He watched her out of the corner of his eye, while saying gruffly, “I guess you have a job now and that’s only right.”
“And I didn’t when I came, and you helped me anyway,” she said. “You don’t know how much that meant to me.”
Niklas shrugged, picked up a hammer, started pounding on an iron bar that didn’t look like it needed pounding.
She knew that the gruffness, the dismissal, was only his manner. A side effect, perhaps, of the howling depression he’d once confessed to her was his curse. The outline of his shirt caught on the iron underneath, the tough cotton snagging on the metal ridges, the hang of the leather jacket deformed by the iron chest that squeezed him like a vise, as if a tighter cinching could drive out the poison. She remembered the shape of that rigid corset from when she’d tried to hug him goodbye. Old Ironsides, one of the boys had called him, trying to make an affectionate nickname for the man they worshiped.
But Niklas didn’t take to affectionate nicknames. And the name was never mentioned in his presence again.
The boy appeared in the doorway. “Hey miss, there’s a man says you’re gonna miss your train.” He shouted around Niklas’s banging, slipping his words in with the familiarity of practice. “He says if you don’t come quick there may not be a car when you get there, as some hoodlums looked int’rested in dismantlin’ it.” A grin showed what he thought of the driver’s worries.
Niklas did not stop pounding the iron bar with his hammer, though Jane turned again, said, “Thank you, Niklas. Thank you.”
There was maybe a half-nod in return.
“All right,” she said to the boy, pressing a coin into his hand. “You take care of him, right?” The boy nodded, his sharp chin bobbing, his knobbly fingers shutting tight around the coin.
Jane clutched the jar in her pocket. She hurried through the door of the workshop and out the gate, hurried into the impatient orbit of the worried driver, leaving the foundry of the ironskin behind.
*
Jane’s thoughts flew back and forth as the train clattered into the country station. First Helen and her new, utterly foreign society. The cruel rumors about Mr. Rochart and Dorie. Then—the paste might work, the paste might work. She could try it on Dorie the very next morning—starting with her hands.
As long as Dorie could touch iron without injury.
Iron was the only thing that stopped the fey. The rules had been hard to pin down—still were inconclusive—because the fey didn’t take well to capture, after all. Besides, the war had gotten so tied up with superstition, as soldiers draped themselves in lucky iron charms—it was hard to tell what did and didn’t work.
But one thing seemed pretty firm.
If a fey took over a dead body, that fey could be killed. An iron spike—a feyjabber—directly into an artery destroyed that fey forever.
Iron weakened fey, barred fey, wounded fey—it was why the iron mask on her cheek kept the fey curse from crossing the barrier and spilling out into the air, infecting others. If Dorie’s talent was similarly a foreign part of her, a fey parasite on a human host, so to speak—then it should work. But was Dorie more human … or more fey?
The train jerked to a stop and Jane disembarked, thinking of the exercises she would have Dorie try. With the tar in her bag, suddenly all the frustrations with Dorie seemed possible to overcome. New ideas, new methods, spilled through her mind, firing her with new energy. She was startled to see a tall shadow spill over her, to hear a voice near her ear.
“Ah, my little soldier is returned to fight by my side,” said Mr. Rochart. “Miss Eliot.”
“Sir,” she said, and she composed her suddenly trembling fingers by dint of shoving them in the wool coat’s patch pockets. Her heart seemed to leap at seeing him, but she reminded herself that that was merely her excitement over Dorie’s paste. The man was aggravating, with his hideous masks, his disappearing act, his Prime Ministers’ wives.
Even if his conversation was more intelligent and entertaining than anything she’d heard the whole week in the city.
He loomed over her, a tall figure in a coat just as worn as hers, she suddenly saw, powdered with more of that white dust that followed him in a fog. A button was loose—didn’t he have anyone to mend it? She was cross at herself for wanting to put it right. She was not allowed to be this relieved at returning home. Home? No. Returning to her job.
“You forget us for an entire week,” he said in a low, mocking voice. “I myself brave the moor and damn the last bluepack to fetch you at the station, and I merely rate a respectful ‘Sir?’ Oh, Jane, Jane.”
“In that you have the advantage of me,” she said demurely.