Ironskin (16 page)

Jane thought back. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “when the fire rages up against my mask I feel it. Like a hot orange flame. And then … and then I try to make it go away. Imagine the fire going out. Like it’s being dowsed with water or something. Or Helen used to stroke my arm and I would imagine it rubbing out the fire.” She looked up at Poule. “But I didn’t think it was really doing any good.”

Poule nodded thoughtfully. “You might continue trying it,” she said. Her calm assurance made Jane think she should take this woman seriously. Poule leaned back in her chair. “Now, tell me. What do you want for Dorie?”

“Ironskin,” said Jane, unconsciously touching her bare cheek.

“What you have wouldn’t work on hands.”

“I know,” Jane said. “I’m going to make some gloves that have the iron tar inside. I found some linen in the attic. Now I need the linseed oil to paint the linen and turn it into an oilcloth, so I can make a sandwich of the fabric that has the tar inside it.” She sighed. “Hopefully that will stop the tar from leaking out, because tar’s been getting on everything and I’m sure it’s frustrating Martha no end, though she only looks at us and shakes her head.”

Poule drummed her fingers on the table. In the swaying yellow light she had a funny self-satisfied look, like she was bursting to tell Jane something. “What about a fabric that has iron wires woven through it? A sort of mesh.”

“That might work,” Jane said slowly. “I had thought of chain mail, but it would be too bulky. But can you make wires thin enough?”

“We do back home,” said Poule. “We draw the wires thin enough to crochet. Some people use them to make jewelry—a different take on iron charms. Which—who knows if they work—bloody superstition if you ask me. Well. I’ve been experimenting with these iron threads to see what applications they might have against those blue brutes. The iron mesh cloth has potential.”

“It might work,” agreed Jane. “It might be even better than my idea—no tar to leak through. Do you have a sample of the cloth?”

By way of answer, Poule reached under her chair and pulled out a cotton bag. “A cloth
and
a bit of spare time on my hands,” she said. From the bag she pulled a small pair of long mesh gloves and slid them across the green glass tabletop to Jane.

“Oh, how perfect…,” breathed Jane. She touched the metal-threaded cloth. It was supple enough to move with fingers, like a second skin. Yet it seemed like the iron was woven closely enough to keep Dorie’s talents suppressed. The gloves fastened up the side with little iron clasps, so it would be possible to wriggle Dorie’s hands in.

Poule pulled the gloves away from Jane’s touch. Leaned back in her chair, flicking her grey hair behind her. “The question is: what do you want to pay for them?”

Jane fumbled. “I’m sure Mr. Rochart will pay you what you need, when I tell him.…”

Poule’s eyes were friendly but firm, the creases set in a way that recalled stone. “I don’t make the rules,” she said. “That’s the one thing about both the fey and the
dwarvven
”—and Jane clearly heard the foreign tongue as Poule pronounced the word in her own language—“there’s certain rules. And one is that everything has a price. Everything between your world and ours has to be fairly bought and paid for.” She flipped the screwdriver between nimble fingers like a worry stone. “And it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m
havlen,
a half-thing. Some things still apply.”

Jane said nothing, thinking through her history, attempting to come up with a suitable answer before she let her tongue say something foolish or insulting. The fey drove dreadful bargains, seeking your talent and life and anything that truly mattered to you that they could get; they sealed deals you didn’t know existed.

Whereas no such reputation existed for the dwarves, though they were sometimes said to be cold and miserly. “Wouldn’t give you a smile you hadn’t paid for,” was a common saying about the oft-surly folk. They traded their fine engineering and design for things of the surface: fruits and wheat and wool. Jane had none of these things.

The dwarf leaned back in her chair. Her dressing gown shifted just enough to show that whatever she always carried in her breast pocket had a hard rectangular outline, and like a flash Jane knew what it was.

The one surface culture dwarves shared with humans, that the dwarves were known to love with all their fierce, passionately intellectual hearts. Wasn’t that why so many of the court poets had been dwarves, until Queen Maud’s death put an end to the days of civil friendship?

Books.

The dwarves loved books. They read them in vast, devouring quantities, and they wrote them, too—in their electric-lit caves alongside their molten metal and their turning gears the
dwarvven
scribbled out great gothic tragedies, pouring out their hidden romantic souls into tales of forbidden love and secret temptation, blood-soaked mysteries and swashbuckling pirates.

A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses
was unlikely to be of interest. Poule had surely read
Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns
—Jane only hung onto it for the personal inscription on the flyleaf. But the third …

“I will lend you a book,” said Jane. “A glorious adventure novel.”

Poule’s eyebrows raised. Her hand went unconsciously to the book she was currently reading, tucked inside her dressing gown. “You think you have something I haven’t read?”

“Maybe,” said Jane. “I mean, it is a dwarf author.”

“Probably read it, then,” said Poule. “You’ll have to think of something else.”

“The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud.”

Poule dropped her screwdriver to the table with a clatter. “Not the one her son banned, and ordered all copies burned on sight?”

Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she’d rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book. She leaned across the table toward those bright, eager eyes. “On page twelve he carries off a girl who looks like the queen, but he doesn’t find out she’s actually the court alchemist’s daughter till they’re halfway across the ocean, with a fleet of navy ships in hot pursuit and a nest of sea dragons just off starboard, ready to ravage the ship for its gold and tear the pirate to bits.”

Poule gulped. “Done,” she said hoarsely.

After the bargain was sealed, Jane slowly retraced her path back to the foyer, went up the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor. She stared out the window into the night for another hour, drifting in and out of semisleep.

But no more lights appeared.

*   *   *

Jane was the one with the midnight adventure, but Dorie seemed just as tired as she the next morning.

But thinking back, Dorie had been slower and slower to get out of bed each morning since they’d started the tar. It was not the stubborn revolt of the first day, but a strange passive resistance, as if she had decided she’d rather sleep than do anything that Jane wanted. Listless—slumped. It was an unusual strike for a healthy child.

A very tired Jane knelt by the bed. She was heavy on her feet and her iron mask seemed to weigh her head down. “We’re not going to do the tar today,” she said.

Dorie slowly lifted her head. “No?” she said.

“No. We’re going to try these interesting gloves,” said Jane. “See how pretty they are?” Jane produced the mesh gloves that Poule had made. As a concession to Dorie, she’d gotten up early and stitched red and silver sequins on the backs of the hands.

Dorie looked blankly at the sequins.

“Your friend Poule made them for you,” said Jane, deftly wriggling Dorie’s passive fingers in and fastening the catches up the side of the arm. She hoped she could get them on before the tantrum, as the reverse seemed highly unlikely. “Now the other pretty glove,” said Jane, and in went the other hand before Dorie could discover that these gloves had the same effect as the tar. “Pretty, yes?”

The blank in her eyes faded, and Dorie stared at the gloves with the same intent look she used to wear when she was trying to make something move. Jane readied herself for a full-on tantrum.

But all that happened was that the intent look in the girl’s eyes slowly died.

Her gloved hands fell to her lap and she stared off into nothing, through the papered wall. Jane felt suddenly alone in that white-and-silver room. The air vibrated with emptiness around that little girl who sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, slumped like a forgotten porcelain doll.

*   *   *

The nightmares increased.

They grew more focused, more detailed, until Jane was seeing the same scene, night after night. A terrible, familiar scene, one she had tried to block out for five years.

She sees the blackened moor, bare rubble separating her town from the terrifying forest. She played in that forest once; they all did. Yet now she and her childhood friends take their places with jagged scraps of iron, watching the menace pour from the forest. This is how the Great War is fought, for soldiers are spread too thin when the enemy is not a human enemy, with one home base, with needs of food and water and horseshoes. This is an enemy that materializes out of every forest in the land, first here, then there, an inhuman pattern not easily deciphered.

Their misfortune, to live so close to the trees.

It is the dawn of early spring, and the moor is dense and roiling with fog. Daily there have been reports that the Great War is being won, that they are drawing ahead. This may well be propaganda, for they have not seen it. For almost four years some trick of circumstance kept them safe here in Harbrook, untouched by the ravaging, decimating war. But after the winter solstice something turned, and the enemy began appearing. Perhaps they were driven here, or perhaps it was next in their plan. They have been attacking night after night, gnawing the town’s defenses one by one. Harrying the town, taking one child here, one woman there. Till at last they have been seen, blue-orange lights gathered just inside the perimeter of the barren forest, and the ragged army of Jane’s friends takes their desperate stand against them.

Charlie steps in front of Mother and Helen, pushes them back with a pale, dirty hand. Helen is thirteen and useless when faced with this terror. She wrings her hands in her dirty apron and holds Mother tight. Mother is brave, brave enough to let Charlie go forth with the men, even though he is all of twelve.

I am not as brave as Mother, Jane thinks. Not brave enough to stay behind. She picks up her stave of iron and follows her baby brother onto the field where the yellow cowslips poke through the black turf.

“Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. “Jane!”

*   *   *

Jane thrashed herself awake. It was cold pale dawn, and Jane’s buoyant hopes for Dorie were fading to despair. The days were all the same now, and Jane went through the morning rituals by rote: locking Dorie into the gloves, helping the listless girl dress and eat and play with her toys.

It felt ridiculous to complain about no tantrums … but Dorie wasn’t doing anything at all. Jane had expected the girl’s stubbornness and energy to sustain her through learning this new skill, but now?

Jane watched Dorie color on a picture of a rabbit with blue chalk. The girl lay on her stomach, her cheek on her left arm as if she were too tired to lift her head. Her right arm scribbled randomly over the rabbit, but she was using her hand, so though Jane despaired, she did not say a word. Just sat and tried to quench the impotent rage inside her that wanted to jump on Dorie for the tiniest infraction.

She tried to turn her thoughts aside from her failure, but that just turned them back to Mr. Rochart, and the frustration of not seeing someone when you wanted to change what you said, wanted to rewrite the whole scene. No, that change of subject didn’t help one bit.

Jane breathed in and out on counts of three as she watched Dorie’s gloved hand creep back and forth across the page in short jerks. It was a good thing Jane had the mask on, or Dorie would feel her rage no matter how hard she tried to pack it down inside her where it belonged. What was it that Poule had said? Maybe the calming thoughts really did help? Jane breathed deeply, imagining water filling the mask, the rage steaming off and dissipating.

Dorie’s hand moved slower and slower and Jane reached out and gently touched her elbow. “Why don’t you sit up and try a new color?” she said. “Or a new page?”

Dorie’s fist opened and dropped the blue chalk. Jane placed a piece of yellow chalk on her mesh-gloved palm. Dorie did not look at the chalk, but just started scribbling on the page again.

“Do you want to color the ears yellow?” suggested Jane.

Dorie looked at the picture, moved her hand over the ears, and started her slow scribbles again. Her eyes closed as if they were too heavy to keep open.

Jane sighed, not understanding why Dorie wouldn’t at least want to do a good job. She liked pretty things—surely that would be a motivator for making the page pretty. Girls this age usually didn’t have to be enticed to attempt to stay in the lines, even if they didn’t always make it.

Of course, Dorie wasn’t like any other girls. Jane knew that.

But she watched Dorie’s limp curls and slow-moving gloved hand and wondered if they were making any progress at all.

*   *   *

“The old servants’ entrance got blown off with the north wing,” Cook said. “Like as not we’ll get the temporary staff wandering in at the front door today. You’ll be knowing where the side door is to show them if you see them? And the passageway to the kitchen? Little matter for today, but there’ll be none of this front door waltzing-in when the guests are here, I can tell you. Sure and I’m the closest thing Rochart has to a housekeeper, but I won’t see him humiliated for all of that.”

Jane sat huddled in the painted white chair in the kitchen, absorbing the unwanted news that there was going to be a house party in two days. “Extra staff,” she repeated.

“Yes, to whip this house into something not an embarrassment and to be serving the guests. We’ll be having to open up at least two bedrooms in the damaged wing and maybe three. As well as extra rooms belowstairs for those we’re hiring and the staff of the guests. Still, better pence coming in than pence going out, though why potential clients have to be romanced for a week and not just an eve, I’ll never know. Especially when that puts them here over May Day, and won’t they just be expecting a grand celebration, as if those city folk had anything to do with the ending of the war.…”