“Suit yourself,” said Cook.
They made their way up the stairs to Dorie’s playroom, Jane studying the girl as they went. As she had told Niklas, Dorie seemed to use her hands to direct her fey curse. Though she did not use her fingers in any dexterous sense, she often waved her stiff hands in the direction of what she was mentally moving, or to direct the light pictures she made.
It did not necessarily mean that that’s where the fey curse resided—especially since there were no visible signs of the curse—but it gave Jane hope. After all, if Dorie had to be entirely covered with paste from head to toe, that wasn’t a workable solution any more than Niklas’s trenchant suggestion of eyes or mind.
Once inside the white-and-silver playroom, Jane took the precious jar of iron-flecked tar paste out. Dorie looked interested, until her eye fell on her Mother doll. She wafted the doll through the air and started it turning somersaults.
Jane smeared paste on the back of her hand and studied it, considering. Iron was a barrier to fey—the iron on her face kept the poison sealed in just as the iron in the threshold kept the fey out. Or a feyjabber in a fey-ridden corpse killed it for good.
Jane realized her hand was shaking. Nonsense! Dorie went in and out all the time over iron. Mr. Rochart—Edward—had said it had no effect on her.
The experiment might fail, but it would not harm Dorie. Jane was really very sure of it, but it didn’t seem to calm her nerves.
“Dorie,” she said. “We’re going to try a little experiment. Does my hand feel cold to you? Touch it very carefully.”
Dorie looked suspicious at this directive, but curiosity trumped it. She touched the tar with her flat palm. “Funny,” she said. Jane regarded her closely, but she did not shriek or shudder, and when Jane picked up Dorie’s hand and studied her fingers, they were free of blisters and scars.
The iron on Jane’s own face didn’t hurt her at all. It merely stopped the fey poison from leaking its power past the barrier. If iron had the same effect on Dorie’s abilities, no one might have noticed. There were few enough people like Dorie, or like Jane—and so no real exploration into how they could live normal human lives, besides what they themselves figured out and shared with each other, what Niklas shared with those lost souls in the city. Besides, everything iron during the war had been melted down to make strips for windows and doors, for shields and feyjabbers. There was little enough of it for Dorie to come in contact with when she was sitting in the middle of her room playing with Mother.
Jane patted the brown tar all over Dorie’s hands, smoothing it around her fingers and up her arms, checking several times—“Does that burn? Does it feel cold?” But Dorie said no, interested in this messy new game.
Jane was dying to see if the tar worked. But if she asked Dorie to try her light pictures and she failed, Dorie would immediately connect that with the tar. Better to carry out her plan of distraction. She quickly cranked up the gramophone with Dorie’s favorite piece—a cheerful ditty from the Southern Continent with a bunch of made-up words like jumbuck. “Show me the dance you do,” she said to Dorie over the music. “I want to learn it.”
This remarkable novelty swung Dorie’s attention away from her sticky arms. She demonstrated her made-up dance for Jane, and even seemed faintly interested in Jane’s inability to do it properly on the first try. But Jane could tell the wheels in her head were turning.
Jane took them straight from the jolly jumbuck song into a Gaellish one about cockles and mussels, and then into another of Dorie’s favorites. About then, she saw Dorie’s steps fading, her attention growing focused on her arms. So she brought out her pièce de résistance: a new dance record her sister had been tired of. That caught Dorie’s attention.
“But first, some blocks,” said Jane. Her stomach tensed with the coming conflict. She got down the blocks and started forming pyramids. “Now your hands will make the blocks sticky. Isn’t that silly? It’s a new game.”
Dorie touched a block with her palm and saw that, indeed, the tar made the block sometimes stick to her hand without her moving her fingers at all. Her expression grew interested. For the moment she had completely forgotten their usual point of conflict, captivated by this game that was halfway between using her hands and not.
This was an unexpected bonus, and Jane made the most of it, encouraging, joking, distracting. For the rest of the morning, Dorie tried building with blocks with Jane. Jane alternated between triumph and tension—Dorie working with her hands was brilliant, but nothing had been proven one way or another.
And then Dorie’s block house fell. And then the next one. Her attention shifted, and Jane clearly saw the moment when Dorie’s inner eye focused, as she attempted to rebuild the blocks in her preferred way.
Breath held, world stopped.