Whereas no such reputation existed for the dwarves, though they were sometimes said to be cold and miserly. “Wouldn’t give you a smile you hadn’t paid for,” was a common saying about the oft-surly folk. They traded their fine engineering and design for things of the surface: fruits and wheat and wool. Jane had none of these things.
The dwarf leaned back in her chair. Her dressing gown shifted just enough to show that whatever she always carried in her breast pocket had a hard rectangular outline, and like a flash Jane knew what it was.
The one surface culture dwarves shared with humans, that the dwarves were known to love with all their fierce, passionately intellectual hearts. Wasn’t that why so many of the court poets had been dwarves, until Queen Maud’s death put an end to the days of civil friendship?
Books.
The dwarves loved books. They read them in vast, devouring quantities, and they wrote them, too—in their electric-lit caves alongside their molten metal and their turning gears the dwarvven scribbled out great gothic tragedies, pouring out their hidden romantic souls into tales of forbidden love and secret temptation, blood-soaked mysteries and swashbuckling pirates.
A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses was unlikely to be of interest. Poule had surely read Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns—Jane only hung onto it for the personal inscription on the flyleaf. But the third …
“I will lend you a book,” said Jane. “A glorious adventure novel.”
Poule’s eyebrows raised. Her hand went unconsciously to the book she was currently reading, tucked inside her dressing gown. “You think you have something I haven’t read?”
“Maybe,” said Jane. “I mean, it is a dwarf author.”
“Probably read it, then,” said Poule. “You’ll have to think of something else.”
“The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud.”
Poule dropped her screwdriver to the table with a clatter. “Not the one her son banned, and ordered all copies burned on sight?”
Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she’d rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book. She leaned across the table toward those bright, eager eyes. “On page twelve he carries off a girl who looks like the queen, but he doesn’t find out she’s actually the court alchemist’s daughter till they’re halfway across the ocean, with a fleet of navy ships in hot pursuit and a nest of sea dragons just off starboard, ready to ravage the ship for its gold and tear the pirate to bits.”
Poule gulped. “Done,” she said hoarsely.
After the bargain was sealed, Jane slowly retraced her path back to the foyer, went up the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor. She stared out the window into the night for another hour, drifting in and out of semisleep.
But no more lights appeared.
Jane was the one with the midnight adventure, but Dorie seemed just as tired as she the next morning.
But thinking back, Dorie had been slower and slower to get out of bed each morning since they’d started the tar. It was not the stubborn revolt of the first day, but a strange passive resistance, as if she had decided she’d rather sleep than do anything that Jane wanted. Listless—slumped. It was an unusual strike for a healthy child.
A very tired Jane knelt by the bed. She was heavy on her feet and her iron mask seemed to weigh her head down. “We’re not going to do the tar today,” she said.
Dorie slowly lifted her head. “No?” she said.
“No. We’re going to try these interesting gloves,” said Jane. “See how pretty they are?” Jane produced the mesh gloves that Poule had made. As a concession to Dorie, she’d gotten up early and stitched red and silver sequins on the backs of the hands.
Dorie looked blankly at the sequins.
“Your friend Poule made them for you,” said Jane, deftly wriggling Dorie’s passive fingers in and fastening the catches up the side of the arm. She hoped she could get them on before the tantrum, as the reverse seemed highly unlikely. “Now the other pretty glove,” said Jane, and in went the other hand before Dorie could discover that these gloves had the same effect as the tar. “Pretty, yes?”
The blank in her eyes faded, and Dorie stared at the gloves with the same intent look she used to wear when she was trying to make something move. Jane readied herself for a full-on tantrum.
But all that happened was that the intent look in the girl’s eyes slowly died.
Her gloved hands fell to her lap and she stared off into nothing, through the papered wall. Jane felt suddenly alone in that white-and-silver room. The air vibrated with emptiness around that little girl who sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, slumped like a forgotten porcelain doll.
The nightmares increased.
They grew more focused, more detailed, until Jane was seeing the same scene, night after night. A terrible, familiar scene, one she had tried to block out for five years.
She sees the blackened moor, bare rubble separating her town from the terrifying forest. She played in that forest once; they all did. Yet now she and her childhood friends take their places with jagged scraps of iron, watching the menace pour from the forest. This is how the Great War is fought, for soldiers are spread too thin when the enemy is not a human enemy, with one home base, with needs of food and water and horseshoes. This is an enemy that materializes out of every forest in the land, first here, then there, an inhuman pattern not easily deciphered.
Their misfortune, to live so close to the trees.
It is the dawn of early spring, and the moor is dense and roiling with fog. Daily there have been reports that the Great War is being won, that they are drawing ahead. This may well be propaganda, for they have not seen it. For almost four years some trick of circumstance kept them safe here in Harbrook, untouched by the ravaging, decimating war. But after the winter solstice something turned, and the enemy began appearing. Perhaps they were driven here, or perhaps it was next in their plan. They have been attacking night after night, gnawing the town’s defenses one by one. Harrying the town, taking one child here, one woman there. Till at last they have been seen, blue-orange lights gathered just inside the perimeter of the barren forest, and the ragged army of Jane’s friends takes their desperate stand against them.
Charlie steps in front of Mother and Helen, pushes them back with a pale, dirty hand. Helen is thirteen and useless when faced with this terror. She wrings her hands in her dirty apron and holds Mother tight. Mother is brave, brave enough to let Charlie go forth with the men, even though he is all of twelve.
I am not as brave as Mother, Jane thinks. Not brave enough to stay behind. She picks up her stave of iron and follows her baby brother onto the field where the yellow cowslips poke through the black turf.
“Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. “Jane!”
Jane thrashed herself awake. It was cold pale dawn, and Jane’s buoyant hopes for Dorie were fading to despair. The days were all the same now, and Jane went through the morning rituals by rote: locking Dorie into the gloves, helping the listless girl dress and eat and play with her toys.
It felt ridiculous to complain about no tantrums … but Dorie wasn’t doing anything at all. Jane had expected the girl’s stubbornness and energy to sustain her through learning this new skill, but now?