Ironskin

“Yours, Helen.”

 

 

Jane dropped the letter to the desk. It was always difficult to get at her sister’s real feelings; she insisted on burying them under a layer of decorative nonsense. Helen had always been fond of saying silly things passionately, like “we must have new ribbons,” or, “you must eat that cake.” Perhaps her willful gaiety had been good for Jane; but then, Jane’s serious determination had probably been good for Helen. Certainly she had always tried to be a steadying influence. Mr. Huntingdon, however … Was he the reason the letter seemed sharp and sad all at once?

 

Jane was sorry that the only window with a screen looked onto the forest, but regardless, she needed air. She rose to crank the window open, and then, down among the black cedars and thorny locusts, she saw it.

 

A glimmer of blue light, streaked with orange.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9

 

 

THE MISSES INGEL

 

 

Even as she saw it, it vanished, and then there was only pre-dawn blackness, leavened by thin moonlight. Jane stared into the forest, her eyes wide open and scanning. Had she really seen that? Surely it was just a trick of her nightmare carrying over, showing her fey where none existed.

 

Jane put a hand to her chest, uselessly trying to slow her heart through the touch of her fingers. She reasoned with herself. The fey had not been seen for five years. Why would one appear only when she was sleepless in the dead of the night? It was ridiculous. She had only imagined it. Wound up from her nightmares, her eyes insisted on seeing danger where there was none, lights where only blackness reigned. She turned off the fey-tech light, watching.

 

There.

 

No. Yes?

 

Jane grabbed her dressing gown and hurried down the side stairs by her room, out the side door. Well before she got to the back of the estate she was wondering what she hoped to accomplish by running outside without shoes or clothes or even a feyjabber. But that didn’t stop her feet from flying.

 

She stood twenty feet from the forest, panting and searching the woods for more blue light. She didn’t dare take a step closer into the darkness than that. She studied the edges of her vision as the moonlight glimmered off leaves and dew and played havoc with her sight and nerves. Had she really seen anything? And what about the last time she was out at dusk—had she really heard the sharp bzzzt of fey then, or was this house just getting to her?

 

“What are you doing out here?”

 

Jane spun to see Poule standing there, her sturdy form solid and black in the night. Moonlight lit her grey hair silver, spun itself along the length of the dingy red quilted dressing gown the woman wore. Picked out the glints of metal at her wrists, and a lump in an inside breast pocket such as Jane had seen the first day, and taken for a blackjack.

 

Jane backed up, as if she expected the odd butler to kneecap her and haul her back. “I thought I saw a fey,” she said. The grass was wet and cool on her hot feet.

 

Poule’s grey eyebrows disappeared into her hair. She went toward the forest line, closer than Jane, leaned forward as if scenting the air. The night was quiet around them. Then she shook her head and returned to Jane. “They’re not there now.”

 

Jane’s heart thumped at the turn of phrase. “But you think they were? It’s not just my imagination? They’re supposed to be gone.”

 

Poule’s eyes held no comfort. “The fey won’t ever be completely gone, and you know that deep inside, don’t you? Know it as well as we do.”

 

We? “I guess I do,” Jane said reluctantly. She felt exposed by Poule’s assessment of her, and questions wrote themselves in the furrows of her brow.

 

“You don’t have your mask on,” the short woman said.

 

Jane realized that just as Poule said it, automatically tilted her head forward to let her hair swing over her cursed cheek.

 

“You’re leaking, I think,” Poule continued. “It’s odd, feeling it from you. Usually it’s just around the fey that you become bombarded by feelings not your own. Feelings you don’t want. At least for dwarves—humans certainly aren’t that perceptive, or you’d have been able to spot all those humans taken over by fey long before the bodies rotted and gave it away by the stink.” She gestured back at the forest. “I can’t swear if the blasted blue-things were there before or not, but I don’t scent them now.”

 

Jane wasn’t sure how to interpret this barrage of information, but her tongue found tactless words before her brain had caught up and said: “A dwarf? You’re a dwarf?” Immediately she realized how rude it was to ask, as rude as asking someone what their curse was.

 

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