Ironskin

Chapter 14 Attack

The fey that hadn’t been seen in five years.

The fey that would destroy you to claim your form—and you with no way to kill them in their natural shape.

There was little Jane could do without a weapon. No way to even protect herself without iron. She knew this in her bones like she knew how to breathe. And yet she staggered to her feet, stumbled into the clearing, her human instinct sure she should do something to protect her little girl. The shimmers of blue-orange fey coalesced into one form, a form with a heartbreaking female face that curled in the air around Dorie.

The fey looked at her. And then a wall of black fear swept over Jane, swept in through her face, and it was the nameless terror of her nightmares.

It was a fey attack, though she had never heard of one like this.

There was a strange feeling all through her—fear and attack all mixed up together—and Jane felt as though her thoughts were being scrambled away from her and into something else, some other thing.

No, she protested, no—and she recoiled from it, while simultaneously it seemed to be recoiling from her. Disgust—revulsion—distaste—ugly, ugly—pull back, pullbackpullback … The attack of fear fell away, and Jane still stood, as the fey surrounded the translucent Dorie.

Jane made her shaky legs go forward, heart galloping a mile a minute. She groped in her pockets for a nonexistent feyjabber, pushed her way into the clearing. Dorie stood in a circle of grey stones, a circle with a wall of hard air that Jane’s fingers would not go through. “Are you all right, Dorie?” Her voice was remarkably steady.

Shimmering, Dorie came loose from the fey’s encircling light, bounced through the hard air past the stones to Jane, sweeping through her. Jane felt the touch thrum through her body like the pattering of rain, a distinctly opposite feeling from fey invasion. “My pretty lady,” Dorie said, and Jane felt those words like a smile deep in her body. Dorie bounced back to the fey, cradled herself in that light.

The fey’s imaged face was calm after that first attack. Disturbingly calm, like the destroyed porcelain doll. She observed Jane. Studied the war-torn face that her people had caused. Her voice, when she spoke, was high and throbbed somewhere in Jane’s skull. “You. Must leave us. It is my child.”

“No,” said Jane. “She is human.” She remembered what Edward had said. “Just because you stole her mother’s body doesn’t make Dorie yours.” She didn’t know why, but again she tried to take a step forward, as if trying to fight a fey without shielding or feyjabbers—madness. The fey had weapons with which they could destroy her in an instant. Wasn’t her cheek a reminder of that failed attempt?

The fey said, “My small part-of-me,” in a voice that Jane felt rather than heard. The fey blazed up hot and gold and shaming, and Jane despaired, felt herself being frightened from the clearing by the sheer force of fey emotion. Before she could master her own emotions, she was huddled in the brush outside the clearing, weeping at her inability to act.

Steps behind her—Edward coming up, coming past her. Her tears blurred her sight as the light dimmed, died, faded away to nothing. Jane sprang up, temper rebounding high, pushed into the clearing—but the fey was gone.

Dorie lay on the ground inside the stones, a crumpled heap of silk dress and tangled curls. One hand curled around a broken foxglove whose orange petals were lit with fey glow.

“Dorie,” said Edward, and his voice broke on the word. He knelt beside her, but Jane was already there, checking, waiting, dying—finding that slow pulse fluttering in Dorie’s neck.

“She’s breathing,” Jane said, and the tears ran down her ruined cheek. She gently wrested the poisonous foxglove away from the curled fingers, threw it. “Dorie? Can you hear me?”

Dorie mumbled something and scrunched her eyes tighter.

“Dorie, sweetheart.” Pleading. “Wake up.”

Dorie’s breathing became stronger, more regular, and her pulse strengthened under Jane’s touch. But she did not open her eyes.

Edward cradled his daughter to him and stood. The shadow was dark on his face as he raised his eyes—and looked straight at her face.

Her bare face with no veil, no mask.

Jane swallowed. She knew what he saw. She felt his shock like a whiplash against bare skin. She crushed Dorie’s tiny hand in hers—could not let go of the charge she cared for, even though that meant she was standing a handsbreadth away from Edward.

How could she have thought simply—he can’t love me as he’s never seen my face?

Because he had. If Nina spoke true, he had made her face. Sculpted it, to see her as she should have been.

So no, what she meant was—I’m not normal. He couldn’t care for her when she wasn’t normal. Even the fey had rejected her. Edward and Dorie were not her family. Ugly ugly unclean …

“Jane…,” he said. Only that, holding his daughter close.

“Go,” she said, hollow in her chest. “Lead the way back. You know these woods.” She dropped Dorie’s hand, walked toward him till he had to turn and she could follow, heart constricting in her chest. She retrieved her hat with its torn veil as they followed their path of broken branches and twigs back through the woods. Dorie’s legs hung limply from her father’s arms, jarred back and forth as he strode through the forest. The small limbs seemed as fragile as the porcelain doll’s.

Poule was waiting for them at the edge, her lips set in a grim line. Her careful fingers touched Dorie’s cheek, neck, wrists. “I’ll send for a doctor,” Jane heard her tell Mr. Rochart.

“Doctors won’t help,” said Mr. Rochart. He continued on toward the house with Dorie as though he didn’t know what to do but get her away.

“No, but you’ll feel like you’re doing something,” Poule said. “Let him take her pulse and tell you not to worry.”

Jane searched the back lawn until she saw the elder Miss Davenport. When their eyes met, the girl squealed and turned away. Jane swallowed against the sick feeling inside. And yet … she could not return to hiding behind her wall of iron.

Poule was issuing instructions about the doctor to the nearest temporary servant. She turned to go, and Jane hurried after, fell in beside her. Before she could change her mind she let the words tumble out. “I need your help,” she said. “Please.”

Poule looked up at her, her sharp eyes seeing through Jane’s hastily wrapped veil. “Better bring that book with you to satisfy your last debt. Meet me downstairs in ten minutes.”

Jane slid The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud across the green glass tabletop to Poule. The dwarf’s eyes gleamed as she ran her fingers lovingly over the remains of the dust jacket—she could still make out the pirate’s grin as he valiantly fought a busty mermaid riding a sea serpent. With a show of great restraint Poule tenderly tucked the book inside her dressing gown without even cracking it open.

“How much for this help?” said Jane. The hollow feeling was not going away. The fey had returned. The fey had harmed Dorie, had attacked Jane. Jane had attacked Miss Davenport. She cared too much for everybody, and everything was broken.

“Provided I can, then it’s an even exchange for information about what you saw in the forest,” said Poule. “What help do you think I can give?”

Jane rubbed her eyes behind the veil. But everything was broken meant start somewhere. Be the Jane who had come to Silver Birch to make things right.

Fix one thing at a time.

“You said you had tales of a dwarf cursed by rage, who started a war,” Jane said. “Moum.”

Poule raised her eyebrows. “Three wars. But you’re not that bad.”

“But what you said before that. You said ‘I’ve felt worse.’ Not ‘I’ve heard of worse.’ And before that, the first time we were talking about water imagery, and practicing controlling your emotions. You said you’d had a lot of practice.”

Poule let out a breath. “Ah.” Her short fingers touched the book at her heart, fell to the glass tabletop.

“Please,” Jane said gently. “You knew someone who was cursed. Didn’t you?”

Poule stared at her fingers on the table. “My father,” she said. “On an ordinary trade mission.”

“I thought dwarves didn’t use fey technology.”

Anger lit Poule’s face. “We shouldn’t,” she said. “We mostly don’t. But dwarves are bloody arse-faced mules, and we don’t all agree on anything, no matter how crackbrained, how costly, how—” She breathed. “Pappa worked for the Steel Conglomerate, going back and forth between cave and sky. Things went wrong—it doesn’t matter how. He came home wounded in the chest.”

“Was it also rage?”

“Yes—no. Violence. Not just anger—brutality.” She rubbed her silver-grey head, and Jane thought that this must have been a long time ago. “There weren’t many curses back in those days, you know. I researched every rumor of a cure, pored through old books.… Well. During the Great War, I heard about ironskin and tried it on Pappa, though by then he was old and sick. It was just one more thing to try, I thought. But covering his curse with iron just made him sicker.” Her shoulders slumped inside her old suit coat. “I know he didn’t have much time left anyway, but…”

“I’m sorry,” said Jane. But also … “It made him sick? The iron keeping the curse in?”

Poule shrugged. “I didn’t think that might apply to humans, too. You all just kept wearing it.…” She looked at Jane. “But I am sorry, that I didn’t think of that for you.” She stood as if uncomfortable, went over to a nearby worktable, busying her hands by sorting pliers, recoiling spools of wire. “That’s why I’ve been working on these things since then,” she said. “The iron thread, like Dorie’s gloves. Her mesh was closely woven, to ape the tar or your mask. But I’ve been working on others.” She held a thin ribbon of ironcloth out for Jane to see. “Variants. More iron, less iron, farther apart, closer. Is there some level where the iron can boost the person with the curse, help them control their emotions? Help them dissipate the blight, without making them sick from the blasted fey poison?”

“That sounds very useful,” said Jane. “But wouldn’t it take a lot of control from the individual?”

“Yes,” said Poule. “Just like the dwarves practice. Like I told you with the water imagery. So who knows if it would work with humans—at least, not without a long apprenticeship, and the will to work their arses off.”

“That’s the help I want,” said Jane. “I … yelled at one of the Misses Davenport. The elder one. I couldn’t help myself. It was like I was on fire. I can’t keep the iron on and make myself sick—but I can’t be afraid of myself, either.” Her voice rose on the end of the sentence, more shrilly than she had intended. Perhaps Mr. Rochart could help her, but perhaps he wouldn’t, and Jane couldn’t live with herself anymore. She was the lit end of a firework, a short fuse that would burst into a thousand stars. “Do you see what I mean?”

“Calm,” said Poule. “You can do this. A long apprenticeship, I said? You’ve been plugging away at it for five years, from what you’ve told me. All you need is a little more confidence that it’s working. A little more focus of mind.” She set down a spool of wire, rustled through the mess on the table. “Let me give you a bit of the loose-weave iron cloth.” She held up a linen mesh through which only a few iron threads glinted. “Put this on like a bandage,” she said. “See if the crisscross dampens the curse to where it helps you control what goes in and out.”

Jane took the cloth, took several breaths to calm herself. “Actually it was rather odd,” she said, holding the cloth in her hands like a life preserver. “It almost felt like I was doing something with the curse. When I yelled at Miss Davenport. Like I made her do what I wanted.”

Poule looked at her strangely. “Well, she is easily cowed,” she said. “I could make her do what I wanted.” She bent a bit of wire back and forth. “Tell me what happened in the clearing.”

Jane summarized the terrifying event, including how the fey had attacked her.

Poule nodded. “It felt like fear, you said? But you’re sure it wasn’t your fear.”

“You know,” Jane said slowly, “it felt oddly like my rage. Like Niklas’s depression. Like … a fey curse attacking me, from the fey itself. I thought usually that came from the blue fey bombs.”

“It’s the Queen,” Poule said grimly. “Maybe that makes a difference.”

Jane shuddered, remembering. “It was almost like it was trying to get inside of me. If so, I’m not sure I stopped it—I think it stopped itself.” It rejected her. Ugly ugly unclean … “And then, like it was trying to get inside Dorie. Something made Dorie all shimmery, but I don’t know if that was the fey, or Dorie herself. And now…” What if Dorie didn’t wake up? Jane refused to consider that. Dorie must wake up.

Poule looked thoughtful, but she clapped a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder. “They only invade dead bodies,” she said. “Take heart—you’re not a corpse yet.”

Jane did not feel particularly comforted.

She did not want to intrude on Mr. Rochart in his worry, but she could not stand to go quietly back to her rooms and wait like “patience on a monument,” as the girl in Thirteenth Night said.

She nudged the door to Dorie’s room open a crack and saw Mr. Rochart kneeling by the bed, his forehead pressed into the white dotted coverlet and his hands wringing the sheets.

Jane turned away, unwilling to disturb them.

But as she turned he said her name.

Jane came back, stood at the foot of the bed. Dorie lay there, for all the world as if she were sleeping.

“She stirs,” he said. “She rolls and mumbles, like she’s talking in her sleep. But she does not wake.”

Jane sat on the other side of the bed, across from Edward. He had hold of one of Dorie’s hands, and Jane took the other. The small fingers lay limply on her palm. “She will,” Jane said, willing it to be true.

“I should never have gone into the woods,” he whispered. Jane heard in that an echo, that he did not mean today. Long ago, he meant. Regret, he meant.

“She will wake.”

“I did not know there would be such a cost,” he said softly. His hands closed around Dorie’s.

Jane squeezed Dorie’s other hand, angry now, the rage coming out. You do not deserve this, she thought fiercely at Dorie. You’ve had enough trouble in your five years. You deserve to be normal. Jane’s head bowed, hot tears pricking the corners of her eyes as she held Dorie’s hand.

Silence. Blue, gold lights, a pattern on eyelids shut too tightly. And then …

“Dorie,” breathed Edward. “Dorie…”

The blue eyes were open.

A great lump of joy seized Jane. She reached down to hug Dorie just as Mr. Rochart pulled his daughter to him, cradled her tightly in his arms. Jane’s arms fell away.

Dorie yawned and stretched. “I saw the pretty lady,” she said. She gave her father one of her rare smiles. “She showed me pretty things.”

“What kind of things?”

Dorie yawned again. “Lots of pretty ladies. I like pretty ladies.” She was using full sentences now, and Jane noted it with pride even through the eerie fright the words provoked. Dorie twisted around to smile at Jane. “She said you’re a pretty lady.” Jane’s heart thumped in her chest as Dorie turned back to her father. “Is she?”

“Well,” said her father, at a loss for words, “well…”

Jane crumpled the bit of ironcloth around in her hands.

She wasn’t. But she could be.

Her hand reached out to touch Dorie’s dress, fell away. “What if,” she said, and she described what he might have done, watching his reactions, wanting to know. “What if you shaped me a plain mask. Not a face of surpassing beauty, like Blanche Ingel. Or what you’re doing for Nina. Not a face to attract all the men in the world.” She touched her scarred cheek, then all at once pulled her veil aside until the thin sunlight poured over her entire face, over the ripples that writhed through her cheek and jaw. “Just me. Me as I was.” She felt along the scar ridges that extended out, up past her eyelid, forehead. “Whole.”

If Nina had told her the truth, then he did not confess to it. “You shouldn’t risk it,” he said. “The process is dangerous.” His shadowed eyes met hers. “I do not speak lightly when I say that my past is unforgivable. You do not know what I have done, and my state of mind, my intentions, are of little excuse.” His arms tightened around Dorie’s body, his fingers locked. “The sins of the father are revisited on the child.” Eyes on her. “Do not make me compound my sins.”

“You said you were in my debt,” said Jane. “All I want is to look normal. To feel normal.” Fire burned hot within him. “Do you understand what I mean?”

He nodded reluctantly. “Jane…,” he repeated, and there was something so strained in that one word that she couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to have him pity her, or dismiss her, or say anything to contradict the way her stupid wishful thinking wanted him to feel and she burst out:

“We should tell the guests to leave. They need to get out of here, now. Before sundown.” She looked at the lone button under the chest of drawers, at the silver wallpaper, at anything but Edward and his daughter. If he was going to deny her her own face she didn’t want to know just yet.

“No.” His knuckles were white as he gripped Dorie’s form close to him, and the fire inside him billowed out, turned to smoke, vanished. The girl murmured, protesting the grip, and Edward loosened his fingers, carefully, loosening words at the same time. More softly, “No. I’ve worked too hard to get them here. And they won’t be ready to leave by nightfall—you know these women—and in the dark on the road, they’d be in just as much danger.”

Dorie wriggled all the way free, and he stood and set her back on the bed. She looked from one tense face to the other. She squirmed off the bed, and though Jane assumed she was going to get closer to her father, she ran to Jane and threw her arms around Jane’s skirts. Touched, Jane held Dorie’s shoulders close.

“Jane?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

Big blue eyes, confiding. “My mother’s coming to get me,” she said.

“What?” said Jane, and Edward stumbled backward, looking down at Dorie with horror in his amber eyes.

Dorie squeezed Jane’s legs tighter. “Do I have to go? I don’t want to.”

“Of course not,” said Jane. She knelt beside Dorie, hugged her little girl close, through the nerves, through the fear. “What do you mean, she’s coming to get you? What exactly did she say?”

“She said she’s coming to get everybody,” said Dorie. Her blue eyes unfocused, looked through the wall at the woods. “She said it’s time.”

Edward grabbed Jane’s arm and held it fast, but Jane hardly noticed through the terror. “Get the guests inside, I don’t care how,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said. The silver wallpaper flickered blue as Dorie looked at it, through it, seeing something Jane could hardly guess. The room hummed with emptiness.

“Tell Poule to check the iron at all the doors and windows.” His words swallowed themselves, dropped down his gullet like stones. “Tell her to prepare for a siege.”

Poule and Jane worked as silently and secretly as possible. Poule enlisted Martha for the task, and between the three of them they slipped in and out of bedrooms and washrooms, sitting rooms and hallways, staying out of the way of the guests and the extra servants from town.

Some of the windows were solidly covered in Poule’s mesh iron screens, but many had torn or been removed completely in the last five years, and had not been replaced. Too many of these screenless windows were open to the breezy spring air. Jane and Martha marked the places that needed work and watched the bedroom doors for guests as Poule slipped inside with crinkled sheets of iron mesh and a welder.

Mr. Rochart had disappeared almost immediately, leaving Jane with the admonition to keep an eye on Dorie—which she would have done in any case. She thought he must be in his studio—wondered how he could work with that threat hanging over him. But he had lived within the grasp of the woods for many years. Perhaps he was able to separate the two parts of him: the part that feared, the part that worked.

When she closed the door behind Dorie the last time, she met up with Poule and Martha on the landing.

“That’s everything in the open wing but the two rooms the guests are actually in right now,” Poule said. “Those will have to wait till they retire.”

“All the rooms that we’ve checked are done,” Jane said grimly. She pointed at the carved door between Dorie’s rooms and her own room. “I haven’t been able to get into Nina’s room all evening. She’s got herself barricaded in there.”

“Then we’ll have to do it in front of her,” said Poule. “That or bar iron across her door and lock her in for good.”

Despite the tension, Jane grinned. Mindful of her own lack of iron, she had taken the solitary tasks and continued her mantra of thinking of cool still pools of water.

“This iron will make us safe then?” said Martha. The normally unflappable maid betrayed the slightest hint of worry. From a chance word of Cook’s, Jane had picked up that Martha was fifteen—therefore six at the start of the Great War. Old enough to know the danger they faced now, young enough to have only dimly grasped the point of all the scrap iron drives and melted-down ornamentation back then.

“The iron mesh is so tight they can’t squeeze in,” said Poule. “We’re completely safe. As long as no one asks them in.”

Martha’s eyes widened. She rubbed one knobby elbow, nervous.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would do that,” said Jane, comforting. “It’s hard for a fey to hold a human shape without it being obvious. They can’t keep up a whole body for more than a few seconds before they turn back into light.”

“Thought they could take over folk,” said Martha.

“Yes, but only dead bodies,” said Jane. She had the irrepressible urge to add Poule’s line about them not being corpses yet, but she would not for the world scare Martha further, so she did, in fact, repress it. Gallows humor, she thought. When your nerves are wound that tight sometimes all you can do is make jokes about being as dead as King Bertram’s lover.

“More precisely, it seems like they can only take over bodies they’ve killed,” Poule was explaining to Martha. “We’re not sure why, but perhaps something about the act of murder is a part of it. That’s why they make those fey bombs.”

Jane bit her lip and tried not to think of Charlie.

“And if the dead knock at the door, none would let them in,” said Martha seriously. “All right then.” She looked perfectly unflappable once more.

“So, this Nina person,” Poule said, moving to the door. She lifted a fist and banged—monotonous, annoying thumps. Jane was impressed by her ability to skip politeness and jump right to the next level.

At length, Nina answered. A black satin sleep mask was pushed onto her forehead, and she held a short fat glass of amber liqueur. Her eyes met Jane’s—there was a flash of the nervousness she’d seen earlier—and then it vanished as Nina glared at Poule.

“Maintenance,” said Poule. She shoved the greasy bar of iron into Nina, so Nina had to either immediately back away or ruin her dress. She backed up and Poule squeezed past, headed straight for the windows.

“What is this?” said Nina. “Really, Jane, I thought you were understanding.”

“No,” said Jane. It felt good to stand up to Nina. She followed Poule’s path into the room and shut the door. (Martha in the hallway shook a firm NO at the unspoken question of whether she wanted to join them.)

“Really, Jane,” repeated Nina, and then she fell silent as Poule’s tools whirred loudly on the window nearest Nina’s bed. When she saw that Jane and Poule were set on staying, she huffed, downed her whiskey, and sank into a tufted sixteenth-century armchair, glaring at the room.

It was a mess. Heaps of satin and tulle straddled spindly-legged tables, arms of chairs, the canopied bed. Nina’s dramatic black hat hung giddily over a vase painted with cherubs, and several glasses ringed with plum lipstick crowded the top of the vanity. The messy modernity of Nina seemed to swallow the dated, threadbare room.

This was what it was like to put your stamp on something. This was someone with presence. Whatever Nina wanted would be hers, just by virtue of being so unstoppably Nina. Blanche Ingel’s charisma lay only in her face, the unearthly face that Edward had created for her. But Nina’s charisma oozed from every inch of her skin. Jane thought that even now, she would place her bets on Nina to best Blanche in any social battlefield. And with the new face? Nina would be unstoppable. She’d be able to ensnare anyone, maneuver any event to her liking.

Surely Edward would be small potatoes then.

The thought was comforting—and then her eye fell on an embroidered chair holding Nina’s wadded-up turquoise dress.

Under the chair were a pair of men’s shoes.

The thought of glamorous Nina entertaining men visitors in her rooms made Jane feel smaller than Poule. The brief victory she and Poule had won over Nina dissipated, and she stood there feeling every inch of her plain day dress and veiled face as if it were Dorie’s iron gloves enclosed around her.

The shoes were enough to rattle her, but—whose shoes? They could be anybody’s, of course.

Nina drawled, “Edward looked very handsome today.”

Jane looked up to find Nina innocently gazing at the shoes. “You weren’t outside with us,” Jane said.

Nina raised eyebrows until Jane blushed.

“Oh. When you saw him alone.”

“He has an air so many men lack,” said Nina. She looked happier now that she was skewering Jane, wresting control of the situation. “So poised. So … skillful. We’re going to have a fine, fine time tonight.”

Jane knew Nina had been in Edward’s studio just for a consultation … didn’t she? Of course, Nina could know Edward in more than one way. Jane despaired, not wanting Nina’s insinuations to be true. Not when Nina was capable of taking—and keeping—any man that captured her fancy.

Poule stepped past Jane to the next window, feeling it with sensitive fingers. “I suppose you’d want him to be skillful, since he’s going to rip your face off,” she said.

Laughter nearly bubbled out of Jane at this gruesome depiction of surgery. Gallows humor again.

Nina’s expression of fury morphed instantly into calm calculation. She looked the short woman up and down, her eyes lingering on Poule’s homely face. “I’d have thought you’d take advantage of his services,” she said cruelly, and Jane, aghast, pressed a useless hand to the veil covering her lips, as if she could take back Nina’s words.

Poule shouldered her tool bag. Outwardly she did not seem affected, but Jane, heart beating, thought surely the words wounded deep inside where the hurt did not show. “If you think I’d want to look like my enemy, you’re a bigger fool than I gave you credit for.”

Jane descended the spiral staircase by her room, thinking how nice it would be to be as sure of herself as Poule. She wondered if that came with growing up in the dwarvven culture, or from the fact that Poule could take care of herself in myriad ways. Perhaps if Jane could do something like Poule—weld iron or sniff out fey or cow obnoxious women—she could wrest control of her own life, make the Jane-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-be into a Jane she could be.

She slipped into a back hallway to retrieve her sketchpad from the afternoon—one of the hired servants had brought it in and placed it in her boot cubby. The fear from the forest had dulled with the application of several hours of manual labor on the iron screens, leaving her time to ponder other problems.

Were those shoes really Edward’s?

Jane brushed the dirt off her sketchpad, absentmindedly eyeing the flaws in the sketch of Dorie, the parts where her lines deviated from Edward’s.

Was Nina really meeting Edward tonight?

A movement through the window next to the back door—there, standing on the back lawn was Blanche Ingel, deep in chat with one of the gentlemen, who seemed to be unable to do anything but gaze into her perfect face. Exasperated, Jane momentarily forgot her stature in the house and spoke to them as she had spoken to the elder Miss Davenport earlier that day. “Get in here,” she said, pulling the heavy back door all the way open.

The gentleman looked startled, but Blanche laughed kindly and said, “I suppose we are out a little later than decency permits.” She came in, scraping her boot heels on the mat. “Can you have a maid fetch me a clean white cloth?” She had a white handkerchief balled in her left palm. “I had a little argument with one of those thorn trees. Made me quite dizzy.”

“Certainly,” said Jane, and did not say, “What on earth were you doing at the edge of the forest? How foolish are you?” Edward had not mentioned the fey, true (he had come up with “the gardener says stay off the lawn tonight while he sprays for insects”), but anyone with half a brain stayed out of the woods after dusk. That had been true for centuries and centuries.

The man followed, throwing a grouchy look at Jane, but she was irritated and worried enough that she was not flustered by his glare. As with Nina on that first day, Jane did remember that for Edward’s sake she should be polite and appropriately deferential to his guests, and so she thought cooling thoughts of water and said, “I apologize for my brusque request, but the other guests are gathering in the library for elderflower liqueur. Our host was worried that you had gotten lost.”

Blanche flushed at that, and belatedly it occurred to Jane that perhaps that statement was no more polite, and maybe it implied that the two of them were doing something inappropriate in the shrubbery. The gentleman pushed past her into the house, grumbling, leaving tracks of mud, and inwardly Jane sighed. She had never been good at this polite and humble business, and with the mask off it was worse.

She locked the back door, and, casting around, she shoved the heavy wooden hall tree in front of it as a reminder.

As if anything would make those partygoers think.

Jane passed the evening either watching Dorie sleep or with Poule, checking iron. By midnight, the party had splintered off in ones and twos, and now when she peeked into the drawing room, only the younger Miss Davenport was there, flirting with one of the men while her mother snored on the window seat.

No sign of Nina.

She walked past Nina’s room to her own. The light was off; only moonlight shone from the crack under the door. Surely Nina was not upstairs but was in there, asleep. And if asleep, she would have her sleep mask on, and wouldn’t see the door open a silent crack.…

Knowing full well she shouldn’t, Jane edged Nina’s door open. A little—and then more, searching the spill of moonlight on the unmade sheets. She unwound her veil, and both her eyes and some unknown sense confirmed it point-blank.

No one was in Nina’s room.

Jane shut the door and found herself walking down the hall, away from her own room, toward the stairs that led to the studio. Knowledge of what she should do didn’t seem to have any effect on the fact that she wanted to know.

She wanted to know if Nina was really in his studio, and if so, exactly what that meant. Was Edward really performing some secret surgery on Nina in the dead of night—or was there another, more obvious explanation for what went on behind closed doors after midnight?

What exactly had he meant by the things he had done wrong?

Was Nina one of the unforgivable things? Blanche?

It would be smarter not to know, not to torture herself with the truth. It certainly was none of her business. It was very off-limits.

And still she found herself climbing the stairs to stand at the door in the attic, an open door into a room lit with rectangles of blue moonlight.

She went softly into the room.

His worktable in the center of the room was crowded with his mask-making supplies—clay, metal tools—and a white wet towel covered his latest work. The clay bucket next to the table was nearly empty, its wooden shell containing only an inch of blue-black water.

She put her hand to the wet towel, wondering what she would see—a beautiful Nina? The grotesque version? Or more heart-wrenching still—herself, her whole self?

Her fingers trembled on the cloth, and then out of the corner of her eye, under the side door—she thought it was the moonlight, too, but no, that was light, the blue of fey-tech light.

He was there.

Jane left the cloth, slipped silently across the room to the door. Ever so quietly, before she could even think about what she was doing, she slid it open.

It took a second to resolve the scene in the small white room, and then she did. Edward, in white coat and mask like a surgeon, bending over the face of an unconscious woman wearing black satin. The scalpel in his fingers gleamed in the blue light.

On the wall hung one mask, a beautiful mask.

Nina.