The ironwork was crude here. Niklas didn’t believe in fancy flourishes, even if he had time for them. Except for Jane’s mask, which had had to be hammered to fit her shape if it was to do any good at all, his work was cast iron from roughly carved molds, designed to fit as many as possible and therefore fitting no one perfectly. The boy’s leg was covered from ankle to knee with two pieces of iron, fitting around his calf like a clamshell, and lashed in place on either side with leather ties. The bottom tucked into a boot that someone had tried to adjust to keep the weight of the iron from digging into the top of his foot. The ironskin was too big for him, meant for him to grow into, and the excess space was taken up with rag padding between the iron and the shin.
She wondered what his curse was. Ironskins always wondered what each other had, and yet she would not rudely ask, as Mr. Rochart had. But the boy volunteered, as forthright as his curious stares at her face. “I got hunger,” he said. “No matter how much I eat it’s gone and I’m still hungry. Afore Niklas set me up it made me little sisters all hungry too an’ drove me mum off her head. So I told you mine and that’s polite, so now what you got?”
“Rage,” said Jane. Hungry rage, that could take a crumb of irritation and turn it into a banquet. Like the sharp orange fire she’d felt at Gertrude that morning, when Gertrude’s only real crime was thoughtless stupidity. Perhaps someday it would incinerate her entirely; Jane would go up in a sheath of orange flame. She did not say any of this to the boy.
“Rage,” he repeated. “That’s fierce, ain’t it?” He pondered, weighing the merits. “I guess I’d rather be hungry and have my leg all tore up. I’m used to it, see.”
“And you have ironskin from Niklas to help,” said Jane, gently prompting.
“Right. Niklas.” He shrugged a thin shoulder at her, motioning her toward the foundry. “C’mon, I’ll take you to him.” The boy limped quickly over the uneven bricks, using a crutch to take the weight off the heavy iron leg. At the threshold he turned and gave the impudent greeting favored among the lower classes during the Great War, and since. “Stay out,” he said.
Jane crossed the iron threshold, proving she was no fey. He grinned and jerked his thin body away from her, into the workshop.
There had been more kids here, once. More misfits like Jane, scarred and lost, scarred and orphaned, scarred and rejected. But the number had dropped with time, since the last fey had vanished five years ago. This boy must’ve held out for those whole five years—his family must’ve held out, too—till an ironskin saw him and sent him here.
Five years ago. Niklas’s work might be less, but the scarred still wandered in, Jane knew. She wondered if his task had only gotten harder with the passing years—the number of people might be diminished, but their emotional pain was surely greater, as they’d lived with their anger or fear or pain for five years, and not known its cause.
She walked through the crowded workshop, remembering. She had only stayed here six months, after the hospital and before that first governess job. She had been too devastated by the loss of her brother, her mother’s illness, and by the inexplicable and terrifying rage that filled her, to think of this as home, or even a refuge, or anything except the place where she was one moment, and then the next moment. Perhaps that was the skill she had learned here, to make one minute follow the next, like making one foot follow the other, leading yourself out of hell by only thinking about one foot touching the ground and the other foot rising. Step by step, moment by moment, back into the land of the living.
The boy paused ahead of her. “It’s an ironskin,” he called out, and around that turn in the workshop she saw Niklas. He was just as she remembered: tall and broad, his cropped black beard striped with grey, and the curious dwarven-manufacture work glasses he wore fitted around his eyes like the crystal facets of spiders. He wore close-fitting hoops of iron in his ears, iron bands on his wrists. An iron circle hung from a string around his neck. String for safety reasons—if the hoop got caught on something, it would snap long before his neck would. She did not know if the iron charms worked, as clearly none of them were touching his veins, but she knew that he had always worn them since the war, would always wear them, and that gave her comfort.
He glanced up at her, then back down at his work. He was making a mold of a leg, gouging the wood with a sharp chisel, and apparently it was more interesting than saying hello.
The boy shrugged at her, as if to say, “That’s Niklas, what can you do?” then scampered off as quickly as his leg would let him.
“It’s Jane,” she said. “Jane Eliot.”
“I’d recognize that face if it were forty years instead of four,” he said.
The wide back doors were opened for the light, and the river smell mingled with the hot iron and burnt wood. There, she had huddled on her first day, as if she were six and not sixteen. There, she had met a boy with despair running across his breastbone and understood what it was like to be on the other side. There, she had stood when Niklas brought the cooled mask from his desk, and showed her how to wrap the padding in place, slide it over her cheek, adjust the leather straps.
Niklas’s heavy hands turned the mold back and forth as his chisel slipped along the contours. “What did you come back for?”
She remembered the driver waiting at the gate and said, “I don’t have much time. But I know someone who needs your help.”