“Where’s the scarring?” said Niklas.
She stalled before the part he wouldn’t believe. “Niklas,” she said. “You’ve seen a lot of curses.”
“That I have.”
“Do you know of one that doesn’t hurt the people around the person? Like mine makes people angry, and the boy who let me in—his makes people feel starving. Do you know of one that doesn’t cause pain?”
“Where’s the scarring?” Niklas repeated.
Jane shook her head, admitted it. “There is none. None visible.”
He looked up from his work. “What makes you think there’s a curse at all?” he said, reasonably enough.
Jane clasped her hands together, to stop them from shaking as she described it. It was ridiculous how strongly the girl still affected her, even though she’d worked with Dorie every day for several weeks now. “She can do … fey things,” she said. “She makes pictures out of light. And she can move objects around.”
Niklas clasped the iron at his throat, as if to ward off her mere words. His voice rumbled, deep, angry, and he leaned toward Jane as if he would shake her. “Then this woman is a fey,” he said. “A fey in disguise. Where did you meet her? She must be destroyed.”
Jane started. “Oh, no!” she said. “No, no, no. This is a little girl. Her mother was the one cursed, while the girl was unborn. It’s affected her strangely, that’s all. And I have to figure out a way to stop it. I thought maybe you would have heard of somebody else like this.”
She had forgotten the effect of his work glasses up close. She felt pinioned in their faceted gaze. “There’s nobody like this,” he said. “A fey could take over a dead child’s body as easily as an adult’s. You need to reveal her for what she is and destroy her.”
Jane pushed the billowing panic back down at his words. He couldn’t possibly be right. It was all wrong to come see him. He was too fixated on what he thought he knew to be true, and now Dorie could be in danger. She made her voice very calm. “Listen carefully,” she said. “The girl is five years old and has lived with her family and the servants that whole time. You know perfectly well that fey-ridden bodies last no longer than a year, tops. Thus the old story about King Bertram’s lover, who started to stink, but the King couldn’t be convinced of that. This girl is human, but because of the circumstances around her birth, the curse is different. I still need a way to help her. Just as you helped me when I needed it.”
The fanatic tension in his posture slowly died. He gestured at his furnace, at the bars of pig iron, the empty casting molds. “How can I send you back with ironskin if she doesn’t have a scar to cover?”
Jane exhaled, tension unwinding. “That’s my problem,” she said. “One of them. I’d hoped you would have an idea.”
“Short of welding her into a solid iron box?” His face twisted in a way that said it was only half a joke. When Jane did not move, he said, “Well, since you won’t be put off. I do have something. Something new.”
He turned from his workbench to rummage around a thick wooden table piled high with slates covered in notations, papers, scraps of metal, stubs of lead, links of chain, and coils of rope—Jane wondered if that desk had changed at all since she’d been there four years ago. No, nearly five, now.
“Ah. Here,” he said. He picked up a small, greasy looking jar containing a brown-and-black substance.
“What is that?”
“Tar,” he said. “Tar with flecks of iron. I’ve tried it out and it works almost as well as the ironskin itself. It’s horrible stuff and gets on everything, but you might find you can use it to find her weakness. The fey point of entry.”
“Maybe I could,” agreed Jane, awed by the possibility. She turned the jar around in her hands. Even the outside was tacky to the touch, smeared with bits of iron-flecked tar Niklas hadn’t managed to scoop into the jar. “I remember you had a theory that the location of the curse might influence the type of curse—that similar curses cluster on similar parts of the body. I know you haven’t encountered one like hers … but do you have a suggestion of where to put the tar?”
Niklas closed his fingers around iron, his expression closed off. “Say again what she does,” he said.
He listened attentively as Jane told him everything she could remember. “You say she often waves her hands when she’s making things happen. Or looks in that direction, which sounds like her eyes or her mind. I’d try one of those three.”
Jane shuddered. “Tar in her eyes?”
Niklas shrugged. “If she is fey, maybe it’ll kill her off for you.”
“If the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch,” Jane said wryly. She slipped the jar into the pocket of her dress. Took the few bills she’d brought inside and stuffed them into the iron cauldron Niklas used as a bank.