Wolf Who Rules

Chapter 7: Things Better Left Buried

The treaty between the elves and humans banned certain humans from Pittsburgh as it traveled back and forth between the worlds: criminals, mentally insane, and orphans. When her grandfather died, her cousin Oilcan had been seventeen and Tinker had just turned thirteen. Facing possible deportation, dealing with her grandfather’s things had been the last thing on Tinker’s mind. Truth be told, she’d run a little mad at the time, resisting Lain and Oilcan’s attempts to have her move in with them. She roamed the city, hiding from her grief, and sleeping wherever night found her. Terrified that she was going to lose the only world she’d ever known, she drank it down in huge swallows.

Only when Oilcan turned eighteen, able to be her legal guardian, did they settle back into a normal life. With money from licensing her hoverbike design, she set up her scrap yard business, moved into a loft, and laid claim to a sprawling garage between the two. Her grief, however, had been too fresh to deal with her grandfather’s things; Oilcan and Nathan Czernowski packed up them up and stored them away in a room at the back of the garage.

Even now — looking at the small mountain of boxes, draped in plastic, smelling of age — it was tempting to just shut the door on the emotional landmines that the boxes might hold.

“Domi,” Pony said quietly behind her. “What are we looking for here?”

“My grandfather created the spell at the ice cream factory. I need to find his notes on it so I can fix it quickly. I figure it’s in one of these boxes.”

Pony nodded, looking undaunted by the task. “How can we help?”

Backing out of the whole tree mess wasn’t really an option; she already had too many people involved. The dust, however, was making her nose itch.

“Can you take these boxes out to the parking pad?” She waved toward the square of sun-baked cement. “After I look through a box, you can put it back.”

The first box she opened was actually some of their old racing gear. Inside were a dozen of their FRS walkie-talkies, heavily shielded against magic. She’d upgraded the team to earbuds, and mothballed the handheld radios.

“Score!” she cried. “This is just what I wanted!”

“What are they?” Pony picked one up. “Phones?”

“Close. I want to make it so the Hands can communicate over distance better. These are a little bit clunky but they’re easy to use.”

Oddly, Stormsong thought this was funny. She took the box, saying mysteriously, “This should be interesting.”

Tinker supposed it could be worse. Her grandfather had been methodical in organizing his things. Oilcan kept everything carefully separated as he packed the boxes. Still she couldn’t find anything filed under Reinholds, Refrigeration, Ice Cream, or the type of compressor that Reinholds used.

“Ze domi,” Stormsong murmured politely.

Tinker sighed. Random searching wasn’t going to work. “What is it, Stormsong?”

“I want to thank you for yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” Tinker found the Aa-Ak box and sat down beside it. “Can you put these boxes in alphabetical order?”

Stormsong started to rearrange the boxes, but switched to English, losing her polite mask. “Look, little one, you’re a good kid — your heart is in the right place — so I guess I do have to thank you for that stupidity you pulled yesterday. If you hadn’t come back, I’d be dead. But I had made my peace with that — being sekasha is all about choosing your life and your death — so don’t ever pull that shit again. You really fucked up. When that thing hit you, you should have been so much dead meat — and would have been a huge waste — because you are a good kid. The kind I would have been happy dying to protect — do you understand?”

Tinker blinked at her for moment, before finding her voice. “I thought I figured out a way to kill it.”

“It wasn’t your place to kill it.”

“What? I lost at paper, scissors, stone?”

“You know what I hate about being a sekasha? It’s the domana. We sekasha spend our lives learning the best way to handle any emergency. We train and train and train — and then have to kowtow to some domana who is just winging it because they’ve got the big guns. Do you know what? Just because you’ve got the big brains, or the kick ass spells, doesn’t mean you know everything. Next fight, shut the fuck up and do what you’re told, or I’m going to bitch slap you.”

It took Tinker a moment to find her voice. “You know, I think I like you better when you speak Elvish.”

Stormsong laughed, “And I like you better when you speak English. You’re more human.”

Tinker controlled the urge to stick out her tongue. She deserved Stormsong’s criticism since she had screwed up. Still, she suddenly felt like crying. Oh joy. The last few weeks had left her rubbed raw. Instead, she pushed the Aa-Ak box toward Stormsong, saying, “I’m done with this one,” and moved on. At least, having had her say, Stormsong took the box away without comment.

Under “Birth” Tinker found birth certificates for everyone in the family but herself. She pulled Oilcan’s and had Stormsong put it in the car. Under “Dufae” she found the original Dufae Codex carefully sealed in plastic. She’d only worked with the scanned copy that her father made.

“Wow.” That too she pulled out and had put in the Rolls to take home with her. The next book started with E’s, and toward the back was a thick file folder marked simply: Esme. “What the hell?”

Tinker pried the file out of the box, flipped it open and found Esme Shanske looking back. She ruffled quickly through the file. It was all information on Esme. NASA bios. Newspaper clippings. Photographs. It threw her into sudden and complete confusion.

“What are you doing here?” She asked Esme’s photo. “I wasn’t looking for you. What was I looking for?” She had to think a moment before remembering that she wanted to find her grandfather’s notes on the spell at Reinholds so the walk-in freezer could function again so she could store the black willow. But why? “Why am I doing this again?”

Lain wanted the black willow (thus the whole reason it was salvaged in the first place) and it might revive — good reason to lock the tree in the cooler. The cooler was broken. She needed to fix it. They were all nice, sane, and logical links in a chain.

What made it all weird were her dreams and Esme popping up in odd places. It jarred hard with Tinker’s orderly conception of reality. It pushed her into an uncomfortable feeling that the world wasn’t as solid and fixed as she thought it was. She wanted to ignore it all, but Windwolf had said that it wasn’t wise to ignore her dreams.

Perhaps if she dealt with them in a scientific manner, they wouldn’t seem so — frighteningly weird.

She got her datapad and settled in the sun to write out what she remembered of the dream, and what had already materialized. The pearl necklace headed the list, since it was the first to appear. Second was the black willow and the ice cream. She considered the hedgehogs of the dream and the flamingoes in the book’s illustrations and decided her future might be decidedly weird.

And who was the Asian woman in black? She felt that the woman had to be tengu because of the crows. She had felt, however, that she knew the woman, just as she knew Esme. Perhaps she was another colonist, which was why the birds kept repeating, “Lost.” Riki had told her that the first ship was crewed by tengu. Then it hit her — Riki lied about everything. She flopped back onto the sun warm cement and covered her eyes. Gods, what was she doing? Trying to apply logic to dream symbols was not going to work! So how was she going to figure out the future with only dreams and possible lies?

“Domi,” Pony’s voice and the touch of his hand on her face yanked Tinker out of her nightmare. “Wake up.”

Tinker opened her eyes and struggled awake. She lay on the warm, rough cement of the parking pad. Stormsong was doing a leisurely prowl in the alley. Pony knelt beside her, sheltering her from the sun. She groaned and rubbed at her eyes; they burned with unshed tears. “What is it?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

She grunted and sat up, not wanting to fall back to sleep, perhaps to dream. Lately dreaming was a bitch. The oni had really force-fed her id some whoppers, not that her imagination really needed it, no thank you.

“Domi?” His dark eyes mirrored the concern in his murmured question. “Are you all right?”

“It was just a bad dream.” She yawned so deep her face felt like it would split in half. “How can I sleep and wake up more tired?”

“You’ve only been asleep for a few minutes.” He shifted so that he sat beside her. “Nor was it restful sleep.”

“You’re telling me.” In her dreams, she hadn’t been able to save him from being flayed of his tattoos. She leaned against his bare arm, his skin and tattoos wonderfully intact, glad for the opportunity to reassure herself without making a big deal of it. Just a nightmare.

He smelled wonderful. After weeks together, she knew his natural scent. He was wearing some kind of cologne, an enticing light musk. She felt the now familiar desire uncoil inside her. Gods, why did stress make her want to lick honey off his rock-hard abs? Was this some kind of weird primitive wiring — most of us are going off to be eaten by saber tooth tigers, so let’s fuck like crazy before the gene pool lessens? Or was she uniquely screwed up?

Every night with Pony among the oni had been a torture of temptation. There had been only one bed and she had been stupid enough to insist that they share it. She would lay awake, desperately wanting to reach out to him — to be held — to be made love to — to be taken care of. She managed to resist because of a little voice that reminded her that she would swap Pony for Windwolf in heartbeat — that it was her husband she really wanted. There been no way to kick Pony out of the bed without admitting how much she wanted him, so he and her secret temptation stayed.

Even now she fought the urge to plant little kisses on his bicep. I’m a married woman. I’m married and I do love Windwolf. She couldn’t even imagine being married to Pony, although she wasn’t sure why — he was to-die-for cute. Unfortunately, she could imagine having hot sex with him. She sighed as her curiosity stirred to wonder what running her tongue up the curve of his arm would taste like. Now I’ve done it — it will eat me alive wondering…

“Domi, what is it?”

Embarrassment burned through her. “N-N-Nothing. I’m just tired. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Have you found what you needed?” He asked.

“No.” She shook her head and yawned again. She saved her notes on the datapad and handed Esme’s file to him. “Put this in the Rolls. I’ll get back to work.”

Luckily the information she was looking for was in the F’s, under Flux Compression Generator. Huh? Normally compressing a magnetic field would generate more amperes of current than a lightning bolt and cause an electromagnetic pulse. What in hell was her grandfather thinking? But there was no mistaking the Reinhold floor layout, and the accompanying notes on the spell. With the folder, it should be fairly simple to recreate her grandfather’s spell.

She heard the scrape of boots on the cement behind her. The sekasha were probably bored to tears.

“This is what I was looking for.” She got to her feet and brushed the dust from her skirt. She looked up and was startled to find the sekasha forming a wall of muscle between her and Nathan Czernowski. The sight of him put a tingle of nervousness through her. “Nathan? What are you doing here?”

“I saw the Rolls and figured that it had to be you.”

“Yeah, it’s me.” She busied herself with the boxes as an excuse not to look at him, wondering why she felt so weird until she remembered where they’d left off. Last time she’d seen him, he — he — she didn’t even want to assign a word to it.

Nathan had been like an older brother to her and Oilcan. He hung around the garage and scrap yard on his off hours, drinking beer with them, and shooting the breeze. On racing days, he acted as security for her pit. She knew all his sprawling family members, had attended their weddings and funerals and birthday parties. There wasn’t another man in Pittsburgh that she would have let into her loft while she was dressed only in a towel. Nobody else she would have thought herself utterly safe with.

Then he’d held her down, tore off her towel, and tried to push into her.

In one terrifying second, he’d become a large, frightening stranger. She had never considered before how tall he was, how strong he was, or how easily he could do anything he wanted with her.

He hadn’t actually done — it. He’d stopped. He seemed to be listening to her. She would never know if he actually would have gotten off her, and let her up, and gone back to the Nathan she knew because Pony had come to her rescue.

A day later she’d been snatched up by the Queen’s Wyverns, dragged away to attend the royal court, and then kidnapped by the oni, where she witnessed true evil. She hadn’t thought of Nathan once in all that time. She wasn’t sure what she felt now.

“I heard about the monster—” Nathan started.

“You and all of Pittsburgh. I’m fine!”

“I see.” Nathan gazed her wistfully. “You look beautiful.”

“Thanks.” She knew it was mostly the jewel red silk dress. She also knew that it clung to her like paint where it wasn’t exposing vast amounts of skin. Suddenly she felt weirdly under-dressed.

They stood a moment in nervous silence. Finally, Nathan wet his lips and said, “I’m sorry. I went way over the line, and I’m — so — sorry.”

She burned with sudden embarrassment; it was like being naked under him again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, I’m ashamed of what I did, and I want to apologize — though I know that really doesn’t cut it.” His voice grew husky with self-loathing. “I would have killed another man for doing it. That I was drunk and jealous excuses nothing.”

“Nathan, I don’t know how to deal with this.”

“I just loved you so much. I still do. It kills me that I lost you. I just don’t want you to hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” she whispered. “I’m pissed to hell at you. And I’m a little scared of you now. But I don’t hate you.”

At least she didn’t think she did. He had stopped — that counted for something — didn’t it? More than anything, she felt stupid for letting it happen. Everyone had told her that things wouldn’t work out between her and Nathan — and she had ignored them.

They stood in awkward silence. It dawned on her that sekasha were still between her and Nathan, a quiet angry presence. She realized that Pony must have told Stormsong who Nathan was and what he’d done, and embarrassment burned through her. Once again she was having her nose ground into the fact that she was being constantly watched. She pushed past the sekasha and Nathan, wondering how much detail had Pony told Stormsong. She could trust Pony with her life, but not her privacy; she wasn’t even sure he understood the concept.

When she reached the Rolls, she was tempted to climb in and drive away, but would mean leaving the storage room half unpacked. She dropped the file in the back of the car, beside the other things she’d set aside to take home. Nathan and the sekasha had trailed her out to the Rolls. Somehow, out in the alley, she felt more claustrophobic, their presence made unavoidable by the fact that they had followed her en masse.

“I have what I need,” she told Pony and then realized she had said that already. “Everything needs put back.”

“Yes, domi.” Pony signaled to Stormsong to return to the storage room; he remained with Tinker.

Nathan stayed too. His police cruiser sat behind the Rolls. For some reason the Pittsburgh Police had doubled up and Bue Pedersen waited patiently for Nathan to finish.

“Bowman,” Tinker nodded to Bue.

“Hiya, Tinker.” Bue nodded back.

“They tell me that you’re his domi.” Nathan meant Windwolf.

“Yeah.” She fiddled with the bracelet. She had no wedding ring to flash as proof. Elves apparently don’t go for those kind of things.

“You know, everyone’s going on and on as if you got married to him and you’re a princess now, but Tooloo says that you’re not his wife.”

Her heart flipped in chest. “What?”

“Tooloo says that Windwolf didn’t marry you.”

She stared at him dumbfounded for a minute before she thought to say, “And you believed her? Tooloo lies. You ask her five times in a row when her birthday is and she’ll tell you a different date each time!”

He looked down at her bare fingers. “Then why was there no wedding? Why no ring?”

She tried to ignore the weird cartwheeling in her chest. “Nathan, it’s not — they — they don’t do things like we do.”

He gave a cold bitter laugh. “Yeah, like changing someone’s species without asking them.”

“He asked!” she snapped. She just hadn’t understood.

“Come on, Tink. I was there. You had no idea what he had done to you. You still don’t know. You think you’re married. Hell, half the city thinks you’re married. But you’re not.”

She shook her head and clung to the one thing she knew for sure. “Tooloo lies about everything. She hates Windwolf. She’s lying to you.”

“Tink—”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit! Stormsong, we’re leaving! Just the lock the door and come.”

“The humans farm — grass?” Bladebite prodded the green rectangle of sod laid down in the palace clearing.

“Convenient, isn’t it?” Wolf pointed out, although he suspected that his First Hand wouldn’t see it as such.

“It’s unnatural.” Bladebite grumbled. “Grass already grows quickly — why would they want it to instantly appear?”

Wolf rubbed at his temple were a headache was starting to form. ‘Quickly,’ of course, was all a matter of perspective. The palace clearing was still raw wound of earth from the cutting down the ironwoods and tearing up the massive stubs. Until the dead gossamer could be cleared, the clearing would have to double as an airfield. Wolf knew his First Hand reflected what most elves would think of the sod. It couldn’t be helped. After last night’s rainfall, the clearing was turning into a pit of mud.

Wolf had delegated cleaning up the gossamer body to Wraith Arrow, an imperfect match of abilities and task, but currently the best he could hope for as Tinker had apparently found some project on the North Side that was taking up her time. Reports were drifting back, along with a box of walkie-talkies.

His First Hand viewed the devices with the same open suspicion as the sod. Luckily, while Wraith dealt with the gossamer, Cloudwalker filled the fifth position. The ‘baby’ sekasha was cautiously prodding the buttons on the walkie-talkie.

While his Hands kept alert for trouble, Wolf focused on getting the clearing ready for the arrival of the Queen’s Troops. The settlements on the East Coast reported that a dreadnaught had passed overhead, so it would be arriving soon.

“You’re not going to take down the oaks — are you?” The human contractor pointed out the massive wind oaks. “That would be a crying shame.”

Wolf hated the idea of cutting down the trees for a single day’s use of the clearing. While the trees were spellworked to be extremely long-lived, their acorns rarely sprouted hardy saplings, and thus the trees continued to be quite rare. Wolf had been sure that finding five so close to Pittsburgh was a sign of the gods’ blessings. He had chose the site because of the trees and planned to build the palace around them.

He paced the clearing, trying to remember the dreadnaught’s size. Would there be room for it to land without taking down the trees? While he did, he wondered about the oni’s attack. Why kill the gossamer? Thinking with a cold heart, he realized that it would have made more sense for the oni to attack Poppymeadow’s in the middle of the night. The ley line through the enclaves wasn’t strong enough to support aggressive defense spells. The rocket would have triggered the alarms, but Wolf wouldn’t have been able to call his shields in time.

One would think that the oni would have realized by now that Wolf was their strongest adversary. But maybe he was overestimating their grasp on the situation. Taking himself out of the equation, he considered the question again. Why the gossamer? There had been a second gossamer in plain sight, waiting for mooring. True that airship had fled the area and it would probably take hours for its navigator to coax the beast back to Pittsburgh. Perhaps the oni hoped to isolate Wolf by killing both his ships before he could react. Perhaps they didn’t realize that he had already sent for support.

While the gossamer’s death was a pity, he was glad that the oni attacked it and not the enclaves. He had lost two of his sekasha this century. He did not want to lose another.

Wolf became aware that the sekasha had stopped a human from approaching him while he was thinking. He focused on the man with pale eyes and a dark goatee. “What is it that you want?”

“I’m the city’s coroner.” The man took Wolf’s question as permission to close the distance. Bladebite stopped the human with a straight arm and a cold look.

“I am not familiar with that word.” Wolf said.

“I’m — I’m the one that deals with the dead.”

“I see.” Wolf signaled to his Hand to let the man advance. Sparrow had dealt with this man, since Wolf had always been wounded the two times his people had been killed.

“Tim Covington.” The coroner held out his hand to be shaken.

Wolf considered the offered hand. The other domana would not allow such contact — a broken finger would leave them helpless. Humans needed to be schooled in day to day manners — but was now the time to start? He decided that today, he would keep to human politeness and shook Covington’s hand. At least the man introduced himself first, which would be correct for both races.

“Wolf Who Rules Wind.”

“I was down the street, dealing with the oni bodies, and they said you were here.”

“We only executed one oni.”

Covington looked away, clearly disturbed. “They unburied two more dead males when they brought in the backhoe.”

“Why do you seek me out? I have no dead.”

“I’ve been coroner for nearly ten years. I dealt with both Lightning Strike and Hawk Scream.” Covington named the two fallen sekasha.

“They have been given up to the sky.”

“Well, I prepared Sparrow but no one has come for her. The enclaves — they have no phones. I wasn’t sure what to do.”

Bladebite recognized Sparrow’s English nickname. He spat on the ground in disgust.

“No one will come for Sparrow.” Wolf turned back to pacing the clearing.

“What do you mean?” Covington fell in step with Wolf.

“Sparrow betrayed her clan. We will have nothing to do with her now. Deal with her body as if she was an oni.”

Cloudwalker suddenly trotted up to them, looking concerned. “Domou! We have a problem.”

“What is it?” Wolf cocked his fingers to call the winds.

Cloudwalker pointed to the oak trees. Humans had chained themselves to the massive trunks.

“How did they get there?” Wolf glanced around at the three Hands of sekasha scattered across the clearing.

Cloudwalker blushed with embarrassment. “We — we tested them and they were not oni. They had no weapons.”

They did have a banner that said, “Save the oaks.” Wolf had heard of this type of lunacy, but never seen it in action. How did they get organized so quickly?

“We did not realize that they were not part of the human work crew,” Cloudwalker finished. “So we let them pass. What do you want us to do with them?”

Wolf didn’t completely trust his sekasha to solve the problem without involving swords. He didn’t want dead peaceful protesters. “Call Wraith Arrow — he has the EIA helping him. Have them send the police to arrest these humans.”

Covington waited as if there was more he needed. Wolf turned to him.

“I’m not sure what to do with the oni,” Covington continued their conversation. “Do you know their practices?”

“I am told that they in times of plenty, they feed their dead to their hounds,” Wolf said. “In times of famine, they eat both their dead and their dogs.”

“I don’t believe that’s true. That’s the kind of sick propaganda that always gets generated in a war.”

“Elves do not lie.” Wolf paused to consider the areas he just paced off. He believed that the one section of the clearing was large enough for the dreadnaught to land easily, even in high winds. The other sections, however, were deceptively small — they should mark the areas in some manner.

“Everyone lies.” Covington demonstrated in two words the humans’ greatest strength and weakness. They were able to look at anything and see it as human. It gave them great ability to empathize but it also kept them from seeing others clearly.

“Our society is built on blind trust,” Wolf said. “Lying is not an option for us.”

But Covington couldn’t see it. Perhaps it was too big for him to grasp. The need for truth came from everything from their immortality, to their fragile memory, to the ancient roots of the clans, to the interdependency of their day to day lives. Tinker, though, seemed to understand it to her core.

“Treat Sparrow as you see fit.” Wolf knew that Covington would be true to his human nature, and treat her with respect, but unknowingly consign the dead elf to the horrors of embalming fluid, a coffin and a grave instead of open sky. “Ask the EIA what to do with the oni bodies. Be aware that there will be more. Many more.”

Tinker’s grandfather always said that you needed a plan for everything from baking a cake to total global domination. He taught her the minutia of project management along with experimental and mathematical procedure. Over the years, she had put the skill to good use, from starting a small salvage business at age fourteen, to thwarting the oni army with just her wits and one unarmed sekasha.

The truly wonderful thing about focusing on a complex project was there wasn’t time to think of messy, extraneous details like elfin wedding customs. Just trying to drain off the buildup of magic out of the cooler required creative scavenging for parts and guerilla raids across the city for workers. She designed four jury-rigged pumps that used electromagnets to siphon magic into steel drums of magnetized iron fillings. Unfortunately, the drums would slowly leak magic back out, so they would have to rotate them out, letting them sit someplace until inert. While the siphons were inside the cooler, she sat the drums outside, so whoever changed them didn’t need to enter the locked room. The walls seemed solid enough — she would have to check the architectural drawings to be sure, but certainly reinforcing the door wouldn’t hurt.

The more she considered safety procedures, the less sure she was this was a good idea. The project, however, was rampaging beyond her ability to stop it. The Reinholds’ employees were searching out drawings and adding bars to the door, the EIA was sending a tractor-trailer truck to Lain’s, a dozen hastily drafted elves were gathering to help with the move, and she’d given out her promises like Halloween candy.

Why was she doing this again? Was her only reason some nonsense out of a dream? Or was she really focusing on the tree so she didn’t have to consider that Tooloo was right?

Afraid that she’d fry any of her computer equipment, she had stuck to low-tech project management. Settling on the loading dock’s edge, she wrote ‘domi’ on her pad of paper and then slowly circled it again and again as her thoughts spun around the question.

Without question, she was Windwolf’s domi — the queen herself had confirmed that. Tinker had assumed that domi meant wife; for a long time she simply translated it as wife. Later, she had sensed that it didn’t mean quite the same thing. And Windwolf never used the English word ‘wife’ or for that matter, ‘married.’ He’d given her some beans, a brazier and a dau mark. She rubbed at her dau between her eyebrows, feeling the slight difference in skin texture under the blue glyph. What the hell kind of wedding ceremony was that? And nothing else? Hell, when Nathan’s cousin Benny had been married by the justice of the peace, they still had a wedding reception afterwards. Surely the elves did something to celebrate a marriage — so why hadn’t there been something?

If domi didn’t mean wife, what did it mean? She had talked to Maynard two months ago about it, she’d gotten the impression it meant she was married, but now she couldn’t recall the exact words that Maynard had used. What she remembered distinctly, was how Maynard had been carefully trying to keep his balance on the fence between the humans and the elves. Had she heard only what she wanted to hear? Certainly it would make a neater package for Maynard if Windwolf married Tinker instead of just carried her off to be a live-in prostitute.

Whispering in the bottom of her soul was a small voice that called her a glorified whore. She couldn’t ignore the fact that the only thing she did with Windwolf was have sex. Great sex. Wives did more than that — didn’t they? Nathan’s mother and sisters went grocery shopping, cooked for their husbands and cleaned up the dirty dishes but Lemonseed handled all that for Windwolf. Wives washed clothes — Nathan’s sisters actually had long discussions on the best ways to get out stains. Dandelion, however, headed the laundry crew.

Without thinking about it, she started a decision tree, branching out ‘wife’ and ‘whore.’ What difference did it make to her? She never worried about being a “good girl” but at the same time, she had always been contemptuous of women who were either too dumb or too lazy to do real work, using their bodies instead of their brain to make a living. Could she live with all of Pittsburgh knowing that she was a glorified whore?

Stormsong squatted down beside her, took the pencil from her hand, and scratched out ‘whore’ and ‘wife’ and wrote ‘lady.’ “That, domi, is the closest English word. It means ‘one who rules.’ It denotes a position within the clan that oversees households that have allegiance to them but are not directly part of their household.”

“Like the enclaves?”

“Yes, all the enclaves of Pittsburgh owe fidelity to Wolf Who Rules. He chose people he thought could function as heads and supported the building of their households. It is a huge undertaking to convince people to leave their old households and shift to a new one. To leave the Easternlands — to come this wilderness — to settle beside the uneasy strangeness of Pittsburgh —” Stormsong shook her head and switched to English. “You have no fucking idea how much trust these people have in Wolf.”

“So why did he choose me? And why do these people listen to me?”

“I think that he sees greatness in you and he loves you for it. And they trust him.”

“So they don’t really trust me?”

“Ah, we’re elves. We need half a day to decide if we need to piss.”

“So — I’m not married to him?”

Stormsong tilted her head side to side, squinting as she considered the two cultures. “The closest English word is ‘married’ but it’s too — small — and common.”

“So, it’s grand and exotic — and there’s no ceremony for it?”

Stormsong nodded. “Yup, that’s about it.”

A hoverbike turned into the alley with a sudden roar. Stormsong sprang to her feet, her hand going to her sword. Pony checked the female sekasha with a murmur of “Nagarou” identifying Tinker’s cousin Oilcan as the sister’s son of Tinker’s father.

Oilcan swooped around the extra barrels and dropped down to land in front of the loading dock where Tinker sat.

“Hey!” Oilcan called as he killed his hoverbike’s engine. “Wow! Look at you.”

“Hey yourself!” Tinker tugged down her skirt, just in case she was flashing panty. Gods, she hated dresses. “Thanks for coming.”

“Glad to help.” He leaned against the chest high dock. Wood sprites was what Tooloo had called them as kids — small, nut brown from head to bare toes, and fey in the way people used to think elves would look. Beneath his easy smile and summer stain of walnut, though, he seemed drawn.

“You okay?” She nudged him in the ribs with her toe.

“Me?” He scoffed. “I’m not the one being attacked by monsters every other day.”

“Bleah.” She poked him again to cover the guilty feeling of making him so worried about her. “It’s like — what — nearly noon? And there’s not a monster in sight.”

“I’m glad you called.” He pulled out a folded newspaper. “Otherwise I might have been worried. Did you see this?”

“This” was a full front-page story screaming “Princess Mauled.” She hadn’t seen a photographer yesterday when Windwolf carried her through the coach yard but apparently one had seen her. She flopped back onto the cement. “Oh, son of a turd.”

Oilcan nudged against her foot, as if seeking the closeness they had just moments before. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shown it to you.”

“You didn’t take the picture.” Lying down felt too good, like she could easily drift to sleep. She sat back up and held out her hand for the paper. “Let me see how bad it really is.”

She looked small, helpless and battered in Windwolf’s arms, covered with an alarming amount of blood. The picture caption was “Viceroy Windwolf carries Vicereine Tinker to safety after she and her bodyguards were attacked by a large wild animal.”

“What the hell is a vicereine?” she asked.

“Wife of the viceroy.”

“Oh.” There, she was married, the newspaper said so. “It still sounds weird.”

“Vicereine?”

“All of it. Vicereine. Princess. Wife. Married. It seems unreal for some reason.”

She scanned the story. It was odd that while it was she and the five elf warriors in the valley, all the information came from human sources. It listed her age and previous address, but only gave Stormsong’s English name, not her full elfin one of Linapavuata-watarou-bo-taeli which meant Singing Storm Wind. And the sekasha were labeled “royal bodyguards.” Was it because the reporter didn’t speak Elvish, or was it because the elves didn’t like to talk about themselves? She learned nothing except the news had a very human slant. It was odd that she hadn’t noticed before.

“Even after all this time, you don’t feel married?” Oilcan asked.

She made a rude noise and nudged him again in the ribs with her toe. “No. Not really. It doesn’t help that Tooloo is spreading rumors that I’m not.”

“She is? Why?”

“Who knows why that crazy half-elf does anything?” Tinker wasn’t sure which was worse: that Tooloo was considered an expert on elfin culture, or that the people Tinker cared about most all shopped at Tooloo’s general store. Her lies would spread out from McKees Rocks like a virus with an authenticity that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette couldn’t touch.

“Hell,” she continued. “It was like three days before I even figured out that I was married — I don’t even remember what I said when he proposed.”

“Does he treat you well?” Oilcan asked. “Doesn’t yell at you? Call you names? Try to make you feel stupid?”

She made the kick a little harder. “He’s good to me. He treats me like a princess.”

“Ow!” He danced away, laughing. “Okay, okay. I just don’t want to see you hurt.” He sobered, and added quietly. “My dad always waited until we were home alone.”

His father had beaten his mother to death in a drunken rage. When Oilcan came to live with them, he was black and blue from head to knees, and flinched at a raised hand.

“Windwolf isn’t like your dad.” She tried not to be angry at the comparison; Oilcan was only worried about her. “If nothing else, he’s a hell of lot older than your dad.”

“This is a good thing?”

Tinker clicked her tongue in an elfin shrug without thinking and then realized what she’d done. “The elves have been so much more patient than I could ever imagine being. Windwolf has moved the whole household to Pittsburgh to make me happy, because to them, living here for a couple decades is nothing.”

“Good.”

“Now, are you going to help me with this tree?” She asked.

“I’ll think about it.” He grinned impishly.