She needed to know how to do the scry spell so she could see danger coming. She needed attack spells so she could stop it instead of just stand there and hope that her shields didn’t fail. She had the genome keys needed to tap both the Wind Clan and Stone Clan Spell Stones, and possibly even the Fire Clan’s too. What she needed was to learn how to use them.
Ironically, it all came down to having time. It would be one thing if she could study them on her own, but someone had to sit down and teach her.
“That was so cool.” Blue Sky murmured beside her in the back of the Rolls.
She glanced over and saw that he was replaying the footage of the warg encasing her protection shield in ice. She grunted slightly; it was incredible that the beast could generate so much coldness, but she didn’t think it was “cool.”
“How does it work? You’re not drawing spells on paper with grease pencils! He just — just—” For lack of words, Blue waved his hands in mad parody of the domana casting. “Whoosh! And boom!” He held out the camera, giving her pleading eyes for an explanation. On the display, he’d paused on Prince True Flame cocking his hand up to his lips to trigger the flame strike.
“I’m not sure,” Tinker said slowly, taking the camera, and stepped through the frames showing True Flame casting. It looked so simple. “But I think I can figure it out.”
2: ECHOING OF MERRIMENT
It was the elf’s tunic that caught his eye, a sun-ripe splash of yellow, like a daffodil in a raw spring morning. A female elf stood just outside the train station at the edge of Pittsburgh’s bleak Strip District. She was staring at a Coke machine as if it were the most amazing thing in the world. Her thick braid of walnut-brown hair swung back and forth as she swayed hip to hip, nearly dancing to music only she heard. She drummed her silent melody with a pair of olianuni mallets, complete with exuberant flourishes of victory.
Oilcan found himself slowing down as he drove past the station, watching her. There was something joyous about her that made him smile.
She was impossibly slender and surprisingly short. It made him think that she was an adolescent — she probably wasn’t over a hundred years old. A small mountain of brightly colored travel sacks and the distinctive bulk of an olianuni sat at her feet. As he rolled past her, she paused in her drumming to reach out cautiously and touch the selection buttons on the Coke machine — clearly mystified. The train aside, it could be the first machine that she’d ever seen.
He reached the light at the corner before he realized that it was odd that she was just standing there, alone. Usually one of the elves at the train station would be herding a newcomer to safety, especially a child. He sat through the red light, studying her in his rearview mirror. It took him a minute to realize why she was alone — there wasn’t a speck of Wind Clan blue on her. Her loose tunic shirt was yellow, and her leather pants and slouch boots were black. Even the ribbons and flowers threaded through her braid were yellow and black. She was Stone Clan.
The elf clans weren’t allowing a common enemy to deter them from feuding. Since the train station was Wind Clan territory, none of the elves there would help the female.
He sighed, put his pickup in reverse, and backed up to pull even with her.
“Hoi!” He called to her in Elvish. “Do you have someplace safe to go to? Is there someone who knows you’ve arrived here?”
She startled, looked behind her as if suspecting he was talking to someone else, and then came down to the curb to look in his pickup window. “Forgiveness, are you talking to me?”
“Yes. The streets aren’t safe after dark. The oni have been raiding at night. Do you have someplace safe to go to tonight?”
Her eyes went wide at the news. “I–I’m coming to my majority.” He was right; she wasn’t an adult. “I’ve heard so much about Pittsburgh. I’ve heard the music they play here — it’s so raw and wonderful — and — and with the war and everything, the Stone Clan is receiving remuneration. .”
Oilcan sighed as she trailed off. “Do you know anyone that lives in Pittsburgh?”
“I–I have a letter of recommendation to the domana Earth Son — is that bad?”
His dismay must have shown on his face. “Earth Son is dead.”
She gave a quiet “oh” of hurt as her plans unraveled. She frowned at the ground, worrying her lower lip with her teeth. “Majority” for an elf was a hundred, which made them physically equal to an eighteen-year-old human. Elves, though, sheltered their children so much that the extra years did little to prepare them for Pittsburgh.
“My name is Nahala kaesae-tiki waehae lou.” There was a reason most elves in Pittsburgh picked up short English nicknames. Literally her name was “echoing of merriment in stone” but truly meant “laughter echoing through a cave,” with the implication that it was the innocent laughter of children. The focus of sound in her name meant that her family were most likely musicians. If he had to pick an English name for her, he’d probably choose Merry.
Merry gave him a hopeful little smile.
“I’m Oilcan.”
“Oilcan.” She repeated the English word, clearly puzzled by it but undaunted. “There, we know each other now. I know someone that lives in Pittsburgh.” She paused, losing courage, but then rallied to finish with “Can — can I stay with you tonight?”
Why were the human runaways so much more streetwise than the elves who were nearly five times their age? She clearly had no idea what kind of danger she could be stumbling into.
Maybe it was the color of her hair, the hesitancy of her smile, or the open sweetness of her face, but she reminded him of his mother. Having recognized that, he couldn’t just drive away, but she was a minor female and he was an adult male, albeit still nearly eighty years her junior.
“I’m not sure I can just take you home with me,” Oilcan said.
Merry nodded as if she expected the answer. “Your household wouldn’t allow you—”
“No, no, I don’t have a household. I live alone.”
“That’s horrible. What happened to your household? Oh! Did the oni kill them?”
Oilcan laughed, shaking his head. “It’s something humans do when they reach majority. They live alone until they find someone to love.”
Clearly the idea was so completely foreign to her that she couldn’t quite grasp it. “But — isn’t that lonely?”
Months ago he would have said no. He had a comfortable rhythm to his life. He shared his work day with his cousin Tinker and split the weekends between hovercycle racing and the local rock scene. He actually had to work hard to create his time alone. But then the oni invaded and everything changed. “Sometimes it is lonely.”
“Let us be lovers,” Merry suddenly said in English, stunning him. “We’ll marry our fortunes together.”
He laughed after a moment, recognizing the lyrics, keenly aware that they were across the street from the old Greyhound bus station in Pittsburgh. He sang the next line of lyrics back to her. “I’ve got some real estate here in my bag.”
Her smile was radiant with delight. “You know the song!” she cried in Elvish and dived into one of her travel sacks to pull out a hand-bound journal. “An olianuni apprentice that I know let me copy his songbook.” She flipped through pages of carefully hand-drawn musical scores to find the Simon and Garfunkel song. Below the English lyrics were Elvish translations. His eyes caught on the line: “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”
Yes, that’s the way I’ve been feeling.