Elfhome

Lain seemed willing to totally ignore their fight and everything that followed. “I said the saplings that I observed were non-ambulatory. After I was able to study the mature Black Willow, I realized that the level of magic altered the plant’s activity level. This bed is on a ley line.”

A weak ley line meandered through the back corner of Lain’s greenhouse. When Tinker was growing up, it was the corner where her radio-controlled cars would suddenly run amuck. As a domana, she could now sense the flow of magic as a slight trickle of power over her toes, like she was standing in a shallow stream of warm water.

While Tinker could understand how magic could influence the sapling’s movement, she wasn’t sure about accelerated growth. When she last saw Lain, she had been culling seedpods. “Did you grow these from seeds?”

“No, I transplanted them from a very magic weak area to test my theory.”

Tinker leaned down to catch one. She wanted have a closer look at their feet. “I didn’t think plants could move so fast.”

“Careful,” Lain blocked Tinker’s outstretched hand with the tip of her crutch just as Pony caught Tinker by the shoulder and pulled her backwards.

“They bite,” Lain said in English as Pony murmured in Elvish, “Domi, they can bite.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Tinker’s shadow seemed to have attracted the saplings attention; they gathered against the wall in front of her and scrambled wildly at the smooth surface. It was creepy and funny at the same time.

“When the saplings are in mass like this, they act like a school of piranha,” Lain seemed inordinately pleased at that. She was probably wallowing in the joy of alien biology. Lain had thought her career as xenobiologist ended with the shuttle explosion that crippled her; Earth’s space agencies only tapped the most physically fit for extraterrestrial missions. When Pittsburgh had been accidentally transported to Elfhome, though, Lain had gained a second chance to study life on another planet. “They tore a large groundhog apart in the matter of minutes and swallowed even the bones whole.”

The rust-colored splashes on the nursery walls took on ominous meaning. “You fed them a live groundhog?”

“Not intentionally. The stupid thing burrowed into the nursery.” Lain pointed out a mound of disturbed dirt near one corner. “So far when Earth’s flora and fauna meets Elfhome’s, Elfhome’s come out the winner. Magic seems to raise the whole ‘evolution of the fittest’ to a higher level. Just consider the elves themselves; they’re taller, stronger, and immortal. If we could use magic to bioengineer…”

“You can study how magic changes plants.” Stormsong was the only one of Tinker’s sekasha fluent in English, thus the only one following the conversation. “But you must not try to use what you learn. That type of magic is forbidden.”

“Forbidden?” Lain looked pointedly toward Tinker who had been human up to a few months ago and was now undeniably elf.

“There are exceptions, but they are few and strictly controlled,” Stormsong said. “Nature did not make us this way. The Skin Clan enslaved us and treated us like animals. They bred us for desired traits and slaughtered any infant that didn’t meet their standards.”

“Yeah, spell-working — bioengineering using magic — is a major no-no.” Tinker waved a warning to Lain to back off the subject. The Skin Clan had set out to create the perfect being in the sekasha to act as their bodyguards. While they wildly succeeded, the perfection worked against them. The sekasha were morally horrified by their makers and wiped them out.

“For a long time spell-working was completely forbidden,” Tinker explained. “That’s the importance of Tempered Steel, the sekasha monk that they make such a big to-do over during the Harvest Faire.” While she was growing up, the story competed with the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving; every Harvest Faire featured a cute little puppet show and an odd fixation on keva beans. Only after becoming an elf did she realize all the little nuances of the story that she’d missed. “Wheat blight was creating a massive famine until Tempered Steel successfully argued for special allowances for spell-working.”

What she didn’t realize as a child was the fact that despite the domana-caste being “the lords” of the elves, it was the sekasha that had the final say in all matters. Tempered Steel hadn’t gone to the elf king but to the sekasha monasteries of all the clans to argue his case. Being sekasha, his argument had been backed by serious sword skills. In the puppet show, he would defeat the monastery’s champion before uttering his famous line of “Evil lies in the heart of elves, not in magic.” In the end, it was the sekasha that decided that spell-working would be allowed and created the guidelines.