Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  It burned, oh, how it burned.

  It burned all the last bit of silver away, and then she was free to use her power to set Tam free once and for all. Keeping her arms wrapped around him, she reached down with her fey side into his hands and began pulling it out in long blue slithers, letting the fey do what it wanted and go out into the other world. It grew harder as she went and at some point she realized Jane was screaming from outside the circle.

  She couldn’t think why, but it was getting harder to think. She felt so faint, but the blue was coming out of his hands and still she held him.

  And then it was all gone, and as she sagged against Tam she understood what Jane had been yelling about.

  Her own fey side had been freed by removing the wyvern. And now it, too, was crackling away, too, going, going, out of her fingers and toes and the ends of her hair, vanishing into the ether.

  The fey were almost through now, every last bit of them, and that included her.

  The blue storm raged through her, and as it went it sucked all the last bit of her blue right along with it. It drained from her fingers and ears and toenails. It sucked away all the changes she had made and it turned her back into Dorie, bit by bit, unchangeable golden-haired Dorie with the curls and the lips and the skin that would never mar.

  She sagged in Tam’s arms where she held him, and now he held her as she slipped to the ground. The hole was closing—the fey were gone for good and forever. Tam leaned down, ear to her mouth, as she tried to say something. She hardly knew what she wanted to say until the words forced themselves through her lips like they, too, were leaving her body.

  “I will fight,” she said as he held her. The world grew black around her and she thought that perhaps the irony of slipping into it while finally realizing that life was for fighting was amusing, at least to someone not her. At any rate, she had stopped running in time, hadn’t she? Stopped hiding, stopped pretending. She had saved them all, all the fey, forever and ever, and Jane, too, and Tam. She had done something with her life. So it was okay if the black closed in.

  The words came through one more time.

  “I will fight.”

  Epilogue

  In one timeline the silvermen caught her before she could reach the circle, stopped the fey from going through. That world has clean energy for the whole country; surely there they call Adora Rochart a traitor, and burn her in effigy once a year at summer’s end.

  In our timeline the silvermen did not catch her. No one did. Tam did not forgive her in time, and so she went through the portal with the fey, left all of us behind, and we are poorer for it.

  But I like to think that in another timeline they did not catch her, did not catch the fey. They went and she stayed, and perhaps she made things up with Tam, for he had always loved her, even when he thought he shouldn’t.

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

  * * *

  Dorie.

  Five, six years from now. Ten if she’s unlucky.

  She is standing in The Supper Club, now Jack and Stella’s club, for Alberta has retired and the good friends are running it together. Stella does the books and charms the guests, and Jack books the acts and wrangles over maraschino cherries, for it turns out she has a head for that after all. During the weekdays Jack paints canvases that are steadily rising in value, and next year, or maybe five years from now, she’ll be opening her own gallery, a certain redheaded doctor by her side. They’ll sell Jane’s paintings as well, and Jane will finally see a career of her own start to blossom.

  Dorie’s hands have healed, as much as they ever will. They are the descendants of her father’s hands, mangled and scarred, but she doesn’t mind as much as she might. She doesn’t often go to The Wet Pig these days, but when she does, she looks at the picture of laughing Dorie, two perfect hands wrapped around her ale and her head thrown back in a riot of blond curls, and she doesn’t miss that girl, the girl who never changed.

  She wears her hair long and dark brown these days, a twin of her stepmother Jane’s. Her nose has a bump from where she broke it in a fight when she was twelve. Her leg has a long scar from where she broke it when she was thirteen. She has a wry smile like Uncle Rook, and freckles like Aunt Helen, and she doesn’t have to work very hard to keep any of these things in place, but she does, just a little, and that’s okay, because she can.

  Because a trickle of her fey side came back to her.

  There was nothing for a long time. It was a long convalescence for her. Losing half of yourself is a serious undertaking. Dorie spent three months in bed, and the next eight months sitting on a stone bench at the old Silver Birch estate, sitting just inside the woods and looking for something that did not come. The silvermen came at first to threaten her, then came less and less when it became increasingly obvious that Dorie could not only not reverse what she had done, she could do nothing more at all. The palms with their silver eyes did nothing. The application of wyvern goo did nothing.

  Annika was brought in once to examine her with her basilisk eye; she said merely, “She’s clean,” and then pivoted and left without saying another word to Dorie. Dorie heard later that Annika had been promoted to second-in-command at the Queen’s Lab, despite the fact that what had temporarily been a superpower was now a mere curiosity. What use a basilisk eye if all the fey were gone, after all? But Dorie did not care what happened to Annika, not even enough to gloat.

  Tam had not been entirely absent during that time, the time when she sat on a bench in the forest. He spent the first three months she was in bed reading to her, bringing her tea, telling her stories of the city. When she finally came to terms with the fact that she might be human forever, she got up from bed and moved to the bench in the forest, and said she didn’t want to see anybody.

  So Tam left.

  He went around the world, tracking down myths and looking for things. He sent Dorie letters from every port: long handwritten stories he had heard, about ice monsters and feathered rocs and great tentacled kraken. There was still magic in the world, if she would see it. But Dorie did not care much for ice monsters if she wasn’t one of them. In vain Helen tempted her with outings in town. In vain Jane reminded her that she had chosen to stay and fight. In vain the letters came.

  And then one day, as if it had taken all that time for her other half to find a way between the worlds, she woke up with the faintest, vaguest thought that she could sense people standing just below her window. A few months later and she could jostle her teacup without touching it. She spilled the tea all over Aunt Helen’s new rug that day and cackled with delight. Aunt Helen, who had been wearing a worried face for the last year and trying to hide it, smiled at the sight. Even Woglet—who was by now really too big to be sitting in people’s living rooms like a fancy knickknack—flew around and around in circles, knocking over the rest of the teapot.

  It keeps coming back, a very little at a time, as if the opening between the worlds is a fraction of a hairsbreadth, and it all has to come through in a very thin crackle of blue, back to where it belongs. One day there is enough to sense which mushrooms are poisonous. One day there is enough to make a blue light dance at her fingertips. It might take twenty years to all come back, but it comes.

  On the day when there is enough to put the bump back on her nose, she finally answers one of Tam’s letters. She sends a postcard from the village to his last known address, and waits for it to be forwarded on, and him to book passage on the next ship home. When he arrives at Silver Birch Hall he draws the postcard from his jacket pocket, now faded and sea-struck and bent, and shows her the two words she had written weeks and weeks ago. “Come home,” it said, and here he is.

  He sits down on the old stone bench at the edge of the forest; the two of them sit there together.

  “And then I had my own journey,” Tam says, “for I didn’t want to make music anymore. It didn’t come out the same. I put into port and burned all my old scores.” He takes her ruine
d hand. “But then I thought of all you’d lost. And how if I couldn’t fight for what I had, how could I tell you to? So I started over. I’m studying composition and theory and technique. And I play again. Perhaps … not like I did. But what is ever like it was?”

  “Perhaps some things could be like they were,” she says. She takes his hands, and presses her fingertips to his. There is kindness and warmth and simple understanding there, and just perhaps, maybe there is something more as well. A faint trickle of blue—not too much, for she does not have that much—coalesces on her fingertips.

  He pulls back. “No,” he says. “I can’t accept their gifts. Not now that I know what it was.”

  She sets her fingers to his, and when he still seems reluctant, she leans forward and sets her lips to his, and for that he is not reluctant at all. When she pulls back she says, “There is no them, not anymore.” Her voice trembles, firms. “But there is me. And just sometimes, only sometimes … I would like to share with you. Would you like that?”

  He takes her hand and kisses her again and the world spins around and now she is back in The Supper Club, because all that is a real dream, a true dream that has happened long ago, and here she is at the table, watching a dear sweet man in glasses and a battered leather jacket take the stage. He sits down at the piano, and a little bit is her gift, but the rest is him, as the music swells around them and tells everyone a story of long ago.

  It is the story of a Great War that split a country in two.

  It is the story of a girl who was ironskin, and tried to help a small damaged child, and learned terrible secrets.

  It is a story of a copper-haired girl who paid too much for beauty, and fell, and got up, and fought.

  It is the story of a girl who was caught in the war, who paid to save a people with half of herself. Tears run down that girl’s face as she sits in The Supper Club, and listens to her love, and considers what next to fight.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Caroline Yoachim and David Levine for reading the earliest draft, to a bunch of folks on Codex for answering random questions like what a tattoo in your hand would feel like, Neile Graham who has not yet been thanked for catching errors in Ironskin, Tinatsu Wallace for the chained-up copperhead hydra, Super Agent Ginger Clark and the Curtis Brown team, Super Editor Melissa Frain, Amy Saxon, Leah Withers, Susannah Noel, Irene Gallo, Larry Rostant, and the rest of the Tor team, Rosalyn Landor for her incredible voice work on the audiobooks, Peter Honigstock for always making the Powell’s events go like clockwork, my family for giving me a week to hole up in Eugene and write while they toddler-wrangled, Dad for reading the third draft, Mom for catching typos, Eric for, really, just all kinds of help and support, and finally, sweet little baby #2 for only eating half of my brain and not all of it.

  April 2014

  Portland, Oregon

  TOR BOOKS BY TINA CONNOLLY

  Ironskin

  Copperhead

  Silverblind

  About the Author

  TINA CONNOLLY lives with her family in Portland, Oregon, in a house that came with a dragon in the basement and blackberry vines in the attic. Her stories have appeared all over, including in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is a frequent reader for PodCastle, and narrates the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake. In the summer, she works as a face painter, which means a glitter-filled house is an occupational hazard. Learn more at www.tinaconnolly.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SILVERBLIND

  Copyright © 2014 by Christine Marie Connolly

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Larry Rostant

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-7514-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-4540-4 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466845404

  First Edition: October 2014