Silverblind (Ironskin) (11 page)

There was a moment of silence when Dorie did not know what to say. She supposed a boy might clap him gruffly on the back and hand him more brandy. A girl might pat his shoulder and let him cry. She, who had tended so carefully to the scars up and down his leg, did not feel comfortable doing either of those things.

He wheeled on her and said in a low voice, “I want to help. Tell me more about those you’re helping.”

“Oh,” said Dorie. “Well. You.”

Colin shook his head. “Am I really the first you’ve done? I thought maybe—but then you seemed so confident. Are you … you’re sure it really is done then? It won’t come back?”

“It can’t,” she said. “I can tell all the fey is gone. You can, too, can’t you?”

He nodded. And then said again, “I want to help. You’re going to do them all, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Dorie said, because she felt in her bones that this had been her inevitable path from the moment she stole the first egg. Or perhaps from the moment she let the rest of her fey self back into her body. Her fey side could get the eggs that would help the ironskin. Her human side
wanted to
. She, who had been neither fish nor fowl, was suddenly the perfect person to solve this problem. “I will need to find the rest of the ironskin,” she said. “And each one will be time sensitive. I have to wait and find a new egg, nearly ready to hatch, for each person. One egg—one scar.”

He paced. “Could I help find eggs?”

Dorie made a face. “Not easily. They’re hard to find and dangerous to get. And they’re in the country.” If this was going to work, she was going to work alone. Can’t go blue with humans around.

“Dorian,” he said, and he sat his hefty frame on the chair next to hers. “I want to
do
something. Surely you understand. You helped me. I need to help someone now. Have to make it fair.”

She nodded, for she felt a similar force driving her every day.

He spread his arms. “I look around and see so many problems. These are the folks I’ve grown up with. Not saying any of us think we have the right to live like the Queen. But you read things in the papers about how the world is changing. Then I look around and see someone like my landlady’s daughter dying of crimson fever.”

Dorie shook her head. “There’s a cure for that. No one’s died of that for ten years.” She saw his look and quickly corrected herself. “I mean, no one needs to die of that anymore. It’s a tincture of feywort.”

“Which you can get if you have the money for it,” Colin said.

Anger rose through the bewilderment. This wasn’t like the lost cure for spotted hallucinations last summer. Feywort was known and proven. “No one should have to pay for that. You can gather it in practically any forest where the fey have been.”

“And how often have you seen it here in the city?” Colin shook his head. “You’ve a different outlook, growing up in the country. You live with all the old dangers—but you can get all the old cures.”

“The fey lived right behind my house,” Dorie said absently, and he grimaced. She pounded one fist into the other. “You’re right. Let me think this over. There must be something we can do.” She had been thinking too small today. Out to save the ironskin—atoning for her heritage. But there were more than the ironskin who needed her help. It wasn’t enough to set the score even—well, as even as twenty years of living with the injustice could ever be. She needed to tip the balance toward what was good and fair. This had been what she wanted to tell them yesterday when she had applied at the Queen’s Lab. And now she had that chance again. Get inside and find out what their secrets were. Where was the feywort going, if it wasn’t available for the poor? Maybe they knew. What else had they discovered in the forests that they were keeping to themselves? What were they hiding? She had been too proud this afternoon. She should find another egg, go to them as Dorian. Get in the back door so she could use their work for good. Certainly no one else would stand up for the fey. It
had
to be her.

She looked up at Colin, who was offering himself a piece of bread, and then taking it away from his mouth, over and over, with a bemused expression.

Well. Perhaps she had done some good today. “I would need to
find
the rest of the ironskin,” she said. “I only stumbled on you by chance. Do you know of any more?”

He nodded. “You meet over the years. You know each other. You lose some. But it’s not exactly a group that’s growing, is it? Bet there’s maybe twenty left in the city.”

Twenty eggs to find. Were there even that many wyvern pairs on Black Rock? She had never seen that many at once.

“Currently know the whereabouts of eleven or twelve of the ironskin,” he said. “But between us we can find everyone else. You keep tabs, you know. Those of us that are left.” He put the piece of bread down and leaned forward. “Let me bring them to you,” he said with quiet intensity. “I have one in particular that needs to be done straight off. The curse hit all along her spine. It’s a tough one. She can’t hold out much longer.”

Dorie laced her fingers together. “I will warn you. Wyvern eggs are considered the property of the Crown now. Every one I bring you is illegal.”

“I vouch for her that won’t matter.” He gripped the back of the chair. “Shoulda had you go to her first. Was too selfish … Please. As soon as you can. Promise?”

“I promise,” Dorie said. What else could she do? “But look, it’s not just her. With eggs being black market now, every one of your friends will run the risk.”

“And you?”

“I would rather rot in jail than see those rich bastards make off with all our eggs,” she said. Her intensity surprised both of them, and he looked at her for a long time, thinking impenetrable thoughts.

After a moment, he looked around and tried to smile with his usual manner. In a completely different voice said, “Did you know there’s a pigeon in my house?”

A choke of laughter burst forth. “Damn, I forgot,” said Dorie. She picked up the cloth bag and went toward where the pigeon perched on the windowsill, wondering if she could convincingly capture it without going blue.

And then a silver flash of wings streaked past.

The pigeon startled—the little woglet wobbled. They both fell to the floor in a tangle of wings. Dorie stalked over, saying, “Look, you’re not hungry, silly thing. You have a whole rat you can work on. Let the pigeon go.” But even as she arrived on the scene, the pigeon was dying, its neck snapped, its eyes open and fixed on the little wyvern. “That’s nonsense,” Dorie scolded the woglet. “You shouldn’t kill what you can’t eat. Show some restraint.” The woglet looked up at her, green eyes liquid and warm. Then he sank his teeth into the pigeon’s neck.

Dorie sat back down in the chair. “Um, sorry about the blood,” she said. “And rat guts. If you want to boil some more water I’ll help you clean up.”

“What’s it doing?” said Colin.

The woglet had his teeth firmly in the pigeon’s neck and was dragging it backward, straining mightily on his new legs and flapping his still-wet wings. Through his clenched teeth he was humming, but she did not know what it meant. He had to stop several times, exhausted, but the teeth stayed closed and the hum continued all the way up to Dorie’s feet, where the woglet finally let go of his prize and broke out into a full-throated warble.

“I think it’s for you,” Colin said.

Dorie looked at the woglet in shock, who was now attempting to climb her pant leg with his rather disgusting claws. The woglet warbled all the way up her leg in the pitch of a wounded yodeler. Once he reached her lap, he tucked his tail around his nose and folded his wings. The wounded yodel changed to a wounded snore. “It can’t be,” she said. “They hate everybody. I’m supposed to take it back to the forest and try to find its parents.”

Colin grinned. “Think you’re the father now. Hope you didn’t have anywhere to go that don’t involve a baby wyvern.”

Only the Queen’s Lab, Dorie thought in dismay as she watched the silver woglet snore. Only the Queen’s Lab.

*   *   *

Dorie hurried along the paths to the University, still in boyshape, woglet folded in the crook of her arm. It was dark now, and the black buildings rose around her. At the building where her flat was she stopped. What on earth was she going to do with a tiny wyvern on her arm? If the Queen’s Lab really was cracking down on them, then this baby was clear proof of her crime. She had not expected this problem. She had been expecting a cranky baby wyvern that she would have to stare down. Pop him all protesting into the birdcage, and take him back to the forest before he could get too cranky with the situation and steam his way out.

She had not been expecting him to sleep in her arms.

Dorie tucked her fingers under his belly, wondering if she could maneuver him into the birdcage after all. He could stay in their flat then.

Woglet protested and dug his claws in tighter. Dorie yelped and let that bit of her elbow fuzz out to ease the pressure. She brought her whole arm toward the birdcage, and he yodeled ominously. That noise would have their landlady in their room in a heartbeat.

She sighed. She could not miss Jack’s gallery opening. Her first one in the city. The one that would set the stage for her whole career—the one Dorie had sworn in blood to attend.

There was no help for it. She was going to have a wyvern on her, and that’s how it was.

*   *   *

Jack was sharing the space with nine other artists. They had gone in together to rent a space near the University that catered to this sort of thing: art shows and avant-garde theatrical performances. Now as Dorie approached it she saw there was a large crowd outside, and she wondered if the opening time had been delayed, for she was rather late. She had not had time to change clothes or shape; she was still Dorian, still in hiking pants and muddy boots. But apparently it did not matter, for at the top of the steps a man in uniform was taping off the doors.

Jack met her on the grass, ranting and out of breath. She was in red cigarette pants—Jack generally wore red—and a pile of handmade jewelry over a loose top. “One of the artists got us all shut down,” she said. “We were open for all of five minutes and then all these silvermen come in and force everyone out. No one even made it to the back where my work was.”

“I’m sorry,” Dorie said. Curiosity overcame sympathy. “What did he show?” The men in Jack’s collective outnumbered the women eight to two, so she felt safe assuming it was a
he
.

“I don’t even know; he’s been so secretive. I gather it was some sort of human figure but lit up with blue light.” Jack wrinkled her nose. “Well, and obviously that says fey takeover now that I think on it. No wonder—he’s been having a hard time of it since one of his mates got blued. I suppose that’s why the silvermen are involved with a rinky-dink art show.”

“Jack,” said Dorie slowly. “
Blue
light. Like the artist was using a bluepack?”

“You mean like the ones we learned about in history class?” said Jack. “The ones the fey made to trade with us?”

“Not exactly
made,
” said Dorie, swallowing, for she knew the bluepacks’ disturbing history even if the textbooks had elided it. The bluepacks the fey had traded to humans had been split-up pieces of whole fey—punishments set by the Fey Queen. It wasn’t known how she did it—it wasn’t even known that that’s what the bluepacks really
were
until long after the war, and the trade, were over. At that point there was little reason for it to become common knowledge. People had moved on.

But where could this artist have found a bluepack to light up his sculpture? Surely he hadn’t. Surely it was a gel or something. Otherwise … otherwise she did not know what to think.

“If only his works had been at the back, and mine at the front,” said Jack, whose mind was working in quite a different channel. “We drew lots … ugh, this is so frustrating.”

“So not fair,” Dorie agreed. Jack was quite talented, as far as she could tell. She only knew a dilettante’s smattering about the subject, but Jack’s technique seemed to her to be doing something new and interesting. She was mostly doing nudes, but her colors! They were rich and flat all at once—you could not stop looking at them. “You shouldn’t be punished for his mess. What can we do about it? Look, I’ll go distract the silvermen, and we’ll take down the tape.”

“No no no,” said Jack. She grabbed Dorie’s arm, her bracelets clanking. “None of your pranks. As maddening as it is, logically I know the publicity will be excellent. Let the men do their stuff. They’re confiscating all works to take back to the station. Supposedly the rest of us will get our pieces back tomorrow. I’m just keeping an eye out for when they start crating stuff up, because if they think they’re touching my paintings without me present, they’ve got another thing coming.” She sighed. “It’s not the worst thing, to be part of a show banned for public indecency. But why couldn’t it be at the
end
of the evening? Not to mention, then maybe someone would have had a chance to buy one, because our rent is due.” She eyed Dorie meaningfully.

“Yeah,” said Dorie glumly.

“How did the interview with the sleazeball go this morning?” said Jack.

“Horrible,” said Dorie. She lowered her voice. “All he wants are wyvern eggs, and that’s all the Queen’s Lab wants, too.” She told Jack the price he was paying, and Jack whistled. “But they’re living creatures, Jack! Not to mention deadly to the fey. I just can’t take him anything living, and especially not wyvern eggs. I just can’t. I know, I know, the rent…”

“Landlady actually showed someone our quarters today,” Jack said. “I think it was all for show, but who can say.”

“Well,” said Dorie.

“She made the usual threats about tattling on us to my aunt and then said there better not be any more suspicious noises at night or the rent that we haven’t paid would be going up. For someone who’s always going on about morals she sure has a dirty old mind.”

Dorie tried to think of helpful things to say, but couldn’t come up with any. She thought it would improve her mood to sabotage the silvermen’s work, but it sounded like Jack was not in favor of that idea. “Let me change back into curls and we’ll go cadging free drinks to cheer ourselves up?” she offered. “After you crate?” She could feel her ethics slipping every moment.