“What you have wouldn’t work on hands.”
“I know,” Jane said. “I’m going to make some gloves that have the iron tar inside. I found some linen in the attic. Now I need the linseed oil to paint the linen and turn it into an oilcloth, so I can make a sandwich of the fabric that has the tar inside it.” She sighed. “Hopefully that will stop the tar from leaking out, because tar’s been getting on everything and I’m sure it’s frustrating Martha no end, though she only looks at us and shakes her head.”
Poule drummed her fingers on the table. In the swaying yellow light she had a funny self-satisfied look, like she was bursting to tell Jane something. “What about a fabric that has iron wires woven through it? A sort of mesh.”
“That might work,” Jane said slowly. “I had thought of chain mail, but it would be too bulky. But can you make wires thin enough?”
“We do back home,” said Poule. “We draw the wires thin enough to crochet. Some people use them to make jewelry—a different take on iron charms. Which—who knows if they work—bloody superstition if you ask me. Well. I’ve been experimenting with these iron threads to see what applications they might have against those blue brutes. The iron mesh cloth has potential.”
“It might work,” agreed Jane. “It might be even better than my idea—no tar to leak through. Do you have a sample of the cloth?”
By way of answer, Poule reached under her chair and pulled out a cotton bag. “A cloth and a bit of spare time on my hands,” she said. From the bag she pulled a small pair of long mesh gloves and slid them across the green glass tabletop to Jane.
“Oh, how perfect…,” breathed Jane. She touched the metal-threaded cloth. It was supple enough to move with fingers, like a second skin. Yet it seemed like the iron was woven closely enough to keep Dorie’s talents suppressed. The gloves fastened up the side with little iron clasps, so it would be possible to wriggle Dorie’s hands in.
Poule pulled the gloves away from Jane’s touch. Leaned back in her chair, flicking her grey hair behind her. “The question is: what do you want to pay for them?”
Jane fumbled. “I’m sure Mr. Rochart will pay you what you need, when I tell him.…”
Poule’s eyes were friendly but firm, the creases set in a way that recalled stone. “I don’t make the rules,” she said. “That’s the one thing about both the fey and the dwarvven”—and Jane clearly heard the foreign tongue as Poule pronounced the word in her own language—“there’s certain rules. And one is that everything has a price. Everything between your world and ours has to be fairly bought and paid for.” She flipped the screwdriver between nimble fingers like a worry stone. “And it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m havlen, a half-thing. Some things still apply.”
Jane said nothing, thinking through her history, attempting to come up with a suitable answer before she let her tongue say something foolish or insulting. The fey drove dreadful bargains, seeking your talent and life and anything that truly mattered to you that they could get; they sealed deals you didn’t know existed.
Whereas no such reputation existed for the dwarves, though they were sometimes said to be cold and miserly. “Wouldn’t give you a smile you hadn’t paid for,” was a common saying about the oft-surly folk. They traded their fine engineering and design for things of the surface: fruits and wheat and wool. Jane had none of these things.
The dwarf leaned back in her chair. Her dressing gown shifted just enough to show that whatever she always carried in her breast pocket had a hard rectangular outline, and like a flash Jane knew what it was.
The one surface culture dwarves shared with humans, that the dwarves were known to love with all their fierce, passionately intellectual hearts. Wasn’t that why so many of the court poets had been dwarves, until Queen Maud’s death put an end to the days of civil friendship?
Books.
The dwarves loved books. They read them in vast, devouring quantities, and they wrote them, too—in their electric-lit caves alongside their molten metal and their turning gears the dwarvven scribbled out great gothic tragedies, pouring out their hidden romantic souls into tales of forbidden love and secret temptation, blood-soaked mysteries and swashbuckling pirates.
A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses was unlikely to be of interest. Poule had surely read Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns—Jane only hung onto it for the personal inscription on the flyleaf. But the third …
“I will lend you a book,” said Jane. “A glorious adventure novel.”
Poule’s eyebrows raised. Her hand went unconsciously to the book she was currently reading, tucked inside her dressing gown. “You think you have something I haven’t read?”
“Maybe,” said Jane. “I mean, it is a dwarf author.”
“Probably read it, then,” said Poule. “You’ll have to think of something else.”