“Is that her?” Tinker’s surprise made Oilcan realize that she was expecting someone older.
“Yes.” Oilcan sighed as Merry took cover behind him. “Merry, this is my cousin, Beloved Tinker of Wind, her First, Galloping Storm Horse on Wind and her Second, Singing Storm Wind. They brought breakfast.”
Merry made little meeping sounds.
“Gods, finally, someone smaller than me!” Tinker drifted back, giving Merry space, but was studying the little female intently.
“For about a decade.” Stormsong took up guard against sliding-glass doors out onto his balcony, which was the farthest point from Merry that the room would allow. “How old are you? Sixty winters?”
Merry pressed closer to Oilcan under the scrutiny of all the adults. “I’m seventy.”
“Oh — geez.” Oilcan barely kept from swearing. Seventy meant Merry was only about thirteen. No wonder she was so small.
“If she’s only seventy,” Oilcan said quietly in English, “shouldn’t we send her home?”
Stormsong shook her head. “She probably can’t go back if she severed ties.”
Pony was frowning as he struggled to follow the conversation. The young warrior had been studying English but wasn’t fluent. He understood enough to add in Elvish, “Between seventy and their majority, a child is allowed to sever ties with their parents’ household to make new alliances. At seventy, I chose to join Brother Wolf here in Westernlands.”
Pony’s mother was a sekasha beholden to Windwolf’s father, Longwind. If Oilcan understood correctly, Pony normally would have been part of Longwind’s household for the rest of his life.
“You’re sekasha.” Stormsong pointed out that the normal rules didn’t apply to Pony. “And you went with blessings. Wolf is your blade brother, and he’d just been named viceroy of the Westernlands, bringing honor to the clan. He needed support from the clan to keep his position. Most households see a child leaving as a betrayal.”
Oilcan sighed as he remembered Merry’s conversation with Thorne Scratch. “She severed ties.”
Merry rested her forehead against the middle of Oilcan’s back and said, “My mother — she — she called me a liar.”
Lying was an unforgiveable sin to elves. To call someone a liar was to deal the ultimate insult. Oilcan wanted to tell her that everything would be fine, but they were empty words against the weight of the insult.
“But — I thought children were so precious,” Tinker murmured in English. “They really won’t take her back?”
“It’s complicated,” Stormsong said. “It’s the head of household’s decision to take her back, not her parents’. If her sama is old enough to have lived through the worst of the Skin Clan’s reign — which they’re probably are — then they would see any shift in alliance as treasonous to the entire clan. The punishment used to be stoning.”
Tinker eyed Merry with pity and then gave Oilcan a wry grin. “Congratulations. You’re a dad.”
And that was why he loved his cousin so much. The fact that Merry was an elf and part of the Stone Clan didn’t enter into Tinker’s equations; she saw simply a child in need.
“There’s a double missing, too.” Oilcan told them about Rustle of Leaves. “I went to the train station and talked to the elves there. They confirmed that he arrived, but he was Stone Clan, so they ignored him. I have the NSA, the EIA, and the police looking for him, but they keep harping about how the kid is close to a hundred years old.”
Stormsong growled in anger.
“Even Maynard?” Tinker asked.
Oilcan shook his head. “I didn’t talk to Maynard himself. I didn’t realize the kid was missing until after dinner. I talked to someone on the night shift. I wanted to go out looking for the kid myself, but I had Merry to think of.”
“I’ll call Maynard,” Tinker said. “And I’ll get the Wyverns looking—”
“Let us deal with the Wyverns,” Pony said.
“Fine.” Tinker tapped on Oilcan’s chest. “You don’t go out alone looking for him. There’s oni and shit everywhere. And Merry does not count as backup. You call me or you take someone that can kick ass with you.”
“I won’t,” Oilcan promised, knowing that once he did, he would have to keep his promise.
As usual, the condo seemed huge after Tinker and her Hand left. Oilcan distracted himself from the sudden quiet by investigating the baskets of food that Tinker had brought from Poppymeadow’s. Apparently the enclave had decided Oilcan was in danger of starving to death. Considering the state of his pantry, they weren’t that far from wrong. He better spend some time laying in food before things got really sparse.
It seemed wrong, though, to be going through the normal motions of living when there was a child missing. He’d promised Tinker not to look mostly because he couldn’t even start to imagine where to search. So much time had passed since Rustle of Leaves had left the train station. The male could have reached any point in the city within a day. How far had he gotten? The train station lay in the triangle formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. The male could have only gone less than a mile in three directions without having to cross a river. What kind of directions did Windchime give to Moser’s place? Did they include “If you come to a river, turn around quickly”? The river’s edge was a dangerous place. That section of the Allegheny was thick with jump fish.
He had a sudden and awful vision of a pile of travel sacks sitting next to the water. Maybe he should check the river’s edge.
“Beloved Tinker of Wind is nothing like I expected.” Merry broke the silence. “She’s so. . so. . so much like the sky.”
Oilcan laughed. “The sky?”
“She’s the only thing that Summer Court is talking about — the Wind Clan’s new domi this and the new domi that. We hounded Chiming of Metal to tell us about her. He said he didn’t know any words that would truly describe her, and anything short of the proper words would be a betrayal to his domi.”
Poor Windchime. He was probably the only person in the Easternlands that had ever met Tinker. When Windchime had left, Tinker was a human hoverbike racer who occasionally acted as a roadie for Naekanain. During the summer, a chance encounter with Windwolf had catapulted her to the status of domi of the Westernlands.
“Chiming of Metal played this song and said it captured her essence.” Merry hummed a tune that Oilcan recognized. He had written the song for Tinker but had never told anyone that it was about her. He’d called it “Godzilla of Pittsburgh.” Apparently Windchime had recognized Tinker in the oversized melody.
“When he played me the song, all I could imagine was the sky. How it’s big and unlimited, and sometimes it takes your breath away when you watch it, but you can’t hold it and make it yours. You can only watch and be amazed.”
“Yeah, that’s her,” Oilcan said.
“Do you think she’ll find Rustle of Leaves?”
“If anyone can, she will,” Oilcan said.
“What will happen to the others?”
“Others?”
“They said Earth Son needed clan members to build our presence in the Westernlands. Most people wouldn’t dream of coming so far into the wilderness, but Earth Son was going to sponsor anyone that made their way to Pittsburgh. It was a chance in a lifetime for anyone that wanted to set up their own enclave.”
“I don’t know,” Oilcan said. “That will be up to the Stone Clan.”
Thorne Scratch had said that Jewel Tear couldn’t take in any more people, and that Forest Moss couldn’t be trusted. What did the Stone Clan think was going to happen to the people they were sending to Pittsburgh? Were they actually just dropping them into the city and hoping they would survive?