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34: PANTY RAID TAKE TWO


Tinker woke feeling betrayed.

The night before, everyone had acted like she was about to drop over from hypothermia. She had been forced to drink endless cups of hot tea and carried—carried—to the bathhouse. (Yes, soaking in the hot water was sheer bliss despite having all three males from her Hand in with her, Stormsong, and Rainlily. She still wasn’t used to it. At least everyone used towels to keep naughty bits hidden for her sake.)

She thought about telling her Hand that she was to be woken up at dawn. She was sure that if she had said something, they would have complied. (But maybe they would have immediately chided her until she went back to sleep.) Part of her was sure that such an instruction wasn’t necessary as they were in a state of emergency. Still, she had made plans in her head…and fell asleep in the tub before she gave any orders.

Worse, someone—probably Pony—decided that Tinker should be allowed to sleep in.

And then the killing blow on her good intentions: her own body decided that sleeping half the day away would be a good thing.

Totally betrayed from all sides!

“Oh, holy hell!” She sat up in bed, scrubbing at her hair. “What time is it?”

“An hour before noon!” Stormsong answered from the hallway. She opened the door and strolled into Tinker’s bedroom, giving the lie to Lain’s claim that civilized people knocked. Stormsong had obviously been up for hours because she was fully dressed and her blue-dyed hair was neatly braided with a darker blue ribbon.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Tinker had been put to bed in a silky white nightgown that clung to her like a second skin, and no panties. (And she was glad about the panties part because she didn’t want to think about someone wrestling a pair onto her while she was asleep.) She got up and started the ritual of trying to find the clothes that she had worn the day before. Since there were two gowns of fairy silk draped across the foot of her bed—one sapphire blue and the other ruby red—she suspected she wasn’t going to find the blue jeans she’d been wearing. Once again, the staff must have decided that her outfit was beyond saving and made it disappear. “Did they burn my pants again?”

“Because you needed to sleep,” Stormsong said. “And no, they’re washing your clothes. They were covered with mud and ichor.”

“Oooh!” Tinker swallowed down some curses. Poppymeadows did not have electric driers or any other method to speed up the drying of blue jeans. Depending upon the weather, it could be days before her pants would be dry enough to wear. Neither of the offered gowns had pockets and they went all the way to the floor. She was not going to wade into battle looking like a fairy princess! She tossed the gowns aside and stomped to her toilet as all that tea was hitting bottom. “Ichor? What’s ichor?”

“Viscera of the horrors. Blood and guts. Not as much as you could expect, given the size of those we fought. It was more mud than ichor.”

Tinker rolled her eyes while safely hidden by the closed bathroom door. She’d learned from experience that disdain expressed privately wasn’t as private as she believed. “Gods forbid I wear muddy pants!”

“They still smelled vaguely like skunk oil,” said Stormsong’s muffled voice from the other side of the ornately carved wood door. “Lemonseed did not want that stench to seep into the bed linens and curtains. Also, some horrors have poisonous ichor so they might not have been safe to wear.”

Tinker sighed. Defeated by totally valid points.

“Is…whoever…the laundry person…going to be okay handling them?” Tinker had been at Poppymeadows for more than a month but she still wasn’t sure what anyone did beyond Lemonseed. The elderly female was the majordomo of Windwolf’s personal household, organizing the work of all the others. Tinker had spent her time at Aum Renau thinking Lemonseed was just a bossy cook. The rest of the staff was all like ninjas, sneaking around, trying to be as invisible as possible. She was still struggling to learn names.

“They’ll use cleaning spells to neutralize any poison and deodorize the fabric.” Stormsong sounded like she had moved to lean against the bathroom’s doorframe, probably so they didn’t have to shout to hear each other.

Obviously the first order of business was to find clothes in which Tinker could handle anything life might throw at her today. Considering what her summer had been like, “anything” was mind-boggling in range.

What after that?

“Has Windwolf left for the East Coast yet?” Tinker attempted to quietly flush. One would think she wouldn’t still be pee-pee shy after more than two months of living among the elves, but she had boundaries that she hadn’t yet crossed. Lots of them. Probably more than she realized as there was so much about Elfhome, elves, and elf society that she didn’t know (as she seemed to discover daily now that she lived in a house with them).

“No, not yet,” Stormsong said. “He’s at Prince True Flame’s camp. The domana are having a meeting to coordinate prior to leaving. Pony is with him so he can stay abreast of the plans so that he can best guide you. He should be back shortly.”

It meant that Tinker could consult with Windwolf before he headed out, although at the moment, she wasn’t sure what she would talk to him about other than declarations of love and concern. What she wanted to be able to tell him was that she could reverse the damage done to the domana.

She washed her hands and then her face. Her hair was sticking in all directions as she’d been put to bed with damp hair. She looked like a crazed hedgehog. “I need…I need to fix things…somehow.”

“I love you dearly,” Stormsong said, “but I’m afraid this might be beyond even you to fix.”

Hopefully, Stormsong was wrong about that.

“I need to borrow some more clothes.” Tinker grabbed a towel to dry her hands and face.

Stormsong was leaning against the doorframe when Tinker opened the bathroom door. “What is mine is yours.”

Stormsong headed to her room two doors down from Tinker’s. It reflected its owner in all ways, from the manga on the nightstand—as though the female read them while lying in bed—to the candles that scented the air with amber and cashmere, to the dressers filled with human-made T-shirts, blue jeans, and lingerie.

Tinker started with the T-shirts, looking for something that wasn’t a limited edition like the last one, which ended up being cut off her by the hospice workers. “It is possible that what Tooloo has been doing is raising wood sprites to connect Elfhome and Earth together in one mega-city instead of a lot of little, carefully guarded, caves. At least, I assume that the old pathways were guarded.”

“Heavily,” Stormsong said. “The caves themselves could not be altered or they would have lost their ability to connect to Earth. After the Rebellion, clans would build fortresses at the entrances as defense against anything from Earth coming out, and to limit who could get in. Domana would lead the merchants through the cave system as the path would sometimes alter course, depending on the phase of the moon. As the Clan Wars started, fewer and fewer merchants would be escorted through until the trading parties were only domana and their sekasha.”

“Why was that?”

Stormsong shrugged. “My mother had all the pathways torn down before I was born. I can only guess. When we first found Earth, humans had just started to trade with one another. The world was unknown to them and we were accepted as just odd travelers. More importantly, they were not that much different from us. They used swords and spears and wore clothes of cloth. As time went on, they started to leap forward in technology. They developed metal armor and bows and chariots. They were outstripping us. I think when they invented cannons and guns, the end was drawing near anyhow. Humans knew more and more of their world and slowly came to realize that we should not be appearing within their lands with no ship to carry us from whatever distant place we came from.”

“So the trading parties were limited because of the possibility that humans would do exactly what the oni did to Forest Moss?”

“That was the impression that Wolf and I got as we talked to those who used to trade with Earth.”

“It’s one thing to stop an object in motion,” Tooloo had said. “It’s quite another to change someone’s heart.”

What if the object in motion were the trading parties to Earth? Pure Radiance took down the natural pathways, closing off Elfhome from outside visitors. Tooloo, on the other hand, had set up Pittsburgh so it flooded the elves with new ideas and technology on a monthly basis. Pure Radiance countered by using Tinker to destroy the orbital gate.

Was the war in Pittsburgh between Pure Radiance and Vision with the Skin Clan merely being tools? It would explain why Tooloo hadn’t attempted to kill off all of the Skin Clan while they were hiding out on Earth.

Was the entire plan to cripple the domana just a step meant to free Pittsburgh from Pure Radiance’s influence, or was it a case of too many fingers in the pie throwing off Tooloo’s careful planning?

And what was the chessboard all about?

Tinker picked out a cotton baseball jersey with blue sleeves and the word PITT embroidered on the left breast. She doubted it had sentimental value to Stormsong and certainly it wasn’t a limited edition. “What would it take to change elf society?”

“Change it?” Stormsong blew out her breath. “I do not know if it can change. I still have a child’s love of her mother, but it worries me sometime to know that Pure Radiance will forever sit to the right of any Queen or King who holds the throne and fill their ear with her vision of how the world should be. She was born within the slavery of the Skin Clan. While she guided us to victory, I think that her knowledge of how the world could be was stunted by her captivity.”

Stormsong handed Tinker a pair of boyshort panties and a matching camisole. They were white so that the camisole wouldn’t show under the thin white cotton of the jersey. “And it is not just her. In every position, high and low, our leaders are mostly of her generation. It is why we had the Clan Wars in the first place. Trust no one. Keep your secrets. Build barriers to the outside.”

Tinker pulled on the panties, slipped out of her nightgown, and pulled on the loose camisole and the jersey. The shirt was too big but she liked that it came down to mid-thigh like a minidress.

Stormsong nodded to the outfit so far. “There are times I almost can see the shackles still on our people. Humans say that you cannot teach new tricks to old dogs. Certainly it seems as if my mother’s generation cannot consider a new way of thinking. It seems too pervasive to be simply refusing to adapt. As we began to trade with humans, I was stunned at the things that the older elves could not accept as beautiful.”

Stormsong dug through the pile of manga to find a strip of fabric that she was using as a bookmark. The background was rust red with a pattern of pale yellow, orange, green, and blue flowers and leaves woven into an intricate design. “I have been waging a war with Lemonseed for years. Decades. I would like new curtains of this fabric. I cannot get Lemonseed to see it as anything but garish.”

“But it’s beautiful!”

“Say you and I but Lemonseed cannot see the beauty in it. And it is not the first fabric sample I have brought to her. There have been a dozen at least. They are all fabrics that are made by humans. They are too foreign to her. And it is not just Lemonseed—the household is divided straight down the middle. Those who are young can see the beauty in it but the ancient ones—the ones who served Howling—think the colors are off and the design is too busy. Nor do the ancient ones like music like Oilcan plays. ‘Loud noise’ is what they call it.”

“Huh.” Tinker pulled open drawers, looking for shorts. Stormsong’s pants were not going to fit—the legs would be ridiculously long on Tinker. (Yes, they could cut the jeans shorter but Tinker wanted to believe she was going to give the clothes back unscathed.) “Okay I’m going to make some wild guesses here. Tooloo is Vision but possibly like Jin Wong when Providence came to talk to me, is ‘possessed’ by her dead dragon soul, Clarity. I grew up knowing the dragon, not the elf, which is why Tooloo seems so weird when compared to other elves. Even as a newborn elf child, Vision would have known about multiple worlds and a vastly different society. On top of that, Tooloo has lived several hundred years on Earth as human societies shifted from monarchies to democracies. Pure Radiance, on the other hand, was born only knowing slavery in a society that had been beaten into one mold for thousands of years. One language. One religion.”

“In terms of my mother, that is all true. I think your guess might be right about Tooloo. Vision was said to be unnaturally mature at birth. She spoke full sentences at a very early age and rarely cried.”

Tinker plunged on, expanding her theory. “Clarity went to Elfhome with some kind of plan. It would help if we knew more about the dragons and how their society works—but if Clarity was anything like Impatience with a mind-bogglingly strong ability to see into the future, then maybe Tooloo’s plan transcends being an elf.”

“So, we are actually dealing with Clarity here, not Tooloo or Vision?”

“Perhaps,” Tinker said. “She was the last dragon captured, so maybe this is some kind of wild, long-range rescue mission.”

“What I have been told is, all the other dragons were dead before Clarity was captured.”

“There’s dead and then there’s dead when it comes to dragons. Think of Providence.” Tinker paused. “Yes, let’s think of Providence. He’s been around for thousands of years, protecting the tengu, even though he’s dead. What if the problem is that even if Clarity rescued the other dragons, there were all the baby elves with dragon blood to consider?”

“Perhaps,” Stormsong said slowly. “My mother said that Vision was more dragon than elf. Once she escaped the Skin Clan, however, Vision did not flee to Ryu.”

“Impatience stuck around Pittsburgh to help out Oilcan’s kids.” Tinker held up her hand as pieces seem to fall together in her mind. “So what if the origin of the problem isn’t on Elfhome with the freed elves but on Ryu with the elder dragons deciding that they had no right to interfere with the Skin Clan, no matter how evil they were? This doesn’t sit well with the younger dragons and they come to Elfhome in an attempt to do something. They get captured and little half-breeds were made. It would be like Blue Sky. The Wyverns recognized that Blue was one of them even though he was half-human. Even though they didn’t know Lightning Strike, they insisted something be done with Blue Sky to make sure that he was cared for after his human half brother died of old age.”

“He is one us,” Stormsong said in an “of course” tone of voice. “Regardless of who his mother was.”

Tinker pressed on, chasing her theory. “Clarity couldn’t save the original dragons but there were all the little pieces left over. She sacrifices herself in an attempt to save them only to discover that the little pieces have a twisted idea of what being saved would entail.”

“Blue Sky didn’t want to be taken from his brother,” Stormsong murmured. “Even though, in the long run, it would be healthier for him.”

“Exactly! What if all this—this insane crazy summer—has been Tooloo gathering up all the little pieces in one place and trying to do what is right for them? She’s got Impatience and Joy and Providence here and Oilcan’s kids and all the elves and tengu and even all of Forge’s kids in one place.”

“You might be right. Certainly it seems unlikely that Oilcan’s kids and your siblings and the tengu would come from worlds apart to show up here at the same time.”

Their logic seemed solid but it still didn’t explain what Tooloo wanted her to do with the chessboard.

Tinker pulled on the pair of shorts that Stormsong handed her. “Let’s just forget Tooloo and the chessboard and everything. I’m going to focus on undoing what the Skin Clan did in crippling the domana. I need to talk to Windwolf, then, to make sure we’re coordinated. I don’t want to take him out when I cast the cure on the other domana.”



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