Silverblind (Ironskin) (17 page)

There were fey there.

The blue drifted along the scrub in the ravine, disappearing in and out of the foliage. With her half-fey heritage, she never felt the instant dread you were supposed to feel. Despite everything, Dorie was filled with a sense of wonder at the sight of her wilder kin.

“They look so innocent,” Tam said quietly as the blue flickered on past and vanished.

She shifted uneasily. “Tell me the stories you’ve learned about the fey,” she said. “The strange ones. The ones nobody knows.”

“A long, long time ago, the fey and humans were not at war,” he said, starting to climb again. “Never exactly allies, but not at war. You know there was trade until before the Great War?”

She nodded.

“Long, long before that, there’s stories of humans and fey living in close quarters intentionally. The fey would invite humans into the woods—not kidnap them. The humans would return a century later, enriched by the trade. Or so they say.”

“Go on,” Dorie said. She hooked her arm around a birch, hefting herself upward. She never needed nor wanted help climbing, but it was funny not to have someone offer. Restful.

“There’s a very unusual story that I only ran across once,” Tam said. “Most of the stories are repeated, changing from town to town. You can sift out the kernel of truth that the story grew from. But this one I only heard once, from an old woman in the northernmost forests, who was said to be fey-touched herself. Neighbors claimed she had lived two hundred years—spending one of those centuries with the fey.”

“What did
she
say about it?”

“She was evasive on the subject,” he said, looking off into space. Finally he added, “But that’s common. She said that this was an old story among the fey themselves. That even to them it was a myth, an ancient rumor. Their story goes that there’s more than one world. That major events create a bend, a fork, and worlds splinter off.”

“Wow,” said Dorie, trying to wrap her head around the idea.

“I recorded the story and forgot about it,” Tam said. “I ended up not including it in the book—there wasn’t room for everything, and I’m more interested in the stories that mention animals, so I focused on those. But then I was talking with someone from the physics lab and he happened to mention this thought experiment they have—something called the Multiple Worlds theory. It’s the same idea.”

“Wow.”

“Except there’s one more wrinkle. I pulled the story out to look at it. As far as the fey are concerned, the theory is only applicable to them. If you don’t know, back when we were using bluepacks for everything, they didn’t work the farther you got outside the borders. Like you go to Varee and poof, your flashlight is dead. Fey only live in this country—fey power only works here, too. Which is strange, but it was never fully explored. Perhaps there’s a central point in our country—perhaps a larger concentration of fey in the middle somewhere that affects individual fey, perhaps all the fey draw their power from some central nexus—I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“So this fey story claimed that these world turning points only come about due to them—due to large changes in their history. Now, solipsism is nothing new. And how would they know how many worlds there are? Except the story says there is a link between the worlds. Sort of like the nexus that spiders out from the heart of our country, there is a central point between the worlds that they can access.”

“So the fey can know more about these other worlds? But then surely there’d be more stories about this idea.”

“Right. The story implied it was hard to cross over. Because—and mind you, this is the only story I’ve ever run across about this—the story says that, millennia ago, that’s how the fey got here. That they spanned out from one world that had them in it and they crossed over to a few other places, including here.”

“An origin story,” breathed Dorie.

“If you like,” said Tam. “Like all origin stories it leaves out as much as it explains. Where did those first fey come from in the other world?” He shrugged.

“Did you ever talk to the old woman in the north again? After you heard that this was a real theory from your physics friend?”

“I tried to, but it wasn’t until a year later. She had passed on.” Tam sighed. “These stories are being lost all the time, due to the fact that people think of them as fey tales. And sure, does the story of the beautiful sleeping princess with the good fey and the bad fey fighting over her tell us much about anything? Well. Mores, perhaps. That even the fey can disagree. But then you happen on something like the story about the wyvern eggs and that’s a major breakthrough right there.”

“It makes you wonder what else you could learn from spending time with them,” said Dorie. She had done just that for several summers. But she had been interested in her own story, in what she could do, and had not thought to press them for their myths. When had Tam thought to do so? Had it started when he was with them?

“It’s not always worth the price,” he said somberly. “Don’t think I’m hogging my sources, but I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”

They came up out of the ravine and he put a cautioning hand out. “Look.”

Above them, several dozen wyverns soared. Silver wings flashed, and yodels trilled at irregular intervals, like demented birdsong.

“The real question is how we get some eggs away from them,” Tam said in a low voice. “I know you’re good, but are you fifty-some-watching-wyverns good?”

The real problem was she wasn’t one-human-watching good. She couldn’t phase blue with Tam there.

“We passed a sort of cavelike thing as we climbed,” Dorie said. “You take Woglet—if he’ll go—and the pouches and stay there. I’ll bring you eggs and you protect them.”

“It’s hardly fair for you to do all the dangerous work,” Tam protested.

“I can’t get
any
eggs with Woglet,” she pointed out. “Not to mention that your arm is still recovering from the steaming.” She grinned. “You can fight your legendary basilisk when we find it.”

“Deal.”

Woglet was in fact leery of this new arrangement, but once he found a garter snake hiding in the back of the cool little cave he settled down to investigate that.

Tam safely out of sight, Dorie made her way to the cliffs and began to climb. She didn’t dare put the eggs in her stomach again—one baby wyvern was enough. So she actually did need Tam to stay behind in the cave.

She was lucky. It was a good time of year and there were a number of nests with clutches of three and four eggs. Wyverns were clean animals, but this many together at once left a faint acrid tang to the clearing. Still, better than petrol. Dorie phased in and out of blue, slowing and speeding up her timesense to get close to the nests. She was getting pretty good at avoiding triggering the wyverns’ gaze. In the end, she was able to get eight eggs without taking more than one from each nest, and she brought them all, one at a time, back to Tam, who wrapped them up and coddled them in his portable incubator. Another benefit to bringing Tam into this—she would not need to have Stella rig up something for her. With eight eggs carefully packed into the incubator, they had run out of padding—no one had ever gotten more than three at once, as Tam kept saying—and the wyverns were getting restless, so they left.

They retraced their path, tramped up and out of the ravine, hot and dirty. Woglet had gone from flying back and forth like a crazed bat to sleeping curled on Dorie’s shoulder, tail in a chokehold on her neck. His triangular head poked snores straight into her ear.

“When do you think they’re going to hatch?” said Tam.

“Two to three days for most of them,” Dorie said, “except that there’s one that’s going to hatch tonight, probably midnight-ish. So either we sit around at the lab tonight with that one, or—”

“Or we take it to an ironskin,” Tam said. He took a deep breath. “Do you know one we could help?”

“Yes,” she said. “My contact does, anyway. Through him we can reach all of them. I was thinking…” She hesitated, then pressed on. “Four for us, four for the lab?” Besides the symmetry, the bonus for bringing in eggs, split between her and Tam, would then just cover the rent.

“We’ll already be heroes for bringing home four on our first day out,” he mused. “They’d never guess that we found
eight
.” He looked up at her and nodded, decision firming his face. “Let’s do it.”

They agreed to meet at ten and pressed on, talking through the logistics for their secret adventure. It had all gone so well that she thought maybe now was the time to tell Tam the truth. It had been just like the old days—the two of them on some grand and glorious expedition, bringing home twigs and birds’ eggs. Except now the twigs were feywort and the eggs would cure four more of the ironskin. They were in dirty sweaty harmony, and she looked sideways at him and found him grinning. Perhaps something of the same thought was going through his own head, for he said, “You know, Dorian, this has been a really good day.”

“Yes,” she said. “It has.” And then suddenly added, “Let’s not tell anyone about their nesting place, shall we? I don’t want them to be disturbed.”

“Of course not,” he said. She beamed and then her smile fell as he added, “Well, Annika. But other than that.”

“Right. Annika.”

“You don’t like her very much, do you?”

Dorie couldn’t answer that honestly. Finally she managed, “She’s very smart.”

“And forthright,” he added immediately. He looked down at his hands. “I don’t know what your past is like, but I’ve been burned by dishonest girls.” His voice fell away. “Well. One girl.”

Her heart was pounding in her ears and her throat choked with guilt. “Maybe the girl made a mistake,” she said.

He shredded his leaf and let it fall away, turned and grinned wryly. “And maybe all girls are deceitful and I should have known better. That’s why when you find someone like Annika, you appreciate it, is all.”

They came to the edge of the woods then, and right on cue, there was Annika, stretched out on the ground, making a careful drawing of a blue feywort that was growing at the edge of the woods. “You found some eggs,
ja
?” she said, carefully tucking her pencil away in a case and pulling out a penknife. “I stayed through lunch, I stayed through tea, but when he started to encourage me to stay the night I dumped my raspberry fizz on him and hiked up here.”

Dorie laughed in spite of herself. Tam offered Annika a hand up from the ground, which she waved off. With her penknife, she sheared the plant she had been drawing at the base of the stem and wrapped it in a cloth, its bells trembling. A drop of sap welled out, bleeding onto the cloth.

The way back was more convivial than the way out. Despite her trying afternoon, Annika told them all the details with a candid bluntness that verged on having a sense of humor. Tam shared the full story of their adventure—minus the actual number of eggs they had found—and Annika sounded duly impressed. Annika even unbent so far as to say that perhaps they should finish with a drink at the Pig, but Tam demurred before Dorie had to decide whether or not she could enjoy sitting there with the two of them, unable to afford even an ale to take the edge off.

“It’s Thursday, isn’t it? My mother’s having a cocktail hour for her Young Women’s group at eight and I promised to help serve,” Tam said.

“Oh,
them,
” said Dorie. She had a standing invitation-slash-order from Aunt Helen to go, which she had never actually followed through on. It sounded dreadful—all those girls she had never understood during prep school, now grown up and married well and using family money to feel like they were accomplishing something. No one actually down in the trenches, no one she understood. “I mean. That sounds nice. What do they do?”

“Oh, it’s chiefly eating canapés and discussing how to improve the city,” Tam said, not in a dismissive way. “Annika, you’d be more than welcome. In fact, my mother would be thrilled if I brought you.” That hung there for a moment while they all thought about what it meant. Tam coughed and added, “Dorian, I’m afraid I’d be persona non grata if I brought someone of the—erm, inferior gender along.”

“Of course,” said Dorie, all manly and casual while her heart broke inside. Annika go? Tam inviting Annika? Here she was bonding with Tam, and now she was going to be too late to ever make up.

There was a rare moment of hesitation to Annika’s self-assured demeanor. Then stiffly she said, “I think I would like to come, then. If you are sure I will not be intrusive.” She looked down at her dress, now dirty from the forest floor. “And I must change.”

From the backseat, Dorie saw Tam’s posture relax slightly, his shoulders unclench, his back unbend. He laughed. “Me too, or my mother would kill me. I’ll meet you in front of the lab at a quarter to eight.”

Chapter 8

DOING GOOD

Sept. 9: Though difficult at first to believe, the most likely answer seems to be that this poor, cursed girl is seeing a variety of possible futures. It is a confirmation of Dr. Rochart’s Many Worlds Theory, from a most unexpected source. When in fey trance, the subject (Alice) frequently speaks of a scene where men with “silver on their hands” storm the forests around Black Rock Mountain, and systematically decimate the fey. At first I would reason with her, and remind her that the fey were eradicated after the successful “Great War” two decades ago. Continued scans have turned up a grand total of three fey in the years since, each of which was quickly dispatched. But she insists, and now I let her tell me what she sees, for it is all too clear these sights are happening somewhere—at least in her mind if nowhere else.

For now, we have decided to leave the fey substance on her shoulders. This is a hard decision, but with the fey themselves gone, there will never again be such an opportunity to learn.

—Dr. Tamlane Grimmsby,
What Alice Saw

*   *   *

Dorian Eliot stood in front of the mirror and relaxed every finger, each knee, each ear, until she was plain Dorie again. Her “date” to meet Tam was not until ten, but damned if she wasn’t going to that cocktail hour as well. Just, not as Dorian. She took a quick sponge bath—her Dorie shape was automatically clean and shiny and smelled of fresh air after a rainstorm, but she
felt
dirty.