by Wen Spencer
“I’m filling up both my tanks.” Law peeled off twenties she earned from the enclaves. Elves traded gold among themselves, but they took in US currency from their human customers and cycled them back to Law. “And obviously I need some clothes. Shoes. A dress. You got any in the back?”
“Maybe.” The gas station also served as sort of a general store for the transients. Hershel’s had a tiny assortment of basic necessities to tide newcomers over until they figured out where the real stores were. “The kids tend to take anything that says ‘Pittsburgh’ or ‘Elfhome’ back with them as souvenirs. We’re normally picked clean by end of Shutdown.”
That explained their stock. It had mystified Law why all their clothes had writing like “Elfhome: Nailed it” and “Saw a Saurus, Ate it!” Unlike other stores, they also only carried local snacks and drinks. Iron City Beer. Saurus jerky. Steel City Cola. Honey roasted keva beans. Because everything was locally produced, they were usually well stocked.
Pat had called it correctly, though. The shelves looked like locusts had descended. But they were in luck. There was a pair of cowboy boots that fit Bare Snow. Not one of Law’s first dozen choices for footwear but Bare Snow seemed to like them. There was also a Wind Clan blue sundress with Elvish runes spelling out something Law couldn’t read. Bare Snow snickered at whatever it said. The sundress was only a few inches longer than the white baby-doll, but they were important inches.
Pat added two slim packs of Juicy Fruit gum to Law’s tab. “I was holding those for Stormsong but they tell me she’s on Earth with the husepavua.”
Bare Snow caught the one Elvish word in the mix. “What about the husepavua?”
Pat switched to Elvish as she rung up their purchases. “The viceroy is in town because his husepavua is on Earth with one Hand of sekasha. Normally I keep this aside for the holy one, Singing Storm Wind, but she’s with the husepavua. You can have the gum.”
“Who else is with her?” Bare Snow asked.
Pat clicked her tongue, having lived next to elves long enough to pick up their habits. “I only know the young ones that drive the automobiles. The older elves can’t wrap their brains around how to work machines. The ‘babies’ bring the viceroy’s automobiles here for fuel. Stormsong. Cloudwalker. Hawk Scream. Pony. Sun Lance. Oh! I know! Sparrow took Wraith Arrow too.”
Bare Snow distracted the conversation away by picking up the gum. “What is this?”
Law showed her how to unwrap a stick and chew on it.
Bare Snow’s eyes widened and she gave out a moan that sounded orgasmic. All the males in the store drifted closer.
Pat laughed. “Good luck with that, Law.”
“Yeah, thanks, Pat. Can we have the restroom key?”
* * *
Law pumped gas while Bare Snow changed clothes in the restroom alone. The elf returned with a wide-brim hat that she’d gotten from someplace. Law could only hope she didn’t steal it. With the skimpy blue sundress, the long bare legs and the cowboy boots, she looked utterly adorable. The color of the sundress highlighted the blue of her hair.
A white Ford Explorer at the far pumps caught Bare Snow’s attention. One would think that there was no way anyone could miss a gorgeous leggy elf, but the four coeds who arrived in the vehicle never seemed to notice Bare Snow drift about the SUV, peering in the windows.
The female elf scanned the lot while returning to Law’s Dodge. “Your vehicle is very different from all the others.”
“It’s…it’s very old.” In theory the 1947 Power Wagon was nearly a hundred years old, but in truth, every nut and bolt been had been restored or upgraded by her grandfather as he converted the antique truck. It had been his pride and joy and he was probably spinning in his grave that she ended up with it. The simple truth was no one else wanted a manual-transmission gas hog. Both of her parents wanted her to sell it for something more practical; it was the one thing that they agreed on. That and that she should get a dog. (Weirdly her father was fine with her dating girls.)
“Some of them look identical, to me.” Bare Snow pointed at the coeds’ Explorer at the gas pump, one parked half a block down Forbes Avenue, and a third driving past. The older SUVs were popular in Pittsburgh. Most cars on Earth were electric, self-driving, and needed extensive high tech support systems that Elfhome didn’t have. The Explorers were designed to be driven off-road. They were easy to adapt to the lower technology level of Elfhome.
“The only differences are these things.” Bare Snow pointed at the Dodge’s license plate. “What do they mean?”
“Every automobile has a unique code that is written on these.” Law simplified best she could. “They’re called license plates. None of them repeat. The city uses them to track who owns the automobile, if they’ve paid taxes, keep the vehicle safe to drive on the roads, and things like that. Why? Did someone take you to that house in an automobile like that one?”
Bare Snow gazed at her, nervously biting at her bottom lip. After a minute of fierce study, the elf took a deep breath. “I don’t understand why you took me away from there. You don’t even seem to know. You’ve gone place to place, asking ‘who is this’ and ‘where does she belong’ and being turned away. It annoys you not because you want to be rid of me, but because it makes you angry that my people act so coldly toward me.” And as if her hands had a will of their own, she reached out to catch Law’s shirt and nervously twist it between her fingers. “You’ve given me food, and clothing, and most importantly hope, and have demanded nothing back. And I don’t…I don’t understand. Why?”
Law had never been asked why. Most people assumed it was simply the way that she was; like the shape of her chin and the flatness of her chest. She looked more like a knight in shining armor than a princess that needed to be saved. Some assumed that she wanted to be a boy, but she didn’t. Certainly it would have made a few things easier; like going pee in the woods. Under all the dirt, though, she was as girly as the next woman. A few people thought she might have some secret past, fraught with injustices and horror. She had lived a fairly bland childhood.
“I like feeling strong.” She finally settled on something that felt right. “When you’re dealing with your own problems, they seem massive and set as stone.” Crazy parents. Being a star-shaped peg surrounded by round and square holes. Living on the fringe and liking it except for the fact that it made her feel like the little kid, hands always pressed against the candy store window, looking in but never able to go in and get what she wanted. Not even sure what she would pick if she could get in.
“When you wade into someone else’s mess, their problems seem so small and fluid. Do this and that. Hit this guy. Find a new place for her to live. Ask around and find work for her. It all seems so”—she didn’t know Elvish for easy-peasy—“so simple.”
Bare Snow nodded slowly. “Instead of being lost and alone and insignificant, it feels good when you’re finally able to do something. Be important.”
“Yeah.” The gas pump shut off as the main tank hit full. Law shifted the hose over to her reserve tank.
Bare Snow grinned. “Good! Let’s find the white automobile then!” She leaned against Law to draw in the dust on the Dodge’s side panel. “Its license plate looked like this.”
Most native Pittsburghers were fiercely proud if their plate number started with AAA, AAB or AAC. It meant they were in Pittsburgh immediately after the EIA took charge and the city became a district separate from Pennsylvania. Law had inherited the license plate along with the Dodge. When the wave of EIA workers and other newly arrived humans applied for plates, someone in the licensing department decided to jump the numbering system to BAA. This, of course, led to nicknames like B-plate and B-hole.
Bare Snow wrote “BAD-0001” in the dust. Either some B-hole had gotten lucky in the random assigning of numbers, or they’d bowed to the inevitable and gotten a vanity plate that looked like it could be random. It was a plate you’d remember, though, and Law knew she’d never seen it. She was goin
g to have to pull in favors to find the car. How many depended on what the B-hole had done. Would she just need to kick the shit out of this guy or did she need to get the cops involved?
“Was this the person that took you to that house? Did he hurt you? Steal something from you? Tell me everything.”
Bare Snow’s eyes went wide. “Everything?”
“Yes, everything.”
* * *
Her name was Ground Bare in Winter as Killing Snow Falls in Wind. It was the root of all Bare Snow’s troubles. Named within days of her birth, it was so fraught with ill omens that the temple priestess apologized to her parents even as she bestowed it upon their baby. After that, anything that went wrong was assigned to her presence. A boat lost to a storm? Bare Snow’s fault. A red tide? A tsunami wave? All her fault.
Just as Law was starting to wonder if she’d accidently triggered a complete retelling of Bare Snow’s life, the female leapt ahead nearly a hundred years. By then Law had finished filling up her tanks, collected her change, and nosed her way into the heavy traffic.
Five years ago, Bare Snow’s mother had died while on a trip to Winter Court. At the time, the poor female had felt crushingly guilty. Had her cursed name killed her mother? Her father’s death in the spring nearly broke her. Worse, the household she’d grown up in, that of her father’s parents, wanted nothing more to do with her. They gave her a handful of coins and asked her to leave.
She had no other family within the Wind Clan. Unsure what else to do, she’d traveled to Summer Court. She arrived to discover that the town stood virtually empty until the Summer Solstice when the queen was scheduled to shift residence to the northern capital. Bare Snow drifted through the vacant city, seeking a household that would take her. The Water Clan enclaves would not take her because of her name. The Wind Clan household refused her for her blue-black hair and stormy eyes.
After weeks of being rejected, a nivasa-caste male wearing Wind Clan blue approached her in the street and quietly told her that she should go to Pittsburgh. She would find people that would accept her there.
At first it seemed as if the quest was blessed. The way to Pittsburgh was far quicker and simpler than she had imagined. She was able to board one of the cargo ships traveling the Western Ocean and then caught the train.
While she traveled she learned more about the Viceroy Windwolf and his household.
“He’s of two clans, just like me. His father is Wind Clan and his mother is Fire Clan. He had the support of both clans to set up his holdings in Westernlands. He’s asked a Stone Clan female to be his domi; although I’ve heard that has not gone well. She has yet to answer him. Despite his mixed blood, he gathers to him only the best to be his Beholden. Wraith Arrow. Dark Harvest. Killing Frost. His blade brother is the grandson of Tempered Steel and Perfection. And he holds Sword Strikes’ daughter, who is mixed caste! But those are sekasha; they are perfection despite the circumstance of their birth.”
She was sure that Windwolf’s people would look beyond her mixed blood and cursed name. Her hopes, though, were quickly crushed. It had only taken her a day to get from the train station to the Rim and be rejected by all the enclaves, save Caraway’s, which she’d been repeatedly warned not to approach.
“Why?” Law asked.
“Because of the clan wars.” The answer seemed strangely condensed.
When Law was a kid with crayons, she always left the sky paper white unless she did a sunset of yellows and oranges. It was the mythical ocean that Law had never seen, the lakes and the rivers that were blue. To the elves, Bare Snow’s answer probably would make as much sense as Wind Clan claiming blue as a color when there was a Water Clan. Bare Snow’s last name was Wind; why shouldn’t she go straight to the head of the clan in the Westernlands? How did she end up on the other side of the city?
“I had always thought that how my parents met was romantic: a chance meeting on a desolate island. I realize now that the years alone had been sheer torture for my mother. That she had been so lonely that she would risk her life to talk to another being.”
Sensing that Bare Snow was about to go off into another long, long story, Law asked quickly, “So you talked with someone here in Pittsburgh? And they took you to the house?”
Just as Bare Snow had been about to break down, a male approached her on the street. He claimed there was a special area belonging to the Water Clan and that he’d been sent to take her to it. Law was fairly sure that was a complete lie. According to her high school civics class, as long as the gate was functioning, the city was to be wholly human-owned. (Which always struck her as odd wording since if the gate wasn’t functioning, Pittsburgh wouldn’t be on Elfhome. That was the entire reason they called returning to Earth Shutdown.) Elves weren’t allowed to claim anything inside the Rim. More importantly, humans couldn’t settle outside of it. Newcomers liked to bitch and moan about that since it meant they couldn’t go off and dig up emeralds or pan for gold in North Carolina.
“And this human, he had the Ford? The white automobile?”
“Nae. Nae human.”
“It was an elf?” Law thought Bare Snow had told her it was a human.
Bare Snow considered, screwing up her face as she thought. “Looked human. But he was not human.”
“Huh?”
“I’d been to Summer Court. All the households I talked to had spoken in a very austere manner of speech. It is based on the Wyverns’ way of speaking, only more formalized. Here in Pittsburgh, there are only Wind Clan households, and specifically those from the highlands. You can tell by the way they talk; it’s a very marked accent. Even the sekasha at Caraway’s had it when he was using the Low Elvish. It means that the viceroy must not use the very formal court language and thus his people feel no pressure to adapt.”
Law wondered if she was ever going to find out how Bare Snow got to Fairywood. “I don’t understand.”
“All the humans I’ve talked to—Law, Ellen, Patty, Jon—they speak Low Elvish with highland accent.”
Who the hell is Jon? Law didn’t ask. She focused on the mystery human who wasn’t a human. “This male didn’t have the right accent?”
Bare Snow winced and spoke hesitantly. “It isn’t that he didn’t have an accent, it was he had too much of an accent. Not even the enclave elves speak as broadly. It was obvious that he was pretending. Once I started to listen closely, I picked up traces of old tongue, that no elf would ever teach a human, not even unintentionally.”
“Are you sure?”
“The old ways have been rooted out. Young elves are not taught it. No old one would be so lax to use it without thinking.”
“How do you know it then?” Law asked.
Bare Snow blushed and looked down at her hands. For several minutes, it seemed like she wasn’t going to answer, and then she said quietly, “The gardener needs to know the weed from the flowers.”
* * *
Usagi’s place on Mount Washington was the kind of playful chaos that only a home with many small children and pets could achieve. The toys started halfway down the block, growing denser as Law neared the front door. She was sure that any home intruder would end up facedown on the floor with a dozen Legos embedded in his feet. Certainly she needed to step over several large Tonka construction vehicles and two Big Wheels to get down the sidewalk. There was no yard to speak of; the two raised planters had given way to endless landscaping projects with said construction toys.
Bare Snow bent to examine the trucks, pushing them to and fro. She probably hadn’t seen a cast-metal toy before. She was making motor noises for them just like a child would; maybe it was instinctual.
Usagi’s door was painted Wind Clan blue. Law frowned at it, wondering if the white door in Fairywood had been an indication that Bare Snow was Water Clan. Why blue for Wind and white for Water? Law rang the doorbell.
After several minutes, the door opened and Moon Rabbit Warrior gazed up at Law. The little half-elf was in her tweens but she looked six. She
was naked except for a pair of butterfly wings strapped to her back and a pink tutu. Her long black hair was up in its customary pigtails, showing off her elf-pointed ears. In the background, the commune’s TV was playing a cartoon video at full volume. The sweet cinnamon smell of fire berries washed over Law; it smelt like Usagi had spilled an entire orchard of the fruit somewhere in her house.
As usual, Brisbane ignored all formalities and waddled into the house.
“Hi, Moon,” Law started. “Is Widget…”
“Moooom!” Moon shouted at the top of her lungs. “It’s Brizzy!”
“Is his mommy with him?” Usagi shouted from the kitchen.
“Yes!”
“Hi, Law! We’re in the kitchen!”
Usagi’s was haven to human women who had found their way to Pittsburgh one way or another. They were in love with the idea of magic, elves, and a mystical other world, or maybe just completely disenchanted with Earth. Most of them had the reputation of being “elf groupies,” sneaking illegally to Elfhome just to have sex with elves.
In truth, they were taking advantage of a loophole in the treaty. Elf DNA, starting with blood samples but also including children, wasn’t allowed to be taken off Elfhome. Elf tradition stated that children couldn’t be forcibly taken from their mothers. It created a little known and rarely exploited way to get permanent resident status in Pittsburgh.
It didn’t guarantee a living, nor did elves pay child support (although Law wasn’t sure if the males even knew of their children’s existence). Usagi gathered together other female illegal immigrants with marketable skills to pool resources. They’d taken over an abandoned restaurant building and set up a commune. While each woman shouldered a shift of watching the children, they all also had part-time jobs outside the commune. It was part circus act, part logistical nightmare to get any one woman alone.