Ironskin by Tina Connolly Page B

chain, and coils of rope—Jane wondered if that desk had changed at all since she’d been there four years ago. No, nearly five, now.
    “Ah. Here,” he said. He picked up a small, greasy looking jar containing a brown-and-black substance.
    “What is that?”
    “Tar,” he said. “Tar with flecks of iron. I’ve tried it out and it works almost as well as the ironskin itself. It’s horrible stuff and gets on everything, but you might find you can use it to find her weakness. The fey point of entry.”
    “Maybe I could,” agreed Jane, awed by the possibility. She turned the jar around in her hands. Even the outside was tacky to the touch, smeared with bits of iron-flecked tar Niklas hadn’t managed to scoop into the jar. “I remember you had a theory that the location of the curse might influence the type of curse—that similar curses cluster on similar parts of the body. I know you haven’t encountered one like hers … but do you have a suggestion of where to put the tar?”
    Niklas closed his fingers around iron, his expression closed off. “Say again what she does,” he said.
    He listened attentively as Jane told him everything she could remember. “You say she often waves her hands when she’s making things happen. Or looks in that direction, which sounds like her eyes or her mind. I’d try one of those three.”
    Jane shuddered. “Tar in her eyes?”
    Niklas shrugged. “If she is fey, maybe it’ll kill her off for you.”
    “If the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch,” Jane said wryly. She slipped the jar into the pocket of her dress. Took the few bills she’d brought inside and stuffed them into the iron cauldron Niklas used as a bank.
    He watched her out of the corner of his eye, while saying gruffly, “I guess you have a job now and that’s only right.”
    “And I didn’t when I came, and you helped me anyway,” she said. “You don’t know how much that meant to me.”
    Niklas shrugged, picked up a hammer, started pounding on an iron bar that didn’t look like it needed pounding.
    She knew that the gruffness, the dismissal, was only his manner. A side effect, perhaps, of the howling depression he’d once confessed to her was his curse. The outline of his shirt caught on the iron underneath, the tough cotton snagging on the metal ridges, the hang of the leather jacket deformed by the iron chest that squeezed him like a vise, as if a tighter cinching could drive out the poison. She remembered the shape of that rigid corset from when she’d tried to hug him goodbye. Old Ironsides, one of the boys had called him, trying to make an affectionate nickname for the man they worshiped.
    But Niklas didn’t take to affectionate nicknames. And the name was never mentioned in his presence again.
    The boy appeared in the doorway. “Hey miss, there’s a man says you’re gonna miss your train.” He shouted around Niklas’s banging, slipping his words in with the familiarity of practice. “He says if you don’t come quick there may not be a car when you get there, as some hoodlums looked int’rested in dismantlin’ it.” A grin showed what he thought of the driver’s worries.
    Niklas did not stop pounding the iron bar with his hammer, though Jane turned again, said, “Thank you, Niklas. Thank you.”
    There was maybe a half-nod in return.
    “All right,” she said to the boy, pressing a coin into his hand. “You take care of him, right?” The boy nodded, his sharp chin bobbing, his knobbly fingers shutting tight around the coin.
    Jane clutched the jar in her pocket. She hurried through the door of the workshop and out the gate, hurried into the impatient orbit of the worried driver, leaving the foundry of the ironskin behind.
    *   *   *
    Jane’s thoughts flew back and forth as the train clattered into the country station. First Helen and her new, utterly foreign society. The cruel rumors about Mr. Rochart and Dorie. Then—the paste might work, the paste might work. She could try