by Wen Spencer
Riki spoke in dragon. Impatience cocked his head, his eyebrows jumping up in very human surprise, and then he gave a rumbling “huuhuuhuuhuu” of a dragon laugh and answered.
“To help you to return from whence you came, of course,” Riki translated Impatience’s reply. “Why else would I be here? It is not like our little ones know what they are doing. Babies must be taught, despite what others might say. What is ours is ours. We have duty to those who are no longer able to do for themselves.”
“Huh?” Tinker said.
“Providence has implied that the dragons loosely cooperate but are territorial. The tengu are Providence’s, and he will allow no other dragons to tamper with what is his. I believe Impatience is bucking someone’s authority to help out Oilcan’s kids.”
Weird that no matter what their shape, they were all alike enough to share the concept of politics.
Impatience looked expectantly at Tinker, and she looked expectantly at the dragon until she finally growled to Riki, “Ask him how do we get back.”
After a few minutes of talking, Riki said slowly, “Everyone does the same as they did before. But this time . . .” He paused to apparently ask Impatience for clarification. “This time the babies are to tune to home.”
Tinker managed not to scream in frustration. “Tell him that was what they were trying for in the first place!”
“Huuhuuhuuhuuhuu.” Impatience laughed and patted Oilcan gently on the chest and said something at length.
“What did he say?” Tinker asked.
Riki looked confused. “They know the truth when they hear it. They must remember the sound that touched their soul and made them know that they were home.”
“Oh!” Merry gasped. “I know what it is!”
* * *
Tinker checked the inscription of the spell. It was no longer active but still drawn on the only clear spot in the bomb-blasted casting room. Having been out of phase with Elfhome’s reality, that section of the pool had been spared. Reassured that it had taken no damage, Tinker waved Merry and Rustle into position with the olianuni. She made sure that they hadn’t stepped on any of the glyphs and blurred them. Oilcan double-checked all her work.
Reassured that the spell was perfect, she spoke the command that brought it to life. The kids vanished into brilliance.
“That’s what happened before.” Tinker took Oilcan’s hand. “They’ll be okay. If nothing else, they’ll come back to here again. Probably.”
Oilcan snorted and leaned close to whisper, “You hate not being able to lie.”
“Yes!”
Music started inside the shell. Judging by the heavy driving beat, it was a human song. It sounded familiar, but Tinker couldn’t place it. Oilcan laughed as he recognized it.
“What is it?” Tinker asked.
“’We are Pittsburgh,’” Oilcan said.
She recognized the song then. Oilcan had created it during the impromptu concert in the gym. A defiant anthem to the city, it snarled their fierce independence and unity to all those that would try to beat them down and divide them.
“Blood on the pavement,” Oilcan sang along with the music. “Blood on the blade, blood flows through common veins. Three worlds bridged by a single span, steel that climbs from earth to sky. Freedom to create, freedom to fly—one world, one people, one kind. We are Pittsburgh.”
Yeah, that’s home, Tinker thought.
The universe dropped out from under their feet and reality shifted and they were home.
46: KNIGHT ERRANT
Tommy had always hated the legend of King Arthur, a boy yanking a sword out of a stone and suddenly he was the king. He realized now that the boy had always been a king—the sword was just an outward symbol of what was inside. The sword was more than just a weapon, it was a crown.
Oilcan always had that quiet power of command. Even when Tinker was princess of the track, he kept order in her wake. He had never reached out, took hold of the weapon, and gone to war before. Now that he had, the power crowned him.
Tommy could see the news of Oilcan’s fight with Iron Mace move through the Wind Clan elves. They stared at the black-mirror parking lot and then looked across the river at the hole blasted into the side of the lock. Iron Mace had been a Stone Clan warlord during the clan wars. He had been one of their enemies’ best. And Oilcan faced him down and killed him. The elves bowed low to Oilcan, awe and respect clear on their faces.
Obviously, Tommy’s part in the day’s win was being ignored because he wasn’t “one of us.” The elves were still looking at him with open suspicion. It was starting to really piss him off. He drifted into the shadows of a rusting Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride as the elves did the messy work of cleaning up dead oni. He was thinking it was time to disappear when Oilcan showed up with two wicker baskets of mauzouan.
“Dumpling?” Oilcan held out one of the wicker baskets. He took the full glare of Tommy’s anger without flinching. “You saved my life today. I can at least make sure you get some of the free food that’s showing up.”
Tommy’s stomach reminded him that he hadn’t a decent meal for days. He jerked the basket out of Oilcan’s hand and stuffed one into his mouth. “Elves don’t use enough ginger.”
“I used to think that.” Oilcan waved his hand to take in his elf-pointed ears and elf-screwed-up taste buds. “Royally ticked off that beer is going to taste like piss from now on.”
Tommy laughed and settled on the railing that encircled the Tilt-A-Whirl. Oilcan tucked himself into a rusting car of the carnival ride. They ate in companionable silence. When he was done with the dumplings, Oilcan licked clean his fingers and produced a flask from his back pocket.
Oilcan tasted the contents tentatively and raised eyebrows at the result. “It’s good, but it’s not beer.” Oilcan held out the flask to Tommy. “Ouzo?”
What Tommy needed was a cigarette, but he settled for the sweet hard kick of the liquor.
“Thanks for everything.” Oilcan took the flask back and winced through another taste test. “The elves are all impressed, but I couldn’t have done any of it without you. You did more than save my life. You—you helped me be strong enough to do what I had to do.” Oilcan studied the river from the shadows, sorrow filling his eyes.
The kid had never killed anyone before, and everyone is acting like he’s a big hero for it.
Tommy laughed bitterly, shaking his head. “You do what you have to do because the other person is more than willing to rip your throat out if you don’t. Doesn’t make you a monster. It makes you a survivor.”
“I went through this with beer.” Oilcan sipped again. “One beer doesn’t make you a drunk. One killing doesn’t make you a murderer—just doesn’t have the same truth.”
“He picked the game, not you.”
A half-dozen laedin soldiers spotted Tommy in the shadows and closed on him, hands on weapons. This “not one of them” was really getting to be a pain.
“What are you doing here, oni spawn?” the tallest of them asked.
Oilcan leaned out of the Tilt-A-Whirl car and chased the elves off with a look and a quiet “He’s with me.”
Tommy knew true words when he heard them. “Yeah, I’m with you.”
Oilcan tilted his head, catching that there was more to the words. “You are?”
“It took me a while to figure out, but I need to make the world I want to live in. It’s going to be more than just stopping the oni. The elves are locked into this stupid mental straightjacket of us versus them.”
“Stone Clan versus Wind Clan.”
“Any of them. It’s one clan against all the rest. I know how that works—or I should say, how badly that works. ‘Them’ is always everyone else that isn’t us, when it really isn’t, and doesn’t need to be.” If he hadn’t turned to Team Big Sky when Kajo used the tengu against him, he would have lost everything. Up to that day, John Montana, Blue Sky, and Oilcan had been “them” despite years of working with them.
“I’m really
sick of all this us against them,” Oilcan growled. Tommy realized it was because the cousins never saw the world that way. It explained why they had gone to extraordinary lengths to save Windwolf when Lord Tomtom had tried to assassinate him. Why Oilcan had helped Tommy even though he knew Tommy was half-oni. And why Oilcan took in the young elf female and turned the city upside down looking for the others.
By concerning themselves with everyone, Tinker and Oilcan had managed to keep the city strong enough to defend itself against the likes of Kajo. They raised people up to their standards and made them part of that strength. It was their code of chivalry. Be compassionate. Be honorable. Be good.
“I realize I can’t hide in my little corner and hope that it all works out to my liking. I need to sit at the table where decisions are being made and make myself heard and fight for the world I want.”
Oilcan grinned. “Good. Pittsburgh needs you. It needs places where everyone can come together as a whole instead of sticking to their own little neighborhood, isolated by the rivers and hills and their culture. We need places where we can meet each other as just common everyday people.”
Tommy hadn’t even considered the racetrack to be anything more than a way to make money. Put that way, it made sense why Jin had asked him to drop his ban. The tengu wanted access to the common meeting grounds. It was important that they weren’t the monsters hiding in the woods. And he would drop the ban; he didn’t want Kajo controlling him. Besides, it gave him a better leverage on the tengu if he gave them access to his businesses.
“What I hate about this Beholden bullshit is the word. Beholden.” Tommy spat his disgust. “Too much like ‘owned.’”
And “I want to be your knight in shining armor” would sound like he was hitting on Oilcan.
“Yeah,” Oilcan said. “It should be more like ‘team,’ like at the racetrack. The guy on the hoverbike is worthless without a good crew in the pit. And a good pit crew doesn’t stand a chance without a good rider.”
Put that way, it was easy to say, “I want to be on your team.”
“Mine?”
“Team Oilcan.”
Oilcan backed up, waving him off. “Team Tinker is the only team I have.”
“The elves made you a team captain, like it or not. They gave you the power to be a force at the table.”
“There’s Tinker.”
“No offense, but your cousin is like a boy scout on crack. Squeaky clean, trying to do a month’s worth of good deeds in one day, and bouncing off the walls at the speed of light.”
Oilcan grinned. “Yeah, that’s her.”
“You and I are a lot alike.”
“Ah, secretly you’re a bohemian artist?”
“We both watched the one thing we loved most in the world get beaten to death in front of us. I know how it makes you feel weak and helpless. And you swear to yourself that you’d eat broken glass before ever going through that again. But the one thing you won’t let yourself do is become your father.”
Oilcan winced and looked away. “It’s that obvious?”
“I’ve seen you with your cousin, and I recognized all the signs,” Tommy said. “I understand you. I trust you. I want to be on your team.”
“I don’t know what the hell I would do with a team.”
“We would make peace and live in it.”
Oilcan studied the river and the distant lock. He took another swallow of ouzo and passed the flask to Tommy. “Okay, let’s team up.”
47: COMMITMENT
Sacred Heart had unofficially become “the orphan house” as all the various shattered Stone Clan households drifted into Oilcan’s care. Jewel Tear took up residence on the third floor as Iron Mace’s newly orphaned warriors shifted down to the second floor along with the remains of Earth Son’s household. Again and again, the elves mentioned that the front door needed to be painted. By that, they meant “should be Stone Clan black.”
He’d been haunted all night by his conversation with Tommy. Just as the half-oni recognized himself in Oilcan, he could see his reflection in Tommy. They both had been lone wolves while surrounded by people. They had perfected being apart even while crowded by others. They clung to the status quo because it was safe and comfortable.
Oilcan could have taken Tinker’s sponsorship days ago—should have taken it the minute he realized that he needed to provide for five kids. He was afraid if he forced the issue, the kids would walk away from him. He had taken the easy way out by not choosing. He had even drifted along in whatever he had with Thorne Scratch—silently accepting whatever she gave him because if he asked her to clarify, he might not like the answer.
In fact, wasn’t that his whole life, drifting behind Tinker, letting her choose the path? He had one-night stands with women who couldn’t stay on Elfhome, did nothing to discourage the one night becoming one month, and then watched as the relationship ironically imploded under his fear that if he put demands on the other person, he would lose them. The pattern was there, clear to see, if he only made himself look.
Much as the possibility of losing the kids and Thorne Scratch scared the shit out of him, he couldn’t drift along anymore. He had to take a stand. He had to make his choice of clan clear as the color of his front door. A household of Stone Clan members and a city full of Wind Clan wouldn’t let him be apathetic any longer.
He knew that he couldn’t be Stone Clan. It would be like walking away from everything that was him. But if changing clans would slowly drive him insane, wouldn’t it be even more so for the kids? Avoiding the issue, though, wasn’t the answer.
Talking to all the kids at once seemed like a bad idea. They were very good at joining forces, and he doubted his resolution could withstand their combined will. He decided to start with Baby Duck. She only had scattered memories from before Pittsburgh. In theory, she had the least attachment to the Stone Clan.
“Quiee,” Baby Duck quacked after Oilcan finished. They were sitting in the grass out before the anchor rocks. The indi leapt from stone to stone with the bells on their collars tinkling with each jump.
He waited for her to say something else. After a few minutes, he realized that she wasn’t going to say anything else. He felt like he’d broken her.
“I’ll be your sama as long as you want me to.” It scared him a little to know that now it meant forever.
She climbed into his lap and buried her face against his chest. “Quiee.”
He’d take that as a yes.
* * *
Fields of Barley was practically chained to the kitchen now that he was cooking for an army. It delighted him to no end. “I’m going to bake these carrots with honey glaze and sprinkled with chopped walnuts. The peas I’m just going to blanch quickly—it would be a crime to do more to them than a dab of butter and pepper. Wish I could do a presentation piece with the rabbits—but we need to stretch the meat. I’m going to make a pie with shallots, mushrooms, and apples. I need to do something other than pie with the peaches that cousin sent over.”
Apparently “cousin” was now going the other way.
“That sounds good.” Oilcan hated to break Barley’s good mood with bad news, but there was no way around it. He explained what he planned to do.
Barley carefully wiped down his knife and slid it into the butcher-block holder. “Sama—my first sama—said never use a knife when you’re upset.”
“I’m sorry.”
Barley attacked the bread dough. “We have the advantage of being the only Stone Clan enclave. The incoming clan members would come to us first and only go to the others if we have no room. If we become Wind Clan, we’re the smallest and most crudely furnished enclave. We don’t even have beds—we have cots. Our bathing room is still unfinished and our courtyard is paved and being used as a laundry.”
“Yes, we have rough edges. We’ll smooth those out. I think, though, that much of our business will come from humans. They’ll come for the music.”
Barley laughed, punching the dough. “You
cannot make money from music.”
“We’ll charge . . .” There wasn’t an Elvish word for it, so he used the English. “A cover.”
“A cover? What is a cover?”
Oilcan explained the idea. He’d already talked to Tommy Chang about using the gym as a nightclub. It was going to be their first joint effort.
“They’ll pay for not sleeping the night?” Clearly the concept mystified Barley. He pondered it as he shaped loafs and covered them to rise again. “We would not have to wash so many sheets if they do not spend the night.”
Currently, their laundry was very makeshift, with one industrial washer that amazed the kids and a maze of clotheslines in the backyard. It was taking up lots of time from everyone’s life to help keep up with the sheets.
“It frightens me, Sama. I walked away from my enclave and got so lost. I’m afraid to walk away from my clan.”
“Even if something happens to me, Tinker and Wolf Who Rules will take care of you.”
“I know,” he whispered. His bottom lip started to tremble, and he went to scrub at his tear-filled eyes with flour-covered hands.
“Hey.” Oilcan caught Barley’s hands before he could rub flour into his eyes. “It will be okay.”
“I hate being so weak.”
“You’ll get stronger.” Oilcan pulled him into a hug and let him cry. It was only fair, since he was the one rocking the children’s world.
* * *
Cattail Reeds was attempting to achieve the maximum effect of the paint and fabric on the extremely sparsely furnished second-floor bedrooms. “This is so beautiful.” She held out a rich Waverly floral print of reds and greens and blues. “But we have so little of it, I’ll have to be careful with it. Can we not get more?”
“I bought all that they had.” He cleared whole sections of the little fabric store knowing that what didn’t become curtains would become clothes. “Perhaps we can arrange for fabric to be brought from Easternlands.”
“Not like this.” She laid it aside to pick up the white broadcloth he’d found cheap and plentiful. “This, though, this is boring. I will have to see if I can dye it. If I can match the green, then the print can be an accent to it. If I can’t, maybe the walls will have to be green instead.”
