Copperhead

to save them all. She was on her last wind, but every woman who fell to her power boosted her, bore her up. Perhaps I shouldn’t, Helen told herself each time, but I am and I will. She was setting all of her pieces in play to win.

Helen did not stop until she was looking around for another woman to convince and found they had all been done; that they all sat in clumps, little knots of color eagerly discussing plans and strategies for the morning. Alberta caught her as she stubbed her toe on a chair and fell, staggering.

“When did you last sleep?” Alberta said.

“A very long time ago,” said Helen.

“You can’t leave till dawn anyway,” said Alberta, and she pulled Helen through the throng and made her go into Frye’s guest room and lie down.

“But Jane, and Tam—,” said Helen.

“Asleep in the kitchen and under the piano, respectively,” said Alberta.

“And Mr. Grimsby, and the warehouse—” Helen’s mouth felt full of marbles. She was so tired now that she actually was on the bed, and lying down. Had Rook gotten away? Had they all? Helen could not think who had been trying to get away to where. Some people who were dear to her, all going home to the mountains, for good and always. So tired, and her eyes were shutting, shutting.…

“Ssh,” said Alberta, and turned out the light, and Helen slept.

* * *

They let her sleep too long. The house was eerily silent when she woke, and the slanting sunlight betrayed the hour of the morning. Helen shook out the skirts of the apple green voile she had not taken off. It was well- creased from sleep and she said to it, “You can withstand a trolley explosion but even you have limits.” She looked around, thinking that she would perhaps stretch Alberta’s kindness too far by borrowing—and then likely destroying, the way things had been going—one of her dresses, and her eye fell on a neat pile of clothes by the door. Someone had cleaned and pressed—and apparently, even mended—her herringbone suit from the day before.

She picked up the jacket, and the blouse, and the skirt you could not really climb in, and below that was one more neatly folded item, and she shook it out and found it was a pair of trousers. “Well, then,” she said, and took off the apple green voile and put them on. They had not been Frye’s, for they were only a little big, and she belted them with the accompanying belt, and put on the blouse and herringbone jacket, and put her hands on her hips, contemplating.

She strode out into the rest of the house before she could think too hard about it. Jane and Tam were in the kitchen, frying bacon with one of the piano players—Stephen—for company. Everyone else appeared to be gone on their tasks. Jane looked lost and Tam looked as though he had a hangover. Brilliant sun streamed through the narrow windows, erasing the usual November fog.

“I think you’re loony,” Stephen said in a chummy gossipy voice, not turning around from his bacon. “A hundred of you girls against those fey? Against that awful Grimsby person who runs Copperhead? You know he’s attempting to have the Prime Minister tried for treason, don’t you?”

“Not girls,” said Jane. “Women.”

“Semantics,” Stephen said cheerfully. “Here, eat up before you go into battle.”

“It’s not battle,” said Helen. “We’re just going to show up and take our faces back. Oh, and take apart his weapon, whatever the heck it is. Then leave.” She began to repin her hair, using a small round mirror hanging between the show posters. It was funny, but she felt as though she moved differently in the slacks. They were just clothes, weren’t they? And yet she of anyone should know the difference that clothes made.

“Bacon, bacon, bacon,” said Stephen, dropping it onto plates. “And what’s to stop him from making another weapon?”

“Well, he won’t have us to do it with,” Helen said to the reflection. “There’s that.”

“He didn’t exactly have his wife’s permission, did he?” said Stephen.

“How did you know about that? I didn’t think you were here last night.”

Stephen shrugged. “Jane’s been telling us the whole story. How you went to look in the warehouse window last night and saw him there. Oh, and talking to someone in a sort of fey trance. Did she make it all up?”

Helen sat down at the table, straddling the back of the chair because she could, and looked hard at Jane. “You know things,” she said. “I didn’t mention those details.”

“I know things,” Jane said dreamily.

“Listen, Jane,” Helen said. “There’s a fey inside you. I know it.”

Tam raised his head from his hands, looking wide-eyed at Jane.

Jane suddenly backed up from the table, skittering away, and Helen cursed herself for a fool. “He’s not, he’s not,” she said, eyes wide. “He’s not.”

“What do you mean, he’s not?”

Jane closed her eyes. “He comes and goes,” she said. “Sometimes I vanish. Sometimes I see everything. I saw you in the warehouse. I saw Millicent. I saw her go out into everything, searching into all the blue. And then … go.”

Stephen looked from one to the other, eyes wide.

“Tell me,” Helen said urgently, and she gripped the back of the chair. “Are you Jane now? Can you tell?” She did not know what this sometimes business was and yet it fit with everything she’d seen so far. She had thought Jane was warring with a fey that lived inside her. But how could the fey come in and out? Jane herself had said several months ago that the fey could not do that. Once they went into a person they were there until death—their death, or the body’s.

Jane’s eyes darted around. She seemed unable to speak.

“Tell me,” Helen pressed. Subconsciously her hand closed on the copper necklace. “Tell me.”

Jane’s mouth opened. “That’s him,” she said, pointing at the necklace. “That’s him too.”

They all looked at the copper hydra. The necklace that had been clinging around Helen’s neck like a snake itself ever since Alistair had given it to her. The necklace that did not want to come off. Helen started to pull it off and said, “That’s silly, Jane. How could a necklace be a fey?” She let it fall again.

“Copper’s not poison to fey,” said Stephen. “Back when we had all the bluepacks—bits of fey I guess they were—you put them in copper casings to run things.”

“I think my lapel pin’s hollow,” said Tam. “Maybe they all are.” He rubbed bleary eyes, peering at Helen’s hydra charm as if he were much older.

“It seems so silly to want to take it off,” said Helen. “And now that’s making me feel very disturbed. Why don’t I want to take it off?”

“You should keep it on,” Jane said dreamily.

“I think not,” said Helen. But her hands did not move.

“I’m not touching it,” said Stephen.

“I’ll do it,” said Tam. He scrambled off his chair and clambered up on the one next to Helen, binoculars waving. Carefully he stood and reached for the necklace. “It feels … funny,” he said. “Like a friend.”

“Don’t trust it,” said Helen.

Tam grasped the chain and carefully lifted it from around Helen’s neck. Instantly Helen felt the compulsion to keep it on lessen. She could see it as just a pretty necklace. “It likes me,” Tam said. He stroked the copper heads. “It likes Jane. Mostly it just wants to go home.”

“What are you, the fey whisperer?” said Stephen. He looked at Helen with disgust. “Did you know you’d been walking around with that on?”

“Of course not,” said Helen. Although she should have known. She had been able to do more with it, hadn’t she? “Give it here,” she said suddenly to Tam.

Obediently he handed it to her, and she cradled the little piece of copper in her hand. It was hard to believe it had a piece of fey captured inside. And yet … “It likes Jane, you say?” Helen looked at Jane. “Like should call to like, I think,” she murmured.

“What are you—oh,” said Jane. She put her hands to her face.

“Come here,” Helen crooned. “Come here.”

Jane’s face lit up a strange fey-blue for a moment, then faded away.

“Did you see that?” Helen said.