And you provoked them, thought Jane, for around the flowery description of a long time ago she heard this fey tale like heartbeats in her throat. My father was cold and I was lonely. I went into the forest with my sketchpad. I sketched beauty.
“Well, go on,” said Jane when he stopped. “What sort of things provoked them? Back then.” The roughness in her voice broke against the spell his words were weaving, fell away.
The ice pick coaxed eyelashes from the clay lids. “Great beauty. Great artistic talent. Passion. There used to be a saying in the towns near the fey, though it was forgotten long before the wars—”
“May you be born plain,” breathed Jane along with him.
“Yes.” His voice rolled on, filling the room with the long-ago world. She closed her mouth, certain her words would derail him from the only way he could get through this story. It had to be distant, it had to be a fantastical tale to spin itself out of a pile of horrid truths and a story of me. Me, I lived this.
“Some average men set up trade, of a sort, with the fey,” he said, “and many curious things were brought over to ease human existence. Blue-lit fey technology replaced human invention, and it never occurred to the men who traded for bluepacks to run lights and cameras that everything had its own price, its own story.
“Scalpel. No, that one.” She came just close enough to hand it to him, then backed away. He slid it into a nostril of the mask, cleaning up the edges.
“Now, this boy was not from the forests.” He was a small boy who rattled around a too-big house. “He knew little of the fey, hardly any of the tales, and so he wandered into the woods, sketching birds and animals.” He was talented for a such a small boy. His birds seemed as though they would startle and take to the air. “And when a beautiful shimmering woman appeared, he sketched her. When she invited him home for dinner, he accepted.
“Gauze.” He pressed it under the woman’s ear, wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Regret dripped from him like the beads of sweat.
“Go on,” Jane said softly. She had heard these stories. The tales of the travelers who ate a golden apple hanging from a tree in winter, drank water from a cup held by a beautiful woman.
Ingested something belonging to the fey.
The sleeve had left a pink streak on his forehead. He bent over the woman again, his voice dropping. “But when the young boy tried to go home, the Queen held fast to the fey inside of him, and he could not depart. The Queen had chosen him for her consort. Now those whom she chooses are sometimes let go, back into the world, many years later. Decades. When their families have long since turned to dust. When her attention has finally turned to a new … toy.” He dropped the pinkened gauze into a metal can. Studied his patient. “Again and again, the story is the same. The consort is let go, and paid, in some fashion, with a gift for serving the Queen all those years.” He spread his right hand wide, as if contemplating the fey gift lurking in his fingertips.
Then he blew skin dust from the woman’s forehead and turned to face Jane. For the first time he appeared to study her.
Only then did Jane realize that she had never rewound the veil after peering into Nina’s room. She felt shock from him at seeing her bare face when he did not expect it—how did she know his shock, when his expression did not change?
More, how did she know the myriad things she suddenly seemed to know about him, and her mind raced back through the day, hearing what he didn’t say in his story just now, knowing each breath and feeling in the forest, feeling him touch her as she fell and thinking calmly—he loves me—mind racing, saying, that was all just today, today when I was without iron, today I knew that, today—
“Is Dorie still all right?”
“Yes,” said Jane.
His shoulders moved—the tiniest bit of relief. Quietly he said, “Come, see how Nina looks.”
Mind whirling, Jane forced herself to approach the table, to focus. Her first thought was that the work seemed surprisingly fake—the mask was dead white, the line where it had been glued into place clearly visible, outlined in a thin strip of red. Nina’s eyes were open and staring, though she remained unconscious. They seemed to be set a long way behind the mask.
“What do you think?” He touched Nina’s chin, delicately. “It will blend into her own skin very shortly. I will bandage it for now to keep it together, but in a couple days, you won’t see those lines. She will look as though she was born that way.”
“She will be very beautiful,” admitted Jane. She could admit his talent as an artist. And yet … “She looks … fey.” She remembered the face floating in the forest.
“Where do you think our notion of beauty comes from?” said Edward.
“Do you think so?” said Jane. “Somehow that’s more disturbing than anything else.”
The white mask glowed palest pink at the corners of the cheeks. Paint? Or life, slowly filling the clay? Jane’s breath caught at the beauty Nina would have, and she thought: I could be that beautiful. But in the next instant—no. No, all I want is to be normal … and I still want that.
She saw him at work, she was shocked, she was repulsed. And yet it did not lessen the fierce desire.
Normal, she thought, like a hunger in her belly. He could make me normal.
Edward brushed aside another fleck of dust, picked up a roll of bandages, and started securing the woman’s face. “So you see,” he said, “why Dorie must not give in to that side of her nature. I fight against their gifts, and fail. Just like I once fought against the Fey Queen’s hold and failed. There is great evil in that failure.”
His eyes were shadowed again, even in the bright workroom light. She felt his pain, clutching deep in his chest. More—she really did feel it. She was sure of that now. She could feel his shame as if it were her own, and it was only just now, since she had removed the iron from her fey-cursed cheek. She put a hand to her bare red cheek and found it was blazing hot.
The shame of … letting others suffer for his mistakes? His daughter, but first … his wife. Fey-bombed and taken over while pregnant. A wonder Dorie had survived. “And then,” she said in a low voice, “the Fey Queen returned.”
A short nod confirmed that horror. “Dorie must not give in to her curse,” he said. “Almost six and can’t dress herself? No. She must be strong.”
Jane was going to say that strength wasn’t the issue—that bottling up wasn’t strength, a whole host of things she was discovering this last week, this day, now. She put that aside to convince him, she must convince him that her way was right. She swallowed. “The Fey Queen told Dorie she was her mother.” Something niggled at the back of her mind about that but she ignored it in favor of listening to the emotions that were suddenly rampaging through Edward, trying to sort out the cacophony she was hearing. “If I help Dorie learn how to use her fey gifts, then she’ll be able to defend herself if the Fey Queen tries to take her away.”
“To defend herself,” he said, and hope lit his whispered words. “To be strong where I was weak.…” He laid the bandages on Nina’s breast, and suddenly his eyes and insides were all aflame. “Tell me more about what you and Dorie have done together.”