Copperhead (22 page)

Frye waved this aside. “Sometimes I think I’m storing half the theatrical wardrobes in the city,” she said. “I’ll see if I have something. Now Jane, I’m going to tuck you in the attic with toast and broth and a dirty book and then Helen and I will go find your women. I still have my fey face, so that extra charisma should help. I can be quite charming when I try.”

Helen shook her head, slowly, resolutely. If this was going to work there was more to it than this. And sometimes, like fixing Alistair, maybe you just had to step in and start fixing situations, or at least sorting them out. “I can’t,” she said. “Frye, if you’ll let me direct you—?”

“That’s what actors are for.”

“I’ll give you Jane’s journal and explain everything I know about it. Then you’re in charge of getting all the women together. You and your charisma.” Helen looked at her sister dubiously. Jane was staring off into space, fingers delicately tracing the raised pink line on her jaw where the iron had been. “Hopefully Jane can help if anything in the journal needs interpreting.”

“And you?” said Frye.

“I’m going to the
dwarvven
slums,” Helen said. “And find out what a certain
dwarvven
spy knows about all this.”

Chapter 10

DWARFSLUM

Helen went straight to the statue of Queen Maud on the pier. She was sure now it wasn’t coincidence that Rook had mentioned it at Frye’s party. Not when Alistair mentioned Jane being spotted there, and then Jane turning up at the factory a half-block away. Besides, there was Alistair’s insistence that Rook was a spy. That he was working for Grimsby all along—and more than the nebulous
other business
Rook had admitted to. Helen cringed, thinking of her frank admissions to Rook.

Helen didn’t know if she could trust Rook—but him being a spy did not seem the sort of thing Alistair would lie about. Rook must be entangled with Copperhead somehow. He must know more than he was telling.

The area was rough. Even Frye, who had cheerfully gone down to the section of the waterfront where Jane’s nasty flat was, had warned Helen not to go to the
dwarvven
slums. “It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t know,” Frye said. “Stay here and feed Jane chicken broth. I’ll get those women for you.”

Helen wished she could have taken Frye up on her offer. Yet something drove her on, so now she was here, walking through the rough alleys in a dress of peacock blue, carrying a little letter-opener of Frye’s as though it would protect her from harm.

Dwarvven
or human, the men mostly looked tired, she thought. Hopefully she wouldn’t encounter trouble, especially since there was no slim black-clad man walking beside her tonight to save her from her own folly.

As if in response to that thought, a man sitting on a bench across the street looked over at her perfect face, caught her eye.

Look away,
she thought fiercely.
Look away
. She had loved the attention at first; she had loved suddenly having that power over every single person she saw. But now, when she was tired and miserable and afraid …
look away
.

Perhaps her fierce expression warned the man off, for he went back to staring at his grimy hands, picking at them as if to worry some splinter free.

But he wasn’t the only one.

She stared some men down, boldly, trusted in the power of her face and warded them away. It was not a skillful application of the power, as she had done with Alistair, changing his motives, changing his soul. It was merely the fey glamour she’d had for six months, with a little extra oomph behind it.
Let your gaze slide away.

But she could feel the gazes pressing in from all sides, and finally she couldn’t take the tension anymore. She picked one out, a man leaning against a crumbling brick building. He was perhaps the roughest-looking of all—bigger and wider than Alistair, who was a tall man. His gaze flicked across the street, idling time, just waiting for a mark to come into his vicinity.

Helen walked straight to him.

The man looked down at her, his face an interesting cross between leering and disbelief. “Well, look what dropped into my lap,” he said in a soft rumble.

Helen’s heart was a sledgehammer on her ribs. She had only tried something this complicated with Alistair, whom she knew intimately. What ridiculous thing was she doing now? Breathe. “I need protection from here to the
dwarvven
neighborhood,” she said. “I’m told it isn’t far. Here’s something for your trouble.” She took several coins from the inner pocket of her coat and dropped them into his palm. They disappeared inside his fist, but he made no further move.

The leer intensified. “And what makes you think—?”

Helen didn’t have time for this. “You will take me now,” she said, and put the full force of her will behind it. Her fingers closed around her copper hydra necklace, her talisman.

The man straightened up. “Yes’m,” he said. “This way.”

He strode stiffly down the block, as if his legs weren’t completely under his control. Which they weren’t, Helen reflected with satisfaction. Her knees shook with relief. She could get used to this. Fix anyone who threatened her or her friends. Fix Alistair to be the husband she had thought he would be. Perhaps after Jane restored Millicent to herself, Helen could even fix Grimsby, make him into a good husband for Millicent. Her power suffused her, overwhelmed her. Perhaps a great many of The Hundred could do with her help. Would she or Millicent have changed their faces without their husbands’ insistence? And now she could solve that for them. She could fix all those husbands, every last one.

The man stopped at what looked like an entrance to a junk shop. “Right here, ma’am,” he said.

“This is a store,” Helen said, suddenly worried that she had messed him up with her power.

The big man actually grinned. “It is that.” He pointed. “Through the back.”

Helen went inside the dim store with some trepidation. Maybe she just thought she had changed him but she hadn’t at all. Maybe there were men here ready to capture her and sell her off. Her mind created a million dramatic scenarios until she realized she was looking at a very small woman behind the dilapidated wooden counter.

“Er,” said Helen. “I’m trying to find an acquaintance. He’s
dwarvven
. Part.”

The woman shrugged. “So?” She crossed her arms and Helen saw the chain mail glint at her wrists.

The store had no lighting, electric or otherwise—the only illumination came from the greasy windows. The back of the shop was curtained off in a patchwork of repurposed fabrics. As Helen watched, a line of ten short men came out from behind the curtain, stomped gruffly past, and vanished out the front door.

She was sure they couldn’t have all been back there. The shop must indeed lead to where the
dwarvven
lived. But how …

Helen’s eyes widened. “The compound’s underground,” she said.

The woman shrugged again.

“I need to speak with someone,” persisted Helen. “How do I do that? Can’t I go back there and find him?”

“No.”

“Can I leave him a note?” Helen’s gaze swept the shop. She realized that it actually
was
a shop, not just items in the windows for pretend. In the dim light it appeared to be all secondhand stuff—a lot of metal implements. But fully one quarter of the store was piled high with used books of all shapes and sizes for the
dwarvven,
who notoriously loved to read. It was hard to be frightened of a pint-size woman who ran a bookstore, but Helen figured she’d better stay on guard nonetheless.

The woman finally came back with a full sentence. “What’s your friend’s name?”

“Rook,” said Helen, aware that it might not do her any favors. The
dwarvven
weren’t any kinder to mixed race than the humans were.

“I think you’d better leave,” said the woman.

“He wants to see me,” said Helen, and though it was not strictly true she thought it might as well be.

“I’ve no instructions on the matter,” said the woman, and her arms stayed folded. Knowing the stubbornness of the
dwarvven,
Helen thought she might stay there till doomsday. She almost turned, and then she remembered.

She could fix this woman. She could make her change.

It was for a good cause, wasn’t it? Helen bore down on the woman, saying with all her will, “You will let me in.”

But the woman only snorted. “Think fey tactics will work on me? Now you’re never getting in.”

Helen stopped, embarrassed at being caught. She did not even have the nerve to apologize. She turned to go—and then a young man came through the curtain. A man who suddenly seemed tall in comparison to the others. “Rook!” she said.

“It’s okay, Looth,” he said. “She’s with me.”

The woman watched Helen the whole way back past the booth and through the curtain.

Rook led her around piles of junk, boxes and furniture and more stacks of books, until they reached a door that appeared to lead to an ordinary cellar. He motioned her in front of him and said under his breath, “I’m sorry for the way they act.”

“You can’t blame them,” said Helen. She picked her way down the crumbling stone stairs. A few lights strung here and there lit patches of the tunnel with a faint yellow glow. They appeared to be getting into the remains of an old sewer system, long ago cut off from the new city plumbing. It was quite dank, but it did not smell any worse than mold. She put her wrist to her nose, breathing in the lavender scent of Frye’s dress, and below that, her own citrusy smell from Frye’s soap.

“Of course you can,” said Rook. They reached the bottom of the stairs and he took her hand and pulled her along by the light of his electric flashlight. They were walking along a stone embankment; below them rainwater washed slowly along the old stone tunnels, heading out to sea. Marking the tunnels were painted symbols in different colors—they must form a map of sorts, but Helen could not see any pattern to them. “If they’re justified in hating you simply for being human, then you’re justified in hating them for being not,” Rook said. “
Copperhead
is justified in their hatred. You can’t legitimize hatred.”

“Still,” she said. “I guess I didn’t expect a welcoming committee.”

“Closed to outsiders,” Rook said. He stopped and she looked up at him in the yellow flashlight glow. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t fit in with the
dwarvven
any better than I would in your world.” Helen looked at him wonderingly. “Not that they even accept me,” he said, and there was a touch of bitter to his voice. “Except I’m useful.”

“Rook,” she said, for this was why she had come. “What is your role in this? Someone told me you’re working for Grimsby as a spy. But you can’t possibly be … can you?”

Quietly he said, “I only do what’s necessary to get them to trust me.”

So Alistair had been telling the truth. “A double agent,” she said slowly. “You probably swear the same thing to Copperhead about your time here with the
dwarvven
.”

His face was in shadow; she could not read it. “I wish I weren’t working for either of them. But my history with the
dwarvven
is … complicated.”

“Tell me,” she said, remembering what he had said of his past two nights ago. “You know how I ended up on my path. Tell me how you went down yours.” There was silence for a long time, and finally the things he hadn’t said in the dark the other night came out now, in that cold quiet tunnel.

“It was almost six years ago,” said Rook. “I was seventeen and it was almost the end of the war. You know what it’s like when you’re seventeen.”

“Yes,” murmured Helen.

“I thought I knew everything. And … I was angry. I was tired of being laughed at for being
havlen
. At the same time, being
havlen
meant I could go among the humans, and pass.” He exhaled. “We were sick of the war dragging on, you know. The sensible ones hunkered down and figured it would be all over soon. But there are
dwarvven
who’ve hated humans for the last two hundred years, since Queen Maud’s son threw us all out. They’re not content to stay home and read books and invent things. They’ve had it in for humans. And after months and months of war … some of them started to believe they saw a way to make the humans pay. Chief among them was a girl named … Sorle.” Rook suddenly stopped and looked sideways at her. “You don’t really want to hear this, do you?”

“Tell me,” she said, for although she was not sure that she wanted to hear that his life revolved around this Sorle person, she wanted to know his story. What was he capable of? What was he involved in? Why did she feel in her bones she could trust him completely, even when he’d admitted that he was playing the
dwarvven
and the humans off each other? The answer to that last was that she was a fool, of course. She was here in the
dwarvven
compound to prove it. Helen took a breath and wrapped her coat tighter. “Tell me.”

Concern showed on his face. “You look tired,” he said. “You didn’t come here to hear this.”

“What’s that? It’s easier not to tell embarrassing stories about yourself? You’ve already told me how you made a fool of yourself over Frye; now tell me how you fell for Sorle. It’s the oldest story in the world, isn’t it? You did everything she asked to win her heart.”

Amusement flickered. “One usually does not tell the new lady about one’s past affairs.”

A delightful shudder danced along her bones, but she said lightly: “Not new, but old and married.” Affairs was right. He was the sort of man who had a million. He talked to every girl the way he did her—which was delightful, make no mistake, but not exactly something you could take to the bank. She let the conversation flow away from him having to admit terrible secrets and into things that were amusing to talk about. “So spill. How many past girls have there been? A dozen? A hundred? A whole harem, as in the stories of famous lovers? But come to that, I couldn’t possibly figure you for a famous lover, for we’ve already established that you have no idea of proper dancing nor etiquette.”