“A monastery?” He had never heard of anyone but sekasha living at the remote mountain temples.
“The sekasha will not allow me to wander the landscape alone. A female domana waltzing about, sleeping with who knows what? Everyone will be happier if I’m under their protective wing while I gaze at my stars.”
Wolf loved his sister’s clarity of vision. She knew what she wanted and went for it with all her passion. He had so many choices open to him. He knew that he could be anything — perhaps even the next king if he chose to be Fire Clan and something happened to his cousin, Queen Soulful Ember. When Halo Dust died, the Wyverns chose the late king’s youngest child, not his oldest.
Wolf was named for greatness. He was bewildered, though: what was he supposed to do? He was the first domana born that could tap two esva. There was no blueprint for him to follow. Everyone was standing back and letting him figure it out. A new land would have no limits or expectations. Perhaps it needed someone like him to settle it.
Starlight leaned close. “Know this: No matter what clan you choose, you will always be our beloved baby brother. Be bold and brave as your name, Wolf Who Rules Wind. If you need us, you will only need to call and we will answer.”
Whiskey nodded in agreement. “Wind or Fire. Blood binds us.”
The deep rumble of the locomotive’s diesel engine pulled Wolf out of his thoughts. The train squealed and hissed to a stop at their makeshift camp. They were twenty miles outside the Rim at an old railroad construction camp alongside the Youghiogheny River. It was nothing more than a large flat clearing, edged with towering ironwood trees, currently overflowing with Fire Clan red and Stone Clan black. It put them an uncomfortable forty miles from the enclaves in Oakland. The train’s arrival meant that the last of the royal marines had arrived and that they would be moving out soon. All around Wolf was orderly chaos as his people pulled down their tents and packed up to move.
In a matter of a few minutes, he would march his people away from this last bastion of civilization with no idea when he might be able to easily communicate with the enclaves again. Any message would either have to pass through human hands via the EIA or some of his laedin soldiers would need to fight their way back to Oakland, forty miles or more, on foot. Wolf wanted to ponder long on this question but he didn’t have time. Wolf looked down at the scrap of paper in his hand.
“What?” the distant-voice message read. “Am I not good enough for you? Jay Bird Screaming in Wind.”
Wolf had called on six of his nine siblings when Tinker vanished. Starlight and Charcoal were at Aum Renau. Whiskey and Ibis held down the eastern end of the railroad, putting his brothers at his seaport of Brotherly Love. Dove and Cricket were at New Haven. It gave each of his settlements one domana of Fire and another of Wind to protect it. As of yet, none had been attacked, which was good because his siblings were young and untried. Only through sheer desperation had he turned to them. Legally they could lay claim to anything they protected for a long period of time. His siblings were the only domana he could trust not to loot his Beholden.
He hadn’t contacted Kiln, Echo, and Jay. The first two were artists with a bare minimum of combat training, with only Vanity Hands to protect their artwork and vulnerable city holdings.
He hadn’t been sure if he could trust Jay Bird. His older brother had been the baby of the family until Wolf’s birth. If Wolf hadn’t been born able to tap the esva of both Wind Clan and Fire Clan, things might have been different between them. His older brother, though, could not stand being lost in the shadow of the new baby. The day that Wolf had left for Court had been the last time he’d seen Jay.
When the oni had taken Tinker, Wolf hadn’t reached out to Jay because of how they’d been as children. When he was little, he’d had to guard his favorite toys, lest Jay break them out of spite. Wolf had had childish spats with most of his older siblings. The difference was that his other brothers and sisters had occasionally shown him warm regards. They had also reached out to him, from time to time, since he had reached his majority to lend advice and aid. Starlight had even been to Pittsburgh, drawn by the human observatory. Every time Wolf traveled to visit his parents, Jay Bird would be traveling elsewhere. At first, Wolf had thought it was mere coincidence, but in later years, he wasn’t sure.
He knew that Jay was the best combat trained of his siblings by default of insisting that he got the same training as Wolf. He knew that Jay had taken two Hands of sekasha. He knew that of all his brothers and sisters, Jay was the one who could easily shift base since he had yet to set up a permanent home outside of the Wind Clan quarters of Court. Yet, with all the broken toys in mind, he hadn’t sent for Jay.
Now, with Forest Moss running mad, two Harbingers dismissing everything Wolf said as the rantings of a spoiled child, and Cana Lily ready to kill anything non-elvish — enemy or ally or innocent bystander — Wolf was fairly sure he’d chosen badly.
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Earth Son and half of Jewel Tear’s household, one of Wolf’s sekasha, an unknown number of Stone Clan children, and an entire battalion of royal marines were dead. More than a thousand elves gone and they had not yet faced the enemy in open battle.
Did he want his brother here and risk losing him? Now that all sixty thousand of the humans and twenty thousand tengu in Pittsburgh were Wolf’s responsibility to protect, how could he not?
Rainlily stood waiting, trying to hide her impatience. She was one of the sekasha “babies”—she and the other of Tinker’s Hand were all just out of their doubles. Tinker’s influence on her showed in subtle ways. Rainlily wore a pair of Discord’s handmade blue jeans and was chewing gum. She had hand-delivered the distant-voice message from Blue Jay but obviously that wasn’t her main mission.
Wraith Arrow stood at Wolf’s side, listening quietly. His First, Second, and Third Hand stood guard, keeping away anyone who might overhear the conversation. Tinker had been kidnapped, held prisoner, escaped, fought Impatience, fell off the planet, killed Malice, and took on a Skin Clan mole. She had never sent Wolf a message through all that; considering the summer, though, Rainlily most likely did not carry a tender love note. It was almost guaranteed to be life changing.
The rest of his household was breaking down the camp, getting ready to move. Tents, cots, and field kitchens and rations were being loaded on his pack mules. Marines were spilling off the newly arrived train in a flood of red. Overhead, a Stone Clan gossamer waited for the signal to cast off.
“There is more?” Wolf asked.
“The tengu leader, Jin Wong, visited domi late last night,” Rainlily said quietly so only Wolf and Wraith Arrow could hear. “He had important news. Domi would like Wolf Who Rules Wind to return to the enclave to discuss it personally but if that is not possible, she instructed me to explain recent developments.” Then quietly she added, “If I can. I’m not sure I followed everything.”
What could be so horribly wrong now?
Wolf glanced about the encampment. The tengu scouts had confirmed four fortified oni camps an hour apart at a warg’s running pace, roughly in a diamond pattern. Each fort had three to four thousand oni warriors armed with human weapons and hundreds of wargs. Even with a full brigade of royal marines, the elves were outnumbered.