Poule shook her head. “Every time I thought I saw her, she vanished. No telling whether that’s Dorie.…” Or something in Dorie, she did not say.
Jane’s heart twisted, thinking about it. Perhaps she should have grabbed the little girl, stolen her away. She could be here right now, safe on Jane’s lap.
“You’re no safer here than in the country,” said Poule.
“You’ve said as much,” said Jane.
“What I don’t understand,” said Poule, “is that they could’ve taken you, or any of the ironskin over at any time. They didn’t have to wait for Edward to put on the masks.”
“They could,” said Jane. She had been thinking about the moment in the clearing, when the fey had seemed to invade and reject her. “But they wouldn’t take over ironskin, unless that was the only option. They’re drawn to beauty. I was practically unclean to them.”
“Huh,” said Poule. “A thousand centuries of trade with them, and yet I’ll never understand the blasted things, I guess.”
“But what is fey substance?” said Jane. “The curses, the bluepacks—are they the same? Is it like spider silk?”
“Well, that’s the part the dwarvven did seem to have right. Speaking of trade, you see. The fey have a complicated punishment system that I don’t even want to know about because the little I do know is deeply disturbing. But all the fey tech we have—the blue lights, cameras, your mask, everything—is essentially little pieces of a split-up fey. Not big enough to be a full entity that can think and act on its own. But a bit of captured and divided substance. The fey themselves.”
“Heavens,” Jane said faintly. Her fingers touched her new face. Edward had a bit of the actual fey in his hands. The clay must have fey worked through it. And those bombs—little torn-off bits of themselves, coiled around the fire and the shrapnel, to attach like leeches to the victim.
“When the time of the punishment is over, all those little split-up pieces are automatically released. A thousand lights—or what-have-you—die at the same moment as all the pieces of fey rush back to form one whole fey again, back in the forest.”
“So all the time we were trading with the fey, they were selling us—bits of themselves?” said Jane. The thought made the hair on her arms stand on end.
“Yes,” Poule agreed. “I’d take a good old-fashioned turn on the dwarvven rack any day over that kind of punishment.”
Poule stopped the car outside the gated entrance to Niklas’s forge, and Jane said: “But why did you come all this way to get me? Why really?”
The short woman twisted her grey braid away from her face, considering her words. “Because,” she said finally, “because we don’t have a solution to this. And we need one.”
“And…?”
“And it’s going to come through you. You’re the only one I know of who ever bested the fey at their own game. Edward used the fey in his hands for six, seven years, and I’m telling you you have to be bloody strong to do that and not go completely off your rocker. The dwarvven have experience blocking fey wiles in general. But you’re the first to take their curse and turn it against the blasted things. I don’t say you’re special—”
“Thanks,” Jane muttered.
“—only that you figured out how to do it, and that’s got to be the key somehow to stop what they’re doing. Else—”
“Else what hope do we have against them,” said Jane. “Edward’s probably done a hundred people by now. And naturally, all rich and well placed, or they wouldn’t have had the money to do it.”
Poule nodded, then looked inside Niklas’s compound. “Is he trustworthy?”
“Yes,” said Jane, and she pulled the handle.
This time it was Niklas himself who came to the gate, erect and striding despite the singlet of iron she knew was underneath the black leather. Suspicion grew on his face the closer he got. “If it’s charms you’re after, you’d better see one of the fancy shops in town.” His eyes darted between them as if he could not decide who needed more puzzling out, but then finally they stayed on Poule and he said, slowly, “You’re one of the dwarvven, ain’t you now?” He pronounced it nearly as well as Poule.
“Half,” said Poule.
“Don’t hold with half-bloods myself,” he said. “You don’t know where you stand then, do you.”
He seemed twice Poule’s size, but the woman merely folded her arms and looked up at him, considering. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You do that ironskin that doesn’t work.”
Jane interfered. “Please, Niklas, let us in. I’ll explain everything.”
“I know your voice,” he said, unlocking the gate. “But that face—it seems like something I know but wish I didn’t.”
Jane squeezed inside before he could change his mind. “I’m Jane,” she said, “and I’m wearing the Fey Queen’s face.”