Copperhead

Chapter 14 WHAT ALISTAIR DID

The Hundred met on the cobblestoned alley by the warehouse. Well, not quite a hundred. Despite all their best efforts, some of the women simply couldn’t be convinced—and then, of course, there were those who could not be found. Still, there were a lot of them, and they spilled out around the building in hues of violet and buttercup and rose. They were beautiful. They were delicate. They were mad.

Helen went among the newest ones, shaking hands and turning on her fey-enhanced charm to make sure they were fully rallied to the cause. She talked to them face-to-face, and then she had them pull their iron masks on and buckle them securely. By the time she had made the entire rounds, everyone except for her had on their full iron mask.

Now they looked grim. Even in their sea of beautiful dresses they were frightening with their identical iron grey faces. Helen smiled to herself at how delightfully awful they looked in the shining silks and glinting metal. The world was bathed in sunlight; the snow of last night was melting rapidly, and Helen found she was not particularly missing her wool coat. The slacks were a good deal warmer than the voile, or for that matter, than the skirt that usually went with the jacket. Helen took a deep breath of the crisp and river-stenched air as she made her way to Frye, identifiable as always by her trousers.

“The doors aren’t even locked,” said Frye. “It can’t be this easy, can it? That we just walk in?”

Helen grimaced. “I doubt it. But what else can we do? How else do you spring the trap?”

Frye shook her head, then grinned. “That’s why you’re the ringleader of this circus,” she said. “You get to make the hard decisions.”

“Yeah,” Helen muttered, and then a flash of movement behind Frye caught her attention. “Tam?”

He crept around Frye, wearing his binoculars and explorer hat and a stubborn look. “I followed you,” he said.

“Tam—,” she began.

He cut in quickly, “Dorie said you might need this after all.” He held out a copper hydra charm, shiny with wiped-off bacon grease.

She took it from him and said, “And now you must go home. We have to face your—”

“It’s not my father in there,” said Tam. “You know it’s not. I have to see.”

“It’s not a good place for you to be,” said Helen gently. “Besides, that creature looks like your father. That’s going to be hard.”

He set his lips in a line and she remembered Charlie picking up a staff and saying he was going in to fight.

It was hard no matter where you were. It was hard whether you stayed back, or went in, and though she would have protected him from this with her last breath she also would not stop him now. She looked up at Frye, who looked quite sympathetic to Tam’s cause. “You two stay to the rear,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Frye.

“And if it looks at all as though he’s in danger, you take him away.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Frye again.

Helen looked down at Tam. “You swear to obey Frye? This isn’t a free-for-all. There are rules in war.”

He nodded, and Helen shook her head with the tension. Frye clapped her on the back. “Cheer up. You only live once.”

Gallows humor again. Helen smiled because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

It was eerily silent from within the warehouse. She held the shiny necklace in the palm of her hand and concentrated, studying the way the warehouse lit blue when she focused on it. She let go and the light faded. The women milled about, chattering, but she knew the nervous energy, the anticipation, would shortly turn to funk and gloom if they didn’t move soon. None of these women had done anything like this, knew what they were up against.

Helen squared her shoulders. Nobody knew what they were up against. Nobody had faced down a fey leader except her sister, six months ago.

And what Jane could do, so could she.

“All right, women!” Helen shouted. No need for a surprise attack. Whoever was inside knew the women were here, not least because Grimsby surely knew of Helen’s whereabouts through the necklace she held. Well then, let him see. She held it up as she moved through the crowd to the front, and shouted: “Everyone is in charge of finding your own face, first and foremost. As soon as you do that, focus on finding the women they’ve captured and freeing them. Don’t get distracted by whatever the men do. If we take back what we own, they lose control over us.” She took a deep breath. “Iron masks secure? Now. In we go!” Helen flung open the warehouse doors.

The room was a thick cloud of fey blue that swirled and blew. Helen could not see her hand in front of her face. She felt her way forward—and then shouts from behind made her turn.

Helen whirled to see the women behind her being pulled to the side of the warehouse as if being sucked under by a wave. In a clear space in the blue fog she saw a large strange machine that whirled and made a loud thrumming sound. The little iron letter opener Frye had lent her slipped through her fingers, slicing them as they went, and flew toward the machine.

“Masks off, everyone!” Helen shouted. “It’s magnetic.”

So this was part of the trap—they had to advance without protection. Several women helped those who had been caught get unbuckled.

The blue cleared as Helen stepped forward. Inside the cloud she saw them. The men. Twenty or so of the highest-ranking members of Copperhead. Alistair’s friends.

Each one stood in front of a supine body. A caged woman, a funnel attached to her perfect face. And in the middle of the room, sucking all their fey power into the copper hydra box—Grimsby.

Helen’s heart broke as she saw those women. Some she knew, instinctively, without seeing their faces. She knew the missing ones of The Hundred—and some of them had the misfortune to be the wives and girlfriends of Alistair’s friends. Without a doubt she knew that Morse, for example, was standing next to the body of his very own wife. And there, next to Hattersley—poor Betty, who had been supposedly taken by the police for curfew violation.

Heart beating rapidly, she looked for Alistair, but she could not find him. She almost laughed in relief, but then he advanced out of the shadows and said, “Grimsby wishes me to tell you your presence is requested.”

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I am appointed emissary,” he said dreamily. “Ambassador. Go-between. We men understand that sacrifices must be made in war. Today, we will annihilate the fey. We would like you to assist in the glorious cause.”

“You men understand very little,” said Helen sharply. “We do not choose to lay down our lives for some fey’s nefarious plot.”

There was movement then, and she heard some of the men shifting in concern at her words, but whether at the “lay down our lives” or “fey” she did not know.

Alistair turned wide dreamy eyes on her. “Our leader has assured us that none of you will be permanently harmed,” he said. “If anything, you may come out of it more docile and sweet-tempered, which surely you would rejoice to hear.”

Helen smiled then, with all her teeth. “You may tell Grimsby—or rather, that fey living in him—that our presence is neither necessary nor required. Except that we will get what we came for.”

“You think so?” he said with curiosity.

The blue sharpened and the men stood straighter.

Helen set her jaw. “To your faces!” she shouted to The Hundred, and they all poured in. Their iron letter openers and scissors and kitchen knives had been taken by the magnets, but they came with fingernails. They came with copper hatpins. They came with the golden pins of diamond brooches. They came, and they came, pouring into that cold warehouse.

It is almost like a dream, how she stands above them all and sees the wave of women break and flow around the jutting rocks of men. She sees potato-faced Boarham rub his hands together and say, They really did all come, Grimsby, how clever of you—before falling under a sea of sherbet silk. Yes, that is Lady Dalrymple, leading that charge. And there, Agatha Flintwhistle, unhooking faces one by one, handing them carefully to Louisa Mayhew. Tam clambers up the crates like a monkey to throw random junk at the men’s unprotected heads, and Frye whoops and hollers whenever he scores a shot. Alberta stands near them all, whacking men with a wooden bat when they get too close. How clever of Alberta to prepare for the human enemy instead of fey, Helen thinks, for the men did not have a plan to ward off bats.

She sees Calendula Smith, leading a battalion of women in an organized attack into the heart of the room, where Morse and the others are attempting to keep their women tied to their beds. Hattersley has pushed Betty’s bed away from the others—she can’t tell if it’s to keep Betty safe or to deliver her to Grimsby for some even more nefarious purpose. Calendula barks orders like a lieutenant, and the women work together to loosen wrists and ankles, to push and shove and kneecap the men. Calendula herself overpowers scrawny Morse and pushes him with all her sturdy bulk onto the bed, holds him down while another woman ties him up. A lewd comment falls from his lips—another women stuffs rags in his mouth and then nobody has to hear him.

The men are strong, but there are more of the women. And the men are not really expecting a battle. Helen sees that again and again, sees the surprise in their eyes when a pack of beautiful ladies plows into them and bites.

But surprise only works for so long. The men remember that they know how to box and hit, that they have a warehouse full of scrap wood and metal they can pick up and swing. The fighting wears on and she sees the Prime Minister’s wife crumple under a powerful blow from Boarham. Helen herself has been methodically going where she is needed, where she sees a woman alone and outnumbered. It has all been very numb and she is surprised to find she has tears in her eyes when she looks down and sees Calendula Smith’s old face crumpled on the floor, the forehead twisted and smashed from a vicious twist of a heel.

In the blurriness she stands, and there is a man bearing down on her with a lead pipe. There is no time, and suddenly a copper knife flashes out and into the man’s arm, and he stumbles, and drops the pipe. “Iron allergy,” Desirée says to Helen with satisfaction. “Magnets didn’t catch me.” Desirée picks up her copper knife and grins fiendishly at the bleeding man, and he turns and runs out of the warehouse.

He’s not the only one who has run, Helen notices. There are fewer men than there were when they charged in, and some of the ones left are tied up or otherwise indisposed. Backlit by the open warehouse doors she sees Hattersley helping Betty pick her stilettoed way over machine parts and fallen bodies. They flee out the door and Helen watches them go with a mixture of pride and disappointment. They are not the only couple to leave together, and though she is glad that some of these Copperhead husbands are still open to being persuaded to reason, she also wishes more men had turned to fight against their old party as soon as it was clear that not all was as Grimsby said. She remembers again how Alistair spoke of avoiding the Great War five years ago—he paid a poor soldier to take his place. The men of her generation, the ones that are left, are cowards.

Helen wades back to help free the remaining women and faces, to unhook, uncouple, release that machine. She turns and there is Rook, working alongside her and suddenly everything snaps clearly back into focus and they are alone in the midst of a battle.

Like in the dance.

Like in the trolley.

He was there, helping them. He had been there all along.

“You missed your boat,” was all she could think to say.

“I stayed,” he said. “I had to see finished what I started.”

“But how will you get home?” She did not want him to leave and yet the words kept coming out.

His mouth set and he shrugged. “Take a passenger boat. Or go overland. I can’t crew a ship but I do know how to walk.”

“You can’t possibly walk all that way,” she said. “I’ll give you money for the train if you need it.”

“Alistair’s money?” he said, and she reddened.

She matched the intentional rudeness with coldness of her own, retreated into ice. “I suppose my husband can spare it.”

His lips twisted, and he said, “There’s always a husband.”

She wanted to break then, to let the floodgates open but here they were in a battle, and she was too tired to see anything but the future she had already laid out, that she would go one way and he another.

The silence lengthened until his moment of levity fell away, and he said softly, bitterness tracing his tongue, “I suppose you can make him be how you want,” he said. “Keep him so he’s never himself again.” He turned away and she heard the last words called back, “He’ll never have to know how he’s failed you.”

She stood there, heart beating. Keep him so he’s never himself again. What had she done to Alistair?

She was no better than the Fey King, changing Grimsby to suit himself. She remembered Grimsby in that moment of kneeling at Millicent’s side, crushed and heartbroken. A moment when he was free from the Fey King’s spell. When he could be his own person, make his own mistakes.

What had she done to The Hundred?

When did the end stop justifying the means?

Helen moved out into the remains of the melee, moved among the women as if in a daze, undoing what she had done. They fought hand to hand for control of their faces, themselves, and she reached out and touched them, and told them silently to make their own mistakes, live without her command.

She expected a rout. That the battle would suddenly swing back the other way, even with fewer men left to fight.

But she had misjudged them.

There were women who had been afraid. There were women who had been brave. There were women who had been weak and strong and sharp and tough and feeble and clever. Helen could not tell who was who as they wrestled for themselves, to win the day.

The battle was dying down now. The women were winning—had won. At what point did you declare, won? she wondered. At what point were you no longer afraid?

The women found their faces and she and Frye told them to take them and go. Go back to Frye’s. Find Jane. Become yourself again. And many did, and many stayed, helping the others, for there was still much left to do.

Through it all Helen moved, until she found Alistair, dreamily helping a woman over a pile of rubble and out the door to safety. He smiled kindly at her, and she thought, perhaps I have misjudged him, too. Perhaps he is who I always thought he was, and he stands apart from Grimsby because he is something better, something finer.

And even if he isn’t, he deserves his own chance to make mistakes.

She touched him on the arm and took all her changes back. One by one she took them away until he was wholly himself again. He shook himself, blinking, and she smiled up at him and said, “Thank you for helping us.”

Alistair looked around, getting his bearings. Then his eyes narrowed and he seized her arms. “What have you done?” he said in a broken voice. “What have I done?”

Helen swallowed. And then said calmly, firmly, “I changed you. I shouldn’t have. But you were helping us win.” More quietly: “Aren’t you helping us?”

“Out in public?” Alistair dropped his head to his hands. “Grimsby will never forgive me now. Oh, it’s hopeless. I tried to help you, I really did. But you’ve been nothing but trouble to me.”

“Really,” Helen said coldly. She was not going to stay for this. She turned away to help the others.

“I was going along fine as a bachelor. Thought I needed a wife. More fool I. I should have run the other direction when Hattersley told me about you.…”

Helen swung around. Her heart seemed to be beating preternaturally still, as though she was a hawk in the instant before it swoops. Hattersley. That single dropped sentence last night about Betty being a consolation prize for Helen. Everything in her fell to the tip of her tongue, into one swift, dangerous question. “What do you mean, told me about you?”

Alistair did not have the grace to stumble or look abashed. Glumly he said, “About your bargain with the doctor, of course. Hattersley boasted about how he’d found the perfect girl; all he had to do was rescue her from a doctor friend of his. He couldn’t believe the doctor would try to get balloon payments out of you when a variety of obvious answers were staring him in the face. Hattersley’s a family man at heart, though—he wanted a wife. He was thrilled by the lady-in-distress routine, talked of being your white knight.” Alistair laughed ruefully. “That was his undoing. Of course we all had to troop down to the tenpence dance hall and see you for ourselves.” He looked up at her now, as if seeing her then, a girl in a white dress with a green sash. “Well, perhaps it can be okay again,” he mused. “Served old Hattersley right I got to you first, I always thought.”

“Got to me first,” Helen said. He didn’t see the hawk’s claws closing on him, didn’t know he was only a mouse and she blazed with pure predation.

Alistair sighed. “This is why I didn’t tell you,” he said reasonably. “I knew you would take it the wrong way.”

So many years of splitting herself into private Helen and public Helen left her unable to speak. Unable to say the deep thoughts that came roiling up. She could smile and joke with him and laugh it off as a misunderstanding, except she couldn’t. She did not have the words, only she knew like a gut punch that there was something pathologically inequitable about seeking her out when he already knew she was blindly grasping for any lifeline.

No, she could not speak. All her cleverness had deserted her.

But she could be the hawk, all muscle instinct and focused fury.

“Come on,” Alistair said. “We can still reclaim our place. Just let’s go on home before anyone sees. We’ll meet up with Grimsby later. He’ll make it out okay; he’s like a fox.”

“I am not going home with you,” she said, carefully, precisely. “I am not going to your home ever again.”

The color faded from his face as he saw that she meant it. She registered that in the back of her mind, that she had chosen a life of trouble and chaos and public ordeal … and freedom. It blossomed in her mind that if she made it out of here alive, she would have freedom.

And then, because there seemed only one thing left to do, she moved to the center of the room and picked up the last remaining funnel. She would not be like poor Millicent—she hoped. Because she would be both the source and the wielder of the power.

And she moved to the copper hydra that ran it all, and placed one hand on it, even as she placed the funnel on her face.

She was plunged into that waking dream again. But this time she was moving among it herself. She wondered if poor Millicent had felt that before she vanished, that she was a figure on this alien landscape, as she touched every corner of the city at once and they all fed to her eyes and ears and mind.

She could see the fey that controlled Mr. Grimsby in this maelstrom. The self-styled Fey King. He was out there, and he had pieces of himself all over the city, not just in Mr. Grimsby’s face and her necklace. He was in other fey faces. As Tam said, he was in every single one of those hydra pins and necklaces. Before the advent of the iron masks, he had been able to dip in and out of a handful of well-placed people—and now with the copper pins there were another few hundred he could use as eyepieces to the whole city. It was how he had gained so much power so quickly. How he had risen to prominence and caught the ear of the Prime Minister. He must have planned long ago for this, seeding the clay given to Rochart with bits of himself. He was everywhere.

Helen felt it all, and her thoughts ranged across the city. It was something. But it was not enough. She could not reach out to stop the Fey King, who was moving rapidly, connecting pieces of fey out there into nets that pulled and tensed. She felt what she had before in the warehouse, that sense of the bits of fey trying to coalesce, and as the tension grew stronger and stronger she felt the power growing behind it, a sense of stored energy as the grid of fey that lay all over the city crackled alive, joining together in one massive grid of power.

He was definitely not combining all the fey to destroy them.

She saw all those images as she had before, and she tried to focus to where a particular part of the city was becoming strongly blue.

<> she heard, and then the other voice, <> and it seemed to her now that both voices were the Fey King himself, split apart into so many pieces that he had become schizophrenic with it.

She could see the blue in that part of the city, lying along grass and sidewalk and embankment, and the air around it hummed with electricity, hummed like she was able to hear and see a downed wire from the trolley. A bird flew too close and was zapped, fell to the ground with singed feathers.

Helen froze as she saw what he was doing. What he had been planning to do all along, since he had forced the fey six months ago to split and begin settling over the city, lying in wait until he would be ready to use them all at once. He was pulling all the fey into one massive grid of power that would trap the entire city in a single charge.

He would kill all the humans. Once the net was finished. He had gained enough power from the women he had drained to go everywhere. They would reach out and electrify everyone.

But the women were detached now, and the Fey King hadn’t gotten the entire hundred he wanted, and he was slowing down. Helen saw that, and she saw that he would have to make choices.

And she just needed a little boost.

She dropped the funnel to the floor, because she saw she didn’t need it. It had helped her figure out how to focus, but she was her own power no matter how it came. With her now-free hand she pulled the necklace from her slacks pocket, that had the little bit of the Fey King in it, and touched it to the copper.

The blue wriggled free of the copper hydra. Then melted in.

In the maelstrom, Helen seized the bit of fey before it could find the rest of the Fey King, and rode its tail as it zoomed to him, bouncing around his multiplicity. He was frightening and dense in the imaginary world, strung out across the city, bloated and gathering blue.

But it was only a little boost, and it was not enough. She had control over the machine, but not over him.

Electrified blue she said to the warehouse at large, I need more power.

And they came.

Of their own free will they came, those few of The Hundred who were left. Frye and Calendula and Alberta and Louisa Mayfew and Agatha Flintwhistle, they all came and put their trust in her, put funnels to their faces, and fed her their power.

Helen pulled on them, pulled just a little, pulled not too much, pulled on them until she was stronger than the Fey King, because each of the little pieces of fey in the women tenuously connected to their own larger selves out there in the grid, and those fey did not like the Fey King either. Those larger bits of fey came, tunneling through to Frye and Calendula and Desirée, six of them, ten, twelve. They came and came and together, together, they were all stronger than the Fey King, and Helen could put out her hand and crush him.

He gathered all his strength, but it was not enough.

Because as the rest of the fey saw Helen’s group massing, they flocked to her, away from the Fey King’s grasp. <> she heard, over and over. <>

<> she promised, and her hand that was not a hand closed on the Fey King.

He whimpered.

He cried, there in the blue, and in the warehouse Mr. Grimsby curled into a ball and sobbed.

Helen stopped, and everything she had ever not done flashed before her eyes.

If I had gone into battle to save Charlie, perhaps, I, too, would be someone who had killed, she thought. Jane is someone who has killed, and I am the one who stayed with Mother and tended to her while she let herself slip away. No matter how much there needs to be one who stays, the one who stays will always regret not going, and perhaps it takes a particular kind of strength to both stay and bear up under having stayed.

I am still not going to be one that kills. I am never going to be one who has killed.

Directly to the Fey King, so they all could hear, she said: “If I let you go, will you promise to go back to your homes in the forest and never fight us again?”

It flung itself around inside her mental grasp, screaming.

She waited, patiently, waiting for the tantrum to wear itself out. I can and will choose not to kill, she thought, and the heady rope of power thrummed around her. She felt a new kind of power settling in place somewhere in the back of her skull, the feeling that she could make and own her decisions, and that people could decide for themselves whether or not they liked them. It didn’t matter to her anymore. When you ended up with great power you had the responsibility to not abuse it, but you also had the responsibility to use it, if that was necessary. When Queen Maud turned back the Armada, did she worry about what the Armada would think? And now Helen had the power, and even though she had a lifetime of bad judgments behind her, still, perhaps it was time to trust that she had learned something from them.

But perhaps she didn’t mind threatening death, for a good cause. The Fey King had quieted down and so Helen said, “If you do not promise, I will kill you all now.” The large mass of blue on her side thrummed in dismay.

It grew cunning. “I am only one leader. What if they break their promises after I am gone?”

“Fey live a long time,” she said, as if bored by the whole discussion, though her heart pattered through her chest. “Make them all swear, for all their lifetimes.”

It raged again, but then it quieted down. There was a thrumming, and she felt the question go out, through her, through all the women, into the fey that carpeted the city. There were no words, but they said in the way that bits of fey said it, <> <> <> and she heard in that how glad they were to be going home.