“I know,” he said. “I saw your curriculum vitae before. I wrote you about it. I want to know about you.”
Her ruined cheek burned, hot under the iron. It was both at the implication that she’d said something foolish, and at the idea that he wanted to know her. The embarrassment was quickly consumed by anger, always close at hand since that day during the war. “What more do you need to know? You received my letters of recommendation.”
He scratched his chin, studying her closely. “In five years you’ve had four positions. Each one praised your knowledge, punctuality, and morals to the skies. Yet each one let you go.”
She was white-hot inside her veil. Anger at the families who dismissed her, anger at the returning soldiers who took her positions, anger at him for probing her injuries. Barely trusting herself to speak, she said, “Yes.”
“Let me see,” he said, and before she could stop him he lifted her white veil and pulled it away from her face, revealed her to the small red room.
The iron mask covered her ruined cheek. It fit around one eye, crept over her temple where flecks of the fey shrapnel had hit. The hammered iron was held in place by leather straps that buckled around her head. And right now, with the rage that consumed her at his actions, it was probably leaking bits of orange light around the edges, as if Jane herself were on fire.
“How could you—!”
“I needed to know.” He was looking at her as if something entirely unexpected had landed on his doorstep. “What’s your curse and why can’t I sense it?”
“It’s rage, since you asked so politely. And you can’t sense it because I’m ironskin.” “Wearing ironskin,” she had said the first few months, but soon enough she’d dropped the verb, imitating the other scarred children at the foundry. “The iron mask stops the fey curse. The rage can’t leak through.” Jane tore the veil from his hands and flung it over her face, but it was far too late. He stopped her from tucking the cloth down her collar.
“Leave it,” he said. “You won’t be veiled here.” He gestured for her to precede him out of the room. His hand dropped as if it were going to guide the small of her back, but then it did not. It would be too forward of him, but perversely, she was hurt.
In five years she could list on one hand the people who had intentionally touched her.
Jane emerged into the round blue-lit foyer, half-thinking he was going to ask her to leave and not return. Despite her desperation—perhaps it would be for the best. To be stranded here in this house that reeked of fey, with this man who ripped down her barriers, who loomed over her with unreadable eyes … perhaps it would be easier if he dismissed her now.
But he pointed her up the wide stairs. “Come meet Dorie,” he said.
The wide stairs led, logically enough, to the second floor, though Jane knew that “logical” was not a given with fey architecture. Not human logic, anyway. She followed his lead, unpinning her hat with its veil from her carefully crimped hair. Her straight dark hair did not hold crimps well, and there was little enough of it to see between the leather straps for the mask and the hat—still, Jane had tried to look her best today.
At the top of the landing was a suite of playroom and bedroom, and there was a small girl sitting on the playroom floor, dancing her doll in a ray of sunshine.
Jane was so distracted by the sudden appearance of sunshine in the grey house, on the grey moor, that it took her several blinks to notice something that made her stomach lurch.
Dorie was not touching the doll.
Jane willed her feet to stay where they were, though every inch of her screamed to run.
How could this little girl be doing something only the fey could do? Was this child no human, but a fey in disguise, ready to attack at any second? Panic shrieked inside her, she clutched her hat as if to tear it to shreds—but again she willed herself: Stay.
Mr. Rochart reached down and confiscated the doll. “In this house we use our hands,” he said. The doll’s porcelain hands wrestled with his grip; the porcelain legs kicked his chest. “Dorie!” he said, and the doll flopped over his arm, unmoving.
“Mother,” said Dorie.
He leaned to Jane’s ear. “Calling it Mother is a fancy I can’t shake from her,” he said.
“They do look alike.” Jane would not back away from this girl, though the sharp sense of something fey made her queasy, made her wounded cheek blaze. She had expected a girl with a simple curse, damaged like herself, like the others she had known at the foundry—a girl with red streaks on her arm who leaked despair, a boy with a scarred back who filled everyone who came near with a lust for violence. That child she could’ve helped, in the same way that the foundry had helped her: through acceptance and ironskin.
She did not understand this girl.