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25: UNBOUNDED BRILLIANCE

Banging woke Oilcan. It sounded like someone was trying to break down the front door with their knocking. Oni wouldn’t knock, so Oilcan felt safe answering it. He slipped out of the safe room without waking the children.

The peephole showed a wall of sekasha on his porch. He recognized Windwolf’s First, Wraith Arrow, and Prince True Flame’s First, Red Knife, among the Hand of Wyverns. Red Knife stepped forward, eclipsing Oilcan’s view as the male raised his fist to knock again.

“Shit,” Oilcan breathed. Why were the Firsts of two clans pounding on his door? What could possibly unite them on his doorstep? The door jumped under the assault of Red Knife’s knocking.

“I’m here!” he shouted and worked the locks. “One moment!”

He jerked open the door. The sekasha had shifted slightly, and the three abreast were Red Knife, Wraith Arrow, and Thorne Scratch.

“Thorne!” he cried with relief and then realized she had her face set to the cold sekasha warrior’s mask. He’d seen it enough times on Pony to know that she was in full working mode. “What’s wrong?”

“This is him,” Wraith Arrow said quietly to the Wyvern First.

Red Knife gazed down at Oilcan, eyes going wide with surprise. “I know she’s tiny, but I did not expect him to be as well. Is this as tall as he’s going to get?”

The question scored a hit on Thorne’s face that was quickly smoothed back to warrior’s mask. “He is fully grown.” Thorne’s High Elvish was carefully polite. It was intimidating that even the sekasha were cautious around each other.

“He is older than Beloved Tinker ze domi,” Wraith Arrow added.

“Have you lost all influence on your domana that this is what you’re reduced to?” Red Knife asked Thorne Scratch. “Your clan was requested support, not offered babysitting.”

The muscles in Thorne Scratch’s jaw went rigid in anger, but she answered levelly. “I have sent word to my clan’s First that this is unacceptable. It will be rectified.”

Red Knife put a hand on Oilcan’s chest and gently but firmly backed him into the foyer. Sekasha flowed into the building.

“Forgiveness,” Oilcan said cautiously. If the sekasha were sparring with words, how long until they drew their swords? He didn’t want to be in the middle when the blades were drawn. “I don’t understand why you are here. Has something happened to my cousin?”

Wraith Arrow shook his head. “Domi has not been harmed, nagarou.”

Thorne Scratch all but ignored Oilcan in favor of keeping her focus on Red Knife. “This might be totally unnecessary.”

“Let us be done with it then.” The Wyvern waved a hand at Oilcan.

Oilcan’s heart jumped in his chest. Done with what?

Thorne Scratch caught hold of Oilcan’s left hand. With thunderstorms raging in her eyes, she molded his fingers into an odd position and lifted his hand to her lips. For a moment he thought she meant to kiss his fingers. Instead Thorne Scratch sounded out a long, drawn-out vowel. He felt an odd thrumming down in his bones, like he gripped hard to a big engine.

Thorne reshaped his fingers into another position and spoke another vowel.

The air pressure changed, making Oilcan’s ears pop like he just taken an express elevator in a skyscraper, and all around him the air distorted oddly.

Red Knife grunted while both Thorne Scratch and Wraith Arrow looked horrified.

“What — what just happened?” Oilcan asked. “What did you do?”

“What do you see?” Thorne Scratch kept him from moving his hand.

“There’s something — a shield, I think — around us,” Oilcan said. “What did you do?”

Thorne Scratch dropped Oilcan’s hand, and the distortion in the air rippled and vanished. She put on her warrior mask again, but the thunderstorm continued to rage in her eyes. “He doesn’t have the magic sense, but he retains enough of the genome to tap the Stones. He’d have to be trained, though, to use the esva.”

Red Knife laughed. “If he’s as clever as his cousin, he’ll pick it up quickly enough.”

Wraith Arrow still looked as if Oilcan had just dropped over dead. The Wind Clan sekasha wasn’t even trying to mask his grief.

“What is going on?” Oilcan struggled to keep his voice level. He could tap the Stone Clan Spell Stones? Judging by Thorne’s anger and Wraith Arrow’s grief, in the eyes of the elves, it changed everything.

“We’re trying to determine what is to be done with you,” Red Knife said, confirming his fear.

“What was the name of the one that started your blood line?” Thorne Scratch growled.

He could understand Wraith Arrow’s reaction, but why was Thorne angry? “He went by the human name of Guillaume Dufae. He died a long time ago.”

“How long ago?” Thorne asked.

“Nearly three hundred years ago,” Oilcan said.

Red Knife laughed bitterly. “I was already a quad when he died then.”

Which meant Red Knife was well over a thousand years old and needed four numbers to count his age. Considering that perspective, three hundred wasn’t that long ago. Was that why Thorne was mad? That he hadn’t told her about his Stone Clan ancestor?

Oilcan tried to put it in human perspective for them. “We’ve considered ourselves fully human since his great-grandson, several generations back.”

“His true name,” Thorne Scratch said firmly.

“Um. .” Oilcan pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to dredge up the name. Guillaume was a corruption of the Elvish name that meant “Unbounded.” What had been Guillaume’s middle name again? “I think it was Unbounded Bright — no, Brilliance. Unbounded Brilliance.”

A noise came from the direction of the safe room as the children gasped in discovery that that the foyer was filled with warriors. The sekasha glanced toward the noise, hands going to their ejae.

“It’s just the children.” Oilcan shifted between the warriors and the hallway.

Red Knife gave a dry laugh. “Your family’s courage is disproportionate to your size.”

“Courage comes from the spirit, not the body,” Oilcan said.

Red Knife nodded at the truth. The Wyvern First came to tower over Oilcan again. “How old are you?”

Oilcan learned a long time ago not to tell elves his age. A human never lived long enough to seem to be anything more than a child. “I’m an adult.”

“That isn’t what I asked.” There was no mistaking the edge in the Wyvern’s voice despite the politeness of the High Elvish.

Thorne Scratch gave her head a nearly imperceptible shake, telling him not to annoy the Wyvern.

Oilcan gritted his teeth and confessed. “I’m twenty-two years old.” It made him basically about five years old in elf terms.

Red Knife laughed, murmuring, “Just a baby.” He glanced down the hall again at the children cowering there. “Babies taking care of babies.”

“I am an adult now,” Oilcan stated. “My family is no longer immortal. I will not live beyond my doubles.”

“And yet you can tap the Spell Stones.” Red Knife shook his head and then turned to Thorne. “Stay with him until someone sane from your clan can decide what is to be done.”

“What’s happened?” he asked after the other sekasha had left.

“They’re dead. The oni killed them all,” Thorne said bleakly. “They took Jewel Tear. Forest Moss is not currently lucid.”

The gunfire had been part of a massacre. Elves that Thorne had known for hundreds of years had been cut down in the battle.

“I’m so sorry,” Oilcan said. “But I don’t understand how this relates to me.”

“If you can tap the Stone Clan Spell Stones, then you are Stone Clan domana.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are the only functioning Stone Clan domana in Pittsburgh at this moment,” Thorne Scratch continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “You are head of the clan.”

“No!” Oilcan caught her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Look at me! See me! I’m human!”

She studied him hard with her warrior mask on, but then she let the mask drop. She stepped forward and pressed her forehead to his. “I see you.”