Elfhome

The elves eyed grandfather’s casting room with confusion and suspicion. With all her outer perimeter defenses activated, Tinker had her Hand, Thorne Scratch, Blue Sky, Oilcan’s kids, and all the laedin warriors gathered in the big room with her. At one time it had been an outdoor pool, but her grandfather had enclosed it with ironwood and glass. The morning sun dawned through the windowed ceiling, starting the cycle of turning the chilly room into a stifling oven. The unused buckets of chlorine already scented the air with ghosts of summers past.

“Queee.” Baby Duck broke the silence.

“And you and sama lived here alone with your grandfather?” Cattail asked for the zillionth time.

“What a waste of a wonderful bathing room,” Barley said.

“It is…it was a—” What was the Elvish word for swimming? She settled for the English. “Swimming pool, not a bathing tub.”

Everyone but Blue Sky gazed at her blankly. Maybe elves didn’t swim. Considering what lived in most large bodies of water on Elfhome, she didn’t blame them.

The casting room had been one of the epic wars between Lain and her grandfather. Lain maintained that if her grandfather was going to raise Tinker in the middle of a river that routinely flooded, Tinker should know how to swim. Her grandfather believed that if Tinker could swim, she would be more likely to play in the river. (Ironically, they were both right on the subject.) They both ordered supplies and the race was on. Her grandfather’s cement truck beat Lain’s water truck by a few hours, sealing the swimming pool’s fate. The pool maintenance supplies — from algaecide to winter pills — shipped from Earth and nonreturnable — were still piled in one corner of the room, unused.

As a measure of her childhood, her greatest despair had been watching the gray cement slosh across the pool’s pale blue floor. She had been planning on building an entire fleet of toy submarines. She could only wish that her problems had stayed that trivial. It had been over a day since Iron Mace and Forge disappeared with Oilcan. So far, the tengu hadn’t found where they’d gone.

Tinker tried to stay focused on the spell she was transcribing on the white marble slab that been laid on the cement insulating layer. It was the same spell as she had tried on Merry earlier, only slightly modified. She needed to know what the oni wanted from the kids if she was going to protect them. She was afraid that the condition she found them in reflected how little the oni needed the children alive. Was it mere chance that the three that died lacked whatever the other five had? Statistically, it was unlikely, but she didn’t want to stake their lives on what could have been random luck. Perhaps in time, the oni would have killed all the children.

Tinker finished the spell and stepped back. “Merry, could you come down here?”

Merry meeped quietly and backed up slightly, wide-eyed.

“No,” Rustle said. “Not Merry. Let me to this. I’ve felt so useless.”

“You’re arm will be better soon.” Merry cried. “You shouldn’t feel useless.”

“You should have gone down the chute before me. You’re younger than me. You’re smaller. I should have been the one holding back to protect you.”

Merry rest her head against Rustle’s chest. Unfortunately it only made it more obvious that she was so much smaller than him. “You’re hurt now, so I’m the one that should be brave.”

“I’ll hate myself if I let you take all the risks for all of us.” Rustle wrapped his one good arm about her shoulders. “We should share the risk of being hurt.”

“It’s just a spell.” Blue Sky didn’t have an ounce of romance in him, yet. He was giving the two an impatient scowl. “It won’t hurt.” He turned to Tinker, full of blind trust. “Right?”

This was where Oilcan normally smacked her until she admitted that she only vaguely knew what she was doing. She ached deep inside. It felt so wrong not to be charging around, looking for him. She hated this feeling that she was doing the wrong thing. Especially since it made her aware of how much of her life she sailed through, assuming she was doing the right thing, just because she had thought it up. It was thinking like that got Nathan killed.

Blue Sky’s trusting look started to fade as he saw the doubt on her face. “It isn’t going to hurt him?”

“The spell I did earlier on Merry indicated that she was connected to an infinite number of points — evenly.” It was simpler to ramble, trying to be reassuring while not lying. The kids were scared enough without telling them that she really wasn’t sure what she was doing. “Normally magic is affected by a number of things; gravity being one of them. Springs and ley lines are side effects of gravity’s influence on magic. That the points were evenly distributed indicates that the connections weren’t affected by gravity.”

Blue Sky knew her too well. He knew that she was overwhelming them with technobabble until they were too numb to form an intelligent resistance. “Is this going to hurt him?”