Elfhome

9: THORNE SCRATCH

Oilcan had washed four battered souls, seen that they were dressed in simple gowns, fed, drugged, and put to bed. He was trying to determine his obligations to them when Thorne Scratch found him.

“Take the children and go home,” she said.

Her command was fairly clear, but still he said, “I don’t understand.”

“The children cannot stay here. Take them and go.”

“Why can’t they stay? Is the staff trying to throw them out? Tinker won’t allow—”

“The Wind Clan is not the problem,” Thorne said. “Forest Moss has learned of the children. He will be here shortly to claim them. He cannot be allowed to take them. Take the children and go.”

He sat down mostly because his knees suddenly didn’t want to support him. “I–I don’t know — all of them?”

Thorne went to her knees in front of him and caught his hands tightly. “Please. He is mad. If the oni did not drive him mad with their torture, then nearly three hundred years of isolation has. He is desperate for physical contact. The prince has given Forest Moss only male Wyverns to guard him, and he has pressed his suit on them. None of Ginger Wine’s staff will be in a room with him with good cause — his actions are as close to rape as they can come and not be worthy of charges. Within an hour of Earth Son’s death, he tried to corner even me. These children cannot be given over to him, not after what they’ve been through.”

“Can’t we just tell him no?”

“He’s domana. If he comes prepared for a fight, then only Wolf Who Rules and Prince True Flame could stop him. The viceroy has no grounds to deny Forest Moss access to the children, since they are Stone Clan and the prince would sacrifice them to keep the peace.”

What the hell was he going to do with five children, four of which had just been dragged through hell? But she was right — he couldn’t give them to Forest Moss. They were more than a head count to him now. They were the emotionally fragile Fields of Barley, little Baby Duck, who no longer knew her real name and nervously quacked, Rustle of Leaves, who only cared that Merry hadn’t been captured despite the fact the oni shattered the young musician’s left arm, and stoic Cattail Reeds. Oilcan knew their names and faces, had seen the breadth and width of their strengths and weaknesses. Even Fields of Barley, once he stopped crying, had shown incredible resiliency, but none of them would be able to deal with an adult male demanding intimacy from them.

“Okay. I’ll take them home.” It was a big city. It was unlikely Forest Moss would be able to find him — but the elf did have magic. “How long do I need to keep the kids hidden from Forest Moss?”

“Once they wake and have the situation explained to them, they can choose what to do. If they decide to stay with you, they’ll be safe from him. The Wyverns will not allow a holding to be broken by an outsider.”

“Even if I’m human?”

“A precedent must be set and protected if humans are to be part of our society.”

Knowing that she wasn’t lying to him didn’t help; he also knew that people often deceived themselves into believing they were telling the truth.

Moving the children was surreal. They had been dosed with saijin, so all but Merry were asleep beyond waking. The staff lined the back of his pickup truck with mattresses and then tucked the sleeping children in like a litter of kittens. Thorne rode in the back to his condo and then helped him move both children and mattresses into the spare bedrooms. While he knew that he was doing it for the good of the children, it felt horribly wrong to snatch them out of the hospice and take them unawares to his home.

Luckily Oilcan had put Merry in the larger guest bedroom, so there was room for Cattail Reeds and Baby Duck. Rustle of Leaves and Fields of Barley went into the other bedroom, which was more of an oversized closet. He needed to get bunk beds so the kids didn’t have to walk on each others’ mattresses. The hospice had sent only sheets, so he also needed to track down five sets of blankets before it started to get cold. Tomorrow, he would have to find them clothes and shoes. He only had four sets of dishes. His pantry was half bare.

His new responsibilities loomed larger and larger before him like an iceberg sliding out of the mist. It made him want a drink so bad that it scared him. He opened the fridge and stared at the beer bottles gleaming inside. It was his father’s answer to all life’s little problems. This wasn’t, however, a little problem.

Thorne Scratch shifted in the darkness that was gathering inside his apartment, reminding him that she was still there. There to stay, since if he drove her back to the Rim, it would leave the kids alone. Helpless as they were in their drugged sleep, he couldn’t do that. Newly arrived, Thorne probably didn’t know the city well enough to walk the six miles out to the enclaves. Hell, he would have to guide her through using the incline just to get down off Mount Washington.

The need for a drink became impossible to resist.

“Would you like something to drink?” At least he shouldn’t sink to drinking alone. “I’ve got ouzo, apricot wine, mead.” He’d been collecting things that Tinker might enjoy drinking since her transformation had made beer unpalatable. “Water?”

“Ouzo,” Thorne said in her raspy voice. “Please.”

He poured an inch or so of the clear, anise-flavored liquor into one of the canning jars that he used for glasses. Opening a bottle of cold beer, he carried her glass to her and then kept walking out to his balcony that overlooked downtown Pittsburgh, distancing him from the temptation in the refrigerator.

She came to lean against the railing with him and drank in silence.

Usually when someone visited him, they stared at the forest, ignoring the city for the vast carpet of green. As night fell, and the lights of Pittsburgh came on until the city was a bright island of circus brightness, visitors would continue to stare at the will-’o-the-wisps faintly dancing over the ironwoods. It was like they were blind to the city below.

As Thorne Scratch studied Pittsburgh, Oilcan realized that all his visitors, with the exception of Tinker, had been humans from Earth. They were on Elfhome because they wanted something strange and new in their life.

“What do you think?” he asked Thorne.

“I remember being these children’s age. You are so certain you know all that is to be known.” She shook her head. “I was raised at Cold Mountain Temple.” She laughed bitterly at herself. “At this point you’re supposed to be amazed and impressed.”

“Snow falls on Cold Mountain Temple, hewed from living stone, rock solid, rock strong.” He sang the chorus of the Harvest epic. “Even here in Pittsburgh, we know of Tempered Steel. I am amazed and impressed.”

She laughed again, this time at him. “The song does not do justice to the isolation of Cold Mountain Temple. It’s a day’s walk to the nearest holding, which is nothing more than a collection of pigsties. By nature of its location, Cold Mountain Temple is a complete but small world in and of itself. We had to grow all our own food, so every day we trained and tended to our crops. I hated the crops. The dirt. The bugs. That you worked and worked, then winter would come, and you would have to start all over again. Then one day, Otter Dance came to visit her father. She heard me cursing the same damn weeds I had to pull up for the thousandth time, and she laughed and started to help me, saying it had been nae hae since she last had to weed. And I was amazed. How was it that she hadn’t been weeding? Even her great and famous father, Tempered Steel, weeded.”

Oilcan closed his eyes as a feeling something akin to vertigo hit him. Nae hae was short for kaetat nae hae, which meant “count no years.” It meant the person didn’t want to sit and figure out how long ago an event actually happened. It could mean anywhere from a decade to a thousand years. The elves switched to nae hou, or “count no millennia.” The puppet shows of Tempered Steel saving the world from starvation always started “Nae hou, a great famine swept the world.” He’d always assumed that Tempered Steel was as dead as the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. Yet, here, this female had weeded gardens alongside the famous warrior monk.

“Otter Dance had become First to Longwind, head of the Wind Clan,” Thorne continued, most likely unaware of the disorientation she’d caused. “She told me about her life at court, how she spent her day protecting her domou or training and had nothing to do with weeds. It sounded like heaven to me.”

He could see why the children had her thinking of her own youth. “So you left everything you knew behind to go to court.”

“The day after I earned my sword, I left Cold Mountain Temple and never went back.” She went to sip her drink and found her glass empty. She held it out to him. “May I have more?”

Surely someone as old and trained as Thorne Scratch knew how to handle her drinking. After long consideration of his own condition, he got a second beer. By the time he returned to the balcony, he remembered how she started the conversation: you are so certain you know all that is to be known. Was she implying that she had discovered the hard way that she didn’t?

“So life at court blindsided you?”

She considered the question with the cant of her head. “Blindsided implies a quick awareness that things have gone horribly wrong. Everyone at Cold Mountain was brutally honest, keeping true to the belief that lying is a sin. At court, everyone carefully wove lies out of truths and wore them as masks. It was years before I saw enough of the true Earth Son to know I had made mistake in offering to him. If I had left him, I would have destroyed what little credibility he had at court.”

“So you stayed.”

“It was a mistake,” she whispered. “We could tolerate him being a pompous ass at court, but he had been cowardly on the field of battle, had undermined the defense of Elfhome for his own personal gain, and nearly plunged us into a bigoted genocide of a useful ally.” By “we” she meant all five sekasha of Earth Son’s Hand. “I was his First. It was my duty to put him down.”

“I’m sorry.”

She reached out and caught him by the front of his shirt and pulled him to her and kissed him hard. She smelled of leather and anise. She kissed him like she was drowning and he was air.

“From the moment I struck him down, it’s been like I suddenly went invisible. No one will look at me. I–I know they don’t think I was wrong — they would have killed me right there if they did — but they’re scared of what will happen to us, and they don’t want to look like they’re afraid — so — so. .”

“I see you,” Oilcan murmured. “You’re right here with me, and you’re beautiful.”

She tugged at his clothing, kissing him hard and desperate. Inhaling him.

Where was this going? He’d never been with a female elf, but if she were human, it would certainly seem as if they were careening toward sex. She was a sekasha, a deadly holy warrior; surely they weren’t about to go at it like rabbits.

Then her hands were on his bare skin, just as needy as her kisses, suggesting that he was wrong to dismiss the possibility of sex.

She had grown up in a monastery. Maybe she wasn’t used to drinking. Maybe she was drunk and he was taking advantage of her.

She pushed him up against the wall and pinned him there. Yeah, sure, who was taking advantage of whom? The angle of their bodies made it clear that she was inches taller than him.

“Naekanain?” Which was the politest way he could think of to say “What the hell?”

She pulled back, hurt on her face.

“Are you sure—” He fumbled for something safe to say. “Is this really a good place for this?” Whatever this was. “Maybe my bedroom?”

“Your bedroom.” Her husky voice was full of need and promise.

He led the way through his condo, emotions in a tumbling freefall. He wanted her — had always wanted her — had wanted to hear her raspy voice make needful sounds since the first time she spoke. The sane, reasoning part of him was nearly lost under the want, but it was there, whispering ice-cold points of logic. He had an apartment full of kids. She was a sekasha; she could kill him if he pissed her off, and things like this tended to end messily for him.

Then they were in his bedroom with the door safely shut, and the reasoning part of him went silent as Thorne pushed him onto his bed. Somewhere between the balcony and his bedroom, she had shimmied out of her wyvern-scale armor. Underneath she wore a pale camisole that was taut over surprisingly full breasts, considering how lean she looked in armor. As she peeled off her leather pants, he realized he better work at getting naked, too. He kicked off his tennis shoes, stripped off his shirt, and undid his pants. She caught hold of his jeans and pulled them off him. His boxers followed. She moaned softly as she saw how ready he was for her. He reached for her, and, graceful as a dancer, she moved onto the bed, kissed him, and lowered herself onto him. They hummed delight into each other’s mouths as they fit together as if they were made for each other. Each movement of her hips was sweetness and fire.

Afterward they lay, still joined, sharing the same breath. Her braid had come undone at some point, her hair flowing wantonly down across her face and shoulders. She smiled and traced his grin with her fingertips. Slowly the whisper of logic started up in him again, murmuring how this wasn’t sane, but she felt too right in his arms to listen.