Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  “Can you not see that it does not suit her? A babe screams in hunger even as food is offered to it. You don’t strike down the hungry infant. You don’t kill the frustrated child. Where is the wisdom of your years? Why do you let her ignorance guide her to ruin?”

  Father glanced at me and shook his head. “Why encourage her to take up the sword when no one will have a mongrel such as her? I don’t know what her mother was thinking.”

  “I will take her,” the child said. “If she wishes to offer, when the time comes for us both.”

  “You?” My father looked stunned.

  Him? I thought, and stared at him, wondering for the first time who this bold child might be. I realized suddenly that while he had cast a fire shield earlier, it was a wind shield that protected me now. He tapped two sets of Spell Stones!

  “Who better to take her but another mongrel?” the child said.

  My father shook his head. “You are not a mongrel, Wolf Who Rules.”

  Wolf Who Rules! I gasped. The court had been all abuzz about his recent arrival. He was the son of the queen’s sister and the head of the Wind Clan. While the youngest of ten children, he was the only one that was able to access the Spell Stones of both Fire and Wind Clan. He was gifted with a name that foretold a powerful future. You couldn’t find a greater opposite to myself—and yet there he was—likening himself to me. And more amazing—offering to take me as sekasha if I achieved my sword.

  My father glanced at me. “Well?”

  “I like to fight,” I admitted.

  My father took it as a yes, and I suppose, in truth, it was. He sheathed his ejae and bowed low to Wolf Who Rules.

  “Let it be said, lord, that you are earning your name.”

  “Thank you, Sword Strike.” Wolf Who Rules proved that he knew exactly who my father was.

  My father took me by the wrist and dragged me not only from the garden but out of the palace, taking me directly to the Wyvern training hall without even allowing me to collect my fallen book. Not that it was a waste. But I didn’t even get to thank Wolf Who Rules for saving my life in more than one way, or get him to promise that he truly meant what he said.

  I gazed over my shoulder at him as my father pulled me away, wanting to lock down the memory of Wolf Who Rules. He stood and watched us go, and just before we rounded the bend in the path, waved to me, like I was a parting friend.

  Storm Front

  He came to me on winter nights.

  Oh, your mind leaps to naughty things, but we were innocents then. Not that we did not know all the words and actions that put passion into deeds, but the need had not fully awakened in either of us. Yes, at sixty, many are already tumbling into the sheets, driven by maturing bodies. What we wanted from each other was to be mind to mind, and heart to heart, not body to body. That would come later.

  So he came with hopes and dreams and we would plan to make them true. It was maps that we spread across my bed. It was books that we caressed. We fumbled with Latin, Greek, English, and Mandarin.

  The way that time folds and bends and collapses is something that most humans don’t live long enough to understand. Memories become islands in a sea of forgotten. So it was months before I saw Wolf Who Rules again, and yet, now, it seems as if after that day in the garden, we were always together. I know that it must have been months, because it was at Winter Court that he first found his way to my bedroom. (It was not a simple task. I spent my childhood housed with my mother, but when I shifted to my father’s caste, there was no ready place for me. Sword Strike’s place was at the queen’s side; there was no room for a half-grown, hot-tempered child in his quarters. My father and I both thought I was fated for the Wyvern training hall but we had not counted on my mother, who quietly had my things moved to a sprawling room in the palace attics. A grand place indeed but difficult to find.)

  I do remember that I was about to retire, so I was in my sleeping clothes, when he pounded on the door. I opened it to find him juggling books, maps, and scrolls.

  “Discord!” he cried. “My gods, they’ve hidden you away! It took me forever to find you!”

  “Wolf Who Rules?” I remembered my training and stepped back to let him into the safety of my room. I checked the stairs to see if he’d been followed. A Wyvern waited at the bottom of the steps. “What are you doing here?”

  “We must plan!” He dumped what he was carrying on my bed since I had no desk.

  “Plan for what?” I eyed the materials with dismay. Foolishly, I’d rebelled against the rich furnishings that my mother had piled on me, thinking she was trying to lure me back to her training. I’d carried everything I could to hidden corners of the palace like some anti-thief. At that moment I realized that she knew perfectly well that Wolf would be spending untold hours with me in my rooms. (He later helped me to “steal” them back, laughing at me as we moved them quietly through the halls. As a measure of my mother’s influence in the palace, no one ever questioned this bizarre behavior.)

  “We must plan for our future!” He spread open the map showing the great expanse of the Western Ocean. Unlike all the other maps I’d seen, though, there was land defined on the other side of the water.

  “This is the Far East?” I tilted my head and then tilted the map. The great Far East Seas were missing as were the Dawn Islands. “Where is this?”

  “Shortly before we were born, the humans discovered two complete continents. These are maps that they produced of the lands. They called them the Americas. I am calling them the Westernlands. Here, look at this.” He spread out a print showing a great level plain cleared in a forest with orderly enclaves being erected. “This is Savannah, Georgia, in North America. A human named Oglethorpe landed here with a hundred and twenty people and within a year had this! And this is New Amsterdam. The Dutch colonized this. Look. Look at the land! A whole world without clan disputes!”

  I grasped immediately what he intended. I’d been raised at court, after all; I’ve watched the circus countless times. When domana neared their majority, they would come swaggering to court, expecting riches to be piled at their feet. The hard truth was that nearly every square foot of the Easternlands was tied up with multiple claims. When the Skin Clan fell, there’d been a desperate scrabble for resources that led to the Clan Wars. Well established domana held vast amounts but through a network of promises to protect the beholden working the land. They could not share their holdings even if they wanted to; they needed the wealth of the land to protect their people.

  A new continent meant Wolf’s holdings wouldn’t be limited.

  It was a stunningly bold stroke but with many inherent risks. No one would trust Wolf to succeed, not without the proper people at his back.

  And I was not one of those proper people. I didn’t even need my mother’s abilities to know that if I was his First, he would not succeed.

  He saw the realization dawn on my face. “Oh, come, Discord. Give me at least a decade before you count me as lost.”

  “Second Hand is good enough for one such as me.”

  “Discord. My father…”

  “I am not Otter Dance. Her modesty does her well but you must realize that her parentage only brings her honor. You need a strong First Hand or you will never get the backing that you need.”

  “Who of that caliber would follow me into this insanity?”

  With my father’s knowledge of sekasha, I knew who was the perfect fit. “Wraith Arrow.”

  “Howling’s First? Are you serious? Howling could barely talk him into being his First, and my grandfather was a proven warlord. Wraith Arrow would see this as babysitting. He’s at High Meadow Temple because he couldn’t take a household overrun by ten children.”

  I considered my mother’s training on how to best maneuver people to where you needed them to be. “He will do what is best for the clan; he can be swayed by sheer logic. If you present a strong enough case, he will agree to it. With him, you could take two Hands easily. Three even. We will have to ha
ve a solid plan of attack before you approach him.”

  “So you will follow me into this insanity?”

  I had always believed that my mother had some great plan for me. I’d spent my life looking for the reason of my existence. Here, at last, was something large enough to soothe my pride. “Yes. Willing.”

  The Meeting of the Storms

  I met Galloping Storm Horse on the day he was born. It was on the day I reached majority and formally pledged myself to Wolf Who Rules. The first was a public affair of winning my sword, proving my right to call myself sekasha. (The second was between just him and me, a quiet reconfirming of what we’d agreed upon decades before.) Hence my mother was at the Wind Clan Quarters when Otter Dance gave birth to Pony.

  It means, of course, that Pony and I were born a hundred years apart to the day. Others might find great significance in this, but I know my mother too well. Just as she planned my birth, she must have planned Pony’s too. Nor did I at first attach any importance to his name, for it was my mother that named him, not a random temple priestess who was trying to appease his deadly parents.

  Since my father was there to witness my testing, the queen’s First Hand was there for support, although I don’t know if it was for me or for him, in case I failed. So of course within minutes of delivering her son, Otter Dance was washed, dressed, and proudly showing Pony off.

  With my mother right there, it was only natural that Otter Dance present her infant to be named.

  Now, one has to understand that during her long life, Pure Radiance has seen thousands of babies. I think she might be the most experienced person of our race in newborns. When I was young, I had no clue how she could even stand the constant barrage of screaming infants. I realize now that she has some unnatural fascination with them. (I often wonder if she might have invented the entire naming custom to give her access to an unending supply of newborns without upsetting the sekasha.) First thing she always does is undress the babies. Normally this makes the infants cry and upsets their parents, who often had never seen a child before in their life. After my mother gets her fill of tiny little feet and amazingly small fingers, the screaming finally wears out her patience and she hands them back to their bewildered mothers.

  I stood off to one side, quietly dying. I was a half-blood mutt. I was abandoning the clan of my birth to join the Wind Clan. While Wolf Who Rules accepted me unconditionally, there was no reason for his clan to do so. On hand to witness my testing—and thus also my mother’s treatment of Otter Dance and her child—were all the Wind Clan sekasha who would be protecting my back for the rest of my life, however long that turned out to be.

  And there was my mother, indulging her fetish.

  I wanted to snatch up Pony, who was still unnamed at that point, and rush him out of the room. (It turns out that I was suffering needlessly. Otter Dance had helped raise Wolf Who Rules and his nine siblings; screaming babies do not rattle her. Nor did Pony actually cry. He glared up at my mother angrily and aimed a few kicks in her direction.) Still I stood, wallowing in embarrassment and anger at my mother.

  Finally Pure Radiance tired of playing with fingers and toes. Or perhaps she remembered that Otter Dance was the Wind Clan First and probably was fairly short tempered after giving birth. Certainly Otter Dance’s mouth was pressed into a blade-thin line of anger. (I learned later that Otter Dance had seen this act ten times before, had come to the same conclusion that I had and was not amused by it.)

  Placing Pony naked on the weapons table, my mother reached into the sleeve pocket of her white robe and took out the long red blindfold of her office. With a theatrical flourish, she tied it into place.

  “Ah, there you are!” She canted her head as if peering down at Pony. “I’ve been looking for you. Yes, yes, I see now why it’s you and no one else.”

  “What do you see?” Otter Dance asked tensely.

  My mother ignored the question as usual. “His name will be…” She paused for a moment, obviously seeking the most poetic turn. “Galloping Stormhorse on Wind.”

  Otter Dance glanced hard at me.

  The goddess of war rides a storm horse across the skies, its hooves the sound of rolling thunder. With her fly the storm winds, a thousand winged furies that sing of her glory. In the goddess’s wake, like a tornado or a flood, she leaves a landscape changed by her passing.

  Until that moment, I never realized what my name became when I changed my clan. Singing Storm Wind. My mother had named me for the furies that accompanied the goddess of war. Now she’d named Otter Dance’s infant son after the goddess’s steed. With four simple words, she’d tied our fates together in everyone’s mind. Worse, there hung the unspoken implication that our path took us to the service of the goddess.

  Only today I would pledge myself to Wolf Who Rules Wind. Everyone knew our plans, even though we’d follow custom and say our pledges in private. There was no other reason for my winning my sword at the Wind Clan training hall.

  Wolf had a warrior’s name. He had filled his First and Second Hand with veterans of the Rebellion. (I was the exception, a mutt newly out of her doubles.) With the strength of those hardened warriors at his back he built a large household with a score of the best laedin-caste fighters. In addition to that solid base, he had the support of two hundred or more laedin scattered across dozens of Beholden households. Yes, he held a small army, but his dream was of exploration and settlement, not war. A set of Spell Stones had been commissioned and a quarter of the virgin Westernlands had been granted to the Wind Clan. We were to set sail for the river that the humans named the Hudson within the decade.

  Wolf had been born to two clans, tapping both esva. He could have chosen either at his majority. He’d bonded with his Fire Clan cousins; they, in turn, treated him like their own son. In the end, he picked Wind Clan for sheer political reasons. He even furthered the late king’s vision of unity by courting a Stone Clan female to be his domi. There were few more bound to the ideal of peace than Wolf.

  By our names, however, my mother was suggesting that Otter Dance’s son and I were fated to serve the goddess of war. Such a thing would only be possible if I abandoned Wolf. I stood there, feeling utterly slandered and betrayed. If this was the grand scheme Pure Radiance had for me, why did she wait until today to reveal it? After I had committed myself heart, soul and body to Wolf?

  I wanted to scream “why” but I knew she wouldn’t answer me. The only answer she’d ever given me since I was old enough to ask was “If you cannot see the path, then you cannot know it.” It meant that unless I could see the future that she was trying to create, then she couldn’t explain it to me. She couldn’t risk me tipping the delicate balance of chance.

  Pure Radiance handed me the naked baby. Pony and I both glared at her in anger. Never in my life did I want to kill her more, though I knew that even trying was useless. The damn woman was like smoke when trying to land a blow on her. (And yes, when I was a child, I tried many times to do so.)

  While I could not score a hit on her, I could thwart her. If she could not tell me the future that she had planned, I could make the one I wanted. If I handed Pony off to Wolf, it would suggest that Pony’s destiny (and thus my own) would be tied permanently to Wolf Who Rules.

  I marched across the room to where Wolf stood, and I unceremoniously dumped the naked baby into his arms. He accepted the burden with a nod; he understood what I was desperately trying to do.

  Still my mother’s vision seemed to have already expanded, filling the training hall and holding fast everyone within it. I could see it in their eyes. Simply handing the baby to Wolf was too bare an action. It needed words to counterbalance the name of Stormhorse.

  I opened my mouth without knowing what to say and words just came. “This is your blade brother. He will love you well and will guard your heart with his life.”

  And I felt the words go through me and knew that I had spoken truer than I meant to—and it wasn’t the truth that I wanted. I floundered in that mo
ment, wondering exactly who Wolf’s heart would be. Surely I didn’t mean Jewel Tear. So far she had not impressed me, and her vanity Hand would never be a fit for Otter Dance’s child. That much I knew with only my father’s blood to guide me.

  Wolf knew me well enough to see the truth hit me. He nodded again to me, accepting it. He smiled warmly down at the newborn in his arms. “Hello, Little Horse, I’m your Brother Wolf.”

  Pony gave him a long serious look, gurgled out a laugh, and then peed on him.

  LITTLE HORSE

  “What’s he like, this—this brother of yours? Brother Wolf?”

  Little Horse could hear the hesitation as Clove Scented Smoke on Wind fumbled with the concepts. Little Horse scanned the sky from the vantage point of the bridge pier; still no sign of a gossamer approaching from the west.

  “Blade brother,” Little Horse corrected Clove. The apothecary had been sole survivor of a landslide that had reduced his household’s estate to rumble. Since the holding had been one of the clan leader’s farthest-flung households, Clove had little dealings with the holy caste of sekasha and thus wasn’t familiar with the strict mindsets. Nor did he understand the relationships between the clan leader and his bodyguards.

  “But you should not refer to him that way, nor should you call him Brother Wolf.” Little Horse leapt down off the tall stone pier to land lightly beside Clove. “Always call him ‘Wolf Who Rules.’ There are others—like my father—who would be quite upset if you infer that he is my brother of flesh and blood.”

  “I don’t understand how…” Clove sighed as he touched his face and discovered his spectacles were still perched on his nose. Most conversations with Clove were constantly interrupted as he fumbled with the two small disks of glass joined with a slender piece of wire. Despite Clove’s need for them to see anything clearly, the glasses were prone to falling off. “I wish they would just do the spell on my eyes and be done with it.”