It was the first wry grin Jane had seen on the old woman, and it made her seem less threatening. “Half,” she said. “I’m havlen, which translates as a half-thing. We aren’t very kind to those who stray from the mountains, you see.”
Now that Jane knew the woman’s lineage, she wondered how she could have missed it. It also explained the glints of metal she’d seen at Poule’s wrists. “Do dwarves really wear their mail all the time?” she said. “Doesn’t that get uncomfortable?”
“Well, not all our mail,” said Poule. She slid up the arm of her dressing gown to show that the chain mail wristlets only covered her forearms. “You can make a concession to fashion without going whole hog. But tell me what you need for Dorie’s gloves.”
“What?” said Jane. The prying made her tongue rude. “How do you know about the gloves?” She turned back to the forest, watching the black branches sway in the wind.
Poule shrugged. “There are eyes in the walls. A little bird told me. Pick one.”
Jane cringed against the being-watched feeling that she hated. How could she trust anybody when they refused to trust her?
Poule rubbed the back of her neck beneath the iron grey hair and stared wordlessly into the forest. Finally she said, “Have you seen him go in there?”
Jane thought she had seen—but she had no proof. Stubbornly she matched Poule question for question. “Why would he do that?”
Poule looked at Jane with a fierce black eye. Her gaze seemed to effortlessly pierce the veil of hair to the scarred flesh beneath. “If you see him go in, tell me immediately. Promise.”
“I can’t promise anything,” said Jane stubbornly. She didn’t know if Mr. Rochart really went into the forest, but she wasn’t sure she trusted Poule any more than anybody else in the house. Her duty was to herself, then Dorie, then Mr. Rochart, in that order, and she wasn’t about to make any promises she didn’t know the meaning of.
The dwarf looked at her as if she knew what was passing through Jane’s head. Snorted. Then turned and tromped back into the house, her loose grey hair swinging silver behind her, her slippers leaving darker impressions in the dewy grass. Behind her she called, “Do you want linseed oil or not? Come and get it, if you’re getting it.”
The night was empty when you were alone. Jane hurried after before she could be left at the boundary of the woods. The last ray of sunlight didn’t mean very much when there was no sunlight at all.
Jane followed Poule on another winding route, an echo of following Martha into the attic. Except this way led to a small white door, partway into the abandoned wing. It was all quite dark, but Poule flicked open a small electric torch that was not the blue of fey technology, but rather a warm yellow light. Jane kept thinking she should really go get her shoes, but it seemed like if she left now she would never see Poule again, and this opportunity would vanish like the master of the house.
The white door opened to a descending circular staircase. Poule’s voice floated back as they picked their way down. “The iron paste for Dorie’s hands is clever,” she said.
“It’s not that clever,” demurred Jane. “A man in the city gave me the paste. I didn’t think of it.”
“Yes, but you tried it on her hands. Why her hands? I mean, Dorie’s curse isn’t exactly the same as yours, is it?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said, thinking about the first question. “It felt right, I guess. But her curse isn’t the same at all.” She shook her head, recalling what she had told Niklas. “No visible scar, no obvious drawback … Is it because it happened before birth? Because she was unborn when her mother was taken over by the fey?”
But the staircase stopped there, opened up on a hallway. The walls turned to living rock that oozed water into channels on the floor, and so Poule’s only response was, “Mind the mushrooms.”
Several steps down the quiet stone passageway was a wide, red-painted door, the bottom two inches painted with a thick off-white paint that Jane guessed to be some sort of water repellent, for when the floor flooded.
As Poule opened the door Jane heard a mechanical whirring inside, like the sounds heard around Niklas’s foundry. A familiar sound, a homey sound. The large set of rooms on the other side of the door was a studio like Mr. Rochart had, except here in the cellar, down in the damp and dark. Poule pulled on a cord and switched on a glass light that burned with the same warm yellow of her torch.
“Is that fey technology?” said Jane, surprised.
“Of course not,” said Poule, but she didn’t look offended. “Pure electricity; runs off a generator that’s the pinnacle of dwarven achievement. Or at least the pinnacle of my achievement. I do a sweat-ton to keep this old house moving, you know.”