by Wen Spencer
Luckily Oilcan had put Merry in the larger guest bedroom, so there was room for Cattail Reeds and Baby Duck. Rustle of Leaves and Fields of Barley went into the other bedroom, which was more of an oversized closet. He needed to get bunk beds so the kids didn’t have to walk on each others’ mattresses. The hospice had sent only sheets, so he also needed to track down five sets of blankets before it started to get cold. Tomorrow, he would have to find them clothes and shoes. He only had four sets of dishes. His pantry was half bare.
His new responsibilities loomed larger and larger before him like an iceberg sliding out of the mist. It made him want a drink so bad that it scared him. He opened the fridge and stared at the beer bottles gleaming inside. It was his father’s answer to all life’s little problems. This wasn’t, however, a little problem.
Thorne Scratch shifted in the darkness that was gathering inside his apartment, reminding him that she was still there. There to stay, since if he drove her back to the Rim, it would leave the kids alone. Helpless as they were in their drugged sleep, he couldn’t do that. Newly arrived, Thorne probably didn’t know the city well enough to walk the six miles out to the enclaves. Hell, he would have to guide her through using the incline just to get down off Mount Washington.
The need for a drink became impossible to resist.
“Would you like something to drink?” At least he shouldn’t sink to drinking alone. “I’ve got ouzo, apricot wine, mead.” He’d been collecting things that Tinker might enjoy drinking since her transformation had made beer unpalatable. “Water?”
“Ouzo,” Thorne said in her raspy voice. “Please.”
He poured an inch or so of the clear, anise-flavored liquor into one of the canning jars that he used for glasses. Opening a bottle of cold beer, he carried her glass to her and then kept walking out to his balcony that overlooked downtown Pittsburgh, distancing him from the temptation in the refrigerator.
She came to lean against the railing with him and drank in silence.
Usually when someone visited him, they stared at the forest, ignoring the city for the vast carpet of green. As night fell, and the lights of Pittsburgh came on until the city was a bright island of circus brightness, visitors would continue to stare at the will-’o-the-wisps faintly dancing over the ironwoods. It was like they were blind to the city below.
As Thorne Scratch studied Pittsburgh, Oilcan realized that all his visitors, with the exception of Tinker, had been humans from Earth. They were on Elfhome because they wanted something strange and new in their life.
“What do you think?” he asked Thorne.
“I remember being these children’s age. You are so certain you know all that is to be known.” She shook her head. “I was raised at Cold Mountain Temple.” She laughed bitterly at herself. “At this point you’re supposed to be amazed and impressed.”
“Snow falls on Cold Mountain Temple, hewed from living stone, rock solid, rock strong.” He sang the chorus of the Harvest epic. “Even here in Pittsburgh, we know of Tempered Steel. I am amazed and impressed.”
She laughed again, this time at him. “The song does not do justice to the isolation of Cold Mountain Temple. It’s a day’s walk to the nearest holding, which is nothing more than a collection of pigsties. By nature of its location, Cold Mountain Temple is a complete but small world in and of itself. We had to grow all our own food, so every day we trained and tended to our crops. I hated the crops. The dirt. The bugs. That you worked and worked, then winter would come, and you would have to start all over again. Then one day, Otter Dance came to visit her father. She heard me cursing the same damn weeds I had to pull up for the thousandth time, and she laughed and started to help me, saying it had been nae hae since she last had to weed. And I was amazed. How was it that she hadn’t been weeding? Even her great and famous father, Tempered Steel, weeded.”
Oilcan closed his eyes as a feeling something akin to vertigo hit him. Nae hae was short for kaetat nae hae, which meant “count no years.” It meant the person didn’t want to sit and figure out how long ago an event actually happened. It could mean anywhere from a decade to a thousand years. The elves switched to nae hou, or “count no millennia.” The puppet shows of Tempered Steel saving the world from starvation always started “Nae hou, a great famine swept the world.” He’d always assumed that Tempered Steel was as dead as the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. Yet, here, this female had weeded gardens alongside the famous warrior monk.
“Otter Dance had become First to Longwind, head of the Wind Clan,” Thorne continued, most likely unaware of the disorientation she’d caused. “She told me about her life at court, how she spent her day protecting her domou or training and had nothing to do with weeds. It sounded like heaven to me.”
He could see why the children had her thinking of her own youth. “So you left everything you knew behind to go to court.”
“The day after I earned my sword, I left Cold Mountain Temple and never went back.” She went to sip her drink and found her glass empty. She held it out to him. “May I have more?”
Surely someone as old and trained as Thorne Scratch knew how to handle her drinking. After long consideration of his own condition, he got a second beer. By the time he returned to the balcony, he remembered how she started the conversation: you are so certain you know all that is to be known. Was she implying that she had discovered the hard way that she didn’t?
“So life at court blindsided you?”
She considered the question with the cant of her head. “Blindsided implies a quick awareness that things have gone horribly wrong. Everyone at Cold Mountain was brutally honest, keeping true to the belief that lying is a sin. At court, everyone carefully wove lies out of truths and wore them as masks. It was years before I saw enough of the true Earth Son to know I had made mistake in offering to him. If I had left him, I would have destroyed what little credibility he had at court.”
“So you stayed.”
“It was a mistake,” she whispered. “We could tolerate him being a pompous ass at court, but he had been cowardly on the field of battle, had undermined the defense of Elfhome for his own personal gain, and nearly plunged us into a bigoted genocide of a useful ally.” By “we” she meant all five sekasha of Earth Son’s Hand. “I was his First. It was my duty to put him down.”
“I’m sorry.”
She reached out and caught him by the front of his shirt and pulled him to her and kissed him hard. She smelled of leather and anise. She kissed him like she was drowning and he was air.
“From the moment I struck him down, it’s been like I suddenly went invisible. No one will look at me. I—I know they don’t think I was wrong—they would have killed me right there if they did—but they’re scared of what will happen to us, and they don’t want to look like they’re afraid—so—so . . .”
“I see you,” Oilcan murmured. “You’re right here with me, and you’re beautiful.”
She tugged at his clothing, kissing him hard and desperate. Inhaling him.
Where was this going? He’d never been with a female elf, but if she were human, it would certainly seem as if they were careening toward sex. She was a sekasha, a deadly holy warrior; surely they weren’t about to go at it like rabbits.
Then her hands were on his bare skin, just as needy as her kisses, suggesting that he was wrong to dismiss the possibility of sex.
She had grown up in a monastery. Maybe she wasn’t used to drinking. Maybe she was drunk and he was taking advantage of her.
She pushed him up against the wall and pinned him there. Yeah, sure, who was taking advantage of whom? The angle of their bodies made it clear that she was inches taller than him.
“Naekanain?” Which was the politest way he could think of to say “What the hell?”
She pulled back, hurt on her face.
“Are you sure—” He fumbled for something safe to say. “Is this really a good place for this?” Whatever this was. “Maybe my bedroom?”
“Your bedroom.
” Her husky voice was full of need and promise.
He led the way through his condo, emotions in a tumbling freefall. He wanted her—had always wanted her—had wanted to hear her raspy voice make needful sounds since the first time she spoke. The sane, reasoning part of him was nearly lost under the want, but it was there, whispering ice-cold points of logic. He had an apartment full of kids. She was a sekasha; she could kill him if he pissed her off, and things like this tended to end messily for him.
Then they were in his bedroom with the door safely shut, and the reasoning part of him went silent as Thorne pushed him onto his bed. Somewhere between the balcony and his bedroom, she had shimmied out of her wyvern-scale armor. Underneath she wore a pale camisole that was taut over surprisingly full breasts, considering how lean she looked in armor. As she peeled off her leather pants, he realized he better work at getting naked, too. He kicked off his tennis shoes, stripped off his shirt, and undid his pants. She caught hold of his jeans and pulled them off him. His boxers followed. She moaned softly as she saw how ready he was for her. He reached for her, and, graceful as a dancer, she moved onto the bed, kissed him, and lowered herself onto him. They hummed delight into each other’s mouths as they fit together as if they were made for each other. Each movement of her hips was sweetness and fire.
Afterward they lay, still joined, sharing the same breath. Her braid had come undone at some point, her hair flowing wantonly down across her face and shoulders. She smiled and traced his grin with her fingertips. Slowly the whisper of logic started up in him again, murmuring how this wasn’t sane, but she felt too right in his arms to listen.
10: PANTY RAID
No one was happy about the unopened oni mystery box being at the enclave. To make everyone happier, Tinker allowed herself to be bullied into a bath. She still reeked of the pens. It made her skin crawl thinking of the fleas, ticks, or whatever else she might have picked up wading through the filth. After everything she’d seen today, she could use a deep cleansing of the body and a couple of stiff drinks. She hated, though, to take the time.
“An hour will not change anything now.” Stormsong scrubbed Tinker’s back for her after checking her hair for bugs. Tinker still wasn’t comfortable with the elf mixed-gender communal bathing stuff, but there was no way she could feel totally clean without help. At least with Stormsong, there was no weird “I’m cheating on my husband” vibe that being washed by Pony would have triggered.
“If we’d gotten to the station just minutes later this morning—ow!”
Stormsong had smacked her lightly on the top of her head. “Don’t drive yourself crazy with ‘might have beens.’ We were there in time to save cousin.”
“But—”
“But nothing. We were there in time.” Stormsong wrapped her arms around Tinker and kissed her on the temple. “And an hour will not change anything now. You need to take care of yourself before you can take care of others.”
Tinker leaned back against Stormsong and made herself trust in her Beholden’s instincts. Stormsong had an annoying way of being right all the time. Now, if she could only ignore the feeling that Stormsong was right because they were days too late already.
* * *
Tinker suspected that Windwolf’s household staff had burned her dress. There was no sign of it. She was really starting to hate the way her clothes vanished behind her back. All her human clothes had gotten left behind when the Wyverns all but kidnapped her to Aum Renau. The missing dress had the sleeves removed, the skirt shortened, and pockets added. It was the second or third modified gown that she’d trashed to the point that the staff had made it disappear. They’d laid out two new unaltered dresses as possible replacements. Tinker really loathed trying to work in the long flowing gowns of fairy silk, especially in the nearly hundred-degree heat.
It was time to beg, borrow, or steal some better clothes.
All the sekasha had shuffled bedrooms the last few weeks as she picked out the rest of her Hand. As Tinker’s Second, Stormsong was now just two doors down. Tinker wasn’t sure exactly what the whole etiquette was for entering a sekasha’s bedroom. Everyone seemed to pop in and out of her and Windwolf’s bedroom unannounced. The warriors, though, were always armed; they even bathed with their ejae within reach. It seemed unwise to walk into Stormsong’s room unannounced.
“Come in, domi,” Stormsong called as Tinker raised her hand to knock.
“You’re scary sometimes,” Tinker grumbled as she entered.
“I know the sound of your footsteps.” Stormsong was still only dressed in her tattoos. For Tinker’s sake, she pulled on black silk boy shorts. “We learn everyone’s so we can tell who is moving around.”
The bedroom was very much Stormsong despite the recent move. Weapons dominated the room, from a stand that displayed her wyvern-scale armor and ejae to wall racks that held various bows, guns, and knives. Sprinkled in were human mementos: a bookcase crammed with paperbacks and manga, stacks of vintage CDs, a set of skateboards, and an amazing number of Goth Hello Kitty stuffed toys. Most startling was the hoverbike poster that featured Tinker coming around the turn just before the grandstands, head to toe in mud, just inches off the ground, trying to slide under the leader of the race, who was taking the curve high. It was a great shot. What it didn’t show was seconds later, the stupid jerk had dropped down to cut her off and hit her, destroying both their hoverbikes and nearly getting them both killed.
“I can’t believe you have that.” Tinker gestured to the poster. “Roach just started to sell those before—you know—everything.” Before Windwolf. Before the oni. Before her and Stormsong.
Stormsong grinned smugly. “Print number four.”
“You’re shitting me.” Tinker leaned close to check. Roach was part of her pit crew, but he functioned mostly as the business manager. The master of merchandising, he numbered the posters and sold them as “limited prints.” In the corner, in Roach’s careful printing, was “4/50.” She knew for a fact that Roach always kept number one, and she and Oilcan had two and three. “Okay, you’re now officially very scary.”
Stormsong laughed and pulled on a silk camisole top that matched the boy shorts. She looked like a lingerie model in the outfit: lush, leggy, and perfectly fit. “I saw him take the picture and asked for a copy. He told me he’d make posters of the shot.”
With Stormsong’s love of all things human, it made sense that she’d been at the races, but it still felt odd. Her entire life, Tinker had seen the sekasha moving through the city on unknown missions, but she had always given them a wide berth. Until the queen summoned her to Aum Renau, they’d remained faceless strangers. Now that their lives were explicitly tied together, it seemed impossible that they had always been so close, and yet never interacted. After the picture had been taken, the race ended in a brawl between pit crews. Stormsong had been standing close enough to reach out and touch—and Tinker never noticed her. How did she miss a blue-haired elf? Then again, Tinker had been busy trying to kick in the teeth of the other rider.
Stormsong put her hand on the glass covering the poster. “I’d seen you race dozens of times before, but that day, that moment, I suddenly knew.”
“Knew what?”
Stormsong gave a dry laugh. “That’s the shitty thing. My talent is good for knowing ‘duck now or die.’ Every now and then it hits me with a sledgehammer that’s simply labeled ‘this is important.’ I knew I would love you, but I had no idea how you would come into my life.”
Tinker eyed her and then the poster. “I was right there.”
“I was a sekasha bound to Windwolf, and you were human. I could not imagine how our lives would intertwine. Even if I had taken you as a lover, I was only in Pittsburgh when Sparrow came to the city.”
Not to mention Tinker would have been totally freaked out if a female sekasha had asked her out on a date. Scratch that. To be perfectly honest, Tinker would have been curious enough to agree. It probably wouldn’t have ended any worse than her date wi
th Nathan.
That thought took her down a dark road to an intersection where Nathan lay headless.
Tinker distracted herself to safer things by randomly opening up drawers and rifling their contents. “What was that with Thorne Scratch? The peace and war thing? And why did we need to do that in the middle of fighting?”
“She was inside your shield. If we had engaged the oni, she could have easily killed you. That is why we needed to agree to a truce immediately. You have to remember—always—that the Stone Clan has tried to kill you twice.”
“Idiots. We’re at war with the oni. That’s what they should be focusing on, not killing me. Is Windwolf safe with them?”
“They would not dare do anything while Prince True Flame is there with the Wyverns in force.”
That made her feel only marginally better. How insane Forest Moss was was open to debate. Was he crazy enough to ignore the royal forces?
Stormsong apparently had a mild lingerie fetish for silk boy shorts and camisoles; two of the deep drawers were filled with every imaginable color and pattern. Stormsong pulled out cheetah-print done in Wind Clan blue and offered it to Tinker.
“Cheetah print?” Tinker asked.
“They’ll look cute on you.”
Tinker dropped her towel and pulled on the camisole first and then the boy shorts. As always, Stormsong was right; they were cute on her.
Stormsong comforted Tinker by adding, “His First Hand protected Wolf’s grandfather Howling for thousands of years while he fought against the Skin Clan and during the Clan Wars. And Wolf spent half a century at court. They know the dangers well.”
Better than Tinker did—it hadn’t even occurred to her that Thorne Scratch might attack her instead of the oni.
The rest of the dresser was T-shirts. In this heat, did she need a T-shirt? No.
“Do we have to do the truce thing every time we see her?” With Oilcan taking care of Merry, it seemed likely that they might be tripping over Thorne Scratch a lot in the future. It was odd, though; she was the only one from Earth Son’s Hand who had shown up at the train station.
