Silverblind (Ironskin) (25 page)

What. The. Hell.

She stared at the circle’s barrier, stared it down.

She had gone in as full human; she could get out that way. She wasn’t willing to believe anything else. She steeled herself against the nausea and illusions, and in full human mode with Woglet safely under her arm, she pushed through the reluctant barrier until she burst through the other side, dizzy, panting, through. She sat down hard, breathing and trying to find her equilibrium.

Now that she was out of the circle she saw things she hadn’t noticed before—chiefly, something that looked like a track leading away from the circle, up the mountains toward the cave. The remainder of the rainstorm outlined the track, trickling down its ruts, down the mountain. She looked more closely at how the track side-winded and thought, yes, it really does look like the track of a massive tail. Carefully she stood and followed the track, staying off to the side, in the bushes. Woglet squirmed out from under her arm and clambered with pinprick claws to sit on her shoulder.

A half-hour up the track she stopped. Sunshine picked out a wet clearing in front of her, and behind it a large cave, large enough to contain the giant basilisk she had glimpsed in the circle.

Inside the cave she could dimly see three eggs, nestled in a pile of leaves and branches.

Each egg could have comfortably held Stella.

She stared at Woglet. “What is this?” she said, and Woglet chirruped inquisitively. Cautiously she crept to the cave, fey senses extended for a return of the creature she had seen in the circle. She laid her good hand on the nearest egg, wondering if she could sense its state as she had with the wyvern eggs.

A thrumming deep inside her belly, like the vibrations of a bass drum. Tiny motions from the egg. It was going to hatch soon but not today—Tuesday, she thought. She checked the other two, but they seemed colder, a bit further from hatching.

A noise alerted her, and she scuttled back to the bushes, holding Woglet so tightly he squealed.

But it was nothing—a flash of green wings; a bird she did not know. The blood in her damaged finger was pounding more insistently now. The cut was bloodless—it looked like an old wound. But it felt like a new one. She let her finger fade to blue, where it still hurt, but in another way that was more mental than physical. At the moment she thought she would rather deal with some mental pain than actually have to look at the sheared-off tip of her index finger.

Woglet nudged his head against Dorie’s ruined hand, whimpering. “I don’t suppose you have any butter?” she said, a catch in her voice. He nuzzled into her arm and the yodel-whimper sank into a purr that thrummed through her bones and did seem to help. “Come on, then,” she said. “We still have to figure out how a human gets down from here.”

Chapter 11

GOING HOME

… the old woman said it was common knowledge in her village [of 18 people] that the yolk of the wyvern egg was poisonous to fey. But as for applying that knowledge, well, it was a question of who bells the cat. She further stated that, just as the basilisks were much larger, more terrifying cousins of the silvertailed wyverns, so the yolk of their egg was known to be proportionately more powerful. A tincture of the yolk, applied to the eye, would not only grant complete immunity from the fey, it would enable the viewer to opto-paralyze the fey just as regular basilisks opto-paralyzed humans.… Sadly, no basilisks have been reported in two centuries, so this theory is impossible to test.

—Thomas Grimsby, introduction to “Rose-Red and the Basilisk,”
Collected Fey Tales

*   *   *

Dorie was hot and tired by the time she had found her precarious way down the mountain. She was bone-sore, dying of hunger, and her finger was throbbing like fire. There was no help for it. She had to sleep, and eat something more substantial than dandelions, and that meant she had to go home. The rented bike was still there, and she headed down the muddy hill and farther out into the country.

Night was falling as she reached the dilapidated old manor that was Silver Birch Hall. She had not done a four-hour bike ride since she was a teenager, roaming around the country, and her legs ached and her rear was sore.

Dorie banged the hoop doorknocker with her good hand until the door creaked open and a small liveried figure with a cane and long grey braid opened. “Hi, Poule,” said Dorie. She waved the same dirty hand at the old butler. Woglet mewed.

Poule looked at the slight boy standing on the doorstep with first one sharp eye, then the other. “Come on in, Dorie,” she said.

*   *   *

There was dinner, a bath for her and Woglet—Woglet took to it surprisingly well, splashing mightily with his silver wings—and then at length Dorie found herself in girlshape in one of her old dresses, in the faded old piano room, explaining herself to two dubious parents.

“Believe me, I’m thrilled about the ironskin business,” said Jane. “But why do you have to do it as a
boy
?”

“Well,” said Dorie. All her clever reasons seemed to have deserted her along with Tam. “I wasn’t getting anywhere as a girl. And now I am.” Poule had put some sort of cool gel on the hand with the damaged finger, and bound it up to keep the gel from getting on anything. She wondered what was in the medicine—feywort? It did seem to help. She rested that hand carefully on her lap.

Jane shook her head. “I understand, of course,” she said, in a voice that clearly meant she didn’t really understand, not at all. “I just wish you could fight the battle as who you
are
. Not disguise yourself. That just lets them keep thinking they’re winning.”

“But they
were
winning,” said Dorie. She was hot and tired and the road dust was making her eyes itch and water. No, she had washed her face, hadn’t she? It must be something in the air.

Her father came and held her close. “I think it’s very brave,” he said to Jane. “And very clever.” But her father always said those things. Dorie was not naïve enough to think it meant that only her father could possibly understand her, that she was special and unique. No, she understood all too well that he simply loved her too dearly to ever think ill of her. She could probably tell him the whole truth about Tam and have him not say one word of reproach.

Jane also loved her, but Jane had standards.

And if she didn’t live up to Jane’s standards, then she had to think seriously about who was right and who was wrong and what she truly believed.

It would be so much easier to believe she was always right. That’s what her father thought.

Dorie rubbed her eyes with the back of her good hand. “Did you know Aunt Helen and Uncle Rook left town?” she said. Her parents just looked at each other. “Why didn’t you go, too? Are things really that bad? You should have gone with them.”

“You can stay or you can run,” Jane said, but Edward put a hand on her knee, and her face softened.

“In war, everyone has to make the best choice for their family,” her father said. “Helen and Rook have two little girls. There isn’t much I wouldn’t have done for you.”

She felt like she would dissolve at that, but what she said was, “Do you think this is … war?”

“It’s a different kind of war,” her father said soberly. “This war isn’t fought hand to hand. This war isn’t equitable.”

“Does war have to be equitable?” said Dorie flippantly.

But her father answered her seriously. “People in the city are trapping the fey en masse. Led by that blacksmith—”

“Niklas,” Jane said quietly.

“I couldn’t stop your stepmother from investigating, once you tipped her off to what you’d been hearing.” Edward looked at Jane proudly, and Dorie’s heart clutched at the sight.

“You were right,” said Jane to Dorie. “He’s been working on a new machine the last five years.” Anger suffused her thin frame. “And I found out where the feywort is going, to boot. Denying it to those with crimson fever—using it for this! For this, Dorie! They’re
splitting
the fey just as the Fey Queen did when she was supplying us with bluepacks long ago. Clean energy for all—only this time it isn’t voluntary. It’s slavery. And it doesn’t have an end date, which bluepacks had back in the old days. Bluepacks lasted a few years until their servitude was up, and then the bits of fey wriggled free and went home to be whole again. But this? Splitting them forever? This is—”

“Genocide,” supplied Edward.

Jane nodded, her fingers unconsciously going up to touch the old red lines of her face. “I have always hated the fey. I never thought your father should have taken you into the woods. But this … I can’t condone this.”

“We’re practically alone in the fight,” Edward said. “Those of us who speak out are hauled in under Subversive Activities. And out here in the country the wounds are still too fresh, even twenty years later. We get turned away from shops. They see me as a sympathizer.” He spread his crippled hands. “But genocide?”

“It is strange to find myself on the other side of the fight,” admitted Jane. “And yet not so strange, for we have always loved you.”

“Morals aside,” said Dorie, “shouldn’t you run? If you’re in danger from the country, danger from the city? Wouldn’t it be safest to go abroad for a few months?”

Her parents looked at each other, then shook their heads.

“We’ve worried you,” said her father. “We want you to understand what’s going on, but don’t worry about us. We’re safe out here. We’re forgotten.”

Jane shook her head. “We’re not forgotten, not really. But I won’t run, either.”

Dorie could tell this was an old argument between the two of them. She thought how odd it was to have been on her own for so long that they could have an old argument she didn’t recognize. For a moment she looked at them with fresh eyes—the wrinkles beginning to weigh down her father’s face, the grey streaks and white lock in Jane’s hair. “Good night,” she said gently, and kissed the two of them, and headed up to her old room at the top of the stairs.

She meant to sleep just a few hours, then head back into the city. But her body betrayed her; she slept until almost dinner. There would be no trains from here this late on Sunday. She bowed to the inevitable and followed the real sleep with a real dinner: great heaps of potatoes and cheese and whole milk and half of a chicken Poule had insisted on killing for her. (Poule was also very pleased with Woglet’s mousing skills, and said he was welcome anytime.) Dorie had hoped a night’s sleep would make her parents more tractable on the subject of leaving the country, but it did not, and when she finally went up to her bedroom on Sunday night it was with a sense of foreboding.

Sleep was slow in coming. At last she got back out of bed and opened the window, looking out into the pitch-black forest that came up to the back of her house. It was quite cool, now that the heat wave had broken, and she breathed the air with relish. She was seized with the sudden whim to go outside. Martha, the maid, had washed her boy clothes, and Dorie put them on, thinking through where she would go. Perhaps she would go tramp through the forest as she had as a child; perhaps she should leave right now and hitch back into town. She stared into the night, pondering, remembering everything that had happened there, remembering everything she had messed up with Tam.

She stayed awake for so long she heard the men burst through the front door.

Dorie was alert in an instant, shoving her feet into her boots and tying them with her mind as she ran into the hallway. Yes. Silvermen, their glowing palms readily visible in the moonlight. She cast about, searching for something to throw at the intruders. Three shabby old curtains hung around the foyer below her; she ripped them off and tangled them around the men’s ankles. That slowed them down—for a second. Her parents came stumbling out behind her, slow humans running into the hall. “Go,” she shouted at them. “Run!”

But they didn’t. She knew they wouldn’t, and she was proud of them even as she was frustrated—what could they do? Her father was a painter with crippled hands—he didn’t even hunt.

The men were untangling themselves now, heading for the stairs, silver palms extended and glowing in the presence of Dorie. With a presence of mind that suggested she had thought through this scenario, Jane upended an entire bag of Dorie’s childhood marbles on the stairs, momentarily stunning the men again. In the chaos, Dorie mentally pulled an oil painting of her father’s off the wall and smashed one of them over the head. “Sorry,” she called to her father. “I liked that one.” She looked around for something else to throw, but all she saw was the old chandelier. It was well bolted to the ceiling with iron—she couldn’t budge that. But it had once run on fey power, and so the lower links were copper. Perhaps she could loosen those.…

“Martha is taking the auto and heading for town,” her father shouted in her ear under the clatter. “Run to the back and meet her.”

Dorie gripped his arms and said, “No, listen to me. You run. They can’t catch me.”

He shook his head ruefully and said, “I won’t leave Jane, she won’t leave me, and neither of us will leave this house. You see how it is.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” she said, uselessly. Surely sometimes discretion was the better part of valor—surely sometimes it
was
better to lie, and hide, and work within the system. He smiled at her, as if divining her thoughts, and Jane grinned savagely and threw an armful of books, one by one, at the attackers.

They were foiled by the age of the house—the foyer had long since stopped being perfectly level, and the marbles had all run through the missing curtain into the back hallway. The men were approaching cautiously, but they were on the stairs again. The one in front seized Jane—and then Woglet flew into his face, biting and scratching, until the man let go, trying to protect his eyes. Jane kneed the man in the distraction.

Dorie got back to working on that copper ring of the chandelier just as Poule came hurrying down to the foyer, rolling some enormous cylindrical contraption. The old part-
dwarvven
woman moved slowly these days, but she hobbled as fast as she could. The men ignored her, which was their mistake. Poule flicked a switch, and soap foam began to spray out of the nozzle. An invented carpet cleaner, perhaps, repurposed. With frothy accuracy it sprayed into eyes and mouths and noses.