Ironskin

*

 

It took a good while to calm Niklas down, and even then he was fixated on the bit of fey that he had let walk through his door. “You say the last woman went mad. I believe it’s not just from the whole fey entering her, but from the piece of fey clinging to her face.” He clanked a metal prybar against his hand. “We must rip it off before it destroys your soul.”

 

“No!” She eluded him. “It’s the same thing, Niklas. This mask, or my cheek. It’s all the same. Either way they can come for me.”

 

Poule stepped in front of Jane, stared up at the big blacksmith. “And they can come for you, too.”

 

This stopped him.

 

“If there’s fey in you, they can take you over alive,” Jane said from behind Poule’s shoulders. “That’s what your curse is. A little bit of fey, attached to your body till you die. But you can use it against them, if you work at it. If you remove the iron and practice. You can use it as defense.”

 

“Remove the iron,” he said. “I bet this is the fey in you telling me to do that. Bet you’re already all fey, and I invited you in—”

 

“Hush,” said Poule. “Lay off Jane. This paranoia’s not the blacksmith I’ve heard about on family retreats deep in the dwarvven compound.”

 

“Heard about.” He grunted, stared at Poule.

 

Unperturbed by his gaze, Poule helped herself to a stool at his workbench and hoisted Dorie’s gloves out of her bag. “I’m working on a mask myself,” she said. “A rather special one. I hear you’ve got a tar suspension, and I also hear you’ve one of the finest minds for iron solutions outside of the dwarvven.”

 

Niklas grunted. “That’s as it may be.” His sharp eyes flicked to the mesh cloth that formed the gloves.

 

“’Course, if you can’t let go of your preconceptions, I can head back to the country now,” said Poule. “Otherwise, we might have some skills to trade.”

 

She held out a glove and after a pause, Niklas took it. He sat down at his bench and turned it over in his hands, examining the way the metal-threaded cloth moved and folded.

 

Several minutes passed in utter silence, but Jane felt the air in the room change, felt the dynamic shift as Niklas went from suspicion to grudging acceptance.

 

Poule winked at her. “You’d better get back to the party.”

 

“You’re all right then?” said Jane. “Niklas?”

 

Niklas grunted, not looking at her. But that had always been so.

 

Poule pressed bills into her hand for a hansom. “I’ll be back by midnight,” she said.

 

*

 

When Jane reached the house, the party was in full swing. It seemed an age since she’d seen the May Day preparations in the country—what, only yesterday morning? But where Silver Birch had been rustic, with its old-fashioned maypole and few guests, Helen’s house was sharp and polished. And crammed. Everyone who was anyone was there—Jane decided Helen must have hand-delivered the invitations, to let that fey glamour wash over her invitees.

 

Jane saw more than one fey face, now that she was looking for them. The Prime Minister’s wife. A duchess. A woman on the arm of a lord, who Gertrude whispered had been a dancing girl.

 

The Miss Davenports were there, too, and their eyes slid over Jane and refused to acknowledge her presence.

 

But they were the only ones. Jane was pulled into dance after dance, caught around the waist by eager male hands and swung in and out in gay, captivating rhythms. She was in her plain day dress of the day before, wrinkled and smudged from her journey—and yet it didn’t matter, for she had that face, and the face made whatever cloth she wore look like gold.

 

The adulation caught her, unsettled her, swung her in a dance between laughter and tears, but the boys seemed to find even her tears beautiful, and more than one gentleman made a giddy proposal of elopement to her. Jane accepted them all, for why not? There was only this one night in the bubble, for even though Jane did not know how it would all end, she knew like a hanging in the morning, it would.

 

It was the blackest hour of the night before she felt it.

 

Like Helen had said, that chittering under the wallpaper, and more, Jane thought, a sense of a growing storm, of funnel clouds in the nice fine ballroom, of that moment when every hair on your arms stands up and is electrified by the sky.

 

A fey in the house, that house without iron.

 

She felt it and suddenly the blue-orange blur seemed to be everywhere, homing in on the pretty ladies, the women with masks. The fey swooped back and forth, and suddenly there was blue in front of her eyes, and she was under attack.

 

But this fey was not the Fey Queen.

 

This was some ordinary fey, and she was pale in comparison with the Queen’s heat, and she was weak in comparison with the Queen’s murderous rage.

 

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