Copperhead

Chapter 13 WHAT THE HUNDRED DID

Helen moved among them, clasping hands and kissing cheeks. It was like some sort of twisted reunion, and they were all so pleased to see her. Some had been dozing, many were wide awake, but they all greeted Helen happily, with gay chatter or with calm fire. “We’re going to do this. We are,” she heard over and over. There was Calendula Smith. There was that dancing girl. There was Desirée. Helen could not find Alberta or Betty in the crowd, but there was Frye, presiding over it all in her billowy dragon-embroidered caftan, looking like the cat who swallowed the proverbial canary.

“They’re not all here,” Frye said, “as I was only one person with one day. But I made a big dent.” She gestured at the sea of dazzling beauty.

“Thank you,” said Helen. She felt like collapsing, but she straightened her spine, for it was her cue now. She moved into the center of the room, meeting their eyes and giving encouraging nods. There was a little carved bench and she stepped up, her apple green voile falling gracefully around her. She stood, feeling the slick wood under her heels, bracing herself. Her moment onstage.

“Frye brought you all here so we can reverse the damage done to us,” Helen said. “So we can all be safe. Safe without iron masks. Safe without being locked in our rooms.”

Nods of assent.

“But what we thought a simple procedure that my sister Jane could manage has blossomed into something more,” Helen continued. “Mr. Grimsby, the leader of Copperhead and the instigator of this curfew, is playing a dangerous game. Three nights ago he had one of the men of Copperhead kidnap my sister, leaving his wife caught in the fey sleep. We have found Jane, but … well. Let’s say the experience may have cost her.” She pointed to Jane, who was sitting on the floor in her torn and dirty grey dress, tracing the patterns in the carpet.

“Helen found her,” put in Frye from the sidelines. “She’s been putting the clues together. Risking herself.”

“Jane said we needed to all gather and change back now,” Helen said. “Which seemed reasonable enough, when she first said it. Except changing back now involves Mr. Grimsby, and this warehouse, and his invention that some of you saw a couple nights ago, the one that surged all the power in the house and zapped Jane. And I don’t know exactly what his plan is,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But he has all of our original faces. All at the warehouse with him.”

Gasps, denial. “No!” and “How do you know?”

Through the din, Helen pointed a finger at Calendula. “Because I saw one of them, plain as day,” she said.

Calendula went white and red all at once as shock warred with embarrassment. “Me, there,” she said. “The original.”

“All of us,” said Helen, cutting over the voices. “We’re all in this together.”

“But what’s he planning to do?”

Helen swallowed. “Something involving hooking us up to the machine. It drains us through the bit of fey in our faces, feeds some sort of power to the machine. I don’t know what he plans to do with the machine. But I saw him drain one of us. His wife.” One woman let out a sharp cry of sorrow at that, and Helen felt deep regret that she could not have told Millicent’s friend in a more measured fashion.

“So he has our faces as what, bait?”

“Perhaps,” said Helen. “Regardless, Jane said that all of us are supposed to gather there—tomorrow at noon.”

“You trust that?” someone said, pointing at carpet-tracing Jane.

“Clearly not,” Helen said, to both gasps and laughter. “No, it’s a trap,” she said. “And we have to spring it.”

Another wave of riot. “That actress didn’t say anything about danger,” said someone.

Another: “Thought this was making us safer.”

“We have to,” Helen shouted through the crowd, and the hold she had on them started to slip. “He’s got ten of us lined up for tomorrow. I heard him. They may be bait, but we have to rescue them.”

“And you think they’d do the same for us?”

“I came through curfew for this?”

The voices swelled, rose up loud and ugly. Underneath, another sound from the hall—thumps, bangs, and the loud clack of heels as Alberta burst into the room, disheveled and splattered with mud. “They got Betty,” she said. Silence fell as heads turned to look. “We were leaving her flat—and I had my eyes peeled for cops, you know—but this joe nobody on the street corner said, ‘Don’t you birds know not to break curfew,’ and then he turned and he had the copperhead pin on, and suddenly there was a black car pulling up and they grabbed Betty. And they got my scarf, but I twisted out and dodged them. I had to lose one of them on the way here.” She glanced behind her as if to double-check that they were still alone.

A low voice said into the shocked silence: “The first to fall.”

Across the room Helen caught Alberta’s eye. The one woman with more reason to keep her new face than anyone, and here they were at the moment of truth, and Helen didn’t know how Alberta would decide. Alberta nodded at Helen and came forward into the room, straightening out torn fabric and brushing off mud under everyone’s gaze. Helen said calmly to the room, “I want you to hear a little story first. Then you can decide if you want to stay or go home.”

In simple, plain language, Alberta told them of the husband she had fled. How her new face that made her vulnerable to the fey was the only thing that kept her safe from him. “But I’m tired of letting him win,” Alberta said. “And you’re all tired, too. Every day we go around with these new faces we’re in danger of our lives, and those lives aren’t even our own. They’re borrowed. Well, I’ve had it. I want my own life. I want my own face, my own city, and my own freedom. I want to walk around after dark whenever the hell I want. And I don’t want the fey, or Copperhead, or some damn husband telling me what I can and can’t do. I’m going to get my own face back and then I’m going to see my husband divorced and put behind bars. And then I’m going to go out after midnight and paint the town red. That’s what I’m going to do.”

They didn’t all nod, but many of them did, because the ones that were here were the ones who were brave enough to come through the night, break the curfew, come to Frye’s. Helen scanned the room, seeking out who was being swayed, who needed more convincing. She could do that. But not from a distance.

“We need your help,” said Helen, and she took center stage once more. “Frye did a lot, but there’s only one Frye. We’ve thirty-five of us here. Six have been done. The seventh … well. That means fifty-seven left to go—minus the ten he already has, but we don’t know who they are, so we can’t cross them off. Then a few people are listed by first name only. How many of those are there, Frye?”

“Five,” Frye answered immediately. “Women, think who of your acquaintances is spectacularly beautiful and answers to one of these: James, Marlys, Phyllis, Ulrich, Yvette.”

“Yvette Aubin!” shouted several women at once.

“James and Ulrich?” questioned another. “Do we want to get men involved?”

“Perhaps not,” said Helen. “There were only three of them, if I remember correctly. At least, if you do try to take the men on, feel them out cautiously before telling them what’s going on. If you see a hydra pin, run the other way.” Helen looked at Frye. “So what does that leave us, fifty-four?”

“Monica Preston-Smythe was taken by a fey last week,” someone said. “Her family hushed it up.”

“Fifty-three then,” said Helen, not missing a beat. Gallows humor. “All right, everyone. Go to Frye and collect one or two names.”

“I know Louisa Mayfew,” shouted one. “She isn’t here.”

“I know Agatha Flintwhistle. She’ll come if I have to threaten to uninvite her to next week’s dance.”

“Come to that, where’s my invitation?” joked Helen, and the woman shot back, “In the mail with everyone else’s,” which made everyone laugh and things grow a hair less tense.

“Good, good,” said Helen. “Between us we should know practically everyone on that list. Maybe we can figure out the rest of the cryptic notations. As soon as it’s light and curfew lifts, go. Convince your women they have to come meet us. We’re all in this together. And everyone bring iron. A knife or a hatpin or what-have-you.”

“Something sharp and poky,” shouted Frye.

“Right,” said Helen. “Together we’re a lot stronger than those men would believe. We’ll meet at the warehouse at noon.”

She stepped down, turned away from the center of the room, making way for the women to move to Frye and the journal. Some did. Some did not.

Helen drifted back toward the wall, watching the roomful of color ebb and flow. She was so tired, and they were not even all moving to Frye. And this wasn’t even half the women. If they could not even convince all these, how could they possibly convince all one hundred?

Over the shoulders of the crowd she saw a blond woman pushing her way to the door. Alberta was following her, trying to reason with her, but the blonde was agitated. Behind the blonde pushed a dark-skinned brunette, and then a pale redhead.…

Everything they had done. Helen could not bear to make more mistakes, and the huge rushing hollow in her heart could not tell her if it was worse to let them go or to make them stay.

But what was the point of power if you didn’t use it for good? She had been willing to change Alistair. She would have been willing to change Grimsby. She was losing Rook because she couldn’t trust herself not to change him, and if she was going to pay the penalty for the power, she should use what she was buying.

Helen pushed through them all until she blocked their frantic exit. They stared at her with their inherent fey glamour, but Helen had her own, and she was the one with practice wielding it, she was the one who knew what Frye had said. That you could convince.

One by one.

Helen touched soft hands, squeezed silk-clad shoulders. Looked into their eyes and, with the help of the fey intuition, saw what they were made of, told them what they needed to hear. For some, that was enough. For the rest, she gripped her copper necklace until they fell to her charm, blindly agreeing to go, to bring everyone here, to save them all. She was on her last wind, but every woman who fell to her power boosted her, bore her up. Perhaps I shouldn’t, Helen told herself each time, but I am and I will. She was setting all of her pieces in play to win.

Helen did not stop until she was looking around for another woman to convince and found they had all been done; that they all sat in clumps, little knots of color eagerly discussing plans and strategies for the morning. Alberta caught her as she stubbed her toe on a chair and fell, staggering.

“When did you last sleep?” Alberta said.

“A very long time ago,” said Helen.

“You can’t leave till dawn anyway,” said Alberta, and she pulled Helen through the throng and made her go into Frye’s guest room and lie down.

“But Jane, and Tam—,” said Helen.

“Asleep in the kitchen and under the piano, respectively,” said Alberta.

“And Mr. Grimsby, and the warehouse—” Helen’s mouth felt full of marbles. She was so tired now that she actually was on the bed, and lying down. Had Rook gotten away? Had they all? Helen could not think who had been trying to get away to where. Some people who were dear to her, all going home to the mountains, for good and always. So tired, and her eyes were shutting, shutting.…

“Ssh,” said Alberta, and turned out the light, and Helen slept.

They let her sleep too long. The house was eerily silent when she woke, and the slanting sunlight betrayed the hour of the morning. Helen shook out the skirts of the apple green voile she had not taken off. It was well-creased from sleep and she said to it, “You can withstand a trolley explosion but even you have limits.” She looked around, thinking that she would perhaps stretch Alberta’s kindness too far by borrowing—and then likely destroying, the way things had been going—one of her dresses, and her eye fell on a neat pile of clothes by the door. Someone had cleaned and pressed—and apparently, even mended—her herringbone suit from the day before.

She picked up the jacket, and the blouse, and the skirt you could not really climb in, and below that was one more neatly folded item, and she shook it out and found it was a pair of trousers. “Well, then,” she said, and took off the apple green voile and put them on. They had not been Frye’s, for they were only a little big, and she belted them with the accompanying belt, and put on the blouse and herringbone jacket, and put her hands on her hips, contemplating.

She strode out into the rest of the house before she could think too hard about it. Jane and Tam were in the kitchen, frying bacon with one of the piano players—Stephen—for company. Everyone else appeared to be gone on their tasks. Jane looked lost and Tam looked as though he had a hangover. Brilliant sun streamed through the narrow windows, erasing the usual November fog.

“I think you’re loony,” Stephen said in a chummy gossipy voice, not turning around from his bacon. “A hundred of you girls against those fey? Against that awful Grimsby person who runs Copperhead? You know he’s attempting to have the Prime Minister tried for treason, don’t you?”

“Not girls,” said Jane. “Women.”

“Semantics,” Stephen said cheerfully. “Here, eat up before you go into battle.”

“It’s not battle,” said Helen. “We’re just going to show up and take our faces back. Oh, and take apart his weapon, whatever the heck it is. Then leave.” She began to repin her hair, using a small round mirror hanging between the show posters. It was funny, but she felt as though she moved differently in the slacks. They were just clothes, weren’t they? And yet she of anyone should know the difference that clothes made.

“Bacon, bacon, bacon,” said Stephen, dropping it onto plates. “And what’s to stop him from making another weapon?”

“Well, he won’t have us to do it with,” Helen said to the reflection. “There’s that.”

“He didn’t exactly have his wife’s permission, did he?” said Stephen.

“How did you know about that? I didn’t think you were here last night.”

Stephen shrugged. “Jane’s been telling us the whole story. How you went to look in the warehouse window last night and saw him there. Oh, and talking to someone in a sort of fey trance. Did she make it all up?”

Helen sat down at the table, straddling the back of the chair because she could, and looked hard at Jane. “You know things,” she said. “I didn’t mention those details.”

“I know things,” Jane said dreamily.

“Listen, Jane,” Helen said. “There’s a fey inside you. I know it.”

Tam raised his head from his hands, looking wide-eyed at Jane.

Jane suddenly backed up from the table, skittering away, and Helen cursed herself for a fool. “He’s not, he’s not,” she said, eyes wide. “He’s not.”

“What do you mean, he’s not?”

Jane closed her eyes. “He comes and goes,” she said. “Sometimes I vanish. Sometimes I see everything. I saw you in the warehouse. I saw Millicent. I saw her go out into everything, searching into all the blue. And then … go.”

Stephen looked from one to the other, eyes wide.

“Tell me,” Helen said urgently, and she gripped the back of the chair. “Are you Jane now? Can you tell?” She did not know what this sometimes business was and yet it fit with everything she’d seen so far. She had thought Jane was warring with a fey that lived inside her. But how could the fey come in and out? Jane herself had said several months ago that the fey could not do that. Once they went into a person they were there until death—their death, or the body’s.

Jane’s eyes darted around. She seemed unable to speak.

“Tell me,” Helen pressed. Subconsciously her hand closed on the copper necklace. “Tell me.”

Jane’s mouth opened. “That’s him,” she said, pointing at the necklace. “That’s him too.”

They all looked at the copper hydra. The necklace that had been clinging around Helen’s neck like a snake itself ever since Alistair had given it to her. The necklace that did not want to come off. Helen started to pull it off and said, “That’s silly, Jane. How could a necklace be a fey?” She let it fall again.

“Copper’s not poison to fey,” said Stephen. “Back when we had all the bluepacks—bits of fey I guess they were—you put them in copper casings to run things.”

“I think my lapel pin’s hollow,” said Tam. “Maybe they all are.” He rubbed bleary eyes, peering at Helen’s hydra charm as if he were much older.

“It seems so silly to want to take it off,” said Helen. “And now that’s making me feel very disturbed. Why don’t I want to take it off?”

“You should keep it on,” Jane said dreamily.

“I think not,” said Helen. But her hands did not move.

“I’m not touching it,” said Stephen.

“I’ll do it,” said Tam. He scrambled off his chair and clambered up on the one next to Helen, binoculars waving. Carefully he stood and reached for the necklace. “It feels … funny,” he said. “Like a friend.”

“Don’t trust it,” said Helen.

Tam grasped the chain and carefully lifted it from around Helen’s neck. Instantly Helen felt the compulsion to keep it on lessen. She could see it as just a pretty necklace. “It likes me,” Tam said. He stroked the copper heads. “It likes Jane. Mostly it just wants to go home.”

“What are you, the fey whisperer?” said Stephen. He looked at Helen with disgust. “Did you know you’d been walking around with that on?”

“Of course not,” said Helen. Although she should have known. She had been able to do more with it, hadn’t she? “Give it here,” she said suddenly to Tam.

Obediently he handed it to her, and she cradled the little piece of copper in her hand. It was hard to believe it had a piece of fey captured inside. And yet … “It likes Jane, you say?” Helen looked at Jane. “Like should call to like, I think,” she murmured.

“What are you—oh,” said Jane. She put her hands to her face.

“Come here,” Helen crooned. “Come here.”

Jane’s face lit up a strange fey-blue for a moment, then faded away.

“Did you see that?” Helen said.

Tam put a hand to Jane’s face. “It wants to come,” he said. “It wants to join the one in the necklace.”

Helen cupped her hands around the necklace and tried again. “Come here,” she said. “Come here.”

Again the blue rose to the surface. It started to spin out toward Helen, blue smoke tendrils curling through the air.

“Come here,” Helen told it, and she could see it trying.

“Stop it,” Stephen said suddenly. “You’re hurting Jane.”

Helen looked and saw that Jane’s face was dead white where the blue had left it, pink around the edges like a curling ribbon. Like her face was lifting away.

“Her face,” Helen said.

“Don’t they all have fey in their faces?” said Stephen. “The Hundred?”

“Oh no, oh no,” said Helen, and she tried to reverse the command, tell the bit of fey to return to Jane. “It’s the bit of fey that animates the clay on her face,” she said. “Without it it wouldn’t act like skin.”

“She wouldn’t have a face,” said Tam.

“Or anything,” said Stephen, for Jane was having trouble breathing now. She gasped for air, her skin dead white.

“Go back, go back,” crooned Helen as fervently as she had bid it come to her. But the fey in Jane’s face had tasted freedom, felt its bit of fellow fey in the necklace. Helen grasped the necklace tightly, enclosed the fey in her hand. “Go back to Jane.”

Tam reached over and grabbed Helen’s fist in his two little hands. “Go back,” he told the fey, along with Helen. “Go back.”

Slowly, slowly, the blue returned to Jane. It sank in and disappeared, and as it did, pink life returned to her cheeks, and she started to breathe normally again.

Helen seized Jane in her arms and hugged her close, patting the dark hair. “Well, that didn’t work,” Helen said, with a touch of hysteria at the understatement.

“What were you trying to do?” said Stephen.

“I thought there was fey in her. Like a whole fey. I thought I could make it come out. But I guess all the fey is only that little bit it’s always been. How can that be a problem? We all have that, and Jane knows how to deal with it.”

Under her arms, Jane stirred. “Because it’s the same fey that’s in your necklace,” she croaked. “It belongs to the same entity.”

“Jane!” shouted Helen. She seized her sister’s hands and sank down next to her. “It’s you! It is. Tell me what just happened.”

Jane shook her head, and her green eyes held all the intelligence and fire they once had. “I feel as though you wiped the fey clean for a moment,” she said. “It may not have done what you wanted, but it shook it up. It’s just a little piece again. And I’m me.” She shook her head, seeming to remember all the times she’d made similar claims over the last day and a half. “Me for real. I promise.”

Helen narrowed her eyes. “Do you remember coming in and out before? And the memory gaps, and the confusion, and telling us things like go to the warehouse?”

Jane grimaced. “Yes. It has been very strange—and by strange I mean terrifying. Like a dream where you are half-asleep, and sometimes you can make the right words come out, and sometimes you can’t.”

“So what do you mean about a fey that’s the same as the fey in the necklace? And why would that matter?”

Jane swallowed, felt around her forehead delicately, as if seeing if her face was still attached. “I’ve been thinking, very slowly, way in the back of my mind. A fey needs a piece of fey to attach to to enter somebody,” she said. “And we always thought if a fey took someone over, they were stuck there.”

“Unless they’re killed with iron, or the host dies,” said Helen.

“I think this fey has found a loophole,” said Jane. She looked directly at Helen, who knew her next words, a sad blow to the heart. “I was taken over by a fey.”

Stephen gasped. Tam looked on somberly.

“He calls himself the Fey King,” said Jane. “He’s very strong—as strong as the Fey Queen was. Maybe that’s part of it. But he’s able to come and go. Sometimes I have no control, other times I have a little, but I’m dazed. It’s not like when the Fey Queen tried to take me. She was ready to wipe me clean. He—it’s almost like he wants me to be able to use my body. But he wants to use it, too.” She shuddered. “Sometimes I would be cut out completely, and then I felt lost in the back of my own mind, trying to fight my way out. He’s been going in and out since the night in the garret, but he always had a toehold in my mind. Watching. You shook him out for a moment.”

“But why—?” said Helen. “How? How can he do this?”

“Do you remember that I told you that I suspected the Fey Queen took over Edward occasionally?” Jane looked sideways at Stephen, a little embarrassment showing at talking about the delicate situation of her fiancé. “I’ve often wondered how she could. I think it was because the fey in his hands was a part of her. Not just some random fey, but part of the Fey Queen specifically. Somehow that made it possible for her to slip in and out without getting stuck in the host body.”

“And this?” said Helen.

“I think the fey in my mask once belonged to the Fey King,” Jane said.

“And the fey in your necklace, too,” said Tam.

They all looked at Helen’s necklace, dangling gently from her fingers, swaying in the still air.

“Get rid of it,” said Stephen.

“Does it make you do things?” said Jane.

“I don’t think so,” said Helen. “I can do things with it. It’s given my power a boost.”

“You think. But maybe he’s making you. You don’t know.”

Helen’s fingers closed around the necklace. “You,” she told Jane firmly, “have been in and out of it the last few days. Loopy as a crocheted curtain. I’ve had to do everything.”

“But listen, Helen.”

“No, you listen,” Helen said. “I’m the one who’s been here. I’m the one who’s been putting all of this together while everyone is drunk and off their heads around me. I know what I’m doing.”

Jane raised her eyebrows. It was completely infuriating, and it made Helen close her hand tightly on the necklace. It was warm and comforting in her hand—a tangible source of the power she’d never had. She had made Alistair change, she had made The Hundred change, and she would win this war yet.

Small fingers tugged her fist open, took the copper snake away. Tam looked apologetically up at Helen, but said, “You don’t really want this.” He threw it down on the table, and with a strange, set expression, ripped off his lapel pin and put it there, too. “It can see us,” he said in a voice that rose high. “He sees out of them.” He looked around—saw the iron skillet. He kneeled up on his chair, hefted it with both hands, and dumped it with all its bacon grease on top of the two copper-covered bits of fey. “I always wondered how my father knew everything I was up to.”

“Oh, Tam—”

“He’s not my father,” he shouted, and his voice broke.

“Oh, Tam—,” Helen repeated helplessly. She pulled him into a hug.

“You might have cleaned out the pan first,” said Stephen. Helen glared at him. “Oh, sure, blame me for saying what we all were thinking.” He pushed his chair back from the table, throwing his napkin onto the rivulets of bacon grease oozing out from under the pan. “Well, I’m off. Another day in the salt mines.”

“I thought your Saucy Whatnot wasn’t going forward,” said Helen. She reluctantly let go of Tam as he sat up, rubbing his face.

“Men in drag,” said Stephen. He took his coat from his chair and headed down the hall, saying over his shoulder, “Only one man has quit in solidarity with the women so far—the rest are all ‘The show must go on.’” He shrugged. “Besides, I rather like the music. Cheerio.”

Stephen opened the front door, and from down the hall they could hear another voice saying, “Pardon me, is Miss Eliot within?”

“Edward!” said Jane. “Dorie!” She rose to run to them, and, turning white with the effort, hurriedly sat back down. The man entering broke into a run at the sight of her, seized her close.

Helen felt a funny shock of pain at the sight of their happiness. She firmly swallowed it and looked down the hall to where a small figure was standing by the door. “Dorie,” she said. She seemed to remember that Dorie was not much for being touched, so she merely went down the hall, and beckoned her to come in and join them at the table.

Like her father, Dorie was neatly dressed, but the seams of her dress betrayed where they had been let out, and both outfits had places that had been carefully mended. At the clothes the resemblance ended, for Dorie looked like a china doll, with blond ringlets, blue eyes, and a rosebud mouth, whereas Edward Rochart tended to gauntness and was not conventionally handsome. One of his hands had two stiffened fingers; the other was ruined, the fingers stiff and curled in—he usually kept that hand in his pocket.

Mr. Rochart stood, clasping Jane’s hand with his mostly good one. “You’re holding up well,” he said to Helen, his eyes traveling over the face that he had created. He sighed and turned to Jane. “I wish I could help you restore all the faces, but—” He gestured with his crippled hands.

Jane laid a good hand on his ruined ones. “No,” she said. “I’ll be able to finish this task.”

“Not until you rest,” he said. “And more than that, we need to get the fey out of you.”

“We tried—but it looked as though it would make things worse,” said Helen.

“Let me consult,” Mr. Rochart said. “Dorie?” He turned to see Dorie and Tam sitting cross-legged on the floor together, both apparently entertained by something; Helen couldn’t think what.

Tam turned, and for the first time that morning a hint of a smile crossed his face. “Look what she can do!” he said.

Helen’s eyes widened as she saw that the little girl’s hand had disappeared, replaced by a hand of fey blue.

“Dorie,” said Mr. Rochart with some asperity. “Not now. Come and look at Miss Eliot. Can you lend your talents to study her? She’s not strong enough to resist the Fey King from coming back. We need to keep him out.”

Dorie obediently crossed to Jane, who smiled and hugged her close. Dorie’s hand of misty blue touched Jane, and Jane very obviously tried not to flinch, even as she kept her tight hug on the girl. Dorie shook her head. “Can’t get it out,” she said. “Give her a mask.”

“Is there damage? Is she all right?”

Dorie nodded. “Sure.”

“Please make your hand back into a human hand now,” Jane said patiently. Dorie sighed and obeyed.

Mr. Rochart sighed, an echo of his stubborn little girl. “This is part of what we were doing in the woods,” he said. “Dorie has fey heritage. She’s determined to find out more about what it’s going to mean for her future. We have a fey guide.…”

“And I still say there are safer ways to ‘explore heritage’ than go into that forest,” Jane put in, spots of color rising to her cheeks. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.” It was clear this was an old argument, and Helen briefly wondered if that was part of the reason Jane had refused to talk about Edward lately.

“Fey are dangerous,” said Mr. Rochart. “Capricious, even. But they’re not vicious. Not the mass of them—and most of them aren’t in the forest now, regardless.”

“No, they’re all in the city,” said Helen.

“Without a leader, they prefer just drifting around,” said Mr. Rochart. “The Fey Queen ruled for a thousand years. She molded them into shape. She started the trade with the humans. And she instigated the fey punishment of forcing them to split into pieces whenever they were being punished—the trade literally consisted of bits of fey, you know. Without her, they’d be more like the copperhead hydra—deadly if it strikes, but you can avoid it, or avoid provoking it. It wouldn’t come seek you out.”

“Bad analogy,” murmured Helen irrepressibly. She rose and started cleaning up the bacon grease for something to do. “Mr. Grimsby is very fond of seeking The Hundred out. He’d like to strike us all down.”

“And the fey,” said Jane.

“And the dwarvven,” said Helen.

“And all women really, and…,” said Jane.

“Wait, Mr. Grimsby?” said Mr. Rochart, interrupting this litany. “I don’t understand why he’d be so set against fey faces. He has one himself.”

Helen looked at him in dead shock.

“If it’s the same Mr. Grimsby,” said Mr. Rochart. “It was quite a while ago, but it was a very different case. Not like most of the clients. He had an unusual given name—Uriah or Ulysses, something like that.”

“There was a name like that in the journal,” Helen said slowly.

“Ulrich,” Jane said quietly. To Rochart she said, “It was only in your notes by the first name.”

“He was a very private man,” Mr. Rochart agreed. “I’m trying to recall the details. There’d been an accident of some sort.…”

“The motorcar accident,” Helen said. She felt all trembly and she sat down hard. “That’s what Mary said. He was in an accident with his wife. He went through the windshield. He … he must have been cut up all over his face. You can still see the scars in his hair, but they stop, just over his ears—” She looked at Mr. Rochart in horror.

“That’s correct,” said Mr. Rochart. “He wanted to look the same again. Not handsome.”

“And then no one ever suspected him of having fey in his face,” said Helen. “Because he’s—”

“Hideous,” said Jane.

“Mary said he changed because he hit a dwarvven,” Helen said. “That he went mad from guilt.” She shook her head. “But that wasn’t it at all.” She remembered the moment in the attic when he had seemed genuinely sad about Millicent. “It’s just like Jane,” she said. “Sometimes the old Mr. Grimsby comes out. But mostly—”

“He’s been taken over by the Fey King,” Jane finished. She looked quite ill. “The same one who controlled me. But why start Copperhead? They hate the fey.”

But Helen knew these kind of social mind games. You turned on whoever was necessary to rally your circle together, make you come out on top in the end. “It was the best way to get power,” she said. “And it explains so clearly why Copperhead has that weird bent against the dwarvven as well.”

“But you said he destroyed a fey. In front of everyone.”

“What better way to demonstrate his loyalty?” said Mr. Rochart.

Helen nodded. “To get into closed circles, you turn on your dearest, most unfashionable friend, and you destroy her.” She thought back to the warehouse. “But his machine then, the one that your friend Niklas made. Grimsby can’t be planning to destroy all the fey with it. That would be too far.”

“Niklas has gotten quite fanatical,” Jane admitted. “But he wouldn’t have made something to harm humans.”

“No,” said Helen. “But Grimsby’s been making ‘improvements’ to it—so who knows what its real purpose is? Well. Not the real Grimsby, of course. That horrible Fey King, making Mr. Grimsby destroy his own wife. Just like he made you…” The sentence trailed off as Helen saw Jane realize what she had done on the trolley.

Jane went ashen. The horror penetrated her bones, followed a split-second later by the mind-numbing, irrevocable guilt, and Helen felt it all along with her, because of her fey empathy and because it was her sister and she could not bear it.

A bewildered Mr. Rochart was reaching out to comfort Jane, but Helen seized her sister and helped her cry. With wet eyes she looked at Jane’s fiancé and said, “Even if you two wanted to come help us stop Grimsby, you can’t. Jane must stay here. You must stay with Jane.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Rochart. And Helen carefully helped Jane to sit up, and brought her more tea, and watched her looking at nothing as if she was taken by the fey all over again, and felt her heart crack even as she was glad to be the strong one, the one who was there for her sister.

Jane shook her head, trying to turn her thoughts away from what she had been made to do, trying to bear up under the combination of starvation, brainwiping, and anguish. “So long,” she whispered to Helen, and her face was white and red as her empathy for others poured out. “He’s been taken over for so long. His poor son.” Jane looked at Tam, who was playing on the floor with Dorie. Softly said, “His mother gone. His stepmother. And his father—?”

“Has long been dead,” said Helen softly in response. She remembered that moment when Grimsby had wept at Millicent’s side and amended her statement. “Or at least, there’s only a sliver of him left inside. I don’t know if it can come back out.”