Elfhome

It was started as a ballad duet in High Elvish between him and Briar. He sang of the attack and defense sword movements of a sekasha and moved his guitar into rough approximations of the stances. Briar’s counter lines were the domana shield and attack spells; she moved her hands elegantly through the movements that a domi would use to call magic from the clan’s spell stones. And then the song changed, dropping into something wilder, untamed, and in low Elvish, speaking of the shared vow of protection, guarding each other, loving each other. Two people, bound together, determined to protect the other at all cost.

Tinker was burning red with embarrassment but she was holding tight to Pony and Stormsong’s hands with tears in her eyes. It didn’t seem as if she was going to freak out on him. When they went into the chorus the second time, all the elves joined in on Oilcan’s bass line, a thunder of approval.

He thought of himself as Wind Clan not just because Windwolf loved Tinker, although that was part of it. He thought of himself as Wind Clan because all of the clan had opened their hearts to his cousin and taken her in and she loved them back. Her sekasha would die for her, and she would die for them and for that reason, Oilcan was Wind Clan.

And maybe that was the key to breaking the tension between the races. The music was only distracting the audience — and only mildly — from their hostility. The songs weren’t trying to unify them. What could he use? What would make them feel as if they were part of the whole? The only thing they had in common was Tinker.

He launched into “Godzilla of Pittsburgh.” It was strictly instrumental and its reference to Tinker was obscure. The crowd, though, seemed to recognize her sweeping nature in the music. He thought about all the other songs he’d ever written for Tinker. Like the Godzilla song, they were obscure by their intimate nature. The people that really knew Tinker would recognize her, but this crowd didn’t know the real person, they only knew Tinker via second hand stories.

What songs would suggest Tinker? Songs about hoverbike racing were obvious since she had all but invented the sport.

He had just launched into the lyrical “Sky Diving” that he wrote about doing the jumps at Chang’s racetrack when he realized that Tinker was doing guerrilla-style face painting attacks on the audience. He watched with confused amusement as she zigzagged about the gym, grabbing random people, pulling them down to her five-foot level, and lightning quick, drew cat whiskers on their faces. She pounced on elves, tengu and human alike — seemingly at random — but after a dozen or so ambushes, he realized that she was cycling through the races, keeping even the number of painted per race. The oddest thing was that she seemed to be purposely ignoring anyone that was paying attention to her and only ambushing those focused on the music. The result was a growing mass of confused decorated people in her wake, gingerly touching their faces, unsure what Tinker had just done to them.

What was she up to?

The crowd, at least, had stopped snarling at each other and was moving with the music. They were seeing Tinker in the song, taking the massive ramps into the jumps, soaring through the air, and free-falling back to earth. Moser joined him, mouth full but hands free, whiskers drawn on his face, for the instrumental bridge. They were tearing down the last stretch when Merry gave a loud meep of surprise. Oilcan glanced behind him to see that Tinker had whiskered a very startled Merry. A wall of sekasha kept the rest of the audience from seeing whatever Tinker had done to the little female.

“Fields of Summer,” he shouted the next song in the set to Moser and then sidled up to Tinker. “What’s with the whiskers, Tink?”

“Prestidigitation.” Tinker waved her left hand in a showy flourish — and sketched whiskers on him quickly with her right. “There, you’re one of us now.”

Oilcan laughed despite the slight alarm that went through him. What was she distracting people from while she drew whiskers on them? As Wind Clan domi, she should have been able to command this crowd to do just about anything. It probably wasn’t something they should discuss in shouts in front of a crowd.

“Fields of Summer” wasn’t holding the whole audience. The humans were getting the reference to the ultimate causal in parties: a big empty field, a campfire and an acoustic guitar for music. The elves and the tengu were drifting away, unfamiliar with the Pittsburgh tradition. Near the door there was a shove that turned into an angry staring match between the fringe of the tengu flock and some incoming laedin enclave guards.

Oilcan scanned the audience, found Riki at the edge nearest Tinker, watching her with a slight frown. He caught Riki’s attention by paying the jarring notes of the song he had only ever shared with the tengu. Mother’s blood on my toes…