“I was so worried when I heard the scream,” said Jane. She drew back. “What did you call me?”
“Pretty lady,” said Dorie. “Mother.” She hugged Jane harder and her affection billowed up bright and strong.
Jane put a shaky hand to her face. It was cold and smooth and when she ran her fingers along her cheek it was unscarred and whole. Confusion—if her cheek was unscarred, how was she still sensing Dorie’s feelings without the benefit of the fey curse? Was she immediately, full-on using the mask in the same way she’d used her curse? But that confusion seemed a minor detail compared to being called “Mother.”
“Where’s a mirror?” Jane said to Cook, but Cook frowned.
“Don’t know that you’ll be wanting to find one.”
The one on the landing, Jane suddenly remembered, and she led Dorie toward the garret, to the stairs where the mirror suddenly rushed out at you. Her steps faltered the closer she came.
No bandages, as she’d felt. But he had finished. The thin red line encircled her face where he’d finished his surgery.
But it was not the mask she’d seen last night—the beautiful version of her with the chipped forehead. “Dorie,” she said. “Whom did your doll look like?”
“Mother,” said Dorie, and Jane nodded, her gut cold as stone.
She had the face of the Mother doll.
Of the Fey Queen.
“Stay inside,” she told Dorie, and she ran down the stairs, pushing past Cook and out the back door, rocks stinging her bare feet. Everyone from the house had hurried out and stood, openmouthed, hands to hearts or mouths.
A fey hung in the air on the back lawn by the Maypole, a swirl of blue-orange light with an imaged face like the Mother doll, the fey Jane had seen in the clearing.
The Fey Queen.
Advancing on Nina.
Jane shouted at the crowd: “Get back inside!” and they looked at her, startled, as if trying to figure out who she was. Only a few of them obeyed.
But the Fey Queen listened. Instantly dropped Nina and shot through the air to Jane. Hung there in front of Jane, reflecting her new face back to her.
“You’re not taking my body,” Jane croaked.
“Made for me,” the fey said.
“He wouldn’t…” But the proof was on her face.
“Was your. Purpose here.” The swirls tightened; Jane felt the mental effort as the fey switched into a more human way of speaking. “He’s done it before.”
“Dorie’s mother…,” said Jane. But what had been nagging her about Edward’s story finally hit home. “She died almost five years ago. But Dorie is nearly six.”
“I am Dorie’s mother,” hissed the fey. “That form was just the bearer. I needed a body, so I found him a town girl, someone silly enough to be pleased by the master’s notice. Once I helped him seduce her, she was ours. A strong body, even in death. I kept that body a year before the villagers noticed the stink. Your live body will last me much longer. Decades, before it wrinkles and I kill it.” Pitiless eyes. “Once you’ve been the consort of the Fey Queen, you’ll do anything to regain that.”
“You lie,” said Jane desperately. “He has a conscience.”
“A conscience, bah. A human thing, and he is practically one of us. He was with us years and years, after all. You have seen his hands, yes? How he can sculpt beauty out of earth? We did not gift him with that. This is a talent worthy of the fey if ever there was one.”
“But he loves me,” Jane said softly, and somehow all that was left in the words was the wishful thinking of a silly girl. “I love him.”
The Queen sent a wave through her that somehow she knew was the fey equivalent of ostentatious yawning. “In one sense, you shall be with him,” the Queen said. “The other form is nice enough, but yours is the one designed for me. I have seen what you are made of, you know. Your mind will accept my patterns very nicely. We will go together well, after you succumb. I will have it.”
Then the blue-orange advanced on Jane, and Jane was too despairing to run, for the proof of what the Queen said was all too visible. He had given her the Queen’s face, and there could be no other interpretation of that.
She had no defenses, none, and then suddenly there was a wall of iron in front of her and the Fey Queen was crashing into it.
“Run,” said Poule, and she shoved her back toward the house, lifting her makeshift shield at the Queen.
Of course the Queen could go around iron, even a large piece of it, but the brief moment of surprise at hitting it dead on stunned the Queen so she only hung flickering for eight, ten seconds, before she could move again. Jane moved her nerveless feet faster and faster, flung herself over the iron threshold just as the Queen pounced on her ankles and came up with only air.