Silverblind (Ironskin) (15 page)

He himself was taken by the Fey Queen when he was a young boy. Most fey are too indolent to take humans. They drift through the trees. They bask in the sun. But the few fey who are strong-willed cause all the fey tales one hears, back in the human world. This one took him when he was a small boy. Put her hooks into him, and he drifted along with them for several decades, aging at a snail’s pace.

It is said when the fey release humans back into the world, they send them with a gift, and it is so—if you count being impregnated with fey substance a gift. It is both power and curse, and it was what allowed the Fey Queen to retain her hold on Dorie’s father, even after he had been let go.

He has no fey in him anymore. Jane has driven it from him, leaving his hands crippled and scarred, but human again. He is aged; no longer beautiful, no longer talented. They would have no interest in him, and even if they did, Dorie could protect him. He knows this, she knows this. She knows, too, even at seven, that it is a hard thing for her father to go back into the forest, to introduce her to the fey. To let her meet them, to let her go.

She makes him do it anyway.

If you think that children don’t think about their moral compass, you are wrong. This is the thing seven-, eight-, twelve-year-old Dorie struggles with, over and over, the thing that she has constantly turned to Tam about and said, is this thing that I do, wrong? Is this
fey
? And Tam does not know what to say. For when he does something wrong, where can
he
place the blame?

Still, whatever this human thing called compassion is, Dorie thinks she doesn’t have it. Somewhere along the way, whether from Jane’s rantings about right and wrong, or from her own determination not to be amoral like her maternal line, she has developed something else. A strict sense of what’s fair.

Life mostly isn’t fair.

And
she
hasn’t always been fair.

It is perhaps her great mistakes in this arena that make her more determined to not fail each next time. It is not
nothing
when she errs. It is proof that she is rotten, fey to the core. And so each time she fails she becomes more rigid, and Tam watches it happen, and sees her struggle, and thinks she must be human from head to toe, to care so much.

And yet, to know Dorie is to know she pranks. Even Tam knows this, though he never expects it to happen to him.

No, with the strict sense of what’s fair she has fought for, you only trick those who deserve it. The wealthy who don’t deserve their wealth. The policeman who abused his power. Those above, who would trample those down below.

And when you betray someone who doesn’t deserve it?

You are lowlier than the lowliest worm.

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

*   *   *

Thursday morning Dorie woke herself bright and early, a habit she had trained herself into during those first rough months of prep school at fourteen, when you never knew who was about to do what to you for being different. Her headache had ebbed. She wondered if the blue lights in the lab had really physically given her the headache, or if it was just her subconscious saying:
something is wrong.
Because as far as she knew, the fey were not trading. And that whole building was tinged blue, the blue of clean fey energy that Jack’s magazine contact had been hinting at in the bar.

Still, she had no proof that something was wrong. The fey had been absent for nearly twenty years. And yet, they were being seen again occasionally, weren’t they? That incident in the bar with the silvermen proved that. Before, when the fey had infiltrated the city, it had been due to a strong leader. And when there had been trade before, that, too, had been due to a strong leader. Perhaps two decades had been enough time for a fey to rise again, directing the other fey in what to do. Perhaps that fey was making deals with people like Dr. Pearce. Perhaps she had been wrong to think that the fey were the victims here—perhaps there were wheelings and dealings she was not privy to.

She shivered in the light of the summer sun. Perhaps she would swing by the City Hospital on her way into the lab and see if her stepmother was still there.

And then it would be time for her new job.

Her new job with
Tam
.

As Dorian.

Woglet stretched like a cat and rolled over, still snoring. Dorie groaned. She needed to see Jane as a girl, with no woglet, but then appear at the lab as a boy, with one. How was that going to work? She nudged a sleepy Jack and said before her roommate could fully wake up, “I will be back in ten minutes. Woglet is still asleep. You’ll be fine.”

“Dorie,” mumbled Jack threateningly, but Dorie pulled on a dress and hurried over to the hospital, filching an unattended slice of bread and jam off a patio table on the way.

*   *   *

The nurses’ strike was still going when Dorie arrived. Sparse but determined, she would call it—a dozen women in the white dresses of their profession, keeping vigil in sensible shoes. Dorie found Jane down at the end, talking at length to an older man who clearly just wanted to go into the hospital without having to think too hard about workers’ rights at that particular moment.

Dorie took pity on him. “Jane,” she said, catching her stepmother’s attention.

“Dorie!” said Jane gladly, and gave Dorie a poky sort of hug with a sign that read
TOMORROW IS TODAY
. “How are you doing? How did your interviews go on Monday?”

“Mmm, they’ll let me know,” temporized Dorie. “I actually came to ask you a couple questions. Have you … have you heard anything about a certain sort of energy coming back into use?”

Jane compressed her lips and looked around. “Take a sign and walk with me,” she said.

Dorie picked up one that read
BETTER CARE FOR STAFF MEANS BETTER CARE FOR PATIENTS
and fell in line. Her stepmother had not changed much since Dorie was five—she was still thin and neat, still with a white lock of hair that showed where her fey curse had blighted her cheek and forehead and scalp. Her cursed face had long ago been replaced by a perfect one, infused with fey and embedded with strips of iron to keep her safe. The iron was long gone, but a crisscrossing pattern of reddened lines showed where it had been. Up close, Dorie could see where the grey hairs now streaked the dark hair.

“What did you hear?” said Jane.

“Rumors at first,” said Dorie quietly. “But then I saw—the lights in the Queen’s Lab are all tinged blue. Not yellow; blue. Unless it’s simply a new invention it seems awfully suspicious.” She wrinkled her nose. “And it gave me a splitting headache. Does that seem possible?”

“We still had bluepacks at Silver Birch when you were little,” said Jane, “and I never noticed you complaining. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” She darted a glance at Dorie. “Do you remember me talking about a blacksmith named Niklas? Who helped the ironskin?” Dorie nodded. “His hatred of the fey continues to grow more intense,” Jane said. “Leading him into places that … I just don’t know. He spent the first five, six years after the war just working on a machine that would destroy the fey. And when that failed, he turned his attention to other avenues. I heard a rumbling a few years back that one of those avenues might be the energy problem.” She shook her head. “I have not seen him in a long time.”

“The blacksmith,” Dorie said, realizing. “He’s been cured of his fey curse. Did you know?”

Shock filled Jane’s face. “What do you mean?”

Dorie realized belatedly that that subject was going to open so many things she didn’t know if she could tell her stepmother yet, about Tam and her boyshape and the wyvern eggs. Certainly she didn’t want to say any of it out in the open, on the street. She backed up a step and managed, “I mean, I just heard…”

Jane looked hard at her former charge. “Whatever you learn, come tell me about it,” she said. Her attention was drawn then by a mother with two children walking toward the hospital. Jane stopped to tell them about the overcrowding, the long hours, the overworked nurses making unnecessary mistakes. She got the woman to sign her name to the clipboard another nurse carried, and Dorie fidgeted impatiently, certain everyone walking down the street was looking at her in her curls and dress.

“How’s the strike going?” Dorie said, when Jane turned back to her.

“Not well,” said Jane. “When the police came it scared most of the nurses back into the hospital.” She nodded at the other women holding signs. “They gave them a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to be back on duty. We have had some nurses come back and march on their days off, but it’s not really getting the hospital where it hurts.” She shook her head. “Everyone’s for it, but no one wants their face splashed across the newspapers. They want someone else to do the dirty work.”

“Not everyone is as brave as you,” said Dorie. “Getting thrown in and out of jail is more dangerous for those…” like herself, she thought, but she finished up, “well, those with families, for example.”

Jane got a funny look on her face and she bent her head close to Dorie’s. “Have you seen your aunt Helen recently? The twins?”

“No,” said Dorie. “Why?”

Jane shook her head. “I’ve heard rumblings,” she said. “Your uncle Rook is a good man in Parliament. Always willing to fight.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I know he’s someone you can count on to stay and face trouble. That’s what we need there. More people like him.”

From down the street Dorie saw the police returning. Hastily she shoved her sign into her stepmother’s hand. “I’d better go,” she said. “I’m late. For a thing.”

She could see disappointment in Jane’s eyes, but all her stepmother said was, “Be strong.”

*   *   *

Dorie made it to the lab panting and out of breath, but on time, in boyshape, with Woglet on her shoulder. She was disheartened to find that Annika was waiting in the auto for them, but it turned out Annika was only going as far as some nobleman’s country home. “I was warned about this,
ja
? That the token ‘lady scientist’ would be sent to do fund-raising while the men went off to slay dragons. Well, I haven’t turned the tranq formula over, so there’s that. And I won’t until I get the research needed to complete my book.”

“Maybe Pearce sent you because you know so much about wyvern research?” Dorie said hopefully.

Annika shot her a sour look. “He sent me because this man likes blondes.”

There was an odd push-pull with Annika. How was it possible to feel sympathy toward another woman, a smart, strong woman, fighting the same fight you were—and yet to heartily dislike her at the same time? This must be another bit of her fey side coming out, Dorie concluded. Surely an ordinary human woman would readily form a sisterhood with this woman. Or siblinghood, or whatever you called it when one person was a girl and the other nominally a boy. She would have to do better.

After that, they mostly drove in silence. Despite the warm summer day, they kept the top up and the windows nearly closed to contain Woglet. The stink of petrol fumes in the hot auto made her feel nauseated. Woglet crawled up and down the seats, hanging on with his pinprick claws. Sometimes he got too far away from where Dorie sat in the backseat, and fanned his silver wings into Tam’s field of vision as he drove. Dorie apologized and collected Woglet, but it didn’t deter his exploring.

It was a relief to finally reach the place where Annika was going, a grand country house very close to the turn-off to Black Rock Mountain. Dorie watched Annika’s stiff back go up the steps to the door and wondered if she should ever go back to being female.

“Rum go, I suppose,” said Tam, perhaps thinking similar thoughts. He was the only boy she knew to even think these things, but then, he had been raised by Aunt Helen and Rook, and that surely explained it. Aunt Helen did not go off on lecturey tangents about women’s rights the way Jane did, but still, in her own subtle way, you could tell what was and was not acceptable behavior.

“Are you two … you know. Seeing each other?” Dorie asked abruptly.

Tam casually turned the wheel and got them onto the bumpy side road that went straight up, zigzagging back and forth. “It is purely a meeting of two scientific minds,” he said in a decent approximation of Annika’s accent. Which, though amusing, did not entirely answer the question. “Why, do you think she likes me?” he said easily. “I don’t ever understand the signals. Maybe she likes you. Or Pearcey. That would be entertaining.”

“Er. Well,” said Dorie. “I mean, just curious.”

Tam shrugged as he drove. “I confess she seems a bit prickly when you’re around,” he said. “But I’m told sometimes that’s a good sign. Any particular place you want to try? Good leads on possible nests?”

“I actually want to see if Woglet will go back to his parents,” said Dorie. “It would be better for him.” She fidgeted. “One of the stories in your book suggests they might.”

Tam lit up. “Dorian! You read it! What did you think? I’d like to have more feedback from someone who’s a strong field naturalist to begin with. Before the Crown decided it was valuable and locked it away, I’d gotten very little feedback on it. I think because it’s such a mix, you know? Interviews, transcripts of old herbalist knowledge, stories … but it’s all primary sources, and you never know where the next insight is going to come from. I was hoping someone would surprise me by connecting dots I haven’t yet. But the few people who did read it dismissed it as a book for children, and the ones who didn’t were stark bonkers—conspiracy theorists and that sort of thing. It was a real relief to have Annika’s unconditional support.”

“I’ve just read a bit of it,” Dorie said, which was true. “I only borrowed it from the lab yesterday.”
That
part was a lie—Aunt Helen had given a copy to her several months ago, when he’d first published it through his school. She hadn’t been brave enough to crack it until now.

“Well, the bit about the woglets is in the Glass Mountain story,” Tam said. “But that story is often retold, and though I encountered lots of variations from the oral storytellers, the part about the princess returning the hatched wyvern to its parents was always in there. I started thinking more seriously about that once the eggs became valuable at the lab.”