s what the lump in her belly was. The egg. She had saved it after all. It had remained in her belly as she phased back into human form, as she tumbled from the tree.
Dorie ran her fingers over the lump, feeling it with great surprise. It made a hard little shape in there. A strange kind of pregnancy, for this girl who looked like a boy—and an ironic smile twisted on her face. What if she circumvented her whole dilemma with Malcolm Stilby, and gave Tam the egg? She was suddenly struck that perhaps she could use the egg to make amends. Tam could take it back to the lab, be the hero for a day.
But no. How would one egg, one day of praise, make up for what she had done to him? Her guilt was too big to atone, or at least, she had not figured out how to atone for it yet. There was something still to come.
Dorie let her skin go soft and blue under her shirt, pulled the egg free as if she was pulling it from a hidden pouch. “Pretty thing,” she said softly to it.
Tam’s face brightened. “You did get it! I’m impressed. Look, if it’s just money you want, they’ll pay you for it. We’re making great strides studying what can be done with the eggs when they hatch.”
Her spirits rose. Maybe this would be a good way out of her dilemma. “How much?” she said. Tam named a figure that was Malcolm’s old going rate—i.e., half what he was now paying—and she pondered that. Perhaps their landlady would take that in good faith … or if Tam left, she could phase into fey state, climb the tree and take a second egg, though she hated to do that to the wyvern pair.
“It’s a fair rate,” Tam added. “I’d make sure they didn’t try to talk you down.”
Dorie ran her fingers over the raised, glittery surface, thinking. She needed the money. She didn’t want to sell to Malcolm. But what if she could parlay this one egg into a better future? “It’s not money I want,” she said slowly.
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