6: THE TIME HAS COME TO TALK OF MANY THINGS
“You’ll waste time flipping pages and coming to conclusions already reached,” Tooloo said. And the crazy old elf had been right: the twins had already figured out a way to block the oni spell.
Tinker sat in the back of the Rolls-Royce as they headed toward Oakland, flipping through the photos she’d taken of the chessboard. Tooloo said that she’d given Tinker everything she needed. To do what? Not stop the oni from casting the spell. Tooloo hadn’t given her time enough to do that. If Tooloo wanted to stop the oni from using the nactka, she would have told Tinker about Dufae’s box in June when it arrived in Pittsburgh.
Tooloo had bitched about Tinker’s demands for the unedited version of the Dufae Codex, saying that Tinker was wasting what little time she had. Tooloo hadn’t complained as Tinker took the pictures. Tooloo wanted Tinker to focus energy toward deciphering whatever the gameboard showed.
The Skin Clan was playing White—at least that was what the board’s positioning and the little plastic monkeys seemed to suggest. Tooloo had staged a miniature bottle of Heinz ketchup as the Black’s king. The Heinz factory was on the North Side, still making condiments for Pittsburgh-only use. It had a huge sign that you could see from most of downtown of a bottle pouring ketchup out into the Heinz logo. It was so symbolic of Pittsburgh that all the University students owned a T-shirt of it. Tinker had assumed that the miniature bottle represented the city but what if Tooloo was indicating the factory itself?
Black’s bishop right of the queen was a little Superman action figure. Was that Windwolf? Tinker thought he would be the black king but she couldn’t see him as a tomato-based condiment. Nor was Windwolf particularly holy. Was the black bishop Jin Wong? The tengu leader had that spiritual leader vibe and he could fly. It kind of made sense in that Windwolf wasn’t in the city currently but Jin Wong was.
Both of her rooks were chicken figurines. Six of her pawns were mice—five Minnie Mouse and one Mickey Mouse to be exact. By the number and sex, she guessed that they represented her newly arrived siblings.
The only swapped pieces on the White’s side of the board were the queen, one bishop, and four of the pawns were monkeys. If Chloe had been flying monkey five, who were all the other monkeys? Surely not Esme and Lain. Had Esme’s stepfather created an entire swarm of half sisters, or were some of the number Esme’s two little half brothers who mysteriously refused to say goodbye to her?
That felt chillingly right.
There were a variety of possible moves for White to make after his Chloe pawn was taken. Which one he chose would be helpful to know but Tooloo’s board held no clues that Tinker could see. Nor did she know what a “move” might entail. Certainly White’s second pawn didn’t look like it was storming Oakland on the chessboard.
If the mice were her younger siblings, that left the mystery of the two chicken rooks. Were they supposed to be tengu? Or real chickens? Tooloo normally didn’t let her rooster Box into the house, so maybe that was a clue that “chicken” was literal.
Or was she overthinking this? Why had Tooloo stayed hidden in Pittsburgh for so long, doing nothing to warn anyone about the oni? Why did she let it get to this? What did Tooloo want?
There was so much that Tinker didn’t know.
Cloudwalker was driving. Little Egret had gone to the train station to commandeer the royal marines there. Rainlily was following on the Delta in case they needed the mobility that it afforded.
Pony and Stormsong flanked her in the backseat, silently waiting for her to do something brilliant. Tinker didn’t have a clue where to even start.
“Do either one of you know how to play chess?” she asked her First and Second.
“I have never seen this ‘chess’ game before,” Pony said. “It is totally unfamiliar to me.”
“I do—a little,” Stormsong admitted reluctantly. “It is one of the many humans games that Wolf and I learned in order to find out more information about Earth. Chess. Senet. Backgammon. Mehen.”
What information about Earth could you get out of a game of chess? That knights were wonky people, never moving straight, always jumping around? Tinker’s concept of the game was tainted by her experience with Tooloo. She wondered if that was how all elves played the game.
“I don’t understand,” Tinker said. “What did chess tell you about Earth?”
“We were questioning domana who traveled with trading caravans to Earth. They had an odd reluctance to talk about their time among humans. It’s like they had committed some evil perversion that they had to keep secret. Everything about Earth was hidden away like it was tainted. The merchants, though, loved to play human games. They were desperate to play them with someone. Wolf would coax them into a game and then play for hours, plying them with food, wine, and questions.”
“What kind of questions?” Tinker said.
“Everything. Anything we didn’t know. We wanted to focus on the Westernlands but until Wolf reached his majority and built a strong enough support system—two strong Hands and several solid households of Beholden—he would not be able to petition the queen for land. We were afraid if he asked too many questions about the newly found continents, that others—domana older and more established than Wolf—would realize what had been overlooked and claim the best land.”
Tinker was still confused. She’d been under the impression that the elves traveled the silk-road routes. “The trading caravans came to North America?”
“No, they traded with the European countries that colonized the western hemisphere. Columbus had discovered the West Indies Islands and within decades the Spanish had explored much of Central and South America. The Dutch, Portuguese, English, and French were soon to follow, each with a different agenda, to claim different parts of the continents. The domana merchants traded only with the European country closest to the natural pathway that they had claimed for their clan. Fire Clan dealt with the Italians. Wind Clan traded with the English. So forth and so on, dictated by the pathways and the clan holdings. It meant that all the merchants had different sets of information. It was like a jigsaw puzzle scattered across the Easternlands, totally ignored, waiting for us to put together the pieces. Based on everything we learned and what maps we could gather, we decided to set up our first camp along the Hudson River.”
Tinker nodded, understanding Windwolf’s strategy.
The French Revolution had been in the late 1700s. Tinker was vague on the exact dates that Dufae first arrived in France and when he was later caught up in the political turmoil. Sometime between him arriving and being executed, his way back home had been blocked off by the oni war.
Tooloo could have had been on Elfhome until Dufae fled his parent’s home. Her dabbling was the most logical reason that Dufae decided to break into his uncle’s spell-locked box. Tooloo might have come to Earth at the same time that he did—although she might have been slipping back and forth between the two worlds. It would be one way to keep Pure Radiance from finding her.
Tooloo was probably the person who took Dufae’s infant son, Etienne, from France to Boston. A human in those deeply religious times wouldn’t have kept the Codex. Certainly Tooloo would have been the person who taught Dufae’s grandchildren how to speak and read Elvish. Etienne had been too young to have learned it from his father. Etienne’s daughter had taught her brother’s grandchildren, Leonardo and Ada. Oilcan’s mother had taught him both High and Low Elvish so that Oilcan could speak it better than Tinker, who had been born on Elfhome.
Two hundred years of babysitting someone else’s kids. That was a long time—even for an elf. No one does that without an elaborate plan in place that needed those kids.
“Tooloo—Vision—your grandmother—has a plan. I’m guessing it was one that your mother doesn’t like—that’s why she had Vision bound hand and foot.”
“Perhaps,” Stormsong said. “I’ve been thinking about it since I learned that Tooloo was Vision. It makes me wonder about everything that I know about my mother and Vision.”
“You don’t think you know the truth?”
“In a manner,” Stormsong said. “This what I’ve been told. The Skin Clan—wishing to be gods—would experiment on their slaves to see what impact changing them would make. There were limits to what they could do. Strong? Tall? Beautiful? Long lived? Yes, that was possible. But true godlike abilities of legend? To know the future? To be able to step between worlds without aid of a natural path? No. That was impossible with what they had to work with. So they started to track down strange and wonderful creatures. The children that they created were often immediately destroyed as monstrosities, having no magical gifts that the Skin Clan wanted for themselves. But then they discovered the dragons. Having met Impatience, I am not sure how they trapped the creatures, but they did. One by one, the Emperor Heaven’s Blessing gathered the godlike beings and started his unholy experiments. We know—or I should say ‘what I’ve been told but I have been given no proof of its validity’—that Clarity was the dragon that my mother’s bloodline came from. One has to wonder, of all the dragons ensnared, how it was that the one that could see the future had fallen prey to the Skin Clan. She was the last. One could conjecture that, knowing her bloodline and all that happened afterward, Clarity had allowed herself to be captured in order to exact revenge against the Skin Clan.”
“Knowing that she would be killed?”
“Rage makes you do strange things if you let it,” Stormsong said. “It is the emotion that we sekasha are most cautioned against. Rage is the absence of reason. But having heard Providence speak through Jin Wong—I wonder if perhaps that death was not the end of Clarity.”
“You think Tooloo might be possessed by Clarity?”
Stormsong nodded slowly. “Something like that.”
Riki had come looking for Tinker to see if Impatience had marked her as his Chosen One as Jin Wong had been lost to the tengu. Without their Chosen One, they were lacking a way to speak to their guardian spirit. Riki said it would be a red mark on her breast, roughly above her heart. Tinker had never seen Tooloo naked; the old elf could have such a mark without Tinker knowing.
Riki seemed to think Tinker might have been marked because Impatience had touched her—if nearly chomping off her hand could count as “touching.”
“Vision was born after Clarity had died.” Tinker pointed out. “Clarity couldn’t have marked Vision as her Chosen before being killed.”
Stormsong clicked her tongue. “I do not know how she could have accomplished it, but if any being could leap her spirit into a random child made from her genetics—Clarity could. And would. Ruthlessness is one of hallmarks of my mother’s bloodline. Arrogance is another.”
“I have never considered you arrogant,” Tinker said.
“I am my father’s child in that regard,” Stormsong said. “But there was something that my mother once said to me. She said that her mother was more dragon than elf, and as such, did not act in the best interest of our race.”
“Is that why your mother betrayed Vision?” Tinker said.
“I believe it might be. I had heard whispers of how she had helped the Skin Clan bind her own mother and gone to confront her about it. She told me not to be stupid about the motives of people who whisper loudly enough to be heard. I pressed her for an answer. She told me then how her mother had been made differently from the others of our caste—more dragon than elf—or more exactly, a dragon in elf form.”
“Tooloo doesn’t seem that different from other elves to me.” Aside from the fact that she lived alone, seemed to hate the domana, resented the sekasha for their part in establishing peace between the clans, lied as easily as she breathed, and never pranced around nude in communal baths…
Okay, maybe Tooloo wasn’t like all the other elves that Tinker knew. She didn’t seem very draconic either. Tinker’s sample size on dragons, though, was Impatience (whose name suggested that he was hyperactive) and Providence (who was dead, or perhaps more accurately, mostly dead).
Considering her upbringing, Tinker didn’t feel like she was a good judge of “normal” humans either.
“I took my mother at her word because I had not met any dragons,” Stormsong said. “I wonder now…”
“About what?” Tinker asked once Stormsong trailed off to silence.
Stormsong sighed, shaking her head. “It is difficult to explain. There is so much my mother has kept from me that I am not even sure where to begin. I have been digging through the layers of debris like an archeologist, looking for the broken pottery to piece together. My mother has never done anything on whim. Every step she has taken is to move our people—all of our people—whether they wanted it or not—toward some idea of a perfect world that my mother has. She planned the Rebellion, ended the Clan Wars, chose who would be our first King, arranged the marriage between Wolf’s parents and convinced them to have child after child until one was born with the ability to call both esva.”
“It was not without dissension. Those who tried to block her found themselves either plowed over or neatly dodged.” Stormsong leaned close to whisper, “Some think that Howling’s assassination was to keep the Clan War from ending, but it neatly put Longwind into power, who supported my mother’s plan.”
“You think Pure Radiance had Howling killed?” Tinker whispered once she remembered that he was Windwolf’s grandfather.
“No, but she should have been able to prevent it. Such plotting creates massive vibrations in the fabric of the dream world. Howling supported peace between the clans but he did not favor the idea of one clan ruling over the others—unless it was the Wind Clan. He hoped Wraith Arrow would win over Cinder. Howling considered Otter Dance an abomination and had been against Longwind taking her as his First. He would have refused to cooperate in producing a single half-breed on the chance that it could use both esva, let alone producing ten such children.”
It took Tinker a moment to sort through the names of people that she’d never met but were now essentially her in-laws. Otter Dance was Pony’s mother who was half Stone Clan and half Wind Clan. She was First to Longwind, who was Windwolf’s father. “So Pure Radiance let Howling die?”
Stormsong shook her head. “I have no proof of it, just suspicions. She would know that someone within Howling’s household plotted against him. It was more convenient for Howling to die than to warn him. My mother would do anything to steer us in the direction that she desires the world to go. For that reason, I always ignored the whispers about my birth. I knew that I was never born from a forbidden love or a drunken mistake. My mother carefully and coldly planned my birth—but I never knew why. At least, not until Pony was born. On his naming day, I began to suspect what might be the shape of her plan.”
“Which is?”
“There is an ancient myth or a prophecy or perhaps a combination of the two. The goddess of war is said to ride a storm horse across the skies, its hooves the sound of rolling thunder. With her fly the Storm Winds, a thousand winged furies that sing in exaltation. In the goddess’s wake, like a flood or a tornado, the landscape is changed by her passage. My mother named Pony: Storm Horse Galloping on Wind.”
Stormsong’s true name was Singing Storm Wind, which could be seen as one of the singing furies. It would be odd coincidence except Pure Radiance had named both Tinker’s First and Second.
“Your mother thinks I’m the Goddess of War?”
Stormsong clicked her tongue. “I do not know. You do a surprising amount of collateral damage for your size.”
Tinker frowned at Stormsong. She really wished people would stop saying that! It wasn’t like she planned to do so much damage.
“I am sorry, domi.” Stormsong dipped her head in an abbreviated bow. “I do not know what my mother believes nor what she hopes to accomplish. I have asked her many times, nearly every day when I was very young. I can only guess. I think that she realized that the Skin Clan had escaped beyond her ability to root them out by fleeing to Earth and Onihida. She knew that they would return someday with the power of two worlds at their beck and call. I think she might have expanded on a myth in order to keep the others of her caste aware that they should be on the lookout for ‘the goddess’ and her entourage.”
Tinker stared at her, slightly horrified by the implication. “You make it seem as if I was fated to be with you and Pony.”
“Me, Pony, Cloudwalker, Rainlily and even Wolf,” Stormsong said. “There is a second prophecy about the goddess marching across the battlefield with a wolf beside her. Cloudwalker’s true name is Walks Among Storm Clouds Looming on Wind, and Rainlily’s is Lily That Sway in a Storm Wind.”
Once upon a time at Aum Renau, Tinker had been introduced to all the sekasha en masse. Since then, she’d been using the English nicknames for many of them. She hadn’t realized that of the sekasha she had chosen for her Hand, all but one had names that incorporated storms.
“What about Little Egret?”
“I believe he was named by a temple priestess who did not see his destiny. At least, I hope that is why and not because he is doomed to an early death.”
“But—but—but—you’re all hundreds of years older than me—and I was a hermit outside of my team. And I wasn’t even sure you liked me at first.”
“I was still angry with my mother,” Stormsong said. “I wanted her to tell me what grand plan she had for me. I think that I am beginning to understand—or at least, I would like to think I am. I would have never agreed to go with Sparrow if I knew that she planned to kill Wolf. If any other sekasha spotted your sisters creeping around the museum, they would have killed them but I knew that I needed to let them go. Wolf needed to be badly hurt and to have you save him the way you did, or he would not have fallen in love with you. You needed Pony to be beside you at the oni encampment or your plan would have failed. So many things I would not have allowed. My heart would not have allowed it.
“I suppose it has come in handy that my Second can see the future,” Tinker said.
“I think it is something more fundamental. Something that Wolf, I, and Pony share—we’re all mutts. Remember how I said that the merchants hid away their connection with Earth? It is because most of our people see outsiders as dangerous—even repulsive. Most of the Fire Clan thinks the Stone Clan people are too short and brown and ugly. Stone Clan calls Fire Clan ‘giraffes’ and thinks they’re too tall and ungainly and ugly. The elves in Pittsburgh are the ones who were willing to follow Wolf despite the fact he is half Fire and half Wind. Wolf was the only one who was willing to offer to me because he thought of us alike—two mutts that everyone despised.”
“So by design, all the elves in Pittsburgh are the ones most willing to deal with humans without the automatic fear of the other?”
“Considering my mother, yes, by design.”
Tinker handed Stormsong her tablet. “I think Tooloo gave me some secret message in this but I can’t figure it out.” She explained what she thought the chess pieces represented. “At least I think Tooloo was trying to tell me something. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she was just messing with my head.”
“I do not think you are wrong. Dream symbology is highly personal. Your mother borrowed heavily from stories of a girl being lost in an alien world. Alice in Wonderland. Dorothy in Oz. If Vision is like my mother, then she has been training you in the symbology all your life without your knowing it.”
“So, if I think the Heinz bottle is probably the city, then it probably is Pittsburgh—because that’s how I think of it?”
“Yes,” Stormsong said.
“Windwolf is Superman?” Tinker pointed to her bishop. “Or Jin Wong?”
Stormsong winced. “A better question would be: Did Tooloo ever teach you anything about the chess pieces that wasn’t cut and dried?”
Tinker blew raspberries at the question. “Playing with her was always about the chessmen acting like they were real people and not game pieces. She’d play both sides at the same time, having them randomly go off on adventures. In a typical game, one queen would fall in love with a knight…”
“Every game?” Stormsong said.
Tinker paused to think. Had any game ever not had that scenario? “Yes, every game. One queen would fall for a knight on the other side. Sometimes my queen. Sometimes her’s. Wait. We would switch sides since white usually goes first.” Tinker took the tablet back to double-check the photos. Yes, one of the monkeys stood next to the white king. She hadn’t played with Tooloo since she was very young. She considered all the games that she could remember. “It was always the white queen that fell in love. I hated playing white because of that. The outcome varies wildly. Sometimes the king orders a pawn to execute his queen. Sometimes she leaves the board, taking the knight with her. Sometimes the knight kills her. Sometimes she just captures the knight and holds him prisoner until the end of the game.”
“So,” Stormsong said, “one of the other side has fallen in love with one of your allies. The Skin Clan’s ‘king’ does not condone of the affair—nor does your knight return the fervor of the white queen’s love. The queen’s action and your knight’s fate will matter greatly in how the game plays out.”
“Oh, you got to be kidding me! The white queen is one of Chloe’s sisters? Who the hell is the knight?”
“You’ve probably never met him nor is he related to you by blood. The further removed a person is from you, the more generic their dream symbol becomes. What else did Tooloo have the pieces do during your games?”
“Everything. Anything,” Tinker complained. “The pawns were the worse. They all went any which way Tooloo wanted them to go. Sometimes they would just leave the board and she’d say that they got bored. The bishops could get wonky but only sometimes. Let me think.” Tinker closed her eyes and tried to remember the things that reduced her to tears during the games with Tooloo. “One time my bishop assassinated my king—but I can’t remember if I was playing black or white at the time. I really hope I was white.”
“What about the rooks?” Stormsong said.
“I have not a clue.” Tinker eyed the black rook substitutes. “The rooks always behaved themselves. I’m not sure what these chickens as rooks mean. Tooloo has lots of chickens so she can sell eggs. She easily has over a hundred laying hens at any one time. Her place seems really small from the front of the shop, but it goes all the way up the hillside and back for almost half a mile. She’s got all sorts of gardens and orchards and cow pastures with bird coops scattered all among them. A lot of her layers are Rhode Island Reds or little bantams. Those she keeps near her shop so it’s easy to collect their eggs. She has Jersey Giants and Freedom Rangers for meat. Their coop is farther out. She has a lot of random other birds: turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl, quail, doves, and a pair of very mean gray geese.”
She was rambling, hoping to stumble over some meaning hidden deep in her brain.
“Her place sounds almost like an enclave,” Stormsong said.
“One without any walls, but yeah, a lot like one.” Not that Tinker realized it growing up. Places like Poppymeadows opened only their dining rooms to humans, barring them from exploring deeper into the walled-off enclave. She and Oilcan had only been to the enclaves a few times as teenagers, spending their own dime to celebrate some special occasion. She never realized that each one was a self-sufficient farm. Tooloo would know that Tinker now had access to enclaves. “Tooloo’s place is the only farm that I’ve ever been to. I know there’s lots of others in the South Hills. They supply little ma-and-pa stores all over the city with eggs and milk.”
“She would not choose a place that you’ve never been to,” Stormsong said. “Symbology is gossamer in nature, it is the stuff of dreams. It is what your gift uses to communicate to the sleeping part of your brain.”
Tinker stared the picture of the rook. What could it mean? What did chickens stand for in her brain? “Chicken. Chick. Chick. Chick. Chicken! Bok-caw! Bok-caw!”
Thus she was making chicken noises when she climbed out of the Rolls-Royce in front of the Wyverns.