Free The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick Page B

jostled them. It was as if they were ghosts.
    In a window they saw evergreen trees spangled with popcorn and foil and strings of gingerbread soldiers. Beneath the firs was heaped an ogre's hoard of toys, bears in harness beating small drums, machines that were glossy miniatures of those in the street, dolls in lace-trimmed taffeta, a stuffed giraffe half as large as life.
    Jane had never seen anything or any place like this repository of alien wealth, but some resonant echo of the spirit told her that this place was in some way identical to or congruent with the world of her earliest memories, that time and place when she had been small and protected and happy.
    She began to cry. "Rooster, take me home, please."
    He turned to her in surprise and unthinkingly released her hand.
    They were back on the factory roof again.
    "There." Rooster kissed her on the cheek. "Now we trust each other completely," he said.
* * *
    Time was getting short. Jane could feel the grinding vibration of events coming together as the machineries of fate moved them about. The next night, as she was making a pretense of playing with the toys, Jane closed her hand around the nugget of brass 7332 wanted. As a distraction she lifted a glory-hand free of the box, waving it back and forth as if she were playing sorceress. This made Mrs. Greenleaf happy, she knew, acting childish; the more childish she acted, the happier the old elf was.
    Craftily, she turned her body to hide the theft, drawing the nugget close with a languid gesture of her hand, and secreting it among her clothes. Mrs. Greenleaf, busy with pencil and magazine, noticed nothing. Casually, though the Baldwynn never looked directly at anything, Jane glanced up at him to make sure he also was not watching.
    She gasped.
    The elf-laird was not in his chair. Where he had been now floated an egg of light. It pulsed gently. Pale colors played over its cold, featureless surface. She cringed away from the thing, irrationally afraid that it would leave the chair and come after her.
    Mrs. Greenleaf looked up from her acrostics. "Jane," she said warningly. "Is there a problem?"
    "No, Mrs. Greenleaf," Jane said hastily.
    But Mrs. Greenleaf had already turned toward her father. Her mouth opened in a round little O and her eyes bulged as if she had been suddenly ensorcelled into a fish. Her distress was so comically extreme that Jane had to fight down the urge to giggle.
    Magazines sliding from her lap, the old elf-wife stood. She seized Jane's hand in a grip that was thoughtlessly painful, and hauled her straightaway from the room.
    Once the door was firmly shut, Mrs. Greenleaf turned to Jane, the skin on her face taut and white, her mouth a lipless slit. "You saw nothing tonight, do you understand?" She shook Jane's arm for emphasis. "Nothing!"
    "No, ma'am."
    "We are an old family, a respectable family, there has been no trace of scandal since—what are you looking at?"
    "Nothing." Jane was afraid that the elf-wife would strike her. But instead, she was led directly to the dressing room, even though her time here was only half done. Her work clothes were returned to her, and her play dress and lacy underthings packed away once more in white paper. It was early still, at least an hour before Blugg was scheduled to pick her up, when she was deposited out on the front steps.
    "I don't think it will be necessary for you to return tomorrow," Mrs. Greenleaf said firmly.
    She closed the door.
    Blugg was half an hour late picking her up. Jane awaited him in an agony of expectation. When he finally arrived, startled to find her standing outside instead of in the foyer as in times previously, he demanded to know why. Then, when she told him what Mrs. Greenleaf's last words had been, he threw back his head and howled. It was a terrible sound, compounded of pain and the misery of broken dreams.
    When they got back to the dormitory, he beat her.

— 5 —
    IT WAS AGONY GETTING OUT OF BED THE NEXT MORNING. Jane's side