Silverblind (Ironskin) (7 page)

Tam poured a bit of water over the blisters, then took a clean cloth from a pouch at his waist and began to cover the burn to keep it protected. “It’s not your fault. I was testing out this story I ran across that wyverns could be tamed by whistling. Man swore up and down that his grandfather used to walk right up to full-grown wyverns by whistling the Danse in E Minor from the Midsomer Suite.” He laughed ruefully. “It probably was a bit risky. Anyway. Rather my arm than my face, and I have you to thank for that. In a moment I would have been steamed pudding.”

Oh no, it wasn’t that she had aged. It wasn’t anything like that.

She was shaped as Dorian.

Dorie plopped down on the forest floor next to Tam, took the cloth that he was vainly trying to knot with one hand. “Let me,” she said. Her heartbeat slowed as she realized she was safe for a moment, that she could learn about what he’d been doing without risking finding out that he still hated her. Above them the silver wyvern settled back into its nest, not steaming them, but still on guard. Dorie carefully wrapped the cloth around Tam’s forearm, her fey-enhanced senses picking up the scents of clean sweat and dirt. He had his sleeves rolled up and it was clear that, despite the spectacles and the absentminded professor air, he was rather more muscled than he had been at fifteen.

To distract herself from that she cast around for some small talk, and came up with: “Whistling?”

He answered her with a very creditable performance of a tricky bit from the well-known suite. The wyvern did, in fact, settle down, though it kept a watchful eye on them. Tam looked thoughtfully at it. “The thing is, there’s often something to these old wives’ tales,” he murmured, and he pulled a faded leather journal from his vest pocket and began scribbling. “If I hadn’t been rummaging around old attics in ancient crumbly houses, I wouldn’t have my current job.”

“Which is…?” said Dorie, but she knew the instant he said it.

“Field work. For the Queen’s Lab.”

Dorie barked laughter. So she
had
seen him yesterday—it wasn’t wishful thinking playing tricks on her. Tam looked sideways at her. “Nothing,” she said. “Only I applied there”—ah, best not to mention yesterday. “Awhile ago,” she finished. “After University.”

“It’s tough to get in,” Tam agreed. “They only wanted me for my book—thought I was too scatterbrained for the field. I had to produce two copperhead hydras and a winged squirrel before they believed I could do the field work, and they still think I’m going to bolt into the nearest attic at a moment’s notice.” He shrugged ruefully. “Which I might.” He looked up at the wyvern, which was watching them intently. “Still doesn’t help me with wyvern eggs. I don’t know how anyone does it without getting fried to a crisp.”

“They kill them,” Dorie said bluntly, going off what Malcolm had intimated.

His kind face darkened. “Barbaric, troglodyte, stupid, stupid fools,” he said, and he infused the epithet with enough venom to make it sound like a swear. “There’s not an infinite supply.”

Dorie shrugged. The topic made the blood boil in her veins, and she was unsurprised that it would do the same to Tam. She sat down, straightening out her boy’s field jacket. There was a strange little lump in her belly.

His eyes narrowed behind his specs. “That explains how Henderson suddenly started coming back with more eggs. I told him it wasn’t a contest.…” He suddenly pounded the ground with his good hand, his eyes growing wild. “I should never have taken this job. I need the freedom to pounce on whatever I find. And here they have me with a minder and metrics and—” His eyes unfocused as he stared off at something she couldn’t see. “The woods are strange lately. First I saw a flight of purple swallowtails, and they’re usually much farther north this time of summer. Then a clutch of yellow garter snakes I’d never seen before. That kind of pattern disruption is one of the signs, and yet—” He broke off. “Have you seen anything … big … recently?”

Dorie shook her head. “But I haven’t been here recently.” She ran her fingers over the lump in her belly, feeling it out.

He shook his head. “Old Pearcey is all ‘wyverns wyverns wyverns’, but I’ve half a mind to skive off wyvern-hunting for a day and whistle up the fey to ask them about it.”

Dorie started at that. “You would … talk to the fey?” she said. “Willingly?”

The wyvern was restless, and Tam whistled again before he answered, something slow and mournful from the suite. “Sometimes more willingly than others,” he said, staring up the mountain. “But I don’t blame the fey for that.”

Behind him, Dorie flushed again, and her fingers felt hot and numb. Any thought that she would reveal herself to him, that she would find he had forgiven her, was gone now.

He was obliquely referring to
her
.

To the summer seven years ago when she had traded him to the fey.

It did not matter that she had been fifteen, that she had not meant it all to go the way it happened. It did not matter how much she had tried to atone since then. What mattered is that unforgivable things were unforgivable.

Dorie listened to his melody until it ran out, and she thought of just turning and running. Seven years was not enough time to face up to this. But Tam turned before she could make any kind of decision, and in a normal voice he said, “At any rate, the lab would never know. After all, everyone
knows
it takes scads of time to track down eggs.”

The distraction shocked her from her fugue. That’s what the lump in her belly was. The egg. She had saved it after all. It had remained in her belly as she phased back into human form, as she tumbled from the tree.

Dorie ran her fingers over the lump, feeling it with great surprise. It made a hard little shape in there. A strange kind of pregnancy, for this girl who looked like a boy—and an ironic smile twisted on her face. What if she circumvented her whole dilemma with Malcolm Stilby, and gave Tam the egg? She was suddenly struck that perhaps she could use the egg to make amends. Tam could take it back to the lab, be the hero for a day.

But no. How would one egg, one day of praise, make up for what she had done to him? Her guilt was too big to atone, or at least, she had not figured out how to atone for it yet. There was something still to come.

Dorie let her skin go soft and blue under her shirt, pulled the egg free as if she was pulling it from a hidden pouch. “Pretty thing,” she said softly to it.

Tam’s face brightened. “You
did
get it! I’m impressed. Look, if it’s just money you want, they’ll pay you for it. We’re making great strides studying what can be done with the eggs when they hatch.”

Her spirits rose. Maybe this would be a good way out of her dilemma. “How much?” she said. Tam named a figure that was Malcolm’s old going rate—i.e., half what he was now paying—and she pondered that. Perhaps their landlady would take that in good faith … or if Tam left, she could phase into fey state, climb the tree and take a second egg, though she hated to do that to the wyvern pair.

“It’s a fair rate,” Tam added. “I’d make sure they didn’t try to talk you down.”

Dorie ran her fingers over the raised, glittery surface, thinking. She needed the money. She didn’t want to sell to Malcolm. But what if she could parlay this one egg into a better future? “It’s not money I want,” she said slowly.

Tam looked puzzled, then lit up. “Oh. You want a job at the Queen’s Lab.” He leaned in. “Look, Killingsworth just left. Well, not left…”

Dorie’s eyebrows rose.

“Tangled up with a giant
tortua
while overseas,” he admitted. “Came back with several bits missing. He’ll be learning how to walk for a year. It’s perfect timing.” He pointed at the silver egg. “Let me see how close it is to hatching. It looks like it’s started to darken a bit. A day, don’t you think?”

“Less,” said Dorie, relying on her fey intuition. She couldn’t have said how she knew, only that she could tell from the way it thrummed in her hand.

“You bring that in this afternoon and I can nearly guarantee you Killingsworth’s old job. At least for temporary—but you’d have a year to prove yourself and I don’t see why you couldn’t. I mean, heck, I didn’t even see you up in that tree when I arrived, that’s how good you were.”

Breath caught. The Queen’s Lab. Her, Dorie—
Dorian,
but small matter, she could proudly reveal herself to Dr. Pearce well
after
she had brought everyone around to her way of doing things. She briefly entertained a fantasy of leading a team of recruits into the northern mountains a year from now, on the trail of the mythical cave-dwelling ice monster.…

“Bother, social niceties,” Tam said. He rubbed his hands on his trousers and stuck out his hand. She took it, feeling rather odd about the whole thing. “Here I am trying to offer you a job and I haven’t even introduced myself. Thomas Grimsby. But everyone calls me Tam.”

“Dorian,” said Dorie. She had told Malcolm that her last name was Eliot—her stepmother’s maiden name—but she thought she might as well avoid mentioning that for now, as it was Tam’s mother’s name, too. She changed the subject by saying, “What are you finding that can be done with the eggs? I mean, I know they’re poison to fey.”

“Well, you know the silvermen, I suppose? The silver eye in their palm—that compound came from us. The albumen left in the wyvern egg is part of the secret compound.”

“That comes from you,” Dorie stated, that heartbreak rising again. No wonder the lab had suddenly become so wealthy in the past year. What a fool she was to think they would hire her to do anything that might help the fey.

“From the lab, yes. The silvermen use it to drive the fey out of others, but regular folks are using it to keep themselves from being taken over. Defense, not offense. The fey aren’t all evil—but the ones that are…” His face twisted with hatred, and her heart twisted in response. But it only made sense. Even without her mistakes, he had more reason to hate the fey than the average person—one had destroyed his father.

“They leave scars,” she said softly. She was thinking of Tam, but she was also thinking of the ironskin.

Tam nodded, his eyes lighting again. “Yeah, you know about the ironskin? Get this.” He adjusted his glasses and flipped open his journal to a page where he had pasted a photo—the modern black-and-white photos, not the blue-and-white of the old fey tech. It showed an expanse of skin—a belly, she thought—with an old, faded scar. “So the lab hired me for the wyvern research in my book, and stuck me in a lab where they were busy testing it on some captive fey.” He saw her repress a shudder and he said, “I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve since got them to stop it.”

She was warmed by the thought that he could have gone through everything he’d been through and still be more logical about the fey than the average man on the street. Something unclenched a bit.

“So the field work positions were still relatively new,” Tam continued. “They’d been relying on a few freelancers. And there was only one person capable of bringing them fey—a blacksmith. Old guy. Massive. I told him how the wyvern albumen was dissolving the fey he’d brought. And he asked if he could watch the next set of tests—I didn’t think much of it, except that he’s a fanatic, you know? I understand that. Us fanatics are how discoveries get made. So I snuck him in.

“And then get this—apparently this blacksmith was ironskin himself. I was standing there with the freshly hatched egg and suddenly he hiked up his shirt. There was a horrible red scar—nasty looking. I’d never seen an ironskin scar but I knew it was fey all right. They seem to bubble and writhe. I was kind of stunned and then he took the albumen from me and he flat-out rubbed it on his scar. It steamed and hissed and I’m sure he would have been screaming if he weren’t this crazy stoic blacksmith guy. But it cleaned out the fey.” Tam showed her the picture again, of the faded scar that looked a decade old. “I took this the same day.”

Dorie’s eyes were wide. “No.”

“Yes. Weird, huh? So you can see we’d be happy to pay you for the egg.”

“The scar is gone,” she said slowly. That the goo in the wyvern egg killed fey was disturbing, but this new implication was a sudden bright spot. If it could kill just the bit of fey remaining in a two-decades-old scar …

“Well, his skin was still technically scarred,” said Tam, putting away the journal. “But there wasn’t any fey left in it. He no longer had the curse to deal with.”

“What about the others?” she burst out suddenly.

“What others?”

“The other ironskin. Are you going to take care of them?”

Slowly he turned to look at her. “
Are
there any others left? I mean, I only knew of one other, and she was fixed a long time ago.” Her stepmother, Jane, he meant. Jane still had a bit of fey in her face, but it was no longer cursed, and it could not be removed without harming her.

Dorie nodded. “I know of at least one.” The server at The Wet Pig, with the curse on his leg, who was hungry every day. He could be helped after all.

His lips twisted sardonically. “More important, could they pay?” She saw again the boy she had known, the boy who was somehow sweet and cynical all at once. He was the one who had explained to her that a little girl who was visiting would shun her if she tried to impress her with any of her fey tricks—and when she had done them, and the girl had indeed called her names and run home, he had comforted her, and let her show him the fey tricks he had seen many times, until she finally fell asleep, tear streaked and exhausted.

“Oh,” Dorie said, crushed. Another reason she had hoped to join the Queen’s Lab, gone. She had wanted to find remedies for those who needed them. But what to do when the remedy was there … but not being given? She suddenly felt hopelessly naïve for not having realized that maybe research wouldn’t be enough. Cures shouldn’t be kept for those who could afford to pay. But how could she make those with control over the eggs see that? She cupped the precious egg in her shirt, keeping it warm. “Do you know—is any other part of the wyvern poisonous to fey? The outside of the egg?”

Tam shook his head. “We sacrificed some eggs to studies. The anti-fey substance in the white and yolk increases in concentration right up to the moment of the wyvern’s hatching. So you don’t get any benefits by disturbing its birth. What’s left inside the eggshell as the wyvern steps out of it is the purest stuff there is. And yes, the only anti-fey substance appears to be the leftover albumen.”