Ironskin

Chapter 15 May You Be Born Plain

Surely he could hear her heart racing. But he didn’t turn, didn’t look up.

Edward ran his scalpel around the woman’s face, as close to the hairline as possible. Just before the ears and just under the jawline. Then he worked underneath the flap of skin with a spatulate tool until he could peel the face up and away. It hung up around the nostrils and eyelids and he had to fiddle with it until it lifted away completely.

The woman’s face—Jane could hardly think Nina in connection with it—was horrifying underneath. All red like a war victim—Jane shut her eyes. When she forced herself to reopen them, Edward was settling Nina’s skin back into place.

But no, not skin.

A mask.

A clay mask, matte white and opaque and sculpted by a master craftsman.

From Jane’s angle, the clay mask did not blend with the rest of the woman at all. It was rigid, dead white. Unthinkably unlike human skin. Edward picked up a delicate brush, thick with glue, and began to attach the mask to the red scalp line, the red neck. He pulled the woman’s skin, the skin of the mask, as he bound the two together. Despite his orders to the contrary, the window was open to the night, and the sheet draped across the wooden table fluttered in the breeze.

His hands—no, that wasn’t just the blue-lit room—his hands were faintly blue. Jane made some sound, too tiny to be a gasp.

Slowly he turned and looked through her. She backed up one step. His eyes—she had never seen them like this. They were glassy, filmed over as if she were seeing them through stagnant lake water, through layers of mold and algae.

The blue in his hands died, till Jane could almost doubt that she’d seen it. A small zip, a pop. And then he was looking at her, and the glass in his gaze was gone, and he was not smiling, but he was there.

“How long have you been standing there?” he said.

“Long enough,” Jane said in a low voice. “Long enough to see you peel a woman’s face back like the skin off a rabbit. You’re no artist. Nor a surgeon. Surgeons can’t do what you just did.” Her hands clenched, went instinctively to where she’d once kept a feyjabber at her side. “You’ve got fey technology.”

This wasn’t like Dorie, who couldn’t help it.

He was in league with them.

Edward turned back to his work, running his fingers along Nina’s cheek. He seemed to be searching for what to say.

Dazed, she thought: This must be what it means, his hints, his allusions. The presence of bluepacks in this household, to run our lamps and motorcars and machines, long after everyone else’s have died.

He is working with the fey.

From the table he picked up a fine sandcloth, began brushing away pilled glue and blood. “You will leave me now,” he said. “You will exit my life. You will denounce me to the world.”

Her breath caught, hearing not command in his tone but sharp regret, an envisioned future. “Not that,” she said. “Never that.”

“You will make your excuses then, and leave us.”

“An invented dying aunt,” said Jane, and she seemed hardly to have the breath for the words. Her feet took her two steps closer, one step back—she froze there, watching as he gently teased the mask’s eyelids in place with a long tool like an ice pick. One word, that she hoped would bring her closer and not farther away.

“Why?”

Why do you have this skill, why are you using it, why. Tell me, tell me why, and in that telling let there be some measure of explanation that will make it okay, will make it so I don’t have to hate you, don’t have to pick up my stone-still feet and run to my sister in the city.

Why.

In that silence she seemed to hear him swallow his fear. Then the words rolled out, deep and velvet, above the woman in black with the frozen white face.

“Once upon a time, a long time ago,” he said, “back when the waters were low and calm and the stars were hardly hung in the sky, there was a young boy who wanted to be an artist. The fey were different in those days, back when the air was clean and the sky blue. More substantial. They had bodies, especially when they were in the forests, and they did not need to steal forms from mankind. They were as dangerous then as they are now … but they were reclusive. They rarely attacked unless provoked, and so they were like recluse spiders, or copperhead hydras—you hardly heard of them unless you happened to live right at the edges of the forests where they walked. And then you knew how not to provoke.”

And you provoked them, thought Jane, for around the flowery description of a long time ago she heard this fey tale like heartbeats in her throat. My father was cold and I was lonely. I went into the forest with my sketchpad. I sketched beauty.

“Well, go on,” said Jane when he stopped. “What sort of things provoked them? Back then.” The roughness in her voice broke against the spell his words were weaving, fell away.

The ice pick coaxed eyelashes from the clay lids. “Great beauty. Great artistic talent. Passion. There used to be a saying in the towns near the fey, though it was forgotten long before the wars—”

“May you be born plain,” breathed Jane along with him.

“Yes.” His voice rolled on, filling the room with the long-ago world. She closed her mouth, certain her words would derail him from the only way he could get through this story. It had to be distant, it had to be a fantastical tale to spin itself out of a pile of horrid truths and a story of me. Me, I lived this.

“Some average men set up trade, of a sort, with the fey,” he said, “and many curious things were brought over to ease human existence. Blue-lit fey technology replaced human invention, and it never occurred to the men who traded for bluepacks to run lights and cameras that everything had its own price, its own story.

“Scalpel. No, that one.” She came just close enough to hand it to him, then backed away. He slid it into a nostril of the mask, cleaning up the edges.

“Now, this boy was not from the forests.” He was a small boy who rattled around a too-big house. “He knew little of the fey, hardly any of the tales, and so he wandered into the woods, sketching birds and animals.” He was talented for a such a small boy. His birds seemed as though they would startle and take to the air. “And when a beautiful shimmering woman appeared, he sketched her. When she invited him home for dinner, he accepted.

“Gauze.” He pressed it under the woman’s ear, wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Regret dripped from him like the beads of sweat.

“Go on,” Jane said softly. She had heard these stories. The tales of the travelers who ate a golden apple hanging from a tree in winter, drank water from a cup held by a beautiful woman.

Ingested something belonging to the fey.

The sleeve had left a pink streak on his forehead. He bent over the woman again, his voice dropping. “But when the young boy tried to go home, the Queen held fast to the fey inside of him, and he could not depart. The Queen had chosen him for her consort. Now those whom she chooses are sometimes let go, back into the world, many years later. Decades. When their families have long since turned to dust. When her attention has finally turned to a new … toy.” He dropped the pinkened gauze into a metal can. Studied his patient. “Again and again, the story is the same. The consort is let go, and paid, in some fashion, with a gift for serving the Queen all those years.” He spread his right hand wide, as if contemplating the fey gift lurking in his fingertips.

Then he blew skin dust from the woman’s forehead and turned to face Jane. For the first time he appeared to study her.

Only then did Jane realize that she had never rewound the veil after peering into Nina’s room. She felt shock from him at seeing her bare face when he did not expect it—how did she know his shock, when his expression did not change?

More, how did she know the myriad things she suddenly seemed to know about him, and her mind raced back through the day, hearing what he didn’t say in his story just now, knowing each breath and feeling in the forest, feeling him touch her as she fell and thinking calmly—he loves me—mind racing, saying, that was all just today, today when I was without iron, today I knew that, today—

“Is Dorie still all right?”

“Yes,” said Jane.

His shoulders moved—the tiniest bit of relief. Quietly he said, “Come, see how Nina looks.”

Mind whirling, Jane forced herself to approach the table, to focus. Her first thought was that the work seemed surprisingly fake—the mask was dead white, the line where it had been glued into place clearly visible, outlined in a thin strip of red. Nina’s eyes were open and staring, though she remained unconscious. They seemed to be set a long way behind the mask.

“What do you think?” He touched Nina’s chin, delicately. “It will blend into her own skin very shortly. I will bandage it for now to keep it together, but in a couple days, you won’t see those lines. She will look as though she was born that way.”

“She will be very beautiful,” admitted Jane. She could admit his talent as an artist. And yet … “She looks … fey.” She remembered the face floating in the forest.

“Where do you think our notion of beauty comes from?” said Edward.

“Do you think so?” said Jane. “Somehow that’s more disturbing than anything else.”

The white mask glowed palest pink at the corners of the cheeks. Paint? Or life, slowly filling the clay? Jane’s breath caught at the beauty Nina would have, and she thought: I could be that beautiful. But in the next instant—no. No, all I want is to be normal … and I still want that.

She saw him at work, she was shocked, she was repulsed. And yet it did not lessen the fierce desire.

Normal, she thought, like a hunger in her belly. He could make me normal.

Edward brushed aside another fleck of dust, picked up a roll of bandages, and started securing the woman’s face. “So you see,” he said, “why Dorie must not give in to that side of her nature. I fight against their gifts, and fail. Just like I once fought against the Fey Queen’s hold and failed. There is great evil in that failure.”

His eyes were shadowed again, even in the bright workroom light. She felt his pain, clutching deep in his chest. More—she really did feel it. She was sure of that now. She could feel his shame as if it were her own, and it was only just now, since she had removed the iron from her fey-cursed cheek. She put a hand to her bare red cheek and found it was blazing hot.

The shame of … letting others suffer for his mistakes? His daughter, but first … his wife. Fey-bombed and taken over while pregnant. A wonder Dorie had survived. “And then,” she said in a low voice, “the Fey Queen returned.”

A short nod confirmed that horror. “Dorie must not give in to her curse,” he said. “Almost six and can’t dress herself? No. She must be strong.”

Jane was going to say that strength wasn’t the issue—that bottling up wasn’t strength, a whole host of things she was discovering this last week, this day, now. She put that aside to convince him, she must convince him that her way was right. She swallowed. “The Fey Queen told Dorie she was her mother.” Something niggled at the back of her mind about that but she ignored it in favor of listening to the emotions that were suddenly rampaging through Edward, trying to sort out the cacophony she was hearing. “If I help Dorie learn how to use her fey gifts, then she’ll be able to defend herself if the Fey Queen tries to take her away.”

“To defend herself,” he said, and hope lit his whispered words. “To be strong where I was weak.…” He laid the bandages on Nina’s breast, and suddenly his eyes and insides were all aflame. “Tell me more about what you and Dorie have done together.”

“Well, we’ve practiced diverting things out of the air. In case a fey bomb were thrown at her. I don’t know why a fey claiming to be her mother would do that, but…” She trailed off, confused by his nearness, by the heat that billowed up inside him as he came toward her, nearer, nearer, one foot nudging hers now, now he stood right there, and it was not something that had ever been going to happen in this timeline, it was so not this Jane that she could hardly breathe.

He gently touched her chin, and when she did not jerk away, he drew his fingers down her ruined cheek. “Doesn’t it hurt you when she uses that cursed side of hers?”

Her cheek flamed where his finger touched it. “Not so much as I expected.” Speaking and breathing seemed impossible; she was overwhelmed by her discoveries, by him. “That’s what I think is so important. That if we let the poison run out … it doesn’t stay inside and fester and make us die a slow, lingering death.” He ran his thumb along her bottom lip. “So … I think our work … is important.…”

Edward bent his head and kissed her. The new sense of him seemed to draw extra fire into her, fire that had been born in his body. Like drinking in the heat that he carried. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see whether he closed his. With her eyes closed, she was just Jane, on any branch of time.

Then there was air around her mouth and she breathed.

“Your work is very important,” said Edward. “I want you to be able to do it to the best of your ability.”

“Yes.”

He leaned in, kissed her again, again. “I will get you anything you need.” A flicker of something dark—and frightened?—shuddered through him, and when she opened her eyes she realized his were now open. Watching her ruined face. Warmth and ice ran through him so intermingled that she could not tell what he felt, what he wanted. She stepped back, dropping his hands from her own.

The woman on the table was still and silent. Her unearthly beauty filled the room. The woman, the room, Jane, were cold, cold, but Edward’s heat could drive all that away. She knew what she wanted. For that one moment she set aside all knowledge that there was something about her he feared and put a daring hand to his belt loop. “Close your eyes and kiss me again.”

He obeyed. His lips touched hers and heat poured into them. She drowned, was engulfed, immolated.

But something rocked his body—tension, fear—and she realized there was noise from below, from the darkened house. Pounding on the outside studio door, short heavy footsteps bursting through—Poule. Jane stepped back from Edward, but not quickly enough for the quick-witted dwarf to miss the truth, she knew.

Poule’s eyes darted around the room, taking everything in, fell on Edward within a single heartbeat. “Come quick,” Poule said. “The kitchen. It’s Blanche.”

Edward turned for the door, pausing only long enough to say to Jane: “Stay here with Nina. I don’t want her to be alone when she wakes up.”

Then the two of them were pounding down the stairs and Jane was alone, trembling emotion crashing through her body, swaying her tired feet. Jane looked down at the unconscious woman. She was so stiff and silent—it was all wrong for Nina to be silent, quiet, powerless.

Despite his orders, Jane could not stay in the studio. She was propelled irresistibly after him, after Edward who both wanted and feared her. Softly down the stairs, clutching her robe around her. In the hallway to the kitchen she moved like a ghost, her bare feet quiet and cold on the scarred stone floor.

Voices. Edward, calming; a woman, sobbing and spitting words.

Jane crept closer, until she stood concealed in the shadows of the hallway.

Blanche Ingel stood in the kitchen like a crazed Shakspyr heroine, all in white with unbound hair. Her left hand, the one she had cut on a thorn earlier that evening, streamed blood onto the floor. Her right hand held a silver knife.

“Get it out, get it out,” she cried, but it was her eyes that frightened Jane. They were glassy and wild.

They were like Edward’s had been in the studio.

“It’s all right, Blanche,” Edward soothed, and he tried to reach in and grab her knife hand without getting cut himself.

Poule stayed back from the woman, nostrils flaring, scenting. She circled around them and then said, “Back away, Rochart. It’s fey.”

Shock pooled Edward’s face. “No—she’s alive.”

“There’s a fey inside her for all of that.” The two looked at each other with grim faces, and in the shadows Jane’s own face was surely white.

A fey in a live human. Such a thing was possible? It turned her world upside down.

“I don’t know if it’s making her go mad or what,” said Poule. “Is she trying to cut it out with that knife?”

“It’s not iron,” said Edward.

Poule agreed. “Then we need to find some.” She wrestled a steel butcher knife from the butcher block, held it up.

Jane tumbled out of the shadows, gasping. “Wait! You’ll kill her!”

“The iron doesn’t have to go in the heart, just a line to it,” said Poule.

But Edward agreed. “No. It’s too risky. And we don’t even know for sure if what you suspect is true.”

“You’re wasting valuable time,” warned Poule.

“Come here, Blanche,” called Edward in a soothing voice. “Come here.”

Blanche looked slightly less wild; she drifted toward Edward. Her arm raised—

“Pull him back!” shouted Poule to Jane, and Jane did, even as Poule lunged for the woman’s knife arm and twisted it behind her back, causing the knife to drop from her fingers. Blanche’s face smeared with pain, and Jane’s breath caught, for despite her new beauty Blanche had always seemed kind, and they were hurting her.

“You didn’t have to do that to her,” said Edward, but Poule just grunted.

“You did her mask yourself, and you’re under her spell. Blasted humans.” She wrestled Miss Ingel toward the side door, and Jane and Edward hurried after. The screen at the door was sturdy, repaired just that afternoon by Poule. Poule opened it and pulled Blanche out onto the lawn. The iron door banged closed.

“Stay inside and call to her,” said Poule. She released the woman and stood there, short and hefty and ready to tackle her again at the least provocation.

“Blanche,” crooned Edward. “Blanche, come to me. Come to me.”

The woman tottered forward, back to the door.

“Go on,” whispered Poule. “Touch it.”

“I forbid you entrance, Blanche,” said Edward in a low voice. Through the mesh, Jane saw Blanche’s eyes film over white, and she swerved away from Edward, from them, and Jane could not tell if she avoided the door on purpose or because she truly could not go through it.

Poule was many things, but nimble on her feet was not one, and Blanche easily darted past her and took off down the back lawn toward the forest. Her white nightgown disappeared into the trees and was gone.

Jane and Edward joined Poule on the lawn. Poule’s face was pale. “There’s definitely fey in her,” she said. “Fey in a living woman. But how—and when?”

They were all frightened by the how. Fey taking over the fey-bombed dead was bad enough. If the rules had changed, no one was ever safe again.

But the when—a chill of realization coiled in Jane’s chest. “She was in the forest tonight,” she said. “I know she was, because she cut her hand on the thorn trees.”

“We’re going after her,” said Edward. “Poule, suit up. Jane, you’re in charge. Keep checking on Dorie.”

The two disappeared back into the house, toward Poule’s basement suite to get iron, Jane supposed.

“Tell me what you suspect…” floated back from Edward.

Jane stayed by the door, bitter thoughts flooding her. She had invited fey in all unknowing, and the possibilities chilled her marrow. She turned and found a figure in black satin crouching behind her. She stifled a yelp.

The woman with the beautiful face wavered. “Where is Edward?”

“An emergency,” said Jane. “He had to go somewhere. Are you feeling all right?”

Nina put a hand to her new face. The roll of half-finished bandages hung from her chin. “I feel so strange.” A sense of lost drifted out from her.

“It’s the new face,” said Jane. “I suppose you’ll feel normal soon. A couple days. Like Blanche.” Blanche Ingel, who might never be normal again.…

Nina laughed and for a moment her eyes came through the mask, for a moment the mask seemed a real face. Then they died back and the whole of her face looked unreal yet again. “Oh, Ingy,” she said. “Tried to pretend that the hot springs gave her such invigoration, revealed a beauty she always possessed. But it won’t fix her marbles. She’s as jumpy as a cat nowadays.”

Nina had said something to that effect the first day Jane met her, she remembered. “Since she had the surgery?” said Jane. “Aren’t you worried, then?”

Nina laughed again, the loose bandage swinging. “We’re cut from different cloth. She’s weak, born to her state—I had to fight for mine with tooth and décolletage. No silly paranoia will catch me.” She leered at Jane. “Besides, we both know the real reason she keeps coming back for ‘checkups.’ Now, where’s Edward?”

Edward and his endless supply of beautiful women. Inhuman, irresistible. Even Nina’s mask was captivating—Jane had to force her eyes not to linger on the turn of brow and line of cheek. She was suddenly sure it was all true, all of Nina’s insinuations, all that the gossip said. He must have been intimate with all of them, for that’s what real fey glamour did to you, and each of the women had a touch of that spellbinding, unstoppable allure.

All of them. The Prime Minister’s wife, whom he pretended to laugh at. Blanche. Nina. He denied any involvement behind their backs, but surely he turned around and mocked Jane behind hers. Nina probably knew all her secrets.

“Gone, I said,” said Jane. Nina lifted eyebrows at Jane’s sharp tone. No wrinkles appeared in that white forehead. “I’d go lie on the table upstairs if I were you. He’ll be back in the morning.”

“That might be what you’d do,” said Nina. “I’m going back to my room for celebratory drinkies. If you see any of the young men, send them my way. In fact, maybe I’ll go find them myself.”

“I don’t think so,” said Jane. She took Nina’s shoulder, propelled the woman back toward her room. Nina went quietly, mostly because she was still loopy, Jane thought. She jumped from topic to topic, played with her swinging bandages, and generally screwed Jane’s already taut and screaming nerves to the edge. Jane put her in her room with a sense of profound relief. “Stay in there till morning,” Jane said. “Or else.”

“Or else, or else,” mocked Nina. But she shut the door, and Jane drew a silent breath of hope that Nina would go to sleep.

Jane paced the hallway for hours. Her legs grew tired, a knot in her belly sickened with exhaustion, but she could not sleep any more than she could fly. Edward loved her, hated her—but no, put that aside yet again, and concentrate, Jane. What was the truth about her fey curse?

Something about her fey curse was also a gift—when not blocked by iron, she could sense emotions as keenly as if they were her own.

In the forest, Edward had felt for Dorie through his hands, as if they were showing him the path. (Don’t think of Edward.) His fey gift, capable of more than he knew.

And Dorie herself. Also fey-cursed, and strongly, too … but possibly capable of withstanding a fey takeover.

For that’s what had happened in the forest, hadn’t it?

A fey had entered Dorie, just as one had entered Blanche. Had entered Jane, but had left of its own accord. Dorie had fey inside her, Blanche had fey in that mask on her face. And Jane? Jane just had her curse. The fey curse.

Her head flew up with a start, realizing what the three of them had in common.

The fey substance. Call it a gift, call it a curse—it was both. The fey could not gift without cursing—and they could not curse without gifting.

The fey substance lacing her skin gave her these fey traits—emitting anger, sensing emotions. And more—her curse was affecting people less than she feared, because she was learning to control it. Imagining herself as water was not a silly visualization, but a true manipulation of the substance on her cheek. She was doing what Dorie did, in a far less skillful way.

But the fey substance still had one great drawback, a new wrinkle that no one had ever known.

The fey-cursed were vulnerable to the fey themselves.

The fey had never taken over live bodies before—only the shrapnel-flecked bodies of the dead. Because fey bombs were meant to kill. Because humans with fey substance in them tended to be dead.

But they had never had all these live bodies with fey smeared over them, upright and walking around. And Jane wasn’t thinking of the bedraggled and outcast ironskin, though it was true they were equally vulnerable.

The masks.

The masks that those women bought, that Edward put on. A hundred highly placed people, each of whom had turned herself into a host for a parasite: a silver birch waiting to be strangled by mistletoe.

Jane went to the window and looked through the mesh screen onto the back lawn. The maypole glinted in the first light of dawn, its orange and red ribbons hanging loose around it like a flame.

May Day. A time for celebration.

And all the guests who could be coaxed (the girls, mostly) would dance around it, never knowing that on several of their faces lurked a ticking time bomb.

The exact same substance that scarred Jane’s own cheek.

Fear riddled her heart, and with it, determination. It didn’t matter whether she was ugly or beautiful—she was just as in danger.

So she was determined to be normal. That desire had not lessened one whit. She would have the face she was meant to have, the simple whole Jane face. Perhaps the desire for normal was tangled up in her desire for Edward. Perhaps she was no better than the women who would change their face “as easily as a dress.”

If wanting to be herself was wrong, then so be it.

For once she was going to have exactly what she wanted.

Numb and taut, Jane went through the black early morning to his studio. She made her way to the workbench she had passed by earlier—her hand went to that cloth, thrown over his current project.

She stood there, fingers trembling.

Nina had called her new face pretty.

But what sort of pretty did she mean?

Jane almost fled. Almost was sick, almost ready to smash the mask without lifting the cloth.

She lifted the muslin.

Jane knew what she had feared when she saw it. Her own face stared up at her, white and pale, black eyes hollowed out.

But not her own face. Ten—a hundred times more lovely than her own face. Beauty that any girl would die to possess.

He had done a masterful job. She would be more lovely than Blanche, than Nina.

As beautiful as any fey.