Copperhead

and she tossed it back and laughed, and escaped. She did not know what she had said or saw; all she knew was the skirts whisking around her, triumphant laughter belling the air as Rook danced with somebody else.

She bumped into a gentleman—said something delightfully saucy, who knew what? Admiring eyes followed her. She tried to lean into their approval, but she had been doing that for half her life and tonight it was flat and hollow. Millicent was gone and Rook was gone and when would Helen be gone? Not soon enough. It was all noise, so much noise that she could no longer hear any particular words, so much sight that she let it blur in a wash of color across her path.

The next man she bumped into did not move.

She tilted her head to let her mouth chatter wildly and found herself looking into bright hazel eyes, a face that she had surely pieced together herself out of the chaos of color and spectacle around her.

“Dance with me,” Rook said.

“I am getting gin,” Helen said, because in the merry-go-round around her ears it was the one thing she could make sense of. The words were crisp and staccato. The clever chatter left her, and all that was there was something like truth, which was that she definitely wanted a gin.

He took the glass from her hand, dropped it into the bemused hand of a fat dwarvven man standing by the wall. Next her hand, fingers lacing through hers, and Rook drew her in. Their eyes met, level, equal. He was light and lithe and deft in the dance. A touch here, there, and they were moving in time together around the floor, his fingers subtly guiding, hers subtly suggesting.

The detachment was leaving her now. She was suddenly very there, very present in his arms, very there for his uncharacteristic silence. He looked at her thoughtfully, and Helen looked back as if she had nothing to hide, because she could no longer think how to hide it.

“Funny us meeting like this,” she said. It was meant to be a joke, and yet it slipped out without breath, and he let it hang there too many seconds to still sound like a joke.

Music, the sort that lifted you around and around, violins and piano, a heartbeat rhythm pounding faster, stair-stepping higher. A familiar refrain worked into the melody, repeating itself, and her fingers beat it out upon his shoulder as it came round again.

It did not matter how many dancers were in the room, they were alone as the melody went round and round, climbing to a finish that was heartbreaking in the way it triumphed and broke apart, fading away like dying applause, everything wonderful has just happened and now it is over, over, over.

Her heart pounded the echo of the finished music, racing without a song to follow.

“Helen,” he said, and took her hand tightly, so very tightly. Everything was a blur of color around her. She only saw him, and beyond him, like an afterimage, a mirage, a girl in a white dress with a grass green sash.

“Helen,” he said, again, seeking for more words, but she knew the future of all the words he would say.

“Don’t,” she said, and she freed her hand from his grasp. She pressed one finger, two to his lips.

Rook caught her hand before she could pull away, slip away like the tale of the girl who has to flee the dance at midnight, leaving behind one fey-blue shoe. “Isn’t there something I can do,” he said in a low voice. “I must be able to … to free you.”

“No one can help me,” she said. She tugged against his grip. “I must go.”

“But.”

“No,” she said, and turned on him. “You must never speak this. Not even think it to yourself. That is how you can help me.”

She saw him see the fire in her eyes, and think of something, and not say it. But then he opened his mouth again.

“You will not speak,” she said, and the words came out too fast, too fierce, in an attempt to stop him from saying anything that could crush her fragile will. “I am a grown woman who has made rational choices and you dishonor me by suggesting that I have made poor ones.” Let him wriggle out of that.

He opened and shut his mouth. Then: “Mrs. Huntingdon, I will do as you tell me. I had sooner destroy my left hand than disobey.”

A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. “Only left?”

“Dwarvven are generally left-handed. Didn’t you know?”

“Perhaps I should have guessed from the backward way they dance.”

“Come, not fair.”

“No, not.”

The music stopped completely then, and there was a great banging of spoons on glasses. The crowded room grew silent. Helen turned to see the source. A woman stood at the front of the room—clearly an official, a leader. She had a coronet of grey-black braids and the air of someone who was used to being listened to. “Friends,” she said softly, and they all grew stone-still.

Her manner was calm, her posture straight. She looked around at everyone as she spoke, meeting the eyes of her people. “The dwarvven have had a rough road to travel in recent years. Tonight was a hard event to have happen, here on the doorstep of our home. The careful work of Nolle and her team, working under the most adverse conditions, helped to ameliorate this terrible accident.” She did not call it an attack, Helen noticed, and there were murmurs from those in the crowd who disagreed with her. The woman raised her hands. “Now is not the time for argument. Now is the time to honor the two men we lost tonight.” She named them—the trolley driver and a passenger—offering a couple sentences about the kind of men they were, biographies that sounded truthfully funny about the men’s strengths and weakness, rather than grandiose overstatements of their worth.

There was silence for a moment, remembering.

“And now,” she said, “I ask that you take your places, as I have reports from Tumn that policemen are advancing on the bookshop. To … investigate the accident.”

“Where were they during it?” shouted a young man from the crowd.

“We will meet them calmly,” said the woman, “and only if they cannot be turned away with words will we fight. The dwarvven are always ready.”

Helen looked around and saw what she meant. Men and women were rolling back sleeves or unbuttoning dress shirts to reveal the ever-present chain mail that dwarvven always wore. She did not know much about dwarvven custom, but this she did, as it was nominally fashion. The dwarvven always wore chain mail. It tended to be symbolic—just a touch here or there. The unrolled sleeves and unbuttoned shirts were equally symbolic, exposing their chain mail wristlets or chokers. They were ready to fight, just like their ancestors.

Across from her a hardened-looking man had removed his whole shirt to show he was in chain mail from head to toe. He casually held a knife in his hands. Her heart thumped into her throat at the sight of it. It didn’t matter one whit that he was shorter than Helen—she knew she wouldn’t stand a chance against someone like that.

She looked around again and thought, how could I have possibly dismissed the dwarvven as symbolic a moment ago? She was as insensitive as Copperhead. She saw warriors, saw hard glints in their eyes, off their mail. She backed up a step into Rook, whirled to face him.

“I must go. Go get Jane. Get her out of here,” she said.

“I will walk you there.”

She nodded and did not protest that he had agreed to leave her, for she did not like the way that angry eyes met hers, as if all her work tending the wounded was nothing, set against her race. Perhaps it wasn’t.

They hurried out of the dance room, among the sea of dwarvven going to their places to be ready against whatever might come. It was dark in the halls and they were jostled, and he took her hand to pull her along the route he had memorized.

She winced as he seized the bandage. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go. “I didn’t realize your hand was hurt in the accident.”

“I wasn’t—it’s nothing,” she said, pulling away, but he stopped and gently took her hand and she did not pull away again.

“How did it happen?” he said in a low voice. His fingers ran gently over her palm in the dark. There were shouts and clanks as the dwarvven hurried around them.