Read Online Silverblind (Ironskin) by Tina Connolly - Free Book Online Page B

thinking of Tam, but she was also thinking of the ironskin.
    Tam nodded, his eyes lighting again. “Yeah, you know about the ironskin? Get this.” He adjusted his glasses and flipped open his journal to a page where he had pasted a photo—the modern black-and-white photos, not the blue-and-white of the old fey tech. It showed an expanse of skin—a belly, she thought—with an old, faded scar. “So the lab hired me for the wyvern research in my book, and stuck me in a lab where they were busy testing it on some captive fey.” He saw her repress a shudder and he said, “I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve since got them to stop it.”
    She was warmed by the thought that he could have gone through everything he’d been through and still be more logical about the fey than the average man on the street. Something unclenched a bit.
    “So the field work positions were still relatively new,” Tam continued. “They’d been relying on a few freelancers. And there was only one person capable of bringing them fey—a blacksmith. Old guy. Massive. I told him how the wyvern albumen was dissolving the fey he’d brought. And he asked if he could watch the next set of tests—I didn’t think much of it, except that he’s a fanatic, you know? I understand that. Us fanatics are how discoveries get made. So I snuck him in.
    “And then get this—apparently this blacksmith was ironskin himself. I was standing there with the freshly hatched egg and suddenly he hiked up his shirt. There was a horrible red scar—nasty looking. I’d never seen an ironskin scar but I knew it was fey all right. They seem to bubble and writhe. I was kind of stunned and then he took the albumen from me and he flat-out rubbed it on his scar. It steamed and hissed and I’m sure he would have been screaming if he weren’t this crazy stoic blacksmith guy. But it cleaned out the fey.” Tam showed her the picture again, of the faded scar that looked a decade old. “I took this the same day.”
    Dorie’s eyes were wide. “No.”
    “Yes. Weird, huh? So you can see we’d be happy to pay you for the egg.”
    “The scar is gone,” she said slowly. That the goo in the wyvern egg killed fey was disturbing, but this new implication was a sudden bright spot. If it could kill just the bit of fey remaining in a two-decades-old scar …
    “Well, his skin was still technically scarred,” said Tam, putting away the journal. “But there wasn’t any fey left in it. He no longer had the curse to deal with.”
    “What about the others?” she burst out suddenly.
    “What others?”
    “The other ironskin. Are you going to take care of them?”
    Slowly he turned to look at her. “ Are there any others left? I mean, I only knew of one other, and she was fixed a long time ago.” Her stepmother, Jane, he meant. Jane still had a bit of fey in her face, but it was no longer cursed, and it could not be removed without harming her.
    Dorie nodded. “I know of at least one.” The server at The Wet Pig, with the curse on his leg, who was hungry every day. He could be helped after all.
    His lips twisted sardonically. “More important, could they pay?” She saw again the boy she had known, the boy who was somehow sweet and cynical all at once. He was the one who had explained to her that a little girl who was visiting would shun her if she tried to impress her with any of her fey tricks—and when she had done them, and the girl had indeed called her names and run home, he had comforted her, and let her show him the fey tricks he had seen many times, until she finally fell asleep, tear streaked and exhausted.
    “Oh,” Dorie said, crushed. Another reason she had hoped to join the Queen’s Lab, gone. She had wanted to find remedies for those who needed them. But what to do when the remedy was there … but not being given? She suddenly felt hopelessly naïve for not having realized that maybe research wouldn’t be enough. Cures shouldn’t be kept for those who could