Copperhead

by Tina Connolly

  The passengers were the one thing Helen liked about the trolley. Despite the fact that they made it cramped and smelly, they were also interesting, because people were interesting. She had always liked people—but now with the fey mask her interest in people seemed even more pronounced.

  People …

  Helen realized with a jolt that all the men in the trolley were staring at her, whether openly or surreptitiously.

  She had no iron mask.

  She suddenly felt naked. The iron mask was not just protection from the fey. It was protection from herself. It was protection from her own fey charm affecting everyone around her. She had gotten used to the mask turning it off, but now it was on in full force.

  Now she was vulnerable.

  “Do you have the time, miss?” It was a young man, fishing for an opportunity to speak to her. You should never engage any of them, she knew, but she always felt a sort of kinship for the young ones. She knew what it was to want.

  “I’m sorry, no,” said Helen. In the old days it had taken more than a smile to make a man blush, but now with the fey glamour every moment of charisma was magnified, and he went bright red to the ears, though he pretended not to.

  “Does she look like she’d carry a watch?” said another man, rougher. “No place to keep it in that getup.”

  Her coat was hardly revealing, unless he meant her legs. She was not going to inquire what he meant.

  With effort she pulled the carpetbag onto her lap and started to go through it for something to do, some way to pointedly ignore the riders around her.

  Surely among everything else the ever-alert Jane had some iron in here, something Helen could use to defend herself from fey. She opened the clasp and peered into the bag’s dark contents.

  The trolley was dim and the inside of the carpetbag grey-black. Helen poked around the rough interior, trying to feel things out without exposing them to the gaze of the other passengers. That tied-up roll of felt, there—those were the tools Jane used for the facelift. Helen did not remember putting them in the bag, but she must have done it in her shock.

  In a pocket compartment was a sloshy bag of clay in water. A larger compartment held a rough wooden box, secured in place. She would have to pull it out to discover what was inside. She rummaged around the main compartment, found a scarf and hairpins. A small leather-bound book. Train-ticket stubs.

  Apparently not everything in here pertained to Jane’s secret work.

  At the very bottom Helen found some of that ironcloth that Jane used to help her focus the fey power. Helen had tried it, but so far she had not gotten the hang of it. Jane used the combination of the iron plus the fey to direct the bit of fey she still wore on her face—give her the power to put Millicent into the fey trance, for example. Late one night Jane had confided to Helen that she had actually used the fey power to make someone do her bidding once—but that it had scared her enough that she never intended to do it again.

  Perhaps the cloth would substitute for the iron mask that Alistair had taken; perhaps Helen could use it as protection. She pulled the cloth out to examine it, and her hand knocked against a small glass jar. Tam’s bugs. She must have put them in the carpetbag as she left the house.

  Helen did not particularly like bugs, but her hand closed on the jar and she smiled wistfully, remembering Tam. The poor boy—mother gone, now stepmamma, left alone with that horrible man and his horrible friends. Should she have tried to take him with her? But how could she, when his father was right there? She did not know what you could do for a case like that.

  Just then the trolley came to a jerking stop, throwing folks who were standing off balance. A very short elderly woman stumbled near Helen, her bag tumbling to the ground. Helen jumped to retrieve it and helped the woman to sit on the bench next to her, half-listening to the litany of complaints rising from all sides.

  “How can I keep my night shift when—”

  “Boss makes me punch in—”

  “Docked pay—”

  “Fey on the tracks,” one said knowledgeably, though that didn’t seem likely. The blue mist shied away from iron.

  “Are you all right?” said Helen. The old woman had not quite let go of her arm, though it was likely she was finding the bench difficult as her feet did not touch the floor.

  The woman’s fingers tightened and Helen looked up to find the bored ticket-taker staring down at them, his face now purple with indignation.

  “Your kind isn’t to be here,” he spat at the old woman. “Back of the trolley.”

  Helen looked to the very back of the trolley. She saw a cluster of very short men and women there, bracing themselves against the wall for balance. The trolley straps dangled high over their heads.

  The dwarvven.

  The woman’s wrinkled chin jutted out. No one from the back was running to her aid—though the dwarvven were said to be stubborn, fighting folk, these men and women looked tired and worn-out. Ready to be home.

  “C’mon, dwarf,” the ticket-taker said. Dwarf had not been a slur once, but it was quickly becoming one under Copperhead’s influence. It was the way they said it. The way they refused to attempt the word the dwarvven themselves used.

  Helen placed her hand on top of the woman’s wrinkled one. “This is my grandmother,” she said pleasantly to the ticket-taker. Confidentially, leaning forward, “Poor nutrition in her youth, poor thing, combined with a bad case of scoliosis. Oh, I expect by the time I’m her age I’ll be no higher than my knees are now.” She ran her fingers up her stockings to her knees, pushing aside the plum silk, and gave him a nice view of her legs in their bronze heels. “Can’t you just imagine?”

  The ticket-taker looked a little glazed by the flow of words and by the legs.

  Helen dropped her skirt and said, “Thank you so kindly for checking up on us. I feel so much safer now. We won’t take up any more of your time.”

  With a lurch the trolley started again. Dazed, the ticket-taker stumbled on, and the dwarvven woman’s fingers relaxed on Helen’s arm. She pulled her knitting from her bag and began to focus on the flying needles. But under her breath the woman said softly, “I owe you,” to Helen.

  Helen patted the woman’s arm, watching the wicked points of the needles fly. “Don’t be silly, Grandmother.”

  Helen turned back to Jane’s carpetbag, grinning inwardly. She rather thought the dwarvven woman would be just fine on her own, now that she had those weapons in her hand again.

  But the flash of legs had attracted the attention she’d been trying to avoid.

  The boor nudged the young man who had asked about the time. “Ask her to the dance hall with ya. Pretty silky thing like that, even if she is stuck up.”

  Helen flicked a glance over at the two men, assessing the need to be wary. She had encountered rough characters at the tenpence dance hall back in the day. But she had always had a knack for finding protectors. Their loose, dark button-shirts and slacks said working men—the young man, at least, was well-groomed and nicely buttoned, which spoke better for his intentions. She smiled kindly at the young man and had the satisfaction of watching him scoot away from the drunkard, trying to stay in her good graces.

  “Too good for us, she thinks,” said the boor. “I could tell her a thing or two about that.”

  Several seats down she caught an amused expression. A man had carved out a spot for himself on the crowded trolley by crouching lightly on the back of one of the seats, hovering over rougher, sturdier looking fellows. A fresh notice pasted behind him read: YOUR EYES ARE OUR EYES! ALERT THE CONDUCTOR TO SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. His face looked familiar, but she could not think why at first. He had a lean, graceful look, like the dancers she and Alistair had seen at the theatre last spring, before he started spending all his evenings with those terrible friends of his. Helen thought she had seen this man recently, exchanged a smile with him—that was it, wasn’t it? He looked like—or was—the man from the meeting tonight, who had perched on the windowsill during
the demonstration. Everything prior to the disaster seemed to have vanished from her head. She looked more closely. The man was on the slight side, but all slim muscle and amused mouth. Amused at her expense—watching her try to cope with the boor. Helen was perfectly capable of defending herself through wit at a party—but what good would wit do you with a sloshed village idiot like this?

  Well, she’d have to say something, or be on edge for the rest of the trip. Helen turned to face the boor, who was still making comments under his breath. Her mind raced through what she could say to tactfully make him stop. Was there anything?

  “Like the story a sweet Moll Abalone,” said the boor, “who thought she was a lady fine, but when she found she could make her way by not being a lady … whoo boy! Just think on that, girlie. Oh cockles and mussels alive, alive-o…”

  The lithe man raised amused eyebrows at Helen and Helen’s temper lit like a match touched to dry kindling. She unscrewed the bug jar she held and dumped the entire contents on the drunken boor’s head. Bugs and grass rained down around him, and his jaw fell slack in shock.

  So did Helen’s, for she had not entirely meant to do that. What on earth came over her sometimes? It was as if she had no willpower at all.

  The young man opposite laughed delightedly. “You show him, miss,” he said. “More than a pretty face, aren’t you?” and several others clapped.

  Helen’s grin faded as quickly as it had come, as the drunken boor lurched from his seat, more quickly than she would have guessed. Crickets fell from his shoulders and suddenly the hot blast of whiskey was in her face, the rough red-pored face close and hot. In his hand was a knife.

  Chapter 3

  BAREFACED

  She had no time to do more than register the danger and suddenly the man was gone, shoved away. The lithe man stood between them, his back to her. He was wearing some sort of dark leather jacket over slim trousers, made from a tough woven material. It was all very close-fitting, and free of loops and pockets and things that would catch. It was an outfit made for getting away from something. “Here now,” he said softly, dangerously, and then his voice dropped even lower, and despite the absolute stillness of the fascinated trolley car Helen could not hear what he said into the man’s ear. It was something, though, for Helen could see one of the boor’s outstretched hands, and it shook, and then he drunkenly backed up a pace, then another, then another, then turned and pushed his way through protesting bodies toward the other end of the trolley.

  Despite her relief, she had had experience with rescuers. Rescuing a woman was helpful, kind—but generally also an excuse on the rescuer’s part to talk to her. She appreciated his audacity, but that sort of fellow was always harder to tactfully get rid of. Telling them you were married didn’t always stop them.

  And she worried that this one had followed her. How could they have coincidentally ended up on the same trolley? Was he interested in her, or did he have another, more dangerous motive for turning up twice in her life tonight?

  Helen turned back from watching the boor go, pasting a pleasant smile of thanks on her face, ready to parse the man’s motives, feel him out.

  But he was gone. The folks around her were watching the drunkard leave. The dwarvven grandmother had her knitting needles thrust outward, watching the boor leave with a fierce expression on her face. The mysterious man must have taken the opportunity to vanish in the other direction, into the crush of bodies. Helen felt oddly put out.

  Attention started to shift back her way, and Helen quickly turned her gaze back to the bag, shutting out the curious stares. Focus, she told herself. Be smart for Jane. She needs you now. There’s something in here that will tell you exactly where she lives, more than vaguely by the wharf. There must be something in here that will help. The ironcloth, perhaps. Make a veil out of that, like Jane used to wear. That would give you some protection.

  No, not you. Focus. What would help Jane?

  The leather book had a ribbon bookmark in it. Helen opened it to that page and saw a list of names. Then suddenly, thinking, she turned the leather-bound book upside down and flapped its pages, wanting something to fall out. But there was nothing. She looked on the outside of the carpetbag to see if she could find an address, but she was not surprised not to. Jane had always been secretive. She had vanished to the city after their little brother, Charlie, died, and Helen hadn’t known where she’d gone till much later, till long after Mother died, long after Helen had given up standing by the door every night, wishing her last remaining family member would walk in.

  Vanished. To the city.

  To a place where she had gone for sanctuary.

  Abruptly Helen stood. There was one person who might be able to direct her to her sister’s whereabouts.

  * * *

  The night was cold and Helen was tired of walking by the time she neared the foundry on the river. The factories were more here—the smell and smoke greater. But the bits of fey were fewer. Helen saw hardly any as she picked her way down the river-splashed streets, across cobblestoned patches of street as well as rutted packed dirt, hard and frosted with ice crystals. Slush patterned her stockinged legs, the tops of her feet, slid into her bronze heels. Even in the frozen air there was a thin smell of river and sewage and fish.

  A form lurched up to her in the dark. Helen gasped and jumped away as its arms swung toward her like a dead thing. In a moment of stark memory she saw a battlefield long ago, saw a familiar farmer fall to the fey, then rise up just like this as a fey took over his dead body. Lurching with stiff arms, trying to make the limbs obey the new mind.

  “What’s going, pretty?” said the man drunkenly. “How much then?”

  Helen’s heart kept up its mad pounding rush. She did not have a jar of bugs, she did not have a rescuer, but she was not going to be helpless. In the moonlight she turned square to the man and said with all her will, “Go home. Go home.”

  He wavered. “Don’t wanna go home. Wanna drink and a pretty.”

  “Drink yourself into oblivion for all I care,” Helen told him. “But not with me.” She glared at him until he finally backed down, staggered away.

  She breathed carefully, making her heart slow. Her silk dress and stockings were too thin for the cold air. She wrapped her wool coat more tightly, tucked her gloved fingers under her arms. She should be wearing her furs, as ridiculous as that would be in this part of town. Where was that damn foundry?

  The square, redbrick building opposite looked vaguely familiar. It had certainly not been papered with that line of identical posters five years ago, though. Yellow posters with a red seven-headed snake, and the words ONE PEOPLE! ONE RACE! repeated twenty times on the wall in case you missed the first one.

  She touched the curling edges of the very last poster and closed her eyes, trying to visualize the twists and turns she had taken. She had visited Jane once at the foundry, five years ago now. If she thought about it the right way she could almost see it; she was so close.… Eyes half-shut, she moved quickly and with purpose, down another block, around some stairs, and suddenly there it was, the iron fence sharp and forbidding. Her eyes opened against the black night and she stared at it, uncertain now how she had gotten there.

  Or was it simply that she didn’t know what to do now that she had arrived?

  There was an iron hydra coiled on the gate. That was a new feature.

  Helen shuddered as she touched it, the iron cold and firm through her lilac gloves. What was she getting herself into here? She had thought of this as a safe place, because Jane had always spoken of it as her haven. But zealotry could override logic.

  She waited, shivering. Then behind the gate, as if he had always been standing in the shadows, she saw him. The man who ran the foundry; what was his name? Niklas. Tall and broad, wrapped in warm leathers against the night.

  “What’s a fey groupie want here?” he said. “Couldn’t wait till morning to get a new mask?”

  Of course. The iron masks came from here. She had f
orgotten. Oh, wouldn’t Jane have had a biting remark for her about that? The careless rich, who don’t even know where their salvation comes from. “No,” Helen said. “I mean, yes, I need one badly. I can pay.…”

  “Of course you can. And extra for interrupting my dinner. Wait.” He melted away into the night, leaving Helen straining her eyes to see into the tangle of iron and machinery behind the bars. The yard was more crowded than she had remembered it, more filled with hulking boxes with gears and spokes and arms, machines that seemed half-alive under the blue moonlight. She remembered it as a yard of dirt and seagulls and rusting scrap metal, but now it was thick and dense. An enormous metal tower built in front of the old shop building blocked out part of the sky. It was chained with long loops of thick iron links. Everything smelled of soot and hot metal.

  “Here it is,” he said, for he was back again. Niklas held the mask up for her inspection. A plain solid iron mask with mesh wires over the airholes. Identical to the one she had had, to the one all the women had. As if they were anonymous, all these wives, a mass of interchangeable women. A funereal army. “Now pay up.” He named a price and Helen fumbled through her coat pockets as if she would have money inside, but she didn’t, she never did, because you didn’t do that, you simply received credit at all the shops. The change the chauffeur had given her was gone for the trolley; there was nothing that would approach the cost of a full mask.