Windwolf crossed to Stormsong in long strides, beating Tinker to the sekasha's side. The forest floor was annoyingly uneven; after stumbling slightly, Tinker slowed to baby steps. Pony hovered protectively close as if he expected her to pitch face first into the dead leaves. The big gray Rolls Royce they'd left on the other side of the valley and an ambulance had picked their way through the shattered streets to stop fifty-odd yards short of their location.
"Considering how fucked we were, I'm fine." Stormsong slapped Windwolf's hands away from the bloody bandage on her leg. "We didn't stop it—it just left."
Heat flushed over Tinker, and the sounds around her went muffled, as if someone had wrapped invisible wool around her head. It was dawning on her that she'd been stupid and nearly got them all killed. By returning to Stormsong, she'd pulled the other sekasha back to a fight that they should have lost. She should be dead right now. So fucking dead.
Stormsong glanced up at Tinker, frowned, and murmured something to Windwolf, giving him a slight push away from her. Windwolf looked up at Tinker and stood to sweep her off her feet and into his arms.
"Hey, I can walk!" Tinker cried.
"I know." He carried her toward the Rolls Royce. "I have seen you do it."
Tinker sighed at the nuances lost in the translation. This was how she ended up married to Windwolf—she accepted his betrothal gift without realizing he was proposing to her. "There is nothing wrong with my legs."
He eyed her bare legs draped over his arm. "No. There is not. They are very nice legs."
She studied him. All told, they had spent very little time with each other and she was still getting to know him. She was beginning to suspect, though, that he had a very subtle but strong sense of humor. "Are you teasing me?"
He said nothing but the corners of his eyes crinkled with a suppressed smile.
She smacked him lightly in the shoulder for teasing her. "You don't have to carry me!"
"But I like to."
"Windwolf," she whined.
He kissed her on her forehead. "You might think you are well, but you are in truth pale and wobbly. You have done what was needed. Let me care for you."
If she insisted on walking, she ran the risk of falling flat on her face. What harm could letting him carry her do, except to her pride? Like so often since he charged into her life, Windwolf left only bad choices for her to make in order to protect her sense of free will—and she was too smart to choose stupidity. Sighing, she lay her head on his shoulder and let him carry her.
He tucked her into the Rolls and slid in beside her. Pony got into the front, alongside the sekasha who was driving.
She noticed that her T-shirt was shredded over her stomach. Under the tattered material, five shallow claw marks cut across her abdomen; barely breaking the skin, the wounds were already crusted over with scabs. A fraction of an inch deeper, and she would have been gutted. She started to shake.
"All is well, you are fine," Windwolf murmured, holding her.
"I felt so helpless. There was nothing I could do to hurt it. I wish I could do the things you do."
"You can. I gave you that ability when I made you a Wind Clan domana."
"I know, I know, I have the genetic key to the Wind Clan spell stones." Which was how the monster sucked power through her. "What I don't know is how to use the spell stones. I want to learn."
"I was wrong not to teach you earlier." He took her hand. "I allowed myself to be distracted from my duties to you at Aum Renau; I should have started to teach you then."
"You'll teach me now?"
"Tomorrow we will start your lessons." He kissed her knuckles. "You will also have to learn how to use a sword."
"Shooting practice with a gun would probably be more useful."
"The sword is for your peers, not your enemies. Currently you have the queen's protection. No one can call insult on you or challenge you to a duel. But that protection will not last forever."
"Pfft, like random violence solves anything."
"True, it rarely does, but you need to know how to protect yourself and your beholden."
She made another noise of disgust. "What you elves—" She saw the look on his face and amended it. "—we elves call civilized. Can I still have the gun?"
"Yes, beloved, you may have the gun too. I will find comfort knowing you can defend yourself."
"Especially with a monster running around that sees me as some kind of power drink." She winced at her tone—he wasn't the one she was upset with.
"Reinforcements should be arriving soon, but until then Pittsburgh will not be safe."
"What reinforcements?"
"After you and Little Horse were kidnapped, I realized that there were more oni in the area than Sparrow previously led me to believe. I sent for reinforcements; the queen is sending troops via airship from Easternlands. They should arrive shortly. Unfortunately, this will pull the Fire Clan and probably the Stone Clan into the fight—which is why I'm thinking you should learn how to use a sword."
"Why is it a bad thing that other clans are going to help fight the oni? Isn't this everyone's problem?"
"We hold only what we can protect." Windwolf squeezed her hand; she wasn't sure if it was to comfort her or to seek comfort for himself. "By admitting that we need help, we have put our monopoly on Pittsburgh at risk. The other clans might want part of the city for services rendered in fixing this problem. The humans will fall under someone else's rule."
"You've got to be kidding! Why?"
"Because we cannot protect all of Pittsburgh from the oni. The crown will mediate a compromise."
"Couldn't your father, as head of the Wind Clan, have sent us help?"
"He has. He sent domana to Aum Renau and the other East Coast settlements. It is a great comfort to me to know that they are protected. The domana aren't that numerous, and the clans that can help are limited to those who have spell stones within range of Pittsburgh."
"This is all my fault," Tinker whispered.
"Hush, this battle is part of a war that started before even I was born."
She snuggled against him, logic failing to squash the guilty feeling inside of her. She was distracted, however, by something very hard under her. "Do you have something in your pocket? Or are you just happy to see me?"
"What? Oh, yes." Windwolf pulled a small fabric bundle out of his pants pocket. "This is for you."
"What's this?" Tinker eyed it tentatively. Accepting a similar package from Windwolf had indicated her acceptance of his marriage proposal—when she didn't realize the significance of his gift. She still had mixed feelings about being married to Windwolf. As a lover, Windwolf was all that she would want—warm, gentle, and caring wrapped in a sexy body—and she loved him deeply.
It was the whole marriage thing—having someone else's will and future joined to hers. They were building "their home" for "their people" and someday, maybe, "their children." Being the viceroy's wife, too, came with more responsibilities than she wanted; people were entrusting her with their lives. So far, the good outweighed the bad—but with elves "till death do us part" meant a very long time.
"Before the queen summoned me from Pittsburgh, I ordered clothes and jewelry to be made for you. I know that they are not of the style you might pick for yourself. It is important, though, that you look your best in front of the crown and the other clans."
"Okay." She pulled loose the bow and unwrapped the fabric. Inside were four small velvet pouches with drawstring pulls. She opened the first to the glitter of gems. "Oh!"
She gasped as she poured diamonds out into her palm. Over a foot of necklace studded with pea-sized diamonds. "Oh my! They're gorgeous!"
As she lifted them up, the afternoon sun prismed into a million tiny rainbows.
"They will look lovely against your skin." Windwolf dropped a kiss on her throat.
The second bag spilled rubies into her hand like fire, but as she lifted up the strand, it reminded her of the red ribbon in her dream. The
third bag held a matching bracelet.
"They're beautiful," she said truthfully, but still put them away.
The fourth bag held a pearl necklace. She couldn't keep the dismay off her face.
"You don't like them?"
"I had a bad dream after the beast knocked me out. I was looking for something in a forest with this woman. She had a long red ribbon tied around her eyes and on the other end of it was a pearl necklace."
She'd wanted him to say, "It was just a dream," but instead he said, "Tell me all of your dream."
"Why?"
"Sometimes dreams are warnings. It is not wise to ignore them."
So she said, "It was just a dream." How could he rebuke her so easily with just his eyes? "I'm still me. I'm still mostly human—not elf. I would know by now if I had the ability to see the future."
"In elves it is carried by the female line; being that humans and elves can interbreed with fertile results, we must be very similar." He put away the pearl necklace. "It is the nature of magic to splinter things down to possibilities. Even humans without magic can see where the splintering will happen, and the possible outcomes. Humans call it an 'educated guess.' In the past, where magic would leak through natural gates from Elfhome to Earth, there were often temples with oracles predicting the future."
"So it doesn't matter if I'm mostly human or partly elf?"
"Tell me your dream." Windwolf ran the back of his hand lightly down her cheek.
So she described what she could remember. "Both women are someone I know but not really. Movie stars or something like that—I've only seen pictures of them."
"Both women wore blindfolds? The intanyei seyosa wears one when she's predicting. It helps block out things that would distract her from her visions, but also it is a badge of her office."
Tinker remembered then her one encounter with the queen's intanyei seyosa, Pure Radiance. The oracle had worn a white dress and red blindfold.
"So I'm dreaming that they're dreaming? That's very Escher-esque."
Windwolf looked confused.
"Escher is a human artist that my grandfather liked; his pictures are all tricks of perspective."
"I see."
"Well, I don't. What does it mean?" She prodded the bags with a finger. "That you were going to give me jewelry? What is so dangerous about the necklaces?"
"Dreams are rarely straightforward. Most likely the necklaces represent something else."
"Like what?"
"I do not know, but it might be wise to find out."
3: NUTS AND BOLTS
Wolf spotted Wraith at the fringe of the Ghostlands when he flew back to Turtle Creek. He'd left his domi in the care of his household at Poppymeadow's enclave and returned to help deal with the beast that attacked her. He dropped down to land beside his First.
"I don't know what Storm Horse was thinking," Wraith growled in greeting. "How did he end up with all the babies?"
Little Horse had chosen the five youngest sekasha to make up the Hand that accompanied Tinker into Turtle Creek; not one of them was over three hundred. True, any death would have been grievous, but to lose the five youngest would have been a blow to the close-knit band of warriors.
"They are the ones my domi is most comfortable with." Wolf knew that Wraith was truly rattled if he was using the nickname, as some of the "babies" were in truth older than Wolf. His First Hand didn't like to remind him that he was impossibly young for his level of responsibilities.
"Oni, they could have handled," Wraith allowed and then handed a sheet of paper to Wolf. "But not an oni dragon. I'm amazed any of them are still alive."
Wolf recognized Rainlily's fluid hand in the drawing. The low-slung creature looked like a cross between a ferret and a snake. "An oni dragon? Are you sure?"
Wraith clicked his tongue. "It's much smaller than the one we fought when we closed the gate between Earth and Onihida, and the coloring is different. It might be just a less dangerous relative, like we have the wyvern cousins to our dragons, or perhaps a hatchling. It would explain how they survived."
The oni war had been shortly before Wolf was born. A Stone Clan trading expedition had discovered the way from Earth to Onihida by accident. When the survivors managed to return to Elfhome with their tale of capture and torture, the clans united to send a force to Earth to stop the oni spreading from Onihida to Earth, and then, possibly to Elfhome. Wraith Arrow and others of Wolf's First Hand had been part of the battle.
"Are oni dragons that dangerous?" Wolf folded the paper and tucked it away. He would have to let the Earth Interdimensional Agency know of this new threat if they couldn't kill the beast quickly. The EIA could best spread warnings through the humans.
"We lost two dozen sekasha in the caves to the beast. We couldn't hurt it. It could—" Wraith frowned as he searched for a word. "—sidestep through walls as if they didn't exist, and it called magic like you do."
"How did you kill it?"
"When the Stone Clan pulled down the gate and the connection between the worlds broke, its attack pattern totally changed. It dropped its shield and became like a mink in a chicken coop, stupid with bloodlust. We boxed it in so it couldn't turn and we hacked it to pieces."
"Maybe the oni were controlling it magically. Little Horse said that the tengu used a whistle to call it off them—perhaps the sound only triggered a controlling spell. Earth doesn't have magic."
"So their control over it vanished and we were fighting the true beast?"
Wolf nodded. "Perhaps."
"So the key is to kill the controller first."
"Perhaps." Wolf didn't want to fall into a wrong mind-set. He crouched beside the torn earth and spilt blood to find the monster's tracks. They were as long as his forearm, with five claw marks splayed like a hand. Pressed into the dirt at the center of one track was one of Tinker's omnipresent bolts, a bright point of polished aluminum glittering in the black earth. It must have fallen from her pocket during the fight. Wolf picked it out of the dirt, realizing for the first time the size of his beloved compared to what had attacked her. Gods above, sometimes he wished her sense of self-preservation matched her courage; she couldn't keep leaping into the void and swimming back. One of these times, the void was going to drink her down. He rolled the bolt around his palm to shake off the dirt, thinking he should talk to her about being more careful, only he didn't want to fall into the trap of becoming her teacher.
Wraith crouched beside Wolf, and stirred his fingers through the dirt. "Domi showed great courage in protecting Little Horse. She needs, though, someone who can steer her away from the dangers. Little Horse is lost at summer court."
From Wraith's tone, the sekasha also thought that Windwolf was too deep in the first throes of love to think clearly. Perhaps he was. "Are you volunteering?"
Wraith tilted his head. "Do you want me to?"
Wolf considered, tumbling the bolt through his fingers. Wraith was not the first to come forward in the last two days and let him know that they'd be willing to change allegiance to Tinker. He'd given them all permission to advance their case to Tinker since she needed at least four more sekasha to make a Hand. Wraith, though, was his First, and Wolf depended heavily on him. Without Sparrow, losing Wraith would cripple Wolf. "No. I need you. Others plan to offer, she will have plenty to choose from."
"Yes, but will they guide her?"
Do I want her guided? That was the true question. He'd benefited greatly by choosing sekasha who had served his grandfather, but they had brought subtle pressure to bear on him at all times. This conversation itself was a perfect example of their influence on him. Their persuasion extended out to the rest of the household, reinforcing the caste differences so that Wolf was always correctly above everyone. When the queen summoned Wolf to Aum Renau, he'd left Little Horse behind to guard over Tinker. The youngest of the sekasha, his blade brother had also been raised in a household where the caste lines had been allowed to blur. Little Horse would be open-minded, affectionate, an
d the least likely to try and change Tinker. Wolf had hated the necessity to make her elf in body—he didn't want to force her, even by subtle persuasion, to become elf in mind and habit.
No, I do not want her guided in the way that Wraith would.
He would speak with Tinker, but not point her toward the older sekasha. He would allow her and Little Horse to find those they were most comfortable with.
"On this, I will act." He let Wraith know that the conversation was closed, that he would not discuss it farther. He turned his attention back to the oni dragon.