Almost as if their songs summoned them, the members of Naekanain appeared. Snapdragon showed up with his tribal drums, Moser with his bass guitar, and Briar with a bottle of ouzo, and they really let loose, tearing into the human-elf fusion of music that was uniquely Pittsburgh. As always, Moser’s deep growl of English and bastardized Low Elvish was electrifying against Briar’s angelic High Elvish. As they played, more and more people drifted into the gym to listen.
Oilcan was glad to see that the growing audience was all three races, although they still kept to separate camps. The tengu with their backless tank tops and unruly short black hair perched on the bleachers. Elves, looking ethereal even while leaning on brooms, their glorious long hair braided with ribbons, kept to the back of the room. Humans gathered close to the music, varied as snowflakes: short and tall, thin and wide, ugly and beautiful, white and black and Asian.
“You should have charged a cover for this,” Moser shouted at him as Snapdragon and Merry blasted into an instrumental duet that was more like a duel of speed.
“They paid with labor,” Oilcan shouted back.
“No food?” Moser pouted.
“There is food.” Tinker appeared out of the crowd, carrying a basket fragrant with the scent of meat dumplings. A great deal of food, considering the number of Poppymeadow’s people behind her bearing baskets.
“Coz!” Oilcan bumped shoulders with her in greeting. She bumped him back with a grin. She was dressed down in T-shirt and shorts, looking the most like herself in months. She had her five bodyguards with her, although for some odd reason they all had cat whiskers drawn on their faces.
“You always were my favorite.” Moser swung his guitar onto his back and snatched the basket out of Tinker’s hands.
“What about the next set?” Oilcan cried. While he was glad to see Tinker, her arrival certainly was triggering a shift in the audience. All three groups were moving in, trying to be as close to her as her Hand would allow. He knew that the humans were peeved that the elves had “stolen” their girl. To the elves she was domi and had “singlehandedly” defeated the dragon that even Prince True Flame couldn’t kill. She held the tengu, and judging by the way they looked at her, that mattered a lot to them.
But none of the groups seemed happy about having to share her. Stopping the music would be bad. But it wasn’t like Moser was being paid to perform beyond the food that Tinker had just handed him.
“Sing your cousin that new song you wrote for her,” Moser said.
“You wrote me a song?” Tinker squealed.
“Bastard,” Oilcan snarled at Moser. He hadn’t told Moser that the song was about Tinker, but the words were obviously inspired by her.
Moser backed away with the basket. “You said I butchered the words anyhow!”
“You wrote me a song?” Tinker said. “You never wrote me a song before.”
Oilcan had written lots of songs about Tinker; he’d just never shared them with anyone. The lyrics ranged from angry to loving to overprotective, depending on his mood, and once the moment was passed, the words felt too dangerous. What if Tinker thought he was always that angry with her? How badly would she take (because she would take it badly) the rant against her self-centered obsessive curiosity — especially since the whole thing with Nathan had ended so badly? And gods forbid, someone got the wrong idea about the whole “crawl into my bed, hold me tight, and make me feel all right” that he wrote when he was ten and she was six.
Tinker smacked him. “Don’t you dare say no if you sold it to Moser.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll play it.” He had sold it because it felt safe — mostly because it wasn’t about his relationship with her. He wasn’t sure, though, how she would take it. He led into the melody so Merry had a chance to learn it. “It changes though, watch for it, and — and improvise.”
Merry laughed and nodded, eyes gleaming with her joy, her face glistening with sweat.
It was started as a ballad duet in High Elvish between him and Briar. He sang of the attack and defense sword movements of a sekasha and moved his guitar into rough approximations of the stances. Briar’s counter lines were the domana shield and attack spells; she moved her hands elegantly through the movements that a domi would use to call magic from the clan’s Spell Stones. And then the song changed, dropping into something wilder, untamed, and in Low Elvish, speaking of the shared vow of protection, guarding each other, loving each other. Two people, bound together, each determined to protect the other at all cost.
Tinker was burning red with embarrassment, but she was holding tight to Pony’s and Stormsong’s hands with tears in her eyes. It didn’t seem as if she was going to freak out on him. When they went into the chorus the second time, all the elves joined in on Oilcan’s bass line, a thunder of approval.
He thought of himself as Wind Clan not just because Windwolf loved Tinker, although that was part of it. He thought of himself as Wind Clan because all of the clan had opened their hearts to his cousin and taken her in, and she loved them back. Her sekasha would die for her, and she would die for them, and for that reason Oilcan was Wind Clan.
And maybe that was the key to breaking the tension between the races. The music was only distracting the audience — and only mildly — from their hostility. The songs weren’t trying to unify them. What could he use? What would make them feel as if they were part of the whole? The only thing they had in common was Tinker.
He launched into “Godzilla of Pittsburgh.” It was strictly instrumental, and its reference to Tinker was obscure. The crowd, though, seemed to recognize her sweeping nature in the music. He thought about all the other songs he’d ever written for Tinker. Like the Godzilla song, they were obscure by their intimate nature. The people that really knew Tinker would recognize her, but this crowd didn’t know the real person — they only knew Tinker via secondhand stories.
What songs would suggest Tinker? Songs about hoverbike racing were obvious, since she had all but invented the sport.
He had just launched into the lyrical “Sky Diving” that he wrote about doing the jumps at Chang’s racetrack when he realized that Tinker was doing guerrilla-style face-painting attacks on the audience. He watched with confused amusement as she zigzagged about the gym, grabbing random people, pulling them down to her five-foot level, and, lightning quick, drawing cat whiskers on their faces. She pounced on elves, tengu, and human alike — seemingly at random — but after a dozen or so ambushes, he realized that she was cycling through the races, keeping even the number of painted per race. The oddest thing was that she seemed to be purposely ignoring anyone that was paying attention to her and only ambushing those focused on the music. The result was a growing mass of confused decorated people in her wake, gingerly touching their faces, unsure what Tinker had just done to them.
What was she up to?
The crowd, at least, had stopped snarling at each other and was moving with the music. They were seeing Tinker in the song, taking the massive ramps into the jumps, soaring through the air, and free-falling back to earth. Moser joined him, mouth full but hands free, whiskers drawn on his face, for the instrumental bridge. They were tearing down the last stretch when Merry gave a loud meep of surprise. Oilcan glanced behind him to see that Tinker had whiskered a very startled Merry. A wall of sekasha kept the rest of the audience from seeing whatever Tinker had done to the little female.
“Fields of Summer.” He shouted the next song in the set to Moser and then sidled up to Tinker. “What’s with the whiskers, Tink?”
“Prestidigitation.” Tinker waved her left hand in a showy flourish — and sketched whiskers on him quickly with her right. “There, you’re one of us now.”