And you are hurt, he did not say.
“Since there is no phone here, the only way I’ll be able to talk to her—”
“Was if she came and saw you,” Lain said from behind Lemonseed.
Under the guise of having innocent conversation with her estranged (and strange) mother and aunt, a picnic tea was set up in the courtyard under the peach trees. Lemonseed apparently sensed the real importance of the occasion — she only provided teacups and assorted finger sandwiches for three.
Pony and Stormsong stood guard as Shields at the edge of the picnic blanket. Cloudwalker, Rainlily, and Little Egret roamed the courtyard as Blades, keeping the rest of the elves at bay.
“I focused on the children first,” Lain whispered as she spread out the DNA scans on the picnic blanket. “All the children — the living and the dead — were related. They’re all distant cousins.”
“Are you sure?” Tinker frowned at the smudges. That was all they had to work with? “The Skin Clan spell-worked everyone. Could this just be DNA they bred into the Stone Clan? Look at Oilcan and me. We both look like Stone Clan even though we’re only like one-sixteenth or less elf.”
Lain sighed. “You have the intelligence to know all this, if you just applied yourself.”
“I don’t like biology,” Tinker said. “Blood and guts and all that. Bleah.”
Esme snickered, earning a hard look from both Tinker and Lain. “That’s what I said when I was eighteen and Lain tried to talk me into a biology major. Almost those exact words.”
Lain decided to ignore both of them. “Yes, I’m sure. All the children share the same great-great-grandmother.” Lain pulled out sets of the computer-printed spell papers paper-clipped together. “To verify that the scans you found in the chest were those of the children, I used the spell on the DNA swipes.” She divided the paper-clipped papers into two stacks. “These three are the dead children. These are Barley, Cattail, Rustle, and Baby Duck.” She laid a lone sheet between the two stacks. “And this is the control, Merry. Notice these markers at the top. This spell is testing for a certain set of DNA markers and showing positive and negative. The three children that were killed tested negative. The four that survived tested positive. Merry also tested positive.”
Pony growled out an impressive string of foul words. “We thought ourselves free of the Skin Clan and yet they’re still breeding us.”
The Skin Clan was working within the Stone Clan, carrying on their breeding programs? It boggled Tinker’s mind, but she supposed in the confusion of war, a member of the Skin Clan could disappear in one corner of the world and surface in another, claiming to be part of a different caste and clan. In the time she had lived with Windwolf, she hadn’t seen any drawings or paintings of individual elves. Without DNA testing, there was no way to be sure if someone was who they really claimed to be.
“But why bring the kids all the way over here?” Tinker said. “No one has even suspected there’s anything wrong in Easternlands.”
Pony started to pace. “If Skin Clan is working from within the Stone Clan, they could influence mating: encourage a marriage, introduce partners, discourage couplings that they didn’t want. The Skin Clan couldn’t do any spell-working. Every domana within a mei would feel any massive spell use. Even if they had brought one or two domana into their fold, there would be others in range.”
“But if we felt something here, we’d assume it was the oni doing stuff,” Tinker said. “Did they spell-work the kids?”
Lain sighed. “I only have you as a basis of comparison, and what Windwolf did to you was massive. There’s no way to miss it. Merry’s sample seems to indicate that nothing has been done to the other children — their abnormality was there when they were born.”
“They seem so normal,” Tinker complained, thinking of Providence’s warning. The Skin Clan tipped their hand in luring the kids to Pittsburgh. What had been worth that risk?
Tinker glanced to Esme, who was plundering the sandwiches that Lemonseed had left behind with the tea. “What about your dreams? Did you see anything — useful?”
Esme looked unhappy. “You and your cousin, the musician, have been playing hide-and-seek with your shadow at that beat-up old hotel where you two used to live. You’re just little kids, with your hands covered with blue paint, laughing and singing. Your shadow is this horrible thing — when your back is turned, it’s a massive beast with sharp teeth — but when you look at your shadow, it’s just a little girl, all pigtails and laughter.”
“I never had pigtails,” Tinker growled.
Esme frowned, eyes unfocused, as she munched on a cucumber sandwich. “Come to think of it, you have always looked like a little boy in my dreams: short hair, ragged clothes, and covered with mud. Your shadow, though, has pigtails and is wearing a dress.”
“So it’s not really me,” Tinker said.
“It’s a monster and it wants you dead and it’s very good at the game.”
29: SPOT ON
Tommy had raided the fridge for food that could travel and stuffed it into an insulated delivery bag. They sat on the hilltop as the sun set, eating egg rolls, cold pork buns, and fried rice. Afterward Spot curled up against Tommy and slept.
Tommy studied the camp through binoculars, grinding his teeth together. He couldn’t stop thinking of what Jin had said about the elves needing to win the war.
After watching the royal troops flood the city and Windwolf fight, Tommy had been assuming that the elves winning was a given. Now he wasn’t so sure. Yeah, for a while there the elves were pulling rats out of their holes and hacking them to pieces. The most recent score, however, had oni kicking elf butt. Earth Son was dead. Forest Moss had gone over the edge. Jewel Tear had been taken and all her people killed. Tinker was hurt. Windwolf was in protective overdrive. It left Prince True Flame to take on the entire oni army — if Tommy went back and drew a detailed map and the elves believed him.
Windwolf might listen, but he wasn’t calling the shots.
True Flame would believe Jewel Tear.
Of course there was the small matter of finding her and then freeing her — if she was still alive — and then running nearly twenty miles back to his hoverbike with the entire oni army chasing them. He’d have to be insane even to consider it.
Jin had said that you had to create peace to live in it.
Tommy should have grabbed a tengu to drag along. The elves were treating the tengu as trusted allies. If Riki took back reports of the camps, they’d believe him. The bastard had helped kidnap Tinker, but they still called him in on raids of oni whelping pens. Tommy took out his cell phone and checked to see if he had a signal. No surprise: he didn’t.
He sighed and scanned the torchlit camp once more. Most of the warriors were obviously right out of whelping pens, and the camp was pure chaos for it. He probably could walk right into camp, passing as one of them, except for the fact he was too well known. He spotted dozens of officers that had reported to his father. They knew his scent, knew his face, knew that he’d slipped free of the oni hold and joined the elves.
Spot turned in his sleep, and Tommy glanced down at the boy. Spot scrubbed his hand over the fur on his face, rubbed at his dog-like muzzle, and then stilled, his floppy ears covering his eyes.
Spot could move through camp unnoticed. He looked bred in a whelping pen. None of the officers knew the boy; Tommy had kept him well hidden. Spot could track Jewel Tear through the camp, find out where the oni were holding her and—