The inside of the mask was cool on her skin. Sensuous, molding—like skin itself rather than cold clay. She peered out at him and it was like looking through binoculars the wrong way. Everything seemed distant, cut off. “How do you like me now?”
His eyes were invisible. “I like you as you are.”
She could not hear in his voice whether that meant “before” or “now.” Could not feel it, either. She was turned all upside down by the clay on her face. It seemed to thrum with implied power, but differently than her curse had, so that she would have to recalibrate everything she knew.
She turned past him to the mirror at the end of the room. Her eyes looked out from behind the mask. Her own visage, yet transformed. Enduring. Only her frightened eyes marred its regal beauty.
He came up behind her, slid a hand to her waist.
She could not move from the mirror.
“You think I mock you. You think I want you to be other than you are.” He drew his fingers down the cheek of the mask—she felt it as a coldness that slid over her real skin, her damaged skin. “How could you not?”
“When the proof is right here.”
“I used to be a fine artist,” he said. “I used to find beauty in what was. Now I sculpt every mask and it turns fey under my fingertips.” He pulled the mask from her face and she cried out as her reflection appeared again. And hated herself for the agony her own reflection stirred.
“I tried to form your face. Your face, undamaged. Yet the clay twisted under my fingers, edges where there should be none, roundness where there should be none—remaking your face into some horrid fey ideal. Turning a pretty human face to grotesque parody.” He tossed the mask to the worktable, and its forehead chipped. “I had no idea what I’ve become.”
Hardly thinking, she reached to him, ran a comforting hand on his back. “Ssh,” she soothed, like she would Dorie. “It’s all right.” But her words didn’t reach the coldness that seeped out of him again, thick and strong.
“I lose time when I work…,” he said, his voice trailing off. “At first it seemed no more than an artist’s reverie, such as I often had in my youth.…” He balled one fist into the other. “Their gifts are poison, Jane! Miss Ingel…”
Jane formed the word on numb lips. “Dead?”
“We found her in the clearing. Poule stabbed her wrist—iron in any line to the heart works, she said. She killed the fey, but it was too late for Blanche. I fear she will be an imbecile forever.”
Shock and horror. “It could wear off? Dorie woke from it.”
“The only good—nay, wonderful—thing of the day.” But he shook his head. “Dorie has gifts Blanche did not. I fear the worst.”
“It could be.…” She picked up her face, held it to her chest. What was she risking?
The nearness of his body was suffocating. “The fey are drawn to beauty.” Warmth, towering over her.
She could hardly breathe. She wondered if Edward had some other fey glamour besides the ability in his hands. “They are drawn to themselves,” she gasped out. “I am at risk either way.”
He spun at that, spread his hands as if seeing them for the first time. Was he realizing that he must also be at risk? The fey gift lurking in his hands—that too must be the same fey substance as all the rest. The masks, the curses—even the bluepacks? And what was that substance, anyway? Something they grew, gathered? Or spit out, perhaps, like a spider produces silk.
“Yes,” he said, and he folded one hand in the other as if he no longer knew what to do with them. “You are at risk.”
“Give me the new face,” she said.
He shook his head. “I won’t do that to you. The risk—”
“Is the same,” she said, touching her cursed cheek. The imagined pond evaporated into anger. “I have borne the risk for five years, so tell me why the hell I shouldn’t get the reward? And besides. If you use your fey skill to reverse fey damage, wouldn’t that be setting something right?” Steel held her up. For once she was going to get exactly what she wanted, and damn anybody who told her she wasn’t right to want it. “I resent being labeled a victim.”
“I don’t think of you as a victim. As a survivor.”
“I resent having had something to survive. I resent the five years I spent letting fey emotions seep into me, send me down this life that is not mine. Five years their curse has grown into my soul until black rage and shame seem a vital part of me. One I cannot tear out by the roots, no matter how much calm I project. I resent that, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The fire died; the coldness was in her body, too. “No. You can’t. Not you, with your … collusion.”
“My daughter—”
“A daughter is a separate part of you. You can project your sorrow onto her. You can go out and be free of her for hours at a time.”
“No.”
She opened her eyes and studied the pain in his. “No, you’re right. I can’t understand yours anymore than you can understand mine. There. I resent that even in our war scars we are separated.” She held the mask in front of her face. “I resent being alone.”
He seized her hand and fire leaped inside of him. “Jane, my love. No. Do not ask this of me. If I were to lose you…”
Her anger threatened to crumble, her heart trembled at the caress of his words. Her words were fluttering steel. “You said you owed me. The day I pulled you back from the forest.”
He leaned in as if he would kiss her again and she stopped him. She would never kiss him again with these lips.
They stood there, and then finally she said softly, “If we are both in danger, at least let me head into battle with my own face.”
Deep inside a small voice said: Beautiful Jane is not you any more than scarred Jane is. Can you really pretend your motives are pure?
She could not, but she was out of the necessary will to walk away. Her hands closed around the iron-threaded cloth Poule had given her, but at that moment her focus was so hot and pure that she knew she had no need of it. She stood there and told him silently: Give me my face.
He started to protest, but then she saw that glassy white swell in his eyes, as her command raged forth, just as it had against Miss Davenport.
Give me my face.
Give me my face.
Silent and unseeing, Edward took the mask with the chipped forehead from her. She turned and marched to the door at the other end of the room, though her ankles shook her stride.
He made her lie down on his table.
He laid one fey-cursed hand on her forehead and one hand on her heart and then the small white room shifted into dreams.
Dream.
I am the Fey Queen, and Edward is at my command. When I tell him to go, fetch, stay, he does. I have complete power over his hands, his body, his soul.
But I would not command him to do evil, Jane thinks, I would command delightful things. Draw me a picture, I say. Paint a portrait of you, me, Dorie all together on the back lawn, with gold sunlight glinting from our clothes and hair. You swing her around till she is nothing but laughter. Show us how happy we are.
Dream further back. Go to somewhere in the middle of the Great War.
I am the Fey Queen, and I have lost Edward, I have let him go, he has won his freedom in a game of wits. (I did not pay enough attention to him; I was planning battles.) I am angry, but I do not show it. Instead I smile with blinding beauty and I grant him a gift. A special gift, the use of his hands, those sensitive artistic hands. And I tell him his hands will do grand things, and I will come to him and show him how.
No, thinks Jane. I will not be a part of this, of your plan to force Edward to give you the world. Did I coerce Edward to give me that face? Did I command? Then I was wrong. I reject this side of me, of what I could be, of what I might have been.