Yup, totally insane. The question was: What else had slipped his attention?
All the races of Pittsburgh were represented in the workers. Black-winged tengu worked mooring ropes to help the gossamer stay in place. Team Tinker was installing a stout ironwood gate made by Gryffin Doors. Mixed in with the others were the half-humans; Blue Sky was a half-elf and Spot was a half-oni. The construction crew was made up of elves.
Up to yesterday, all of the elves had been Wind Clan from the nearby enclaves. Sprinkled among them now were unfamiliar Stone Clan elves, marked by their shorter stature, dusky skin, and black duck-cloth overalls.
Had the strangers arrived on the gossamer with the stones? Were they going to stay? Did Sacred Heart have room for so many more and still have a separate space for the twins? And how did the stones and elves get to Pittsburgh? There hadn’t been time for Forge’s gossamer to get to the Easternlands and send a loaded ship back. Had the elves been in the Westernlands already?
The massive cargo elevator touched down. Workers swarmed forward to shift the load. They slapped paper inked with spells onto the stones, said the trigger words, and the blocks floated upward to be guided away. In less than a minute, they’d cleared the elevator. Elves didn’t work fast; they were merely extremely efficient. Everyone knew exactly what they needed to do, as they had done similar work for hundreds of years.
Forge stood like a sun at the heart of the organized chaos; everything revolved around his center of gravity. He looked far too young to be a great-great-great-great-grandfather. His hair was still dark brown and the creases at the corners of his eyes were from smiling, not age. He’d changed his doeskin pants in favor of the same black overalls as the newcomers wore but with a crisp white cotton shirt.
“Where exactly are these coming from?” Oilcan called to Forge as he worked his way through the herd of floating stones. There was a silent squaring off between Thorne Scratch and Forge’s First that seemed to be a standard sekasha thing.
“Grandson!” Forge smiled in greeting, clapping a hand to Oilcan’s shoulder. “The stones came from my quarry near Aum Goutanat.”
“Aum Goutanat?” Oilcan echoed. He’d never heard of it before.
Forge motioned to the south. “After it became obvious that the Wind Clan was growing fat on its monopoly of Pittsburgh, the Stone Clan demanded a land grant of unexplored Westernlands equal to what Wolf Who Rules Wind had been given. They hoped to establish a presence in the city. Queen Soulful Ember gave our clan — my clan — an area known as Alabamageorgia.”
Forge smashed the names of the two states together like they were one word.
“I know of the area.” Oilcan had studied American geography in elementary school. “But I thought you lived in the Easternlands.”
Forge laugh. “Yes, I do. Queen Soulful Ember tasked me with building a set of dams on the Tennessee River. I think I’m saying that right. We kept the human names since all our maps are from them. I am to provide knowledge of dam building, skilled workers, and all construction materials. As part of my payment, the queen gave me a stone quarry and virgin forest within the land grant from which I could gather the needed materials for the dams. I had just started the preliminary work when I received the news that my son’s children had been found: orphaned and in danger.”
It explained how and why Forge appeared so quickly in Pittsburgh after the Wyverns discovered who Oilcan and Tinker were descended from. It also explained how Forge could quickly shift building materials and work crews to Oilcan’s enclave.
“Won’t the queen be angry that you…” Oilcan didn’t want to imply that his grandfather stole construction material for the royal dams. “…abandoned the project?”
Forge laughed. “I haven’t abandoned it. Water is a tricky element to work with; you can’t just put a stone in place and hope it stays until you get around to setting another block. Everything needs to be poised, ready to go, before you lay that first stone. We have worked all summer setting up an airfield, starting a limestone quarry, building a camp with a deep well and high walls, and cutting a road linking them all together. You can’t go at a large project slapdash. Patience is an engineer’s greatest tool. With it, you can do anything that you can imagine.”
Forge sounded like a true Dufae grandfather. Tim “Bell” Dufae had drilled project management into his grandchildren as the most important skill they could have.
“I have Beholden working the quarry.” Forge pointed to one of the sandstone blocks roughly a yard long, two feet wide, and eighteen inches high. The chisel lines looked too clean to be cut by hand; the elves must have used some kind of magic to carve out the stones. “These were quarried for a mill pond once I found a suitable perennial stream, but that project can’t begin until next summer. They’ll have plenty of time to quarry other stones.”
Oilcan nodded automatically, his mind racing. Should he tell Forge about the twins? The four babies? The talking mice? Tinker and he needed allies to keep control of the twins’ future, but Forge might decide that he knew best. He had the means to whisk the twins off to the Easternlands hovering overhead.
It was only a matter of time, though, before Forge learned of the children. Tinker had dispatched Rainlily to update Windwolf; if he told his cousin True Flame, the prince might decide to inform the Harbingers.
“We might be — getting more — kids.” Oilcan picked out his words carefully. “They came to Pittsburgh so that they can freely choose their future. Some, however, are quite young and might still fall within the Stone Clan’s purview.”
Thorne Scratch raised an eyebrow, which made Oilcan wonder if she objected to his walking the fine line between truth and fiction or if that last word didn’t mean “purview” like he’d been taught.
He decided to jump to the point. “Sunder is head of the Stone Clan here in Pittsburgh. Do you know Sunder? Will he object to the children being kept by me?”
“Hir,” Sunder said in the very same gentle but firm grandfatherly tone that Tim Bell used while teaching everything from physics to personal hygiene. “Sunder has no gender. The proper pronoun to use for Sunder is hir.”
“Okay,” Oilcan said slowly. He’d learned the pronoun as a child but never understood why it existed. All the elves in Pittsburgh seemed to be either male or female. Being that Skin Clan created everything from walking trees to giant electric catfish, what exactly did “no gender” entail? Oilcan shook his head, trying not to get derailed. “Do you know…hir?”
“Yes and no.” Forge made a seesaw motion with his hands. “The Harbingers have a long and sordid past with the wood sprites. They are why we are Stone Clan. When my mother and the rest of our kind were still children — dangerously clever children — they managed to stage a fiery escape. It was not a trick that they thought they would be able to do twice. Certainly not the thing with the methane again as the Skin Clan became much more careful of their sewage treatment after losing half of their largest city in the southeast.”
The more Oilcan heard about wood sprites, the more he had to consider that Tinker was typical of the breed. It did not bode well for him raising the twins. “How do the Harbingers work into this?”
“The wood sprites were smart enough to know that they needed a protector; they were still quite small and only had been able to take what they could carry. They decided to negotiate an alliance with the Stone Clan warlord, Death. Their choice was fueled by the fact that Death was the most successful warlord that they could easily reach out to. Howling of the Wind Clan was half a continent away and Ashfall of the Fire Clan was farther still and Scourge of the Water Clan could have been anywhere on the Western Ocean. They still write songs about the forming of the pact between the wood sprites and Death; it was a battle of wits that changed the fate of elfkind. Death demanded unquestioning loyalty of those he kept within his protection.”