Silverblind (Ironskin) (12 page)

Jack drummed her fingers on her arm. “The thing is, I wish it were me, you know? The one being arrested.” She nodded at the inflammatory artist, who was being carefully handed into a black automobile, triumph on his face and flashbulbs bright around him.

“Mm,” said Dorie. Like Jack, she was iffy on the value of the law, but she would rather escape to do whatever the heck she wanted another day. Jail did not appeal to her.

“It’s really a wake-up call,” said Jack. “I’m not pushing the limits enough. My technique is really doing something, I think, but that’s not enough in modern times. It’s subject matter that really gets them. But something
meaningful
to me. I have to find something authentic.…”

“Mm,” said Dorie again, who had never thought of searching her soul to share it with strangers. There were so many ways she and Jack were in lockstep that it always surprised her to find the gulfs she could not cross. As far as Dorie was concerned, strangers were entitled to exactly nothing from her. They didn’t need to know anything beyond what she presented.

The woglet in her arm stirred and made sleepy coos of protest at the noise around them.

“Is your arm … yodeling?” said Jack.

“Ugh,” said Dorie. “I don’t even know.” Peering around for the silvermen, she pulled back the rags that covered her elbow and let Jack peek at the coiled ball of silver. “They’re not supposed to … cuddle.”

Jack sucked in breath. “Is that what I think it is?”

Dorie nodded as she covered Woglet.

Jack threw up her hands. “Ugh. Dorie, you know I love you, but seriously. Was that thing in an egg a few hours ago? An egg that would cover our entire rent?” Dorie nodded again and Jack said, “Sometimes I could just…” She made strangling motions at her best friend.

“And there’s more,” Dorie said in a small voice. “I saw Tam.”

“Oh, honey,” said Jack. And then, looking again at Dorie-as-Dorian: “Like that? Oh, honey.” She put an arm on Dorie’s shoulder. “Did you tell him who you were?”

Dorie shook her head miserably. After seven long years she had seen Tam, and he hadn’t known her, and she hadn’t told him. She didn’t know how to say the long-buried story here, on the street with all the students and silvermen. She didn’t think she could ever tell Jack what she had done. Jack knew Tam from way back, of course—Aunt Helen and Jack’s aunt were old friends. Jack knew Tam and Dorie hadn’t spoken since some fight at fifteen, but Dorie had never been able to tell her closest friend the details. She could still barely tell them to herself.

Dorie pressed Jack’s hand where it sat on her shoulder. The sleepy chick was stretching now. Its cooing grew shriller. “He’s probably hungry again,” said Dorie. And silvermen everywhere. “I’d better get out of here.” But before she could take off, Woglet stood and yawned, fanned his wings, and swooped to the ground. He was blessedly silent while yawning, as apparently he could not yodel and yawn at the same time. And then, back into the yodel as he strutted around, no doubt scaring off all the prey for miles. A gallery-goer turned to look and Dorie mentally encouraged them:
turn away, nothing here.

Dorie lunged for Woglet, but he easily eluded her, then made a distinctly petulant yodel in her face that clearly demanded:
feed me, Mom
. No help for it. The little air raid siren would have to eat.

“I have a roll I nicked from the cheese tray before they threw us out,” Jack said, searching her paint-splattered satchel.

“Only if rolls can be hypnotized,” said Dorie. She closed her eyes and searched with the fey senses out around her. Something must be alive, warm, scuttling.… She tracked down a vole under a nearby bush, and, eyes closed to keep attuned to it, she moved unerringly around the edges of the crowd, Woglet screeching his silly head off as he strutted after her. In the back of her mind she thought how powerful that screech must be—maybe his eyes weren’t the only thing that was hypnotic!—to make her do anything fey-related at all, no matter how invisible, so near this enormous crowd. But she could not see any other way to make him shut up.

“It’s there, near that bush,” she told Woglet, opening her eyes and pointing. She did not really think he could understand her, but this close he could probably sense the prey for himself. He quieted as he scuttled under the bush. The vole darted out, the woglet after it, and then he made a new sound, a warm cooing that one’s mother might make, if one were a small and timid vole, and the vole turned to look, and was caught. The woglet advanced, step by step, until it was even with the vole, and then it pounced.

Belatedly Dorie realized that a small circle had formed around them—this interaction was rapidly becoming more interesting than arrested artists. Her encouragement to look away would only get her so far—she and the wyvern were being far too interesting. Woglet devoured the tasty parts of the vole in rapid succession, and Dorie knelt near him. “Come on back,” she said with mounting frustration and fear, and with something long and stringy dangling from his mouth, he obeyed, flapping back to her arm. He tipped his neck up and with one long slurp sucked down the last morsel. Dorie-as-Dorian looked at him, exasperated fondness lighting her face.

And then all the flashbulbs went off.

Chapter 6

THE QUEEN’S LAB

Dorie is nine, and so is Tam. The pair of them run wild through the broken-down house, the house with the bombed-out wing that there will never be enough money to have restored. Not in her parents’ lifetime, anyway. They run wild through the lawns, and then, as soon as they are sure Jane and Edward and Helen and Rook are no longer watching quite so closely, they go into the forest.

Dorie treasures these brief visits with her city cousin. There is no one else who understands her. Not only does Tam truly know who she is, he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to him. He doesn’t run away from her.

For Tam, Dorie’s fey side falls under the category of parental damage. His father, his real father, was in a drunken car accident when he was five, an accident that killed his mother. Then a fey took over his father and impersonated him, eventually destroying its host. So Tam remembers his father as first a lax drunkard, then a rotten dictator, and though he tries to remind himself the second one wasn’t his father, it’s all jumbled up and impossible to sort out. Sure, he was later adopted by Helen and Rook. But you carry those scars. And he knows that she carries her scars, and they aren’t her fault any more than his are. In order to make peace with his own past, he has to make hers okay, too, or perhaps simply realizing that she, too, has a past, makes it easier for him to ignore his. He thinks that in some strange way her history is bound up in his, but he never says anything like this. All that happens on the surface, between them, is that they don’t give two bits for each other’s damage. They let it go.

And if sometimes Tam wakes screaming in his bed, she goes in to comfort him, and they don’t wake any of the parents. And if sometimes Dorie pranks the maid or the postman, he just
looks
at her. And she makes it right again.

—T. L. Grimsby,
Dorie & Tam: A Mostly True Story

*   *   *

Jack rousted Dorie from a hard-won sleep. She had been dreaming of her childhood, running wild with Tam, and now those memories melted away as she sat up. It was morning and the summer sun was already baking her side of the room. So much for the temperate climate—would the heat wave never break? “Woglet!” Dorie said, and then found him curled in a sunbeam, in a nest around her feet.
Girl
feet—she must have shifted back in the night. Woglet seemed not to care what state she was in. Mother or father—it was all the same to him.

“He woke me around six chasing down a mouse,” Jack said. “And that’s after the mouse he ate when we got home last night.”

“Better than a cat?” offered Dorie hopefully.

“Here,” said Jack, tossing a sheaf of newspapers on her bed. “You might as well see this now.”

The front page of the biggest city paper was a clear picture of Dorie-as-Dorian, looking on in maternal—well,
paternal,
perhaps—awe as the woglet swallowed, bright wings spread wide. Dorie groaned.

“The good news is you’re not technically in trouble,” said Jack, plopping down next to Woglet. “The whole article went on about some new law that was passed on Monday making it illegal to own wyvern eggs. Wyverns
themselves
are not illegal. Yet. They asked one of the zookeepers to make an educated guess on how old your wyvern was, but the guy said he couldn’t say for sure whether it had hatched that night or a week ago. Also they didn’t know your name, although it was strongly hinted they were interested in finding out.”

“I don’t even know,” said Dorie. She flipped to the continuation of the article to see if there were any more pictures, but there weren’t. “I guess Dorian’s kaput then. Time to invent a new persona,” she added glumly. She looked up at Jack’s expression. “Did we scoop your show?”

“I can’t decide,” said Jack. “Would we have made the front page without you? Or would we have been buried under a police report file somewhere? The show’s only under investigation for now, but the sculptor who did the fey piece got booked under Subversive Activities. And you know what happens there—you never hear about the incident, or them, again.”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” said Dorie. She laid a hand on Jack’s, but Jack dismissed it.

“Don’t be. In a weird way I envy him. He had something worth fighting for, you know?”

“I suppose,” said Dorie. A brief article below hers caught her eye—
NURSES’ STRIKE TURNS UGLY
. A grainy picture showed one of the women struggling against a policeman in riot gear. They had framed the shot well—the woman looked violent, insane. She peered at it, hoping it was not her stepmother.

Jack thrust a scrap of paper into her view. “We’re not done here,” she said.

“And…? What’s the rest of it?”

“The Queen’s Lab called,” Jack said. “It was strongly suggested that you be there by nine.”

“And the time is?”

“Eight forty-five,” said Jack. She put her hands up. “Don’t look at me—the landlady literally just brought the message up.”

Dorie put her head in her hands and groaned. Woglet ululated happily in response.

*   *   *

The Queen’s Lab was a five-minute walk from their flat. Dorie managed to change into Dorian and get out the door by nine-oh-five, which she thought was doing pretty well as Jack had insisted she clean up the remnants of the mice Woglet had left the night before. Jack was not particularly squeamish, but she said it was the principle of the thing, and she didn’t make Dorie clean up after her models. Dorie said when the models started eating bits of mice they’d talk, and with one thing and another they both were rather grouchy by the time Dorian Eliot slipped out the fire escape and up onto the roof, and leapt the half-meter between the sheltering sycamores to the arts building, which was her preferred method of avoiding their landlady. Artists could always be counted on to leave the roof door open, and she sauntered down the stairs and out of the building.

At the base of the arts building, she let Woglet chase a vole while she nibbled on a clump of sorrel growing in the shade. Someone had left a half-eaten apple by a sketchpad, and she filched the apple and hurried Woglet along from his vole bits before the artist could return.

More than one student stopped them on their walk to see the woglet live and in person. Several wanted to pet him, and Dorie-as-Dorian let them, wondering how Woglet would react. It was different every time—a small boy he let stroke his head, and a large professor he stood up and tried unsuccessfully to hypnotize. Once he snapped, and that person snapped at Dorie for letting her pet him, and Dorie shrugged.

At nine-twenty she strolled into the lobby of the Queen’s Lab, outwardly serene, but truthfully with her heart in her mouth. Woglet was asleep again, digesting the morning’s activities with a wobbly snore. The gatekeeper pressed his silver-sigiled palm onto hers with a yawn, then waved her through. He had done that on Monday, but she had not known the significance then. She walked through the steel door he opened, glad once again that what was poison to true fey was not always so to her. She didn’t particularly
like
being in close contact with iron for very long, but it wasn’t deadly. And now the wyvern goo—although she was not eager to try touching it in fey form, it seemed to not poison her as long as she was in human shape.

Everyone who happened to be walking through the area looked around when she came in. Some of them managed to go back to their missions, but a couple of scientists stopped and stared openly. She always cataloged them, automatically. Like Jack’s artists’ collective, the lab was highly gendered. It wasn’t just the field work position—there weren’t many women here, period. Still, the self-assured girl from the forest must be here somewhere.

Simons came hurriedly up to her, still looking rumpled and overworked, but decidedly more deferential to Dorian than he had been to Dorie.

To be fair, Dorian
did
have a woglet.

“Right this way, sir,” he said. “Our lab director is very eager to meet you.”

Dorie lingered, enjoying the sudden shift in power. “You know, I’d really love to see your wyvern facilities first, Mr., uh…”

“Simons. Are you sure that’s the best idea? Wyverns are notoriously cranky, even with each other.”

Dorie strode forward, strong and easy, toward where she remembered the lab was. She could get used to this. “Is it down this way, Simons?”

He hurried after her, trying to keep up. “Yes, but I’m sure the director will want to show you
personally.
…”

“Oh, but I’ll want to make sure the facilities are adequate for the work I’m interested in doing.”

Simons spluttered. “
Adequate
? This is the Queen’s Lab—”

She was on the edge of gaining her goal when a commanding voice stopped them in their tracks. “That’s enough, Simons,” said a mellifluous voice. “I’ll take it from here.” Dr. Pearce clapped Dorie on the shoulder and steered her down the hall to his office. He gestured for her to take a seat, but she decided Dorian would rather stand than sit in that low chair next to his massive desk. She strolled over to the terrarium, forcing Dr. Pearce to tag along if he wanted to talk to her. The adolescent wyvern was back in the cage—but sometime in the last two days the little copper bolt had been replaced by an iron padlock.