Silverblind (Ironskin) (26 page)

One of the silvermen realized that Poule was more dangerous than she looked. Shielding his face, he crossed the foyer and landed a blow to the gut that knocked the wind from her, toppled her to the floor, unmoving. “Poule!” shrieked Dorie. She redoubled her mental efforts with the copper ring, until she twisted the last bit away, and with a push in the right direction, managed to drop the chandelier squarely on the head of the man who had hit Poule. He crumpled to the floor with a satisfying crash.

It was good but it wasn’t good enough. The other men had seized Jane and Edward now. Edward went gracefully and with an air of hauteur; Jane kicked and bit for all she was worth. The last two men were now approaching Dorie with ropes; they obviously thought the little blond girl would be an easy catch. She smirked, planning what damage she was about to cause. But the man holding Edward seemed to be the one in charge, and he said, “You idiots; didn’t you see her drop the chandelier? She must be fey-ridden.” He tossed a pair of iron handcuffs to the man advancing on her. The eye on their palms glowed silver.

“Go,” shouted Jane, and her father smiled sadly at her.

Dorie backed up through the door to her room, Woglet returning to her side. The men grinned as they came close.

And then there was nothing for it but to leap through the open window and fall, fall, turning half-fey and rolling as she went.

*   *   *

She did not know where to go, and in her despair found herself fleeing into the cold forest behind her house, looking for fey to help her fade out to blue and help all her human worries vanish. But the fey were not there, and as if in a bad dream, she ran wild and half-fey through the woods, searching for her old companions. Woglet flew behind her, cooing in concern.

They were not in the fey ring, where she had once met her mother. They were not in the stand of silver birches that ran along the creek, where she had first gone with her father to meet her other kin. She ran until she reached the place she had never wanted to go back to at all: the old copse of pines where she had taken Tam that summer.

They were not there, either, and she sank to the ground, panting and exhausted. The ground was cold and dark and wet and there is nothing, nothing left of the fey.

She spreads her fingers in the needles and as if that fey loophole has taken her through time, she is back there, and it is sunny and golden where the light slants through the trees. She sees another Dorie, she sees another Tam, but this time she recognizes them all too well. Dorie has blond curls, Tam has a crisp clean explorer hat, and they are both fifteen.

Tam is excited, for he has tried to talk to the fey, but they laugh at those who
want
to find them. Today Dorie has promised an introduction. He turns to her, eyes shining, and takes her hands.

Dorie has butterflies in her stomach that twist and turn into giant basilisks. She has never been truly accepted by the fey. They say she is too human, that she cannot understand their games, their caprices, bright against the backdrop of the lazy drift of time. Impatient, fifteen-year-old Dorie perhaps cannot. But at the same time, she is not fully human, not accepted there, and she thinks again and again when she is teased: fine, I didn’t want to be an ordinary girl anyway.

She spent all last school year plotting her escape and now, here at the start of summer, she has come with a special request. She has asked the fey:
How can I be more like you? What can I trade you? I want to be all fey, as much as I can.

Older Dorie knows what they answered, but does not want to face it, not just yet. She looks at her younger self and wonders if seven years has made any difference in her understanding of time. Perhaps being here, right now, is the strongest suggestion that it has. Fey senses are different than human. They spread over centuries, and perhaps a slow dip into past memories is commonplace.

She would pull back from this memory, but it drags inexorably on, and sick fascination compels her to stay.

For what the fey answered was, <> <> <>

That Dorie, young Dorie, tells herself that she is only giving Tam what he wants. He has begged her to talk to them. He has his notebooks, he has his pencils. He wants to know the stories they tell. He wants to be with them, to drift with them, to
know
.

He does not know what he is asking, not really. He does not know what it is to be a human, taken by them. To go into the forest, where they will entwine him with blue and time will pass more slowly than it does outside, one day for every three. Where the blue fey will start to solidify, in contact with him, and they will amuse themselves with games with him, entertain themselves with his gifts. Where everything around him will be strange and full of illusion.

And she does not really know what she is giving him. She does not really know if it is for him or for her that she holds his hands in response and leads him backward, a step at a time, deeper into the circle of pines.

He stops her before they are quite in the middle, and she thinks perhaps that is the sign to turn back. She can sense the fey hovering, so very near, and she thinks that is why he stopped. That he, like she, has regrets.

Instead he cups her cheek and kisses her, and she dissolves and breaks apart as if she is all fey, turning blue.

But no, when she pulls back she finds she is all too human, looking into those dear brown eyes.

That’s when the fey she has summoned finally come.

That’s when they hand her the blue cup that looks like water, and she looks at him and gives it to him, and he drinks down the fey substance that will let the fey take him and keep him.

He thinks this is just an afternoon of talking.

She never has to see the betrayal on his face when he finds out it’s for a year.

This Dorie pulls back from the past, into the night, and she is crumpled on the ground, broken. There is one fey above her now, two, three. No more, but that is something, and they take her gently and help her fade into nothing.

<> <> they say, and Dorie, lost in her own past, at first does not understand. They are flying quickly now, racing toward the mountain, and they transmit horrible sensations that ratchet her bones, a stretching, pulling feeling like pain.

Then it all stops, and she goes tumbling into the ravine where she and Tam fought only yesterday morning, Woglet tumbling down next to her.

It stops.

Dorie sat up, looking around. The fey that brought her here had vanished. She climbed up the ravine on the wyvern side, looking for the blue. There was an awful smell of petrol and she felt as though she were climbing through memories again, but this time not her own. They were impressions of ripping, of burning, limb from limb. And another smell, a stench far worse than fuel. Her eyes were stinging by the time she got to the top.

The silver cliffs of the wyverns had been desecrated.

Adult bodies were strewn everywhere—mangled and torn in the vicious fight to protect their eggs. She ran to the nests to see—empty. Systematically emptied one by one, and the remnants casually strewn down the cliff. Only the eggs had been considered of value, although here and there she saw wyverns shorn of their head or wings—grisly trophies taken back. Not even the babies she and Tam had brought back had been spared. She recognized Buster’s bent tail and knelt beside him, petting the cooling body.

Night turned into predawn as she cradled the baby woglet. The first blues streaked the sky above. Woglet lifted his head to the sky and yodeled. It was a new sound she had never heard before, a hollow cry as the black became dawn.

Chapter 12

SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES

Nov. 3rd: Sometimes the subject switches from the stories about the extinction of the fey to stories about the extinction of wyverns. Or feywort, or goldmoths, or copperhead hydras. I need hardly mention that none of these have existed since much after the Great War.

Sometimes the subject finds a happier note. This morning she spun a long tale of lonely ice monsters who come down from the mountains at night to dance with pretty girls, and where their dance takes them, they leave footsteps of bluebells and snowdrops.

It is hard to say which of these visions is more fantastical.

—Dr. Tamlane Grimmsby,
What Alice Saw

*   *   *

Dorie managed to hitch on the Monday morning milk train—after changing back into boyshape—and it was still early when she reached the city, eyes burnt and hollow. She had thought it through on the train, and the only way to get the rest of those eggs finished was to warn Colin to prepare. Presuming Tam didn’t hate her so much that he would refuse to give her the ones they had collected. She rubbed her eyes. She should tell Tam about the basilisk. She owed him that much.

If he believed her.

The misty morning air swirled around her as she banged on Colin’s door.

“Dorian,” he said with surprise, blinking sleep away. “Do you have something about to hatch?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Can I come in?”

He ushered her into the small place and she sat wearily down at the table. Her shirt, which had been briefly clean, was now streaked with dirt and wyvern blood. It rustled as she sat, and she remembered that in the midst of that awful descent, she had stumbled on some feywort and tucked it in her button-down for safekeeping. She pulled the blue flowers out now and gave them to him, and he put them in a jar of water.

Woglet curled in Dorie’s elbow, head drooping against her shoulder. “We have all the rest of the eggs,” Dorie said quietly. Colin sucked in breath. “But five of them are hatching tonight, and we won’t be able to make it around to everyone’s in time. Can I trust you to gather the next group of ironskin together?”

“’Course,” he said.

“But listen, I want you to know what you’re in for. You know how dangerous this is getting? They found the doctor’s the other day. The goons raided us. We got away, but…”

Colin nodded soberly. “I’ll be careful.”

“I don’t know,” Dorie said. “Have they noticed at your work? Maybe you should put your brace back on till this is all over.”

Colin shook his head. “A good idea, but when I woke up the morning after you fixed me and I weren’t hungry, I sold the iron for scrap. And good riddance.” He stood and paced. “If the last few days have taught me anything, it’s that you have to stand and fight. Hope comes along when you least expect it. You have to fight for your cause.”

“I understand,” she said. She stood and shook his hand. “I’ll see you an hour after midnight.”

*   *   *

After that, she went straight to the central police station to try to find out where they had taken her parents. She plunked Woglet in the shrubbery across the street so he could find some breakfast and hoped he had the sense to stay in the shade. She dusted her hands, preparing to cross the street with her nice, easy, boy stride, head held as high as if she couldn’t possibly be the least subversive—and then she saw
herself
.

It couldn’t be her, of course.

She peered through the morning traffic, the passersby, trying to catch a glimpse of the girl descending the station steps. It really did look like her—Dorie, not Dorian, no less—in a blue dress and corkscrew curls, looking satisfied.

Dorie ran across the street, insouciance forgotten. Who was that? It wasn’t
her,
obviously. She was currently Dorian and that—That Dorie was nothing, nothing—some trick of the light that made some passerby look like her. She wheeled, searching—but That Dorie was gone, disappeared into the crowd.

Had going into that strange circle in the forest left her with aftereffects? Had hurting her finger hurt her mentally, that now she was seeing things? This Dorie shook her head, trying to clear it. She had been awake too long, was all.

The bored clerk inside the station looked down at her and said that he couldn’t give that information out to just anyone, and what was the young man’s relationship to the people about whom he was inquiring?

“I’m their—” But she stopped short. “I’m their nephew?”

He peered dubiously over his spectacles. “Well, ‘nephew,’ the best I can tell you is that those detained for questioning under Subversive Activities are not being charged with a crime. They are merely being housed in a comfortable space to answer a few questions. The Rocharts will be released within forty-eight hours—provided, of course, that they are
not
charged with activities against the Crown.” He shut his book with a snap. “And with that you will have to be content.”

And with that she would have to be. Unless, of course, she whisked that book away from him to see if it had any further information. Or dumped his tea down his jacket, just because. Or even went outside and came back as Dorie to see if, in this case, being a girl would get her further than being a boy. She suddenly looked hard at the clerk. “Did a girl with blond curls just come in here?”

“No.”

A trick of the light. She eyed that book, but it was under his hands and chained down besides.

“Forty-eight hours?” she said.

He looked sternly at her and repeated his admonition. “Provided they are not charged with activities against the Crown.”

*   *   *

The lab was quiet when she walked in. Two hours late. Heads turned to track her dusty progress and she thought, what? Perhaps I should have taken a shower. If the landlady hasn’t kicked us out completely. She looked down at her boy’s clothes and saw besides the dirt and blood on the shirt, there was smeared blood on her right pantleg. She wondered what the clerk at the police station had thought about that.

But no, it was more than that. Whispers followed her down the hall as she passed open doors. Her night had been horrible, but surely no one knew about it. Her hand sneaked up to feel her rough chin, her cheeks—wasn’t she still Dorian?

It was Annika, of all people, who pulled Dorie into her closet of an office and made her sit. “Where have you been?” she whispered.