Silverblind (Ironskin) (31 page)

“I wouldn’t think that sort of thing could happen to you,” he said.

Did he mean, because she was half-fey? She wasn’t ready to press it. “Since then,” she said, “I seem to see other Dories.”

The notebook was out. “Go on.”

“I think the basilisk
is
from another world. And not just another world. Another timeline. One of those worlds that splinters off at the changes.”

“That’s the same story—”

“You collected in your book, I know. I know. I didn’t steal from that; I’m corroborating.”

“Multiple worlds,” he said with awe. “Another fey story proves to be true.” He looked again at her finger. “But why didn’t anything bad happen today?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It only happened last time when I went fey. And this time—” She held out her palm with the silver symbol.

“You couldn’t,” he finished.

“But I did feel something strange.” She stepped back inside the circle again. She looked out at the ring. There were the multiple Dories, a blur of Dories. But if she concentrated … She stepped up to the edge of the circle and tentatively put her left hand to it, the one with the wyvern goo embedded in it. The basilisk was somehow able to control this portal. Focus it, to use it as a stepping-stone between the worlds. Could the wyvern goo help her do the same? Thinking of the basilisk, she focused on that. Where had the creature come from? She envisioned it—its metallic coloring, its massive wingspan. Its four toes.

She could feel something then. Traces of the pathway. She sought out that vision and it was as though the rest of the worlds stopped turning, until she was looking at only one—the side of the mountain, just like her own. The sight was overlaid on her own mountain; they fit together in a blurry picture. But the basilisk’s mountain was crisscrossed with many tracks from basilisk tails. In the distances she saw more of the creatures, diving and swooping. No, this was definitely not her world. And then—blue. She almost jerked away, but she held still. The fey, masses and masses of them, drifting across the mountain path. More fey than she had ever seen at once here. Perhaps it was a world where the Great War had never happened.

Or where the fey had decisively won.

She pulled her hand away and looked at Tam. “If the basilisk could go through here, why not the fey?”

He pointed at the missing tip of her finger. “I think you already proved they can.”

She clenched her fist, thinking of the systematic destruction under way in the forest. The fey had once been a powerful enemy. But that was then and this was now. “It’s the only way to save them. They have to leave here—forever.”

Chapter 14

BELIEF

Perhaps the betrayal at fifteen is what led Tam down the path to betrayal himself. Or perhaps it was earlier, when a fey took over his father and betrayed him in that way. When that fey taught him how to lie.

—Thomas Lane Grimsby,
Silverblind: The Story of Adora Rochart

*   *   *

Talk was all very well, but how to get all the fey in the country to the circle? More important, how to do it before the basilisk returned home and the circle closed for good? Dorie and Tam trekked upward again to feel the eggs, and she guessed that the last one would hatch Thursday afternoon. On the way down the mountain she found a small cluster of fey that had not been seized by the men with their machine, and she warned them about it, and told them to tell other fey to collect near the basilisk. But she was not really sure how much of the conversation got through to them. It was very hard to converse with fey without being able to slip into her fey side herself; they drifted back and forth and she wasn’t sure they listened at all.

It was well after midnight when Tam dropped her off at her flat. Bone tired, she stumbled as she got out of the auto. “Hey, easy,” he said, and came around and helped her up. His glasses reflected the streetlight as he squeezed her bony boy-shoulders. “We’ll make it,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Get some sleep. What time do we have to start in on the ironskin tomorrow?”

“Six,” said Dorie.

“Well. Get a few hours’ sleep, anyway. I won’t have the car—I have to turn it in. We’ll be walking.”

She nodded and turned, wearily dragging her feet toward the stairs.

“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking. You might not have to keep that wyvern tattoo on, if you don’t want it.”

“Yeah?”

Tam held out his palm with the tattoo on it. “You might be able to abrade the tattoo off. Lose a few layers of skin, but…” He shrugged. “How far down does the poison go, you think? Bloodstream or surface level? It could work.”

She stared at him, smiling, and he gave a half-smile in response. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“I won’t.”

He got back in the auto and closed the door. “Dorie?” he said as she reached the stairs, and she turned, one more time.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Take care.”

The car was around the corner before she realized he’d called her Dorie.

*   *   *

Moira had been true to her word—not that Dorie had doubted her for an instant. When she went to retrieve the eggs the next morning, the secretary handed her a sealed envelope. Inside were the list of names and addresses for every ironskin left. Dorie thought how ironic it was that those left had led an ignored and dismissed existence for twenty years, but now that they could be fixed, this list was suddenly as dangerous as a copperhead hydra. They would have to work carefully and fast to get each person aligned with an egg in time.

There was no time for niceties. Dorie split the eggs and the list with Tam. She roped Stella and her apartment in to care for the baby wyverns—she hated to do it, but there was no one left to ask, and Stella was not the sort to get flustered.

She had split the list geographically with Tam—though most ironskin lived in the slums anyway—and they began crisscrossing the route, moving with caution. They were helped by the fact that at this point, nearly everyone knew they were coming. She rather thought their underground network had supplied them with more names than the government would know; still, they found three flats already ransacked and the ironskin gone.

They had thirteen eggs left, nine of which were hatching today. Ten ironskin. One was a little old lady whose curse was on her hand, and was fear. She lived alone and refused to wear iron, and also refused the treatment. “I’ve lived with it twenty years, and it’s my best defense against prowlers,” she said.

“But perhaps you have children you’d like to see,” said Dorie. “Grandchildren who are too afraid to come.”

The woman smiled and patted Dorie on the head and refused to answer. “You save your egg for some young pup who needs it,” she said.

The egg was in fact near to hatching, and Dorie ran all the way to her next stop, the wyvern chick cracking through in her hands as she burst through the door.

As careful as Dorie was, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. She felt lost without her fey ability to shake pursuit, to blend in. Still, she finished the last of her list without incident. Tam had finished his, and with a profound sense of relief they trudged up the stairs with their last two woglets to Stella’s flat to collect the rest.

Unlike Colin’s flat, Stella’s had not been ransacked. It was as neat and orderly as the
dwarvven
girl liked it: everything in miniature, everything properly pressed.

But the woglets were gone.

And Stella was gone.

Only one of Stella’s small chairs, overturned on the carpet, gave a clue that anything untoward might have happened.

This time Tam reached for Dorie, put his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get her back,” he said.

Dorie wanted to relax into his arm, but she pulled away. “I have to tell Jack,” she said. “I have to tell Jack.” That triggered the memory that it was Wednesday and that meant tonight was the revised gallery opening. “Come on,” she said.

*   *   *

The gallery was packed. People were spilling out of the building onto the front steps and down and for a moment Dorie thought the show had been shut down again. But no, the doors were wide open—it was just the crush of people moving in and out. Someone posted at the door was barring the way, keeping the hordes to a reasonable level, and clearly loving it. Scents of sandalwood, of cigarette smoke, of many many people, drifted around the throng. Dorie pushed her way through up to the door. She was planning to dampen down her visibility and sneak in, and she was all the way to the front before she remembered she was stuck as plain visible Dorian, and she couldn’t smooth things along.

The gallery attendant looked down at the slight man hoping to squeeze under her arm and her eyes widened. She drew back from Dorie—took a step back, even. Her face was a peculiar mixture of salacious excitement and fear. “Go right on in,” she said.

Dorie was puzzled but she seized the chance. She pressed her way in, Tam following behind.

There was a painting just in front of the entrance, the first one you were meant to see, and Dorie stepped carefully through the crowd, peering around shoulders and hats. Was it the fey piece again—people coming to see for themselves what had been alluded to in the newspaper?

But no, she did not see that sculpture’s blue light anywhere. The painting in front of her that held pride of place was a true painting, a real painting, and it was by Jack.

It was the painting of Stella, the one Dorie had seen Jack working on the last week. But it had changed. Jack
was
doing something new.

It was a new style. Jack had had barely any time to put her three new paintings for the exhibit together, and that was obvious to Dorie in the mere fact that it was of necessity a departure from Jack’s regular, labor-intensive work. But there was not a lack in the paintings themselves. It was a mix of Jack’s most gorgeous painterly qualities: the beautifully realized lines, the transparent colors. But they were sparsely used, and were combined with Jack’s other side, her cartooning, caricatured, grotesquely exaggerated sketches. The two combined to make not only a painting style infused with energy, but a treatment of subject that was entirely new to Jack’s work.

The tiny
dwarvven
girl was in the big armchair. But Jack had exaggerated Stella’s small size; she had exaggerated the armchair’s bulk. That offhand comment of Dorie’s was here, writ large. Around Stella you saw a world that was not meant to suit her—a world designed for anyone but her. Simple everyday items were placed in such a way that you saw how she had to adapt, all day long. The real Stella never complained. But to Dorie, it hit home for the first time how hard it must be for her friend. In life Stella had been simply asleep—here the sleeping posture showed her to be wrung out with exhaustion.

It captured—not just Stella, but her place in the world.

Without noticing it, Dorie had moved closer to the painting, fingers stretched out as if to touch her friend. Without noticing it, the space around her had cleared for her.

She turned now, and all around she saw faces shot through with expressions similar to the gallery attendant: shock, excitement, fear. The crowds parted from her on either side; a long hallway of empty space opened up and she walked down it, heart beating more and more wildly.

There was a painting at the end of her walk.

A tall, wide painting, the biggest one in the collection.

Snatches of conversation met her ears before the speakers saw her and stopped. “It’s this Jacqueline girl that’s the real deal.” “A start of a new movement.” “Will be imitated for years to come.” And then, “Do you think it’s really true?” followed by the sharp hiss, the drawn-out breath, “Loooook, it’s him … her…”

The painting was of Dorie. Of Dorian. Of something peculiar and abnormal and
fey
. It was both sides of her, fractured down the middle, pulling each other apart. Dorie on one side, with her blond ringlets and downcast eyes. Dorian on the other, with his bent nose and wry grin, Woglet perched on his shoulder. As the figures were pulled apart they were revealed to be hollow.

In between blue smoke rose up.

It was obvious that even if people wouldn’t have immediately recognized her face as the young man in the drawing, there was only one person in town with a pet wyvern, and she/he was here tonight.

Dorie backed away, Woglet yodeling and flapping his wings for balance at her abrupt motion. The sense of betrayal mingled with something else, something peculiar. Relief, it felt like. She refused to feel it. Betrayal, that’s what Jack had done.

There were silvermen moving through the crowds as she backed up. One more painting caught her eye—a painting of Jack, the size and shape of a mirror.

Jack had not spared herself.

It was an oval picture of Jack in paint-splattered cigarette pants and bangles, kissing a girl who was not Stella. Jack’s eyes were not on the girl; they were looking back out at the viewer. Daring them? Or just, steady. Frank. One hand held a paintbrush, and it was coming toward you, the hand and brush wild and all out of proportion, devolving into a brush-stroked sketch. It was sweeping the fourth wall away, coming for you, going for the next painting, the next truth.

And there was Jack herself in the crowd, and her eyes met Dorie’s as if to say, I’m sorry, and Dorie could not feel any anger toward her best friend, but still, the silvermen were coming, and Stella was in jail; her parents were in jail, Aunt Helen and Uncle Rook had fled—

They were on her then, and Dorie tried to run, but she could not wriggle free. She tried to fade, but she could not become unnoticed. She could not turn over some trash bins to slow them down, she could not blind them with blue light. She was well and truly caught, and she could never disappear again.

*   *   *

Dr. Pearce was the first to come visit her in jail. No, not jail, what was the Crown’s preferred term for their fancy new security building? To be fair, her room had a nice bed and a shiny desk and a terrible painting of flowers and looked more like a hotel room than a dungeon. They had not reached the building till late last night, and so she had had a good night’s sleep for a change. She should have been too worried to sleep, but it turned out she was too exhausted to worry. This morning, a man escorted her to the restroom and back, and now it was breakfast time in her nice not-jail. She could see blue skies and clear sunlight and the Queen’s Lab through the narrow window. But Woglet was missing, the door was locked, and there was some of that new one-way glass all along one wall. The blue tint of fey light was everywhere. Jail would do.