Tinker waved a hand to indicate that “yes” would have been enough. “Sorry, Riki. The last week or so has been sketchy. Spells healed my broken arm in a matter of days but I kept falling asleep mid-thought and then having the weirdest dreams.”
Riki gave a slight bow. “Understood.”
Olivia’s blue-haired escort shifted forward. “Domi, we can use the distant voices to order seeds from the Clan leader, Longwind. It could be counted as part of Forest Moss’s ‘room and board’ since he isn’t being housed in one of our enclaves.”
Tinker nodded. “Please, Stormsong, can you make that happen?”
The female bowed and left.
Tinker waved off an incoming tengu bearing another lamp. “Enough with the lamps, we’re going to start blowing fuses. Riki, can you keep pumping Impatience; see what he can tell you about Little Miss Pocket. I want everything about that box that he might know. It was plain stupid luck that the oni haven’t used it yet. We can’t count on them delaying even a day longer. The game of hide-and-seek that they’ve been playing is over now that the Harbingers are here. They need to strike soon or they’re going to lose their big advantage against us.”
The chaos made sense to Olivia now; Tinker was going to war. This was her command room. She was gathering information to decide on her next action. She was being a domi. Olivia felt like a pale shadow.
Tinker turned back to Olivia. “Look, I know you can’t have any idea what you’ve gotten into because I’m still learning and I’ve been at this for months.” Much to Olivia’s relief, Tinker had slipped back into English. Her relief was short-lived as Tinker pointed hard at Olivia. “I don’t know where you came from or how you got onto Elfhome or why you’re here. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that every elf in Pittsburgh now sees you as a general in the middle of a very ugly war. For better or worse, I’m considered an elf, because once upon a time, my family were elves. If I screw up, it’s on the Wind Clan’s shoulders. If you screw up, it could be marked against all the humans because, strictly speaking, you’re still human. You cannot think of just yourself. If you do anything that could be considered treason, you could accidently kill every human man, woman, and child in this city.”
“I find that unlikely,” Olivia said calmly despite the sudden urge to vomit. She sidled over to the breakfast bar to see if there was any toast to quell her stomach.
“Have you been paying attention to what is going on in this city for the last few months?” Tinker pointed westward. “I found out today that I totally missed fish monsters attacking Downtown! Do you know how messed up things have to be that no one thought to tell me about fifty-foot-long, walking catfish throwing around lightning bolts? I apparently also missed an attack on Oktoberfest and a train derailment. Why? Because I was busy falling off the planet, hijacking spaceships, fighting dragons, and all sorts of other bullshit! This is the life you just opted into! The bad guys grabbed elf kids younger than you off the streets, tortured them, raped them, beat them to death, and then cooked and ate their bodies. We don’t even know how many were killed because there’s nothing left of them but roasted cracked bones.”
Olivia was going to hurl. She grabbed a pastry that looked like a biscotti and shoved it into her mouth. It was fire berry. The unexpected spicy cinnamon sweetness helped distract Olivia from her roiling stomach.
Luckily Tinker had sidetracked herself. “Someone contact Brotherly Love. See if there are any more Stone Clan kids that got stuck there when the train derailed. We want to make sure those kids stay safe. Once all this has ended — if it ends well — they can continue here and we’ll figure something out.”
“Yes, domi.” A male elf bowed and left to carry out her orders.
“There are some whores missing too,” Tommy Chang added quietly. “The ones that work downtown on Liberty Avenue.”
Tinker turned her attention to king of the underworld. “Do the police know?”
“I doubt it,” Tommy admitted uneasily. “The missing kids are all off-worlders. They don’t have family to keep tabs on them.”
Like Olivia had been. No one would notice them falling through the cracks. Certainly no one probably had noticed that she had stopped showing up, except the few hookers she walked Liberty Avenue with.
“We can’t let anyone fall between the cracks just because they’re here alone,” Tinker said. “Human. Elf. Tengu. Half-oni. It doesn’t matter. We need to watch out for everyone. We need to stick together. Things are going to get ugly fast.”
Everyone nodded as if they’d been issued marching orders.
Tinker pointed at Olivia. “Look, there’s lots of ins and outs of elf society I know that you don’t have a clue about. The important one is that you gave your word to Forest Moss to be his domi. It’s like getting married but more so. You’ve agreed to be part of all the craziness. You’ve made yourself part of the elf society. You’ve given your word. You need to keep it.”
The royal marines played games when they were idle. The similarity to the games that Olivia played on the Ranch surprised her. They had lengths of string to play cat’s cradle, pieces of chalk for a game like hopscotch, knucklebone dice, and small bean-filled bags to kick around like a hacky sack. They’d gotten bored waiting for Olivia; all their toys were out. They had posted lookouts at the cardinal points, thus Ox spotted Olivia first as she came out of the enclave.
“Chi-chi-chi!” Ox called, trying to untie his hands from a cat’s cradle. It was a noise that the marines made when they were surprised. “Dagger!”
“She’s back!” Dagger kicked the hacky sack high in the air and caught it. The tall female acted as the group leader even though, as far as Olivia could tell, she had no higher rank than the others. “Fall in!”
Ox shoved his string into his pocket. Rage snatched up her dice. Dart found his cap that had fallen to the ground. Coal picked up the chalk that had marked out the hopscotch board. With a good deal of breathless laughing and shoving, the twenty marines fell into line.
The marines were all laedin-caste, a term Olivia hadn’t learned until she came to Pittsburgh. Her online homeschool Elvish class never mentioned the caste system that was so important to the elves. Laedin were the warhorses of the race, bred to be big and strong and enjoy competitive games. Olivia was tall for a human girl, the tallest girl on the Ranch, but the marines all towered over her another foot. They were from the Fire Clan, so they were uniformly red-haired and green-eyed. They tended to be more strawberry blond to copper red than her auburn color.
She had just spent the last few days trying to ignore them and failing as they had constantly asked her questions about everything new and strange to them. Against her will, she’d learned all twenty of their names and the personalities of the most outspoken ones. At first she thought they asked her questions because she was there — helpless to escape their demands. After meeting with Tinker domi, though, she realized that it was much more like them seeking answers from a commanding officer.
From offhand comments that Forest Moss and the Wyverns who guarded him said, Olivia had pieced together that the royal marines that made up her guard were all very young in elf terms. The average age of the elves guarding her was ninety-six years old; they were approximately teenagers. She hadn’t put any weight on this information because it seemed that no matter how you looked at it, they were still older than her human age of sixteen. They had decades of combat training, and seemed to have casual sex with one another right and left.