Copperhead i-2 Read online

  But were things really as dire as Jane had said just now? Why the sudden haste? The earliest of The Hundred had received their fey faces several years ago. They were all being very careful these days, going out with their iron masks. But all the blue bits of fey did was sit there—well, mostly. Still, surely they weren’t gearing up for some takeover of The Hundred like Jane said, like Alistair and Copperhead thought. Frankly, it would be ridiculous. What no one seemed to remember was that the Fey Queen’s plan had been to have fey secretly infiltrate those women and men and land themselves in influential positions, ready to take over from the inside. You couldn’t secretly infiltrate if everyone knew you were coming, could you?

  And Helen was determined to help Jane, to convince the women Jane couldn’t. But quickly? She thought through some of the women she knew off the top of her head—the self-absorbed wife of the prime minister, there in grey. (She had not sacrificed her apricot-hued shoes, though.) Stubborn Alice Pennyfeather. Close-minded Lady Dalrymple. All transformed from their workaday selves into ethereally beautiful women, and their social status similarly elevated. Even with the iron masks, The Hundred ran the social scene. No, as much as Helen liked a good intrigue, even she was sensible enough to know that she would need more time than a few days.

  The men straightened up, the crowd herded back to their seats. They squashed onto the long benches, stood in the makeshift aisles, ranged long legs along the windowsill. There was silence, and in it Grimsby said quietly, “This is what you have come to see.”

  The cloth was whisked away to reveal a strange device. The center was a large copper ball, full of ridges and rivets. It looked like claws clasping each other, or perhaps snakes that writhed over the copper ball. It was held firmly in an open cube of iron, crisscrossed with wrought iron that curlicued in a curious pattern. In the front of the box was a child-sized door.

  “In this box,” said Grimsby, “I have trapped a fey.”

  Murmurs, tremors. Men who would shout if it weren’t improper.

  With a great creaking and grinding, the copper ball slowly opened its interlocking layers. Inside hovered a blue ball of light. When the copper was completely opened, the light burst out of the ball and flung itself at the open door of the iron box.

  The guests shrieked and ducked.

  But the blue light did not seem to be able to pass beyond the threshold. It thudded to a stop right at the boundary of the open door. Then it launched itself at the side wall, coming to a stop a hairsbreadth from the wrought iron. Back, forth, up and down, till it was spinning around and around the cage with savage ferocity.

  “There, you see?” said Alistair. “Completely trapped.”

  “And well-deserved,” shouted someone from a bench, someone who had had too much wine.

  “It’s beautiful,” whispered Helen, so quietly that no one could hear her. No one must, or could have, and yet next to her was a slight man in black, and he gave one short sharp nod, not looking at her. But that could be about anything.

  Her fingers twisted her handkerchief as if to tear it. How far along were Jane and Millicent? So long to carefully take off the current face, so long to press down the old face and bind it in place, so long to return Millicent from that still-as-death sleep. Helen’s fingers wanted to burst out of her hands, fly like birds to check on the women, flutter at Mr. Grimsby, claw his eyes out for being so hateful to poor Millicent.…

  “I captured this fey by using one piece of a fey as a seed,” said Grimsby. “The machine finds all the other pieces of that particular fey and draws them in, restoring the whole fey to itself.” He grinned cruelly. “Ironically enough, it runs on fey power.”

  “And then that fey you captured can be destroyed forever,” put in Alistair, his face sharp and blue in the glow. “Show them, Grimsby.”

  A hint of malice crept across Grimsby’s face at Alistair’s words. Now he bent his tall bony frame to the machine. If he had made it, why didn’t he make it to measure, thought Helen, for Grimsby seemed like some kind of strange praying mantis folded around too-small prey.

  A switch—a thrum as the machine turned on. The blue light keened with pain. It mutated wildly, turning itself into all manner of things—a frog, a tree, a sparrow. A face, shining out of the light—low gasps as it formed the face of a small child, tears running down its face. “Help me,” it said, and the words thrummed inside Helen’s skull. She felt a tremendous compulsion to run over and let that child free—and by the looks of it, many of the others felt that, too.

  The thrumming grew louder. The face splintered and reformed, struggling to keep its shape. “He’s caught me, he’s caught me. Help—”

  A small boom like an implosion, and it was gone.

  Grimsby turned off the machine and straightened up with a smile. “No mess, no fuss,” he said. “We have never been able to destroy a fey before, unless it was trapped in a human. But this? Very tidy. One People. One Race.”

  Silence in the room as men and women grappled with what they had just seen. Helen felt as if she would be violently ill. She twisted her fingers together, focused on that sliver of pain to distract her.

  Finally a female voice said, “Forgive the impertinence, but how do you get the piece of fey into the machine to begin with? Who bells the cat?”

  Helen looked, but she could not see who had spoken. Grimsby smiled, as if this question was on cue, as if he had waited for just this opportunity. Helen did not like that smile. She put a hand to her seat, starting to turn, wondering if she could slip away. But one of the homely maids was standing there, Helen’s iron mask in her hands.

  “When I turn on the general setting it pulls in the first piece of fey it can find,” Grimsby said. “A dangerous setting, you can see, to have fey come rushing at you.” A calm, meaningful voice. “More dangerous still for those who have fey lurking in their skin. I need every endangered woman to be thoroughly shielded, please.” Heads swiveled as he nodded at Helen.

  With shaky fingers Helen buckled her mask in place. She needed to get upstairs to warn Jane. But the maid was there and all eyes upon her.

  “Windows open,” Grimsby said, and Helen saw that Millicent was right, that there was no iron bolted into the wooden frames. The cold November air rushed in. Grimsby folded himself around his device again, long fingers sliding over the copper curves till they found the heavy lever. He pulled it down.

  The masked women gasped and Helen knew they felt it, too.

  A strange, almost hypnotic pull, tickling around the edges of the iron mask. Eerie, but faint, a fingernail-on-chalkboard sensation that she did not like but could withstand. She wondered how strong the compulsion would be without the iron mask. Would it suck the bit of fey right out of her face, or would it make Helen herself get up and throw herself inside that machine?

  “Nothing’s happening,” grumbled one of the men, and several iron-masked faces turned his way, staring.

  “Increasing power,” said Grimsby.

  He cranked the copper wheel, and suddenly there was blue in the small room, blue out in the middle of the benches. In the middle of the guests—right through the guests, who screamed. A masked woman fainted, and several men stood, angry and red-faced.

  “The piece of fey is resisting,” said Grimsby, eyes gleaming. “It must be a bigger piece than I expected. More massed intelligence. It’s attempting to form a shape.” His eyes narrowed. “Except…”

  Except this figure had a familiar face.

  This figure held a scalpel.

  “Jane,” said Helen, and it did not seem to matter how loud the room was, she was heard. The name carried around the room in waves as Helen pushed her way to the space that had formed in the center of the room.

  It was a wavy blue picture of Jane, Jane who had been bending over a still form on a white bed. But Jane wore iron, Helen thought—and then she saw that the blue light was most sharply focused on her hands, the hands that she had smeared with the fey-infused clay.

  Jane looked
up and through Helen. Her eyes were glassy with concentration, filmed over with white fatigue. Her mouth seemed to be shouting something Helen could not hear. Millicent’s fey mask was off, the face underneath red and horrifying. Helen could not look away, even though it felt as though she was being sucked back a great distance. The blue air whirled around her, and her ears popped as the pressure in her head grew tighter and tighter, and Jane seemed to be farther and farther away.

  “Jane!” Helen shouted. “Jane!”

  Jane looked directly at her then. Her dark hair was wild and blowing about her head. The attic furniture loomed behind her like a crouching beast. Jane held Millicent’s old face in her hands, clutching it in front of her.

  <> Helen heard, and it seemed to be a voice in her head alone, or not even a voice, but the memory of a voice, a thought of one. <>

  Now Jane was straight, the scalpel was gone. She was arching, shrieking. The strips of iron on her face glowed, brighter than the rest of the blue that made up the strange picture of her. Voices screamed. Jane turned and Helen thought Jane was facing her, thought Jane saw her. Jane’s lips faintly moved and Helen read, “Stop it … stop it … stop it.…” Jane seemed to bend in the direction of the copper machine. Stooping, still shouting, “Stop it, stop it.”

  Behind the copper ball Grimsby’s face was backlit from the blue glow, and she could not tell if it was cruelty or fear she read there.

  “Turn it off, turn it off,” Helen yelled at Alistair, but he shouted back, “Do you want the fey to be freed? I’m not going near it!”

  Helen was not conscious of thought in that moment, but if she had stopped to examine the impulse that made her feet pick up and run forward, not away, it would have been something like: If it destroys me, it destroys me—but it will not hurt Jane.

  There were those whose lives were worth something. Those who were trying to do good. Those who were determined as all hell to set things right in the world, and didn’t waste their days spouting off nonsense about “one race” or the cut of their hemline.

  Those people needed to be around to save the rest of them from themselves.

  Helen threw herself onto the lever and shoved it down with all her might.

  And then everything went dark.

  Chapter 2

  THE IRONSKIN

  The pressure slowly faded out and vanished, and then the room was the plain dark of a burned-out light. A hundred burned-out lights—all the electricity had winked out, and now the guests milled frantically about, crashing into one another, voices piling on top of the next, fluttering for explanations. Shouts rang out; orders coldly given by Grimsby: “Round the women up. Make them safe.” Don’t let them leave.

  Helen felt her way toward the wall, tugging her iron mask off so she could not be detected by some man feeling it and attempting to make her safe. She had to get up the stairs and make sure Jane was all right. But the crowd was frantic and just as Helen’s fingers touched solid wall a heavy man crashed into her and she thudded to the ground. She felt as if she would have enjoyed a good panic right about then, but instead she kept her head down and reached once more for the wall. This time someone tripped over her, catching their sharp-toed shoe in her belly.

  As she rolled away from that she lost the wall, and ended up trying to stand in the melee and protect her head from more high heels. She was jostled and bumped and then suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder, guiding her back to safety. Alistair.

  She clung to the hand and gasped out, “Help me,” as the man in blackness steered her along the wall and toward the hall that led to the back stairs to the garret. She found the stairwell railing with one hand and pressed her husband’s with the other.

  But the hand did not have a ring. It was not her husband’s hand. It disentangled itself, and the man it belonged to said in her ear, “Trust none of them,” pressed something small into her hand, and was gone. From the other room came commotion still, and blinks of light as the servant girls brought in oil lamps.

  Helen held on to the railing and went up the stairs.

  It was pitch-black, but her hand found the worn door at the top and opened it, and there was a faint bit of light from the fog-shrouded moonlight. Enough to see that what was in her hand looked like an old-fashioned flashlight, the sort that ran on the mini-bluepacks of fey technology and had not been seen since. But when she slid the button it came on with the yellow of the modern electric lights, not fey blue.

  She might have wondered more about it, but her thoughts were filled with Jane, Jane, Jane, and she ran the flashlight around the slanted room, fast at first, then slower and slower as the sweeps revealed no Jane, and her shaking nerves told her to fear the worst.

  A body lay on the daybed, one arm flung down, white in the moonlight. All the candles were snuffed out. Helen crossed to the daybed. Played her flashlight slowly from feet to head. The woman’s face was white and pale.

  Millicent.

  She wore her beautiful face, as Helen had last seen her, though in the vision just now she thought she had seen Millicent with no face at all. Helen peered closer and saw the red line running around the outline of her face, saw it was slightly crooked, as if it had been hastily shoved back into place so she would not be lying here with no face at all.

  But Millicent was not breathing, did not move. She lay in her fine black dress, sunk in the bone-stillness of fey sleep.

  And there was no Jane, still there was no Jane. A cold wind swept through the garret and Helen shivered.

  Small footstep noise behind her, and Helen whirled. It was Jane, it was the mystery man with the flashlight—no.

  It was the small boy. Tam. He blinked in the flashlight’s glare. He had a jar with a tiny creature in it and Helen’s heart burst into a million pieces.

  “Everyone was shouting and it woke up Sam,” he said.

  “Oh, Tam,” said Helen. She hurried over to him, keeping the flashlight away from Millicent and blocking her from his view. “Your stepmamma’s … resting now. Perhaps you can show her your pet later.”

  She knelt beside him at the top of the stairs. From below the lanterns had turned back to light—they had got the power working again. She heard the heavy pounding steps of men, moving closer.

  Tam wriggled the small jar of bugs out of his pocket. “Do you want to feed Sam now?” he said. He pressed the small jar into Helen’s hand as Helen crouched, listening, waiting. She pulled Tam to the side in the garret room as they came up the steps, all those men, thundering up and into the small attic room. Alistair and Hattersley and Morse, and more she did not know, for Copperhead seemed bigger every day. Grimsby was at the head of them and he went straight to Millicent, lantern swinging, a hunting dog to its prey. The yellow light gleamed upward onto his chin, casting cruel black shadows across his face. A white candle fell to the floor.

  Helen thought how awful she would feel if that were Jane, if that were Mother, if that were someone she loved so devotedly that her heart would shatter to see them like that, trapped in the fey sleep, all unknowing if they could ever come out. She tried to transfer that sympathy to Mr. Grimsby, but she watched the black shadows curl across his face and could not do it.

  “Millicent…,” Grimsby said, and then he turned, and his lamplight fell on Helen, holding on to his son. “What do you know about this?”

  All the men crowded in, and Alistair turned on her, his face sharp with the surety of her betrayal. Which was not fair, she thought. “I don’t know anything,” she said, which was at least partly true. She had known that Jane and Millicent were up here. But Jane knew how to do the operation. Helen did not know what had happened to bring them to this disaster, and if anything, she thought it likely to be the men’s fault, the fault of that dreadful machine Grimsby called their salvation. “You all saw me downstairs. I thought I heard noises from up here. I came up to try to find Jane.” Her arm tightened on Tam, who, surprisingly for a small boy, did not immediately squir
m away.

  The movement seemed to call attention to the boy. “Come here, son,” Grimsby said in a thin, cold voice. Tam obediently wriggled free and crossed the room in silent steps that seemed to shake the floor.

  “It is good you are here, Thomas,” said Grimsby, looking down at the boy. Tam seemed very small next to that tall thin man. He was a mannequin, frozen, his fingers tight on his glass jar. “I have very sad news to tell you, so you must be brave.”

  The constriction inside Helen’s chest loosened an inch. Mr. Grimsby would make it okay. He and his son would become closer while they waited and worried about Millicent. He was not as frightening as she had always thought.

  “Your stepmother is dead.” Grimsby stared down at Tam and Helen saw that little form suppress a flinch. Tam did not speak.

  “I say, Grims—,” said one of the other men and then was silent.

  Helen found her voice. “But she’s not dead,” she said, moving impulsively to Millicent. “She’s in the fey sleep. She might wake up.” Helen smoothed Millicent’s hair, pressed her wrist, willing the pulse to suddenly start.

  Mr. Grimsby cut her off. “As good as dead, for what fey would be willing to revive her? Do not count on a children’s tale, a sleeping beauty revived. We have to prepare ourselves for the worst.” Now he knelt beside his son at last, but apparently only to pick up something he saw on the floor. Helen could not think what it might be, but the movement called her attention to another find—Jane’s carpetbag, humped in a bit of shadow by the door.

  Grimsby rose, his hand clenched around his prize. “And I know what will be the most important to you, son. Justice. Vengeance. We will make the murderer suffer.” Pause. Beat. “And we know who the murderer is.” Grimsby pointed at Helen, a tactile placeholder for his accused. “The fiend who did this is Jane Eliot. The ironskin.”