Elfhome

They had salvaged what they could from the restaurant, including the dishes. They had nailed up shelves to the back wall and stacked the survivors there. Aunt Flo had worked through rice bowls and was now throwing bread plates.

“Stop that,” Tommy snapped. “We’ll need those to start up the restaurant again.”

She flinched away from him, shielding herself with the plate.

“I’m not going to hit you.” Tommy wanted to though, just for thinking he might. She read the anger on his face and continued to quail. “Throw the last one, and then clean up the mess.”

Reassured that he wouldn’t act, she let loose her anger again. “I didn’t want another baby!” She flung the plate against the wall. It shattered, its pieces raining down to a pile of broken china. “I’m sick of babies! You could have stopped him!” She turned to flail harmlessly at him. “You stood there and let him finish and then you killed him! You should have just killed him when he first walked in!”

He caught her wrist and controlled himself so he didn’t hurt her, despite his growing anger. “He had his warriors with him. Did you want us all dead just to save you from…what? Doing what he’d done a hundred times before? We’re free of oni now. This time, you can go to the human doctors and have an abortion.”

The fight went out of her and she started to cry, which only made him angrier, because he’d been helpless to protect her in the first place. It had been Windwolf that killed the oni, not him. She clenched the front of his shirt with both hands, seeking comfort from him as she sobbed. The herd of his younger cousins thundered pass, all shrieking loud enough to wake the dead, the one in the lead with some treasured toy that all the rest wanted.

God, he needed a drink.

4: Three Esva Shy of a Full Deck

Tinker had spent the evening studying the recording that Blue Sky had made of the warg fight. She ran it through a video editor so she could isolate the domana and analyze every frame as they cast their spells. Blue Sky had caught Prince True Flame doing the fire strike, Jewel Tear doing the scrying spell and both the Stone Clan putting up their shields. The fire strike scared her slightly. It looked so simple she barely could keep from trying it out; her curiosity, though, was often deadly to those around her. The problem was she wasn’t completely positive how the prince was directing and limiting the power of his attack. She’d gone to bed wondering how she could practice the spell without worrying about setting things on fire.

She dreamed that she was back at the archery range at Aum Renau. She’d bolted marshmallows on sticks to the mechanical targets that the sekasha used for archery practice. Once on fire, though, the warg-shaped targets had somehow run amok, like crazed flaming sheep. Afraid that the entire palace would go up in flames, she’d wondered around lost, trying to find the Spell Stones in order to call a rainstorm to put out the wargs.

She woke slowly in a warm nest of sheets that smelled of Windwolf with the images tumbling in her mind. She thought of elaborate traps to catch and contain the flaming wargs until she woke up a little more and realized how silly the whole dream had been.

It did remind her, though, that during the three weeks at Aum Renau, she had visited the Spell Stones only once. From the air they had looked like giant slabs of black granite, but up close, it turned out they were layers of stone, each layer inscribed with spells, connected by jumpers just like integrated circuit boards. Why hadn’t she taken the time to study them closer?

“Nothing for you,” Sparrow stated the first time Tinker saw the Spell Stones from the airship.

Oh yes, that was right, Sparrow had kept detouring her away from the massive granite slabs. Strange how in retrospective it was easy to see that Sparrow wanted Tinker helpless when the oni kidnapped her. Things would have gone so much differently if Tinker could have called her domana shields. Even now, though, it was still hard for Tinker to wrap her mind around “why” Sparrow had betrayed her.

“I’m using the oni to fix what is wrong,” Sparrow said. “I’m going to take things back to the way they should be.”

Like that would have worked. How would flooding Elfhome with oni do anything other than just wipe out the elfin race? By the oni’s count, there were billions of them to the few million of the elves. The oni apparently bred like rabbits. The elves were killing all the oni they found in fear even two would eventually reproduce enough to outnumber them. How did Sparrow think she was going to get rid of the oni after the world suited her?

There was the murmur of male voices as Pony greeted Windwolf with “Brother Wolf.”

“Little Horse,” Windwolf said fondly. “She is still asleep.”

“Hhmm,” Tinker said to indicate she was really awake.