Read Silverblind (Ironskin) for Free Online Page B

funny sense of rightness to her new face. It wasn’t that she wanted to be a boy, but she had never felt right in the blond doll shape given her—the face that was unlike anyone she was related to. The face that never showed anything she did, good or bad—no sun, no scars, no laugh lines. This boy had character to his face. This boy looked like her family.
    She had given him a thatch of wild black hair like her father’s. A quirky, amused smile like her uncle Rook’s—so what if they weren’t technically related. Her nose— his nose had a very slight bump, as if he had been in a fistfight as a teenager. (She had.) It was too difficult to change her eyes, so they were still large and blue, but she shrunk the heavy lashes on them. She remembered how she had fallen from a tree when she was eight and in the woods with the fey, and not thought to turn blue herself on the way down. She had gashed her shin and broken her leg. The fey had mocked her, laughing, and showed her how to phase out and fix it herself. She had unthinkingly left the scar on her shin that day, but the next morning when she woke up her skin was clean and unblemished.
    She put the scar back in now. Drew it from her knee, halfway down her shin, a long diagonal line. Her uncle’s amused smile crept over her lips as she looked at her leg in the mirror.
    She thought about modifying the face still more to look like her father, but then she thought better of it. Better to have her heritage be unidentifiable, so she could make it up. She would need a name, though.…
    The door opened and Jack stumbled in, fumbling for a light. Her voice drifted out in song as she came closer. “Singing cockles and mussels alive, alive-oh—oh. Oh. Who are you? No. No!” She came and put her hands on Dorie’s shoulders, laughing hysterically. “And I thought you were just going to cut your hair. It is you, isn’t it? You’re Dorie, aren’t you? Else there is a very naked boy standing in my bedroom, looking like the cat who swallowed the canary. Who are you?”
    Dorie’s lips curved in her uncle’s wry grin. “Dorian,” she said.
    *   *   *
    Dorian Eliot rapped on the massive double doors the next morning, heart in mouth. She had thought she wouldn’t have much girl to eradicate—but there were more things than she realized. More than just crossing her legs at the knee instead of the ankle. Or not crossing them at all and slouching down, taking up two seats on the trolley. Men did not care so much whether they took more than their fair share of something. They did not automatically stay on the edge of the sidewalk so others could pass. Dorie had spent the last seven years trying to blend in with what other human girls did. She was surprised to find how many of those things were specifically girl and not just human . Now she was going to have to unlearn all of those, because if you did any of those weakening maneuvers as a man, you became an obvious target.
    It was still early, but it was going to be another scorcher. She was glad when a butler in tails motioned her into the cool drawing room. The interior was every bit as gaudy as the showy exterior had suggested. The house was not overly large, but what it lacked for in size it made up in peacockery. It was covered within an inch of its life with wood paneling, tapestries, oil paintings, gilt leaf woodwork.… The oil paintings and tapestries were divided neatly into two subjects: exotic animals and barely dressed girls. Her newly returned fey senses were overwhelmed by the scents: tobacco and sandalwood and cloves. It was a heady, dizzy feeling. She curled her lip at the excess. Malcolm hadn’t even been obnoxious in person yet and already she wanted to pick up all his possessions in a whirlwind and send them out onto the street. Just one of those tapestries could feed a family of four for several months.
    Out of habit, she scoped the room for anything edible, but all she found was a bowl of three lonely