Silverblind (Ironskin) (3 page)

Dorie barely glanced at the paper. Her tongue could not find any more pretty words; she could stare at him mutely or say the ones that beat against her lips. “
As it happens,
I have personal information on what your male field scientists get paid, and it is
more
than that number.” It was a lie—but one she was certain was true.

Shock crossed his face—either that she would dare to question him, or that she would dare talk about money, she didn’t know which.

Dorie stood, the violent movement knocking her chair backward. Her fey-infused hands were out and moving, helping the words, the wrong words, come pouring out of her mouth. “
As it happens,
I do not care to have my time wasted in this fashion. Look, if you did give me the field job and it didn’t work out, you could always fire me. And what would you have wasted? A couple weeks.”

Dr. Pearce stood, too, retrieving her chair. “And our reputation, for risking the safety of the fairer sex in such dangerous operations. No, I could not think of such a thing. You would need a guard with you wherever you went, and that would double the cost. Besides, I couldn’t possibly ask one of our male scientists to be with you in the field, unchaperoned.…” His eyebrows rose significantly. “The Queen’s Lab is above such scandal.”

“Is that your final word on the subject?” Her long fingers made delicate turning motions; behind him the copper bolt on the glass cage wiggled free. The silver wyvern put one foot toward the door, then another.

“It is, sweetheart.”

The triangular head poked through the opening as the glass door swung wide. Step by step …

“Thank you for your time then,” Dorie said crisply. “Oh, and you might want to look into the safety equipment on your cages.” She pointed behind him.

The expression on his face as he turned was priceless. Paternal condescension melted into shock as a yodeling teenage wyvern launched itself at his head. Dorie was not worried for his safety—the worst that could happen was a complete loss of dignity, and that was happening now.

“I’ll see myself out, shall I?” said Dorie. She strolled to the office door and through, leaving it wide open for all to see Dr. Pearce squealing and batting at his hair as he ran around the wide, beautiful office.

Chapter 2

A CUNNING PLAN

Unless there is a strong leader to shape and mold them, the fey are not by nature violent. But they
are
very fond of pranks, especially when irritated. They don’t seem to be able to help themselves—or more likely, don’t want to. Many of the stories I gathered—from the humans, at least—are based around some particular fey who tipped over someone’s butter churn once.

—Thomas Grimsby,
Collected Fey Tales
(foreword)

*   *   *

“He was just so … argh,” said Dorie. “Argh!” She had spent the last coin in her purse on an ale at The Wet Pig and was making it last as long as possible while she drowned out the horrible Monday. “All those years at the University. All that time spent preparing for real interview questions. All those
actual
plans of what I want to
do
with the kind of work they’re doing, and I didn’t even get to
tell
anyone about my ideas to help people. I even told him about the work Jane and I did on spotted hallucinations last summer, and does he care? No! Argh!”

“Tell me again how you sicced the wyvern on him,” said Jack, and she gestured with a bit of charcoal pencil. With her other hand, she smeared a chunk of fried fish through the vinegar on her plate and popped it into her mouth, licking her fingers. “In loving detail, please.”

“So I could see that the bolt was copper, so I knew I could finesse it,” said Dorie. She looked longingly at Jack’s last piece of fish, but pride forbade her from begging her roommate for food. The mustard greens she had scavenged in the park would hold her until she could stop by those wild blackberry bushes by the pond on the way home from the bar. She went through the story one more time for her best friend, stopping to thoroughly capture the expression on the lab director’s face. Dorie snickered, then stopped, a little worried. “Is it terribly cold-hearted of me to say that that was the best part of the day?”

“No, any human would say the same,” Jack assured her.

Jack was the only friend Dorie had entrusted with her deepest secret—that she was half-fey. There were only a few people in the whole world who knew. But Jack had been an old family friend since Dorie was little, and back then Dorie wasn’t always as good at keeping her secret as she was now.

Jack—Jacqueline—was the foster daughter of Alberta, a friend of Dorie’s aunt Helen. Jack’s parents had died abroad, and Jack had gone to live with her aunt Alberta, who had raised her as her own. Jack was attractive, with dark skin and curly dark hair that she kept cropped about an inch from her head, and she mostly got along with her aunt except that her aunt wanted her to be practical. Alberta had been a musician long ago, but had given it up when she took in Jack, in order to settle down and have a stable life. She had transferred into the business side of things, and worked fiendishly hard, worked her way up until now she owned one of the very nightclubs she used to perform in. It had a sterling reputation for booking the very best established musicians—it was not a place you went to hear what was new, but a place you would happily take the new girl you were wooing, or your fiancée’s parents, and everything would be beautiful and perfect and unobjectionable. This was the business Alberta wanted Jack to take over.

Jack wanted to be an artist.

“Anyway, surely it wasn’t the
only
good part of the day,” Jack was saying. “Tea on the lap? Spiders down the collar?” She held up the sketch she had been making. It showed a cartoon of a curly-haired girl knocking a baboon across the room with her uppercut. “Of course, that’s what you should have done.” Dorie chuckled as Jack raised her pencil to the bartender. “Another round, please.”

“No, wait. I’m flat,” interjected Dorie. “Completely stinking goners. And the rent is five days past, and I still owe you my half from last time—”

Jack waved aside these objections. “We’re too far in, Dorie. If I don’t sell a good-sized piece at my show tomorrow—or you come up with some way to make the whole rent—it’s curtains for us and I have to go back to my aunt, who’ll say I told you so and then make me learn how to do sums so I can figure out how to get the best price on bulk orders of tuna fish.” She pulled a note from her canvas bag and slapped it on the table. “I have a tenner to my name and that’s only because I caved this morning and drew a dirty picture for that laddie pamphlet that keeps pestering me. It’s blood money that can never be used for the rent and only be used for buying drinks and fried fish.”

“Well, all right,” said Dorie with resignation. “If we’re up a creek without a paddle we might as well enjoy it.” The two of them had been scrimping for years. Jack had won a scholarship to her art school, and Dorie’s aunt Helen had paid for her tuition, as her own parents had no money. But that still meant plenty of odd jobs for both of them to pay for room and board. And now here they were, a month post-school, and everything had finally run out, right down to emptying the old vase they had been throwing pennies in to save against a rainy day. Dorie sighed, for Jack
was
talented, if she could just get her foot in the door. And as for her, researching things that could potentially save thousands of lives was plenty practical—if someone would just
let her do it
.

Dorie pointed to Jack’s cartoon. “I want that for my bedroom wall.” She downed the last of her drink and grinned. “You know, if I
had
done that, it would never have come back to haunt me. If there’s a perk to being a girl that might be it. That boy would never,
never
tell.”

“An unexplained rash of men walking into doorknobs sweeps the campus,” said Jack dramatically, gesturing with her pad as though she were reading a newspaper headline.

“And I did get to see a wyvern hatch,” said Dorie. “That was also pretty good. Except…”

“What?”

“Well, it’s interesting,” said Dorie. “The Queen’s Lab is clearly using the eggshell for something. Or, rather, the goo left inside the eggshell, right as it hatches. But what? This isn’t something I’ve ever heard of—at least not from the herbalists in the village.”

“What about from the fey?” said Jack, who knew that Dorie had spent some time as a child going quite wild in the forest, studying the fey and just being with them. She did not know all the details, though.

“Fey don’t like the wyverns much,” Dorie said. “I don’t remember them talking about them beyond that.” She pondered. “Makes me want to go into the forest and get an egg, so I can experiment. Except I hate the idea of taking the chicks away from their parents.”

“Ugh,” said Jack. “If you want to mess around with wyverns. Aren’t they, like, the baby great-great-grandchildren of basilisks?”

“If they ever existed,” said Dorie.

Jack’s fingers flashed over the pad again. Dorie zoned out and thought about how she would catch a wyvern, until Jack held up the pad to show another cartoon of Dorie staring lovingly into an enormous basilisk’s eyes, each of them with bugged-out eyes hypnotizing the other. Little hearts floated above their heads.

“You goon,” Dorie said with love.

The waiter brought over their drinks—ale for Dorie and some gin thing for Jack. He was rather stout, and had a funny walk—one leg was held completely straight. It didn’t cause him to spill the drinks, though—he was obviously used to it and swung his leg along with a practiced gait.

Jack busied herself with her sketchpad, looking tactfully away from the boy and his stiff leg, but Dorie stared openly. “What’s wrong with your leg?” she said.

The waiter looked up, perhaps surprised that someone was speaking directly to him, and not about him or past him. He appeared to be early twenties like them, with a wide, friendly face, and a thatch of ginger hair. “Just a brace, miss,” he said. He scooped up Jack’s empty fish plate. “Can I bring you something else?”

“An
iron
brace,” countered Dorie, for she had seen it where it rested in his boot top.

“Dorie,” hissed Jack, meaning,
this is not appropriate human behavior.

Dorie flushed. She had only added a little bit of her fey side back into the mix this morning. Was that enough to undo seven years of trying to be human? “My stepmother wore iron for a long time,” she said softly to the boy. “Usually when people wear iron there’s a reason.”

The waiter looked surprised to be having this discussion, but not angry. Perhaps a little sad. He lowered his voice, glancing from side to side. “If you know what iron’s for, miss, you know they don’t like me talking about it. If I want to keep my job, that is.” He raised his voice to normal pitch. “Would there be anything else then?”

Dorie put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to help.”

He smiled ruefully. “After twenty-odd years living with it? You’d deserve a medal, you would.”

“Just tell me,” said Dorie. “What’s yours?”
What’s your curse,
she meant.

“Hunger,” he said simply, and limped away.

Jack raised eyebrows at Dorie. “What the heck was that?”

“He’s ironskin,” Dorie said quietly. It was the old name for those who had been wounded in the Great War two decades ago. Hit by fey shrapnel that contained a bit of fey—which left behind scarring and a curse on the victim that could only be contained by iron. Her stepmother, Jane, had been scarred on her cheek and cursed with rage. Rage that infected others if she didn’t cover it with iron—rage that infected Jane if she did. The poor boy must be hungry all the time. And two decades of it! There were not many ironskin left that she knew of. But the ones left had lived with their curses a long, long time.

Jack shuddered. “Could you fix him the way you fixed your mom?” she said in a low voice.

Dorie shook her head. “I wish. My father and I did that together and he doesn’t have the ability anymore.” Besides, her mother
still
had fey in her face, so that had hardly been a perfect solution. Dorie rubbed her fey-tinged fingers, wishing she could wash away the guilt she felt at the sight of the boy. Every day she found something new about the fey-human rift to feel guilty about. If the fey hadn’t driven humans away from the forests, the old cures wouldn’t have been forgotten. If the humans weren’t polluting the rivers, the fey habitat would still be pristine. And now add the ironskin to her list of things to fix. She sighed. “Where were we?”

They were interrupted by an extremely tiny, extremely curvaceous blonde with a ponytail lugging over a stool from the wall, climbing up it, and plunking herself down next to Jack. The movement made Jack’s gin teeter precariously near the edge of the heavy wooden table, and Dorie imperceptibly scooted it back with a mental nudge.

“Stella!” said Jack, squeezing the girl’s shoulders. “You made it.”

“Soooo many bed sheets to wash,” groaned the girl. “I swear it’s doubled in the last month. And during this heat wave, too! My hands are like sausages. Wrinkled red sausages. May I?” She swooped down on Jack’s gin and took a hefty swallow. She took her ponytail down and fluffed her hair till her heavy bangs fell in a curtain over one eye, causing her to go from laundry girl to glamour girl in a blink. “Much better,” Stella said, and yawned. “The hospital laundry will be the death of me.”

“The hospital laundry plus calculus tutoring plus your maths degree will be the death of you,” said Jack.

“Plus modeling for you,” said Stella. She had a thin cardigan draped loosely on her shoulders for modesty in the streets—now she shrugged it off to reveal a white sleeveless button-down and coral choker. “Even though you don’t pay me.” She pulled out a lipstick that matched her choker and slicked it on.

“Yes, but I let you sleep on the job,” said Jack. “I bet those teenagers you tutor can’t say the same.”