Through the cobwebs she went, her feet smearing dust on the stairs. Up and to the studio, where the tiniest noises of life crept around the open studio door. A small voice, talking. A giggle.
Dorie was sitting on the floor of Edward’s studio, hair lit by a stray sunbeam. Her dress was smeared with dust and something that looked like jam, but she looked safe and healthy. In fact, she looked very like the picture of Dorie as Jane had first seen her, making her Mother doll dance among the motes of dust in the sunbeam.
Unlike that first day, though, she was talking to it. Full sentences narrating the morning life of a five-year-old (“I made my own breakfast, I ate all the jam,”) and that gladdened Jane’s heart.
Dorie broke off when she saw Jane, beamed at her and said, “You came back.”
“Yes,” breathed Jane. “I came back.”
And then it struck her what was odd about the picture, for Dorie was playing with her old doll, the doll that had been destroyed by Dorie herself. Jane had dropped the porcelain shards in the small red room, and later picked them out of the dense carpet one by one, and carried them to the dustbin, dropped them in there with the two blue glass eyes.
Jane took a step back and said, “Dorie, what—”
—and then the doll dissolved into smoke, rose into the air and reformed, and suddenly Jane was staring at her new face, again.
Jane’s hand went right for her feyjabber, but she’d left it sticking out of Helen.
“You are back,” the Fey Queen said. “Your choice is made.”
“The choice to destroy you.” Though she had no idea how.
“The choice to be with Edward, no matter the sacrifice. I understand.”
“The choice,” Jane forced through dry lips, “not to be a victim. Not to be on the run, and not to let you drive me from the few people left in this world whom I care about. Who care for me.”
“A battle you can never win,” the Queen said, “for who can compete with the fey? Now that you creatures voluntarily attach us, you do not even have to be killed. The forms are cleaner, they live longer. A whole human lifespan, I expect, unless we are discovered. My subjects have slowly been slipping into place around the city. Ready to enact change from within. With Edward’s help, we will win this war yet.”
“Help,” said Jane. “You really call it help when you were the one directing his hands; you were the one clouding his mind? But never mind that. The Great War is over, and you’ve lost. If you really thought you could win, you’d be taking over one of those well-positioned women. Not the governess in a tumble-down shack in the countryside.”
“Edward has access to everyone. If you think a leader cannot direct her people from a sheltered seat, you are mistaken. Besides,” and she sent a tendril of orange warmth to flicker through Dorie’s hair, “this is where my child is. My small-part-of-me.”
“Your child who can’t live in either world—”
“Who can live in both.”
“You would use her, as you used Edward—”
“If she and Edward are useful to me, do I love them the less?” She glimmered at Jane. “But I weary of maintaining this human form when the real one is present, and more comfortable to wear in your polluted world. I weary of talking like a human without a human mouth and brain to do the heavy lifting. I weary.”
She dissipated into blue-orange light and then a rage like fire swept across Jane.
It was the attack, finally the true attack, and no Poule there to fling iron in front of her. The Fey Queen was trying to slip in her body through the front door of her face.
But it wasn’t as strong as she had expected. Jane pushed back, blazing hot herself, pushed back and beat the Fey Queen from her body.
The Fey Queen hung in the air in front of her, paler than before, the imaged face only a sketch over colored light. “You. What?”
But Jane knew. “I have had fey substance in me for the last five years. I am not as helpless as you think.”
Deep down inside she knew that the Queen had not used all her force the first time. Jane’s proud words were only that—the last-ditch words of a victim.
No, not a victim.
A defeated warrior is not a victim.
Jane bent her knees, steadying herself, readying herself.
The orange light deepened, blotting out the blue, and there was sneering in that vibrating voice. “Only means I could have taken you anytime, you with fey on your cheek. Except you were hideous.”
“You caused it.”
“The original purpose of the fey bombs was to hook our substance into you so we had an entrance to slip into your dead forms and use them. By accident we discovered that the living maimed made more suitable, if more disgusting, bodies. Once we figured out how to attach small bits of our substance to you without killing you, we understood we could take you over alive.” She swirled. “Of course, there was still the problem of taste. My people wouldn’t wish to live a deformed life like you had. Hideous, disgusting … a half-life.”
“It was still a better life than you’ll ever have,” said Jane softly, for here at the last she knew it. “Mine was real.” It was real and I fought for every piece of it, she thought, and those other Janes that didn’t happen wavered in her sight.
“Do you think we like taking over your forms?” said the Queen. “All we want is our fair share of the land again. We lived in peace until you started to ruin the world. We gave you pieces of ourselves to get you to stop—but you humans never stay satisfied for long. Soon enough the factories were blazing once more, as if we had done wrong by granting you all your wishes. We were forced to fight.” The orange light was red now, and a thrumming crackled through the air which made it hard to think.
“Not forced,” said Jane. “You and I, we chose to fight.” She had chosen to make a stand for her village. She had chosen to stand with Charlie. And that Jane who had not been touched by war, that Jane who had never understood what it was to stand up and fight for herself, thinned out, turned insubstantial.
There was roaring in her ears, and the Fey Queen’s words seemed to enter by the base of her skull.
“The first step was infiltration, which Edward solved for us. The second, to get rid of all of you. Oh, you ridiculous thing, see how you stand, so frail, against me. If you think your tiny bit of fey can stop me, you’re a fool.”
And then the Fey Queen reared back and attacked again, and this time it was like a wave crashing over Jane, thick and hot and thrumming with power, and her slim defenses crumbled as the Fey Queen rushed into her body.
From a far-off distance the door opened. She was dimly aware of her own voice crying “Edward!”—but whether it was her or the Fey Queen calling through her lips she did not know.
“Edward, my love, my thanks,” said her voice again, and now she knew that was the Fey Queen, crackling through Jane, erasing her like a sponge crossing a chalkboard, rewriting the slate with the Queen’s thoughts, words, ideas.
From a long way off she saw terror on Edward’s face, despair. He was losing someone he loved, but Jane couldn’t bear to hope that person was her. If he had to make a choice between Jane and the Fey Queen, Jane shouldn’t give a fig for her own chances. That was what the Fey Queen, laughing, was telling her now, deep inside and all through her marrow.
It was up to her. The warrior.
The Jane who had chosen to be here.
Jane sent all her will into her fingers, still her own fingers, and dug her fingernails into the red line that surrounded her face. The Queen recoiled in surprise, and Jane used that tiny moment to summon all her internal strength, to compress the crackling, questing tendrils of the Queen back into the fey substance that Jane wore. With the lesser fey, Jane had been strong enough to shut it out completely. The Queen was far too powerful; but if Jane could just push her past a certain point, just into the mask only …