Maybe it was a mistake not leaving the female with Ellen.
There was a clang of bolts being thrown behind the gate, so Law focused back on the enclave.
The dark eyes belonged to a sekasha-caste warrior.
Law yelped in surprise and backed up. Sekasha were impossible to miss. They had spells tattooed on their arms, wore a special breastplate made of scales from wyvern, and carried a magically sharp, katana-style sword. They were said to be holy and were rare as hen’s teeth, usually only showing up in wake of the Viceroy Windwolf. All the elves she’d ever met were scared shitless of the sekasha because the caste was legally allowed to kill anyone who pissed them off.
Caraway’s majordomo for the restaurant-side of things was a male by the name of Chili Pepper. He was vibrating in place, trying not to get too close to the warrior and still keep her from fleeing. “Law! Law! Forgiveness. Don’t leave!” He did a “come” motion with both hands even as he turned to the sekasha and launched into rapid-fire High Elvish.
Law glanced back at her pickup. Snow had vanished and now only Brisbane peered out the window. The holy warrior stared at the porcupine, head tilted slightly in puzzlement. Law caught the word “trout” and the warrior’s eyes went to the fish coolers and he nodded once.
Chili Pepper turned back to Law and spoke in Low Elvish. “This is his holiness Galloping Storm Horse on Wind. The viceroy is in residence along with two of his Hands.” His eyes flicked sideways to indicate the warrior beside him. He slipped into English. “Plus one. His English name is Pony, but he speaks very, very little English. The viceroy is here so rarely; there is no need for his people to learn it. Still, we have eleven warriors to feed for the next few days. I need all the water produce that you have.”
“What?” Was this confuse-Law-with-cryptic-remarks day?
“Tomorrow is Shutdown and we will be here on Elfhome and you will be on Earth. The holy ones need meat.” Chili Pepper glanced toward the truck. “Are you sure that we cannot have the porcupine?”
“No!” Law sang and forced a laugh because the sekasha was right there, listening, maybe understanding. “I have trout! Lots of meat!”
She opened up the nearest cooler, which turned out to be the one with crayfish. The crustaceans raised up their large spiny claws in the sudden daylight.
Chili Pepper shook his head. “Those are tasty but they don’t have lots of meat.”
She lifted the lid on the next cooler. This one had trout on ice. “I have several coolers of the fish. The crayfish—” She didn’t want to tell him that she had promised them to Poppymeadow. “You are right. Very little meat.”
Storm Horse apparently had never seen crayfish before. He leaned forward to poke a finger at the mini-lobsters.
“They pinch,” Law warned and then realized that the elf might not understand. “He knows that they pinch, doesn’t he?”
Chili Pepper had his hand pressed to his lips, obviously struggling with what to say himself. “I don’t know,” he finally murmured into his fingers. “He just made his majority in March.”
It wasn’t like the crayfish could actually hurt the warrior.
Snow in hiding. Holy warrior tempting fate. Time to hurry things up and leave.
Law charged the elves more. She reasoned it was a slight surcharge for dealing with the cultural hurdles. Her life would be easier if she didn’t have to catch several different species of fish just because the elves had issues. The elves never haggled. Perhaps because haggling required you to lie about how much you want something and the quality of the item. At the same time, she never tried to really gouge the elves so that they wouldn’t balk at her asking price.
Her heavily insulated plastic marine coolers were special-ordered from Earth and top of the line. The elves used wicker baskets. She used an antique scale when working with the elves, made in the 1800s. (She was never sure if they didn’t understand her digital scale or thought it was inaccurate.) The first step, though, was to establish that the ancient device was calibrated correctly and that yes, five pounds was five pounds. Chili Pepper used an abacus with cinnabar beads that he flicked up and down. With a hundred fifty quarts of fish, it was tedious. She felt bad that she’d trapped Snow in the front seat of her pickup the entire time. At least with the constant flow of elves carrying off baskets of fish, the sekasha was politely shooed away so everyone could work.
If anyone in Pittsburgh knew all the elf politics and skullduggery, though, it was going to be Chili Pepper.
“I found an elf out in the middle of nowhere.” Law waved toward the front of her pickup. “She doesn’t speak English.”
“Yes, I saw.” Chili Pepper didn’t even look up from his abacus. “I heard about her. Thank you for taking the child in.”
Law had saved enough kittens to know what he was actually saying was “No, I don’t want it.” Not that Snow was a kitten, but obviously the act of finding her someplace safe was going to be the same process. “Who is she?”
Chili Pepper clicked his tongue, which was how elves shrugged. “A mutt. Her name is something like—” He paused to think. “Ground Bare in Winter as Snow Falls in Wind. Or something ill-omened like that. You humans would call her—umm—Dead Winter or Barren Ground or Bare Snow. Her father was Water Clan and she was raised in his household. Her twice-cursed mother supposedly was Wind Clan; not that you can tell.”
The attitude at least explained why Bare Snow was hiding in the pickup.
“Twice-cursed?” Law knew that the elves could do real magic but she was a little hazy on what all they could do with it.
“Maybe thrice-cursed. To be stupid enough to leave your clan for a male. To have the idiocy to agree to give birth to a mutt that no one would want.” Chili Pepper glanced at the sekasha. “At least, not with a name like that. And then managing to get killed, leaving said child at the mercy of another clan. They tossed her out, of course. A child belongs with its mother’s people.”
Chili Pepper had called Bare Snow “child” three times. Law knew she was a bad judge of elf ages, but she had thought that the female—nearly as tall as Law and better endowed—was an adult.
“How old is she?” Law asked.
Another click of the tongue to indicate that Chili Pepper didn’t know. “She’s still in her doubles from what I heard.” He glanced to the cab just as Bare Snow peeked over the back of the seat. The female ducked down again. “You humans would say she’s a teenager or a fresh man.” He meant the first-year university students. The freshmen arrived in Pittsburgh eager to see real elves and made themselves pests at the enclaves. The older students knew better. “She’s a little younger than Galloping Storm Horse. Maybe ninety-five. I doubt younger than ninety.”
Law had grown up knowing that elves were immortal but it was kind of mind-boggling to suddenly realize that someone nearly four times older than she was could still be considered a child.
“I don’t know why she came to Pittsburgh,” he stated. “We wouldn’t have been able to take her in, not with the viceroy staying with us. I heard about her making the rounds and thought I might bring it to Wolf Who Rules’ attention. It isn’t right to have a child wandering around in this wilderness alone. Before I could, though, she’d been turned down by everyone else and had disappeared.”
“The other enclaves wouldn’t let her a room?”