Silverblind (Ironskin) by Tina Connolly

Author:Tina Connolly [Connolly, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466845404
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

ALL THE THINGS WE HIDE

Dorie is fourteen, and so is Tam.

Tam trusts no one, but he trusts her. When you have been fooled by someone disguised as your father, you are slow to believe anyone else. He opens up to her about the things he cannot at school. At school he is self-contained and distant, but it’s known he can hold his own in a fistfight, so they let him alone.

Which is good, because his choice of subject matter doesn’t help him stay under the radar.

Tam reads fey tales. All of them: Beauty and the Fey Beast, Rose-Red and Violet-Blue, Bluebeard, Queen Maud and her Pirates, everything. He reads the ones that humans wrote; he reads the ones that dwarvven wrote. And when he is visiting Dorie in the country, he goes around to the old women in town and drinks their chamomile tea and listens to them spin out the stories they knew from their childhood. He has heard some new ones this way, and he ambles home, staring past his spectacles into nothing, and tells them to Dorie. Dorie’s heart beats the most then, for it is as if he is telling her stories about herself. Dorie’s father always stops himself if he starts to talk about the fey, and Jane thinks telling the old tales gives them a power they shouldn’t have.

But Tam tells her, tells her all of them, and they soak into her bones.

It is one of these tales that goes with her into the forest.

It is one of these tales that leaves Tam there.

—T. L. Grimsby, Dorie & Tam: A Mostly True Story

* * *

“You get paid every two weeks,” the accountant said patiently. “That’s perfectly reasonable to work with your budget.”

“Except it’s taken me long enough to find a job that I’m behind on my rent,” said Dorie, trying to sound calm and not desperate. It was Friday morning and the black clock above the accountant was inexorably ticking onward. “I have till noon to pay it. Isn’t there any way to get an advance—just this once?”

“It sets a bad precedent,” said the accountant. “Do you know how many bar tabs we’d be covering for you boys if we did that?” She shook her head with an air of finality. “I’m sorry.”

Dorie trudged down the hall, wondering if she would have looked more fiscally responsible as a girl. Or if the female secretary would have had more compassion for one of her own gender.

No use second guessing. Tam had kindly offered to take the wyvern chick from last night, so that possibility was out. Really, if she didn’t want to be homeless, there was only one option left. Malcolm. And she would have to filch one of their three remaining eggs from Tam’s incubator, and how could she possibly explain that to Tam?

“Dorian,” exclaimed Dr. Pearce, giving her a hearty slap on the back. “Well done, old chap. First time out, and you and Tam brought back a better haul than anyone else.

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