Elfhome

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 ice berg 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 lights of Pittsburgh came on until the city was bright island of circus brightness, visitors would continue to stare at the willow-o-wisps faintly dancing over the ironwoods. It was like they were blind to the city below.

As Thorne Scratch studied Pittsburgh, Oilcan realized 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 raised at Cold Mountain Temple.” She scoffed 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 scoffed 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, Temper Steel, weeded.”