She watched the tiny blond girl smile up at the pretty ladies, her curls light and bouncing, and Jane felt sick. It had taken Nina to point out what Jane should’ve known immediately. It wasn’t that Dorie was being stubborn and resistant, though she was. It was the iron making her ill by forcing her to bottle up her true self.
Jane rose, unsteady on her feet, fingers clutching her golden skirts to hold onto something, anything. Across the room she saw Edward’s eyes go to her, saw him look worried at her distress, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, be there one more minute. She lurched from the drawing room, climbed the side stairs with nerveless feet, flung herself into the safety of her room.
The moonlight laid a square of white on the wooden floor and she stood on its edge till the light lapped her toes, glittered the hem of her dress. Breathing, breathing.
If she were right about this, then everything she had thought was wrong. The good she had attempted was bad, and not just for her.
And now it wasn’t just that she would have to start working to undo years of damage.
She would have to reveal herself to the world.
Oh, say she was wrong, say it! She must be overreacting, must be mistaken. Anything so the answer was not inevitably: The mask comes off.
Jane spun to face the mirror. It was a good mirror, clear, unwavy. Unrepentant. Her iron mask looked back at her, her companion and protector, hiding the half-destruction. Skin on one side, iron on the other. Skin and iron, and her gauzy golden dress moonlit around her like fey light.
An explosion.
Through the mirror she looked until she saw, not Jane, but her past, the battlefield, plain as daylight and as immediate.
There was no sheltering past, no curtain of sleep to filter the nightmare, no, there it was, freed from its nightly confines to attack her in the day. There was her past, coming for her.
“Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. She won’t embarrass Charlie by taking his hand or squeezing his shoulder, but she nods at him, and he nods back. There are no soldiers, no King’s Men to come to their aid. They are all elsewhere, or dead. There is just them, clumped together on the white-grey moor, iron raised against an enemy.
Grim and white-faced they march across the moor.
That dawn Jane thought she saw no signal, no sign that the day was beginning. But she did, or perhaps she only sees it now, now in this living memory, this waking dream. An orange-blue flash like a comforting candle flame.
Then Sam—the baker’s apprentice, the lighthearted boy she danced with once—explodes next to Charlie.
A cry goes up. “There! The fey! The fey!”
Bombs are costly for the fey, she knows. But fey have no body in their natural state, no way to touch humans. Their strategy is to kill the strongest humans and take over their bodies. Then in their borrowed human forms, they can fight. It is why they have been harrying the village before the battle. We knew it, Jane thinks, and yet our hearts lurch when our dead stagger out of the forest, swinging sharpened wooden picks at us.
“Stab them with the iron,” she shouts to her little brother. “It’s the only way to drive the fey out.”
Charlie knows. And they advance, iron staves at the ready. It is gruesome work, and not all the villagers are up to the task. A man runs, retching. Jane’s nerves are strung so tight that every fey she studies seems to be at the end of a long tunnel of fog. Or perhaps that is the actual fog, insistent and cruel, hiding their attackers until they are too near. A farmer she knows by sight runs at her with a sharpened wooden pole and she thinks it is all up. But Charlie trips him, and his clumsy dead feet fall over her. Jane rolls and stabs the dead farmer with the iron. Tentatively, then harder, reminding herself that war is not a time for politeness, reminding herself that this friendly farmer is now a mask worn by the fey.
As the iron goes in, the fey dies. A fey in a human body is vulnerable; the state in which they have bodies to kill is the state in which they can be killed. Blue light ripples around the stave and turns stark white, crackles, keens—is gone. For good. The farmer slumps into the dirt.
“Good work,” Jane says to Charlie, who is ten feet off holding his iron bar. He smiles, that happy-boy smile she knows so well, and then a ball of orange-blue light and rock and glass falls behind him at his feet.
“Charlie!” she screams, and she runs toward him. I think I can bat the bomb away with my iron staff, I think—I do not know what I think. Time slows, and over his shoulder she sees the fey that threw it, a thin blue light with a carefully formed human face floating in its center. The face is exhausted, gloating.
Charlie has time to turn and see his death before it explodes.