Copperhead

“He wants to see me,” said Helen, and though it was not strictly true she thought it might as well be.

“I’ve no instructions on the matter,” said the woman, and her arms stayed folded. Knowing the stubbornness of the dwarvven, Helen thought she might stay there till doomsday. She almost turned, and then she remembered.

She could fix this woman. She could make her change.

It was for a good cause, wasn’t it? Helen bore down on the woman, saying with all her will, “You will let me in.”

But the woman only snorted. “Think fey tactics will work on me? Now you’re never getting in.”

Helen stopped, embarrassed at being caught. She did not even have the nerve to apologize. She turned to go—and then a young man came through the curtain. A man who suddenly seemed tall in comparison to the others. “Rook!” she said.

“It’s okay, Looth,” he said. “She’s with me.”

The woman watched Helen the whole way back past the booth and through the curtain.

Rook led her around piles of junk, boxes and furniture and more stacks of books, until they reached a door that appeared to lead to an ordinary cellar. He motioned her in front of him and said under his breath, “I’m sorry for the way they act.”

“You can’t blame them,” said Helen. She picked her way down the crumbling stone stairs. A few lights strung here and there lit patches of the tunnel with a faint yellow glow. They appeared to be getting into the remains of an old sewer system, long ago cut off from the new city plumbing. It was quite dank, but it did not smell any worse than mold. She put her wrist to her nose, breathing in the lavender scent of Frye’s dress, and below that, her own citrusy smell from Frye’s soap.

“Of course you can,” said Rook. They reached the bottom of the stairs and he took her hand and pulled her along by the light of his electric flashlight. They were walking along a stone embankment; below them rainwater washed slowly along the old stone tunnels, heading out to sea. Marking the tunnels were painted symbols in different colors—they must form a map of sorts, but Helen could not see any pattern to them. “If they’re justified in hating you simply for being human, then you’re justified in hating them for being not,” Rook said. “Copperhead is justified in their hatred. You can’t legitimize hatred.”

“Still,” she said. “I guess I didn’t expect a welcoming committee.”

“Closed to outsiders,” Rook said. He stopped and she looked up at him in the yellow flashlight glow. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t fit in with the dwarvven any better than I would in your world.” Helen looked at him wonderingly. “Not that they even accept me,” he said, and there was a touch of bitter to his voice. “Except I’m useful.”

“Rook,” she said, for this was why she had come. “What is your role in this? Someone told me you’re working for Grimsby as a spy. But you can’t possibly be … can you?”

Quietly he said, “I only do what’s necessary to get them to trust me.”

So Alistair had been telling the truth. “A double agent,” she said slowly. “You probably swear the same thing to Copperhead about your time here with the dwarvven.”

His face was in shadow; she could not read it. “I wish I weren’t working for either of them. But my history with the dwarvven is … complicated.”

“Tell me,” she said, remembering what he had said of his past two nights ago. “You know how I ended up on my path. Tell me how you went down yours.” There was silence for a long time, and finally the things he hadn’t said in the dark the other night came out now, in that cold quiet tunnel.

“It was almost six years ago,” said Rook. “I was seventeen and it was almost the end of the war. You know what it’s like when you’re seventeen.”

“Yes,” murmured Helen.

“I thought I knew everything. And … I was angry. I was tired of being laughed at for being havlen. At the same time, being havlen meant I could go among the humans, and pass.” He exhaled. “We were sick of the war dragging on, you know. The sensible ones hunkered down and figured it would be all over soon. But there are dwarvven who’ve hated humans for the last two hundred years, since Queen Maud’s son threw us all out. They’re not content to stay home and read books and invent things. They’ve had it in for humans. And after months and months of war … some of them started to believe they saw a way to make the humans pay. Chief among them was a girl named … Sorle.” Rook suddenly stopped and looked sideways at her. “You don’t really want to hear this, do you?”

“Tell me,” she said, for although she was not sure that she wanted to hear that his life revolved around this Sorle person, she wanted to know his story. What was he capable of? What was he involved in? Why did she feel in her bones she could trust him completely, even when he’d admitted that he was playing the dwarvven and the humans off each other? The answer to that last was that she was a fool, of course. She was here in the dwarvven compound to prove it. Helen took a breath and wrapped her coat tighter. “Tell me.”

Concern showed on his face. “You look tired,” he said. “You didn’t come here to hear this.”

“What’s that? It’s easier not to tell embarrassing stories about yourself? You’ve already told me how you made a fool of yourself over Frye; now tell me how you fell for Sorle. It’s the oldest story in the world, isn’t it? You did everything she asked to win her heart.”

Amusement flickered. “One usually does not tell the new lady about one’s past affairs.”

A delightful shudder danced along her bones, but she said lightly: “Not new, but old and married.” Affairs was right. He was the sort of man who had a million. He talked to every girl the way he did her—which was delightful, make no mistake, but not exactly something you could take to the bank. She let the conversation flow away from him having to admit terrible secrets and into things that were amusing to talk about. “So spill. How many past girls have there been? A dozen? A hundred? A whole harem, as in the stories of famous lovers? But come to that, I couldn’t possibly figure you for a famous lover, for we’ve already established that you have no idea of proper dancing nor etiquette.”

“Oh, I have a clever way to refute that,” he said.

“Which is?”

In the flashlight glow his hazel eyes looked into hers, light and laughing. His sandalwood scent curled around him. “Well,” he said.

But then there was a noise behind them and twenty, fifty dwarvven poured down the main stairs and hurried through the tunnel, some bumping past them, some splashing in the few inches of rainwater on the concrete floor. They appeared not to mind the cold and dank. One of them hallooed cheerfully to Rook. “Bringing your latest girl to the dance?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Rook. She watched his smile fade as he turned back to her.

For no reason she thought of Alistair. But things were going to be okay with Alistair now. She had the secret to making them okay. So it didn’t matter how many girls Rook had, or what his past was. Not to her. “Tell me then,” she said into the waiting silence. “What happened with Sorle?”

He walked a few more paces, pulled aside a curtain, and gestured her through. The new hallway seemed much the same in the cursory examination via flashlight, but the curtain dampened sound from the main tunnel. There was a stone ledge and they sat on it. The flashlight played around the puddles on the floor.

“Sorle,” he said at last, “wanted to blow up Parliament.”

Helen sucked air over teeth. “And?”

He stood the flashlight between them, where it caught the edges of his expression. “We aren’t quite as awful as you think,” he said, “even if we were all seventeen and a pack of thickwits. We were going to do it when they were out of session. My job, of course, was to pass as human, be charming—get the keys from the night watchman to a certain back door we needed. They had other jobs like gathering the supplies for the explosive. Many of those were things that dwarvven have, you know—but of course most adults weren’t going to be in favor of, or even informed of, this particular blow for justice till it was all safely over.

“I got the keys out safely. And then they all got caught on their end.” His jaw went tight. “I went in to put the keys back, so the man wouldn’t get into trouble. That’s when he caught me. Ran after me down to the wharf— fought me. I hit him too hard—he fell into the water—it was nighttime and he was gone instantly. I waded in, holding on to the pier—but he was gone.” He let out a long breath of air. “The problem with charming things out of people is that you have to understand them. And by the time you understand them, you care for them.…” He shook