by Spencer, Wen
“She has given her word. You are safe from her until we mutually agree on an end to our truce.”
“Really?”
“Thorne Scratch is of the perfection that all sekasha seek.” Stormsong had switched to High Elvish, as if nothing else could capture the truth of her words. Tinker wondered what subtle meaning she was totally missing. “Earth Son was a fool to play politics in a war zone with one such as her at his side.”
Tinker found the jeans. “Wow, an entire dresser of blue jeans? I never figured you for a clothes horse.”
“I was afraid Pittsburgh would go away one day.” Stormsong opened the second drawer and pulled out two pair of shorts. “Hmm. I think the low riders.”
Tinker tried them on and considered the mirror. “You can see my panties.”
“That’s the point.”
Tinker stuck out her tongue but left the shorts on. They were the most comfortable thing she’d put on since she was dragged to Aum Renau nearly three months earlier.
“We can trust Thorne Scratch completely? What if she became Beholden to Forest Moss or Jewel Tear, and they ordered her to kill me?”
“Even then.” Stormsong pulled on a pair of boot-cut jeans. “According to the Wyverns, Thorne Scratch refused Forest Moss already.”
“What about Jewel Tear?”
“They say that Jewel Tear has not asked.” Stormsong seemed slightly puzzled by the fact.
Frankly, as much as Tinker loved her Hand, it drove her slightly nuts to have them constantly underfoot. She could understand why Jewel Tear would skip taking on five more. “Windwolf says she’s nearly broke. You guys have to be expensive to keep. I’ve seen you eat.”
“If she had a second Hand, she would be well rewarded by her clan. It is a loop. The more sekasha a domana holds, the more they can protect, the greater their reputation, the more sekasha will offer to them. It behooves the clan to support their domana to keep the clan strong.”
“Like Prince True Flame and all his zillions of Wyvern?”
“Yes. The Fire Clan supports him so they can send him where he is needed to enforce the queen’s rule.”
Perhaps she needed to rethink taking a second Hand. How did she find more without stealing them off of Windwolf? “Okay, I understand why Jewel Tear should have offered to Thorne Scratch. Maybe she scares Jewel Tear silly. She did lop off Earth Son’s head.”
“Jewel Tear has many faults, but she is not a coward. I believe that Tiger Eye pressured Jewel Tear into not asking.”
“Why?”
“It would be difficult to put into words.”
“I’m patient.”
Stormsong laughed and pulled on her scale-armor vest. “You are anything but patient. Because I love you, I will try to explain.
“We are considered holy because we are perfect, but perfection has its degrees. While I have my differences with my father, even I have to acknowledge that he is one of the greatest warriors our caste has produced. There are only two or three others that are of his match. Tiger Eye is not of the caliber of Thorne Scratch. He loves his domi well, but he treats her like a child. At the tunnel, Jewel Tear should not have felt the need to whisper her order to him. He should not have then so loudly defied her. It is embarrassing that any First would act in that manner.”
Tinker had thought the two had been disgustingly cute.
“It would be impossible for Tiger Eye to be First to Thorne Scratch. It would only a matter of time before both Hands would look to her as if she were First, and such a division of power would be a catastrophe.”
“The importance of fit,” Tinker said.
“Yes.”
“So, how do we get sekasha to Pittsburgh that we know will fit? I think I should take a second Hand.”
Stormsong hugged her tight, laughing. “Tell me again how you’re patient!”
11: SPELL LOCK
Her Hand was silently unhappy in the loudest way possible. After what Stormsong had told Tinker about Tiger Eye being a bad First, Tinker was hyperaware of Pony’s silence beside her as she carefully examined the chest from the whelping pens. Apparently deemed too dangerous to take deeper into the enclave, it’d been tucked into one of the empty bays of the coach house. Unlike the rough, utilitarian garages of humans, the enclave’s coach house was a shrine to transportation. The floor was paved in a herringbone of glazed brick. The walls were rich stained wood. The beveled glass windows gleamed as if freshly cleaned. Still, the chest managed to positively lurk in the shadows.
The chest was two feet high, three feet wide, and four feet long. It had no seams or joints. It looked like one solid hunk of ironwood, as if the chest been carved out of a tree trunk. An eight-phoneme spell-lock was inscribed in a band, three inches down, marking off the lid. Even standing several feet from the chest, she could feel the active spell hidden within. If the trap was explosive in nature, there was enough oomph to it to level the coach house. Her Hand had a good reason to be unhappy.
“The little dragon said you needed to take possession of it, but he did not say you had to open it,” Pony murmured quietly for only her to hear.
“If I can’t open it safely, I won’t try,” Tinker promised, because she knew Pony would be in blast range.
Personally Tinker could understand Jewel Tear wanting Tiger Eye out of danger’s way. Yet Tinker saw the logic of the male staying beside his domi—there could have been any number of other dangers in the tunnel. They were stronger together as a team than apart.
Tinker was clueless, though, as to how to get the chest open safely. She took reference photos and measurements and then retreated across the driveway to the stable’s hayloft. With the loft door open, she could see the chest where it lurked in the garage. Pony settled beside her, still silent but no longer unhappy.
Magic basically reduced material to possibilities, and spells realigned the material to the desired end. Spell-locks used magic to flip the locked material between two states. Generally an “open” state was where two halves of the material were separate identities, and “closed” was where they merged into one solid object. When Tinker was learning to create spell-locks, she had reduced several hundred pieces of wood down to instant splinters before she figured out how pre-tune the lock material.
The chest was made of ironwood. The super-dense wood had been bioengineered to have the same structural strength of high-quality steel. Normally boards ran an inch and a half thick and required special spells and tools to cut. She assumed that any attempt cut the chest open would most likely trigger the trap. Without knowing what was inside, even if she managed to shut down the active spell, cutting the chest open might damage the contents.
She could use a magic null spell on the chest. That would wipe out the trap, but it would also render the spell-lock inoperative in the “locked” position, forcing her to cut her way into the chest.
What she needed was a set of picks and something akin to tumblers that she could feel her way through. She needed to experiment.
* * *
Several exploded pieces of wood later, she remembered why she hated spell-locks.
12: MORNING AFTER
The fire alarm screamed Oilcan awake. It died moments later, a wooden sword through its heart, but its death only muted the sound slightly as the rest of the fire alarms in the condo were still screaming.
“It’s a fire alarm!” he shouted to forestall the death of his other alarms. “Something is burning!”
Sometime during the night, Thorne had pulled on her underwear and arranged her weapons close at hand. She placed her hand against the door and, finding it cool, triggered her shields, jerked open the door, and disappeared down the hall. A moment later, the screams of children joined in that of the fire alarms.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Oilcan grabbed clean boxers, tugging them on one leg at a time as he hopped after her.
Smoke was pouring out of his microwave. Thorne looked like she was considering skewering it. The children were ping-ponging around the
living room like frightened mice.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” he shouted over the screaming fire alarms and children to stop Thorne. The microwave was counting down from eighty-seven minutes while a bag of popcorn blazed. He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall, flipped open the microwave door, and blasted foam over the burning bag. “There, it’s out. We’ve just got to clear out the smoke to stop the alarms.” He wove through the children to open the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was mid-morning outside, surprising him by how late he’d slept in. “It’s all right! It’s all right! The noise will stop in a little while.”
He went to open his front door and discovered the children had built a barricade in front of it out of his recliner and one of his end tables. He picked up the end table and carried it back into the living room. The kitchen counter was covered with his pantry goods. All the boxes and bags, from his baking soda to his polenta—were sitting open. Thankfully they hadn’t figured out how to open the cans.
“I’m sorry,” Merry said. “We were hungry, so I thought we could make pop pop pop.”
“It’s called popcorn.” He gave her the English word. He had made her a bag of it on her first night in Pittsburgh and played her High School Musical. “You should have just woken me up.”
Merry’s glance toward Thorne explained why the children had decided to fend for themselves. This was not the morning he should have slept in.
He muscled the recliner back to where it belonged and then propped open his front door and the building’s main entrance down the hall. He came back into his apartment to discover that the children clearly regarded the open door as more alarming than the nearly naked and armed sekasha.
“There were people talking.” Cattail Reeds pointed out into the hall. “Just beyond the door.”
“There are other humans that live in this building. They are . . .” Friendly? Not completely. The other tenants regarded him as their lazy handyman. They resented that he wasn’t around every hour of the day, fixing all the little things that went wrong in the building. His lease, though, stipulated that he was only responsible for the heating, the air conditioning, and the elevator. “They’re harmless.”
Her eyes went wide suddenly, warning him that someone was at the open door.
Margaret was head of the building association. “Do I need to call the fire department, Orville?”
No matter how many times he asked her to use his nickname, she insisted on his real name. “A bag of popcorn just got left in the microwave too long. The alarms will go off as soon as I get the smoke cleared out.”
She glanced down over him, making him realize that he was still just in his boxers, and then flicked her gaze over Thorne in her underwear and the children in the hospice gowns that looked like pajamas. “You can’t sublet your bedrooms. You can’t have these—people move in.”
Her voice suggested he had a herd of pigs in his apartment. He was getting so sick and tired of bigotry from every angle. He thought Pittsburgh was better than this. “I’m not subletting. I’ve adopted these kids. Thorne will not be living here.”
She glanced over the elves again. “Five children?” She shook her head. “No.”
“I have three bedrooms—”
“The co-op board will never approve six people for your square footage. Four is the most we would consider.”
“Fine,” he snapped. Thankfully the alarms shut off, so he kicked the prop on his door free. “I’ll find another place to live.”
He slammed his door shut. Immediately there was a knock on it. He jerked it back open, expecting Margaret.
Blue Sky jumped back from his snarled “What?” and held up a basket. “I brought breakfast!”
“Sorry. Come in.” Oilcan stepped back to let the half-elf in. Blue wore tennis shoes, blue jeans, and a black T-shirt that expounded “It’s all about racing.” Only his eyes and ears gave him away as a half-elf.
“Did you just get kicked out of your building?” Blue Sky pointed over his shoulder to where Margaret had been standing.
“Yes.” Oilcan took a deep breath as he realized that Blue would probably tell Tinker, and she would hit the roof. As of late, Tinker had been stomping over everyone in her path Godzilla-style. It was tempting to unleash her but the place was cramped for six and the kids weren’t comfortable with strangers living so close. “No. Not really. This place is too small. I needed to move.”
Blue Sky took in the chaos of the kitchen, the smoke lingering in the air, and the fact that Oilcan was still in his underwear and smiled brightly. “I thought Tinker was just trying to ditch me when she told me to come help you, but I guess you really do need me.”
“Yes, I could use some help.” Oilcan really needed to get dressed. He pointed to the Stone Clan children in approximate order of their ages. “This is Fields of Barley, Cattail Reeds, Rustle of Leaves, Merry, and Baby Duck. This is Blue Sky. He was born here in Pittsburgh. Listen to him.” And then added in English, “Make sure they don’t burn down the place while I’m putting on clothes.”
“We’re supposed to obey a Wind Clan baby?” Baby Duck whispered to Fields of Barley.
“He is sekasha first,” Thorne Scratch said. “And you will obey him as you would obey me.”
The children flinched back from her, and Baby Duck quietly said, “Quiee.”
* * *
Oilcan, Tinker, and Blue Sky had all learned how to drive on go-karts that Tinker made out of lawn mowers and leaf blowers. They’d blocked off deserted streets on Neville Island and raced through the abandoned neighborhood at insane speeds. Blue Sky might look ten years old, but he had a driver’s license and could probably outdrive anyone in the city—as long as he could reach the pedals and see over the dashboard. Thus it was no surprise that Tinker had sent Blue Sky in one of the viceroy’s Rolls Royces. It was raining, after all, and the cab of Oilcan’s pickup could only fit three people comfortably.
Figuring out who should ride where was like the logic problem of ferrying a fox, a chicken, and grain across a river in a rowboat. There were eight of them; too many to comfortably fit in the Rolls. He and Blue were the only ones that could drive. All the kids but Merry and Blue were terrified of Thorne. Rustle of Leaves’ left arm was splinted, inked with healing spells, and was still healing, so he couldn’t be squeezed into a shared seat. In the end, the only logical configuration had Blue driving the Rolls with all the kids, and Oilcan following with Thorne in his pickup.
Luckily for Oilcan’s nerves, it was a short trip. No oni leapt out to snatch up the kids and take them away.
Tooloo’s was the only store in Pittsburgh that sold used elfin clothes, albeit usually to elf-obsessed humans. Her place was in McKees Rocks, just a few blocks from John Montana’s gas station. From the street, her store looked like a tiny little hole in the wall, just one large glass block window and a thick bulletproof glass door. Only the hand-painted English and Elvish running under the window, stating BREAD, BUTTER, EGGS, FISH, FOWL, HONEY, INTERNET ACCESS, MILK, SPELLCASTING, TELEPHONE, TRANSLATIONS, VIDEO RENTALS gave a clue to what lay hidden within.
Tooloo had carved out an entire farm from what had been pure city. Orchards and pastures and terraced gardens climbed a hill that was too steep to build on. Outbuildings that started life as garages had been repurposed into chicken coops, dovecotes and a milking barn. For some unfathomable reason, Oilcan and Tinker had spent endless hours working the farm under the guise of being babysat by the old half-elf. How Tooloo ended up as his grandfather’s primary babysitter was one of the unsolved mysteries of his childhood. It was a relationship set in stone by the time Oilcan came to Pittsburgh. He’d asked Tinker about it once when they were little and discovered she was under the delusion it somehow involved spinning straw into gold. (Looking back, he really should have disabused her of that lie, but it was so cute he let it stand.)
“My brother always said that we looked like we poured a can of oil over us and then rolled in dirt all day,” Blue was telling the kids a
s they got out of the car. “At some point we just started to call him ‘oil can.’ That’s what Oilcan means.”
The bells on the doorjamb jangled as Thorne opened the door and stalked into the dimly lit store. Oilcan kept close on her heels, not sure how Tooloo would react to the sekasha. Hell, there was no telling how Tooloo would react to anything. The old half-elf defied logic and reason; Oilcan suspected she did it to keep people at a distance.
Tooloo was stocking the stand-up refrigerator case with milk and eggs. As always, she was in an elegant dress of elfin silk, faded and threadbare with age, and battered high-top tennis shoes. Her ankle-length silver hair was braided into a thick cord. She glanced up with a look of mild surprise as Thorne entered. Then her eyes went wide when she saw Oilcan and the children.
“No!” Tooloo wailed and leapt up. “No, no, no!”
For one moment he thought she was going to object to the Stone Clan invasion, but she swooped down on Oilcan and caught him by both ears.
“Ow, Tooloo! Thorne!” He caught Thorne by the wrist to keep her from drawing her sword. “Tooloo!”
The old half-elf let go of his ears only to press his face between her hands and peer closely at him. Tooloo smelled of smoke and honey; she must have been working with her beehives prior to opening her store. “Oh, my little wood sprite! It’s you, just you.”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Oilcan tried to pull his face out from between her hands, but she had him fast.
“Get your hands off him,” Thorne growled.
Tooloo turned her attention to the warrior. “Shame on you. By the sword and the blood.” Tooloo spat. “My little wood sprite is not for you.”
“This is Thorne Scratch.” Who looked like she was about to slice and dice the crazy half-elf into small pieces. “She’s a Stone Clan sekasha.”
“I have eyes. I can see.” Tooloo let him go. “Stupid guard dog. Tear the throat out of one master only to give its leash to another. Loves the pat on the head and the toss of the ball too much to leave it for true freedom.”