The fanatic tension in his posture slowly died. He gestured at his furnace, at the bars of pig iron, the empty casting molds. “How can I send you back with ironskin if she doesn’t have a scar to cover?”
Jane exhaled, tension unwinding. “That’s my problem,” she said. “One of them. I’d hoped you would have an idea.”
“Short of welding her into a solid iron box?” His face twisted in a way that said it was only half a joke. When Jane did not move, he said, “Well, since you won’t be put off. I do have something. Something new.”
He turned from his workbench to rummage around a thick wooden table piled high with slates covered in notations, papers, scraps of metal, stubs of lead, links of chain, and coils of rope—Jane wondered if that desk had changed at all since she’d been there four years ago. No, nearly five, now.
“Ah. Here,” he said. He picked up a small, greasy looking jar containing a brown-and-black substance.
“What is that?”
“Tar,” he said. “Tar with flecks of iron. I’ve tried it out and it works almost as well as the ironskin itself. It’s horrible stuff and gets on everything, but you might find you can use it to find her weakness. The fey point of entry.”
“Maybe I could,” agreed Jane, awed by the possibility. She turned the jar around in her hands. Even the outside was tacky to the touch, smeared with bits of iron-flecked tar Niklas hadn’t managed to scoop into the jar. “I remember you had a theory that the location of the curse might influence the type of curse—that similar curses cluster on similar parts of the body. I know you haven’t encountered one like hers … but do you have a suggestion of where to put the tar?”
Niklas closed his fingers around iron, his expression closed off. “Say again what she does,” he said.
He listened attentively as Jane told him everything she could remember. “You say she often waves her hands when she’s making things happen. Or looks in that direction, which sounds like her eyes or her mind. I’d try one of those three.”
Jane shuddered. “Tar in her eyes?”
Niklas shrugged. “If she is fey, maybe it’ll kill her off for you.”
“If the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch,” Jane said wryly. She slipped the jar into the pocket of her dress. Took the few bills she’d brought inside and stuffed them into the iron cauldron Niklas used as a bank.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye, while saying gruffly, “I guess you have a job now and that’s only right.”
“And I didn’t when I came, and you helped me anyway,” she said. “You don’t know how much that meant to me.”
Niklas shrugged, picked up a hammer, started pounding on an iron bar that didn’t look like it needed pounding.
She knew that the gruffness, the dismissal, was only his manner. A side effect, perhaps, of the howling depression he’d once confessed to her was his curse. The outline of his shirt caught on the iron underneath, the tough cotton snagging on the metal ridges, the hang of the leather jacket deformed by the iron chest that squeezed him like a vise, as if a tighter cinching could drive out the poison. She remembered the shape of that rigid corset from when she’d tried to hug him goodbye. Old Ironsides, one of the boys had called him, trying to make an affectionate nickname for the man they worshiped.
But Niklas didn’t take to affectionate nicknames. And the name was never mentioned in his presence again.
The boy appeared in the doorway. “Hey miss, there’s a man says you’re gonna miss your train.” He shouted around Niklas’s banging, slipping his words in with the familiarity of practice. “He says if you don’t come quick there may not be a car when you get there, as some hoodlums looked int’rested in dismantlin’ it.” A grin showed what he thought of the driver’s worries.
Niklas did not stop pounding the iron bar with his hammer, though Jane turned again, said, “Thank you, Niklas. Thank you.”
There was maybe a half-nod in return.
“All right,” she said to the boy, pressing a coin into his hand. “You take care of him, right?” The boy nodded, his sharp chin bobbing, his knobbly fingers shutting tight around the coin.
Jane clutched the jar in her pocket. She hurried through the door of the workshop and out the gate, hurried into the impatient orbit of the worried driver, leaving the foundry of the ironskin behind.
Jane’s thoughts flew back and forth as the train clattered into the country station. First Helen and her new, utterly foreign society. The cruel rumors about Mr. Rochart and Dorie. Then—the paste might work, the paste might work. She could try it on Dorie the very next morning—starting with her hands.
As long as Dorie could touch iron without injury.
Iron was the only thing that stopped the fey. The rules had been hard to pin down—still were inconclusive—because the fey didn’t take well to capture, after all. Besides, the war had gotten so tied up with superstition, as soldiers draped themselves in lucky iron charms—it was hard to tell what did and didn’t work.
But one thing seemed pretty firm.
If a fey took over a dead body, that fey could be killed. An iron spike—a feyjabber—directly into an artery destroyed that fey forever.
Iron weakened fey, barred fey, wounded fey—it was why the iron mask on her cheek kept the fey curse from crossing the barrier and spilling out into the air, infecting others. If Dorie’s talent was similarly a foreign part of her, a fey parasite on a human host, so to speak—then it should work. But was Dorie more human … or more fey?
The train jerked to a stop and Jane disembarked, thinking of the exercises she would have Dorie try. With the tar in her bag, suddenly all the frustrations with Dorie seemed possible to overcome. New ideas, new methods, spilled through her mind, firing her with new energy. She was startled to see a tall shadow spill over her, to hear a voice near her ear.
“Ah, my little soldier is returned to fight by my side,” said Mr. Rochart. “Miss Eliot.”
“Sir,” she said, and she composed her suddenly trembling fingers by dint of shoving them in the wool coat’s patch pockets. Her heart seemed to leap at seeing him, but she reminded herself that that was merely her excitement over Dorie’s paste. The man was aggravating, with his hideous masks, his disappearing act, his Prime Ministers’ wives.
Even if his conversation was more intelligent and entertaining than anything she’d heard the whole week in the city.
He loomed over her, a tall figure in a coat just as worn as hers, she suddenly saw, powdered with more of that white dust that followed him in a fog. A button was loose—didn’t he have anyone to mend it? She was cross at herself for wanting to put it right. She was not allowed to be this relieved at returning home. Home? No. Returning to her job.
“You forget us for an entire week,” he said in a low, mocking voice. “I myself brave the moor and damn the last bluepack to fetch you at the station, and I merely rate a respectful ‘Sir?’ Oh, Jane, Jane.”
“In that you have the advantage of me,” she said demurely.
He laughed—a sharp bark at odds with his foreboding appearance. “So I do. Well, Jane, my given name is Edward and you must call me it from now on. I am tired of this ‘Rochart’ nonsense.” His black brows lifted, knit. “I believe you should have a trunk, little one.”
“Indeed I do,” said Jane. “But you mustn’t carry it yourself; you will throw your back out.”
He looked at her sharply, as if trying to decide if she had really called him old. Jane smiled politely, feeling that in some obscure way she was staying level with him; that two could play the game of aggravation, and that by being sticky she was staying more truly Jane. It was a brief thought, with little time to untangle it, for he was speaking again, moving, his eyes searching her face.