"You're blowing my preconceived notion that you're a wise and patient race."
"We appear patient only because our conception of time is different. Amassing oceans of knowledge does not make you wise."
They collected horseshoes with oddly musical clangs of metal on metal.
"But your family is different?" Tinker prompted Windwolf.
"My mother loves children, so she had many, and she did not pace them centuries apart. She thought that when a child was old enough to seek out playmates on his or her own, it was time for another. Amazingly, my father put up with it, mostly. Perhaps their marriage would not have survived if we were not a noble house with wealth and Beholden." Tinker knew that Beholden were the lower castes that acted as servants to the noble caste, but she wasn't sure how it all worked. "The Beholden gave my father the distance he needed from so many children."
Given that his mother could have spent centuries raising children, Tinker blinked at the sudden image of the old woman who lived in a shoe, children bursting out at the seams. "How many kids are in your family?"
"Ten."
"Only ten?"
Windwolf laughed. "Only?"
"I thought maybe a hundred, or a thousand."
Windwolf laughed again. "No, no. Father would never submit to that. He finds ten an embarrassment he suffers only for Mother's sake. Most nobles do not have any children." Windwolf's voice went bitter. "There is no need for propagation when you live forever."
"Well, it keeps your population from growing quickly."
"The elfin population has only declined in the last two millennia. Between war, accidental death, and occasional suicide, we are half the number we once were."
That did put a different spin on things. "That's not good."
"Yes, so I try to tell people. I had great hope that with this new land would come a new way of seeing the world."
"Had?"
"The arrival of Pittsburgh was unexpected."
Tinker winced. "Sorry."
"It actually has been beneficial," Windwolf said. "Enticing people to an utter wilderness was difficult; few wanted to suffer the ocean crossing for so few comforts. Human culture, though, is attracting the young and the curious—the ones most likely to see things my way."
"Good." Tinker focused back on throwing the horseshoes. That's what she liked about the game. It encouraged a flow of conversation.
"What about you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Do you desire children?"
She missed the stake completely, only the chain-link fence keeping the horseshoe from vanishing into the weeds. "Me?"
"You. Or would you rather be childless?"
"No." She blurted out the gut reaction to the question. "It's just I've never thought about kids. Sure, someday I'd like to have one or two, maybe as many as three, but hell, I've never even—" She was going to say kissed a man, but she supposed that wasn't true anymore. "You know."
"Yes, I do know," he purred, looking far too pleased, and it put a flash of heat through her. Her and Windwolf? Like her dream? Suddenly she felt the need to sit down. As if he were reading her mind—gods, she hoped not—Windwolf indicated the battered picnic table beyond the horseshoe pit.
As she clambered up to sit on the tabletop of the picnic table, she wondered what it would be like to be with him, as they had been in her dream. "How old are you?"
"For an elf, barely adult. For a human, I am ancient. I'm two hundred and ten."
Or 11.6 times older than she was. Nathan suddenly seemed close to her age.
"Is that too old?" Windwolf asked.
"No, no, not at all." Tinker struggled for perspective. Elves were considered adults at a hundred, but until they reached a thousand, they were still young. Triples were what the elves called them, or those that could count their age in three digits. Windwolf could be compared to a man that just turned twenty; only he'd been born in the 1820s.
And she was like one of Oilcan's astronomers to him, staying only long enough to break his heart.
First Nathan and now Windwolf. Well, didn't her choice of men suck?
"Have you ever played ninepins?" Windwolf asked, breaking the silence.
"Bowling? Yeah. But only with humans."
"I am much better at ninepins."
"Tooloo says humans should never play ninepins with elves. It always ends badly for humans."
"This Tooloo is a font of misinformation. She was completely wrong about the life debt."
"How so?"
"The debt between us is not yours. It is mine," Windwolf said.
"Yours?"
"How could the count be any other way?"
"During the fight with the saurus…"
"You saved my life. I was dazed, and you distracted the saurus by putting out its eye at great risk to yourself."
She blinked at him, stunned as the events now rearranged themselves in her mind. "But the spell you placed on me?"
"If I did not survive the rest of the fight, I wanted others to know you had acted with courage. You were to be adopted into my household and cared for."
"Oh." She didn't know what else to say.
"We looked for you after the fight, but we thought you were a boy. We asked about 'the boy, and no one knew who we were asking about."
How could Tooloo have gotten it so wrong? Or had Tooloo been lying all this time? But why? Tinker struggled to keep faith in the crazy old half-elf; Windwolf could be lying to her now. But why would he? His version of the events certainly matched what she remembered better, and made more sense.
"I must go. There are days when, even for elves, there is not enough time." Windwolf waved the guard with the present forward, took it, and banished both guards back to the scrapyard. "Last I saw you, you were a child, and now you are an adult. I want to grasp this moment before this too slips away."
He held out the present.
The keva beans had been harmless enough, and this gift looked no larger than the last. "Is this for me?"
"If you desire it."
Why did elves make everything seem so dangerous? It was just a small fabric-wrapped bundle. "What is it?"
"I thought it best to stay with the traditional gift for the occasion."
Trust elves to have a traditional gift for saving one's life. She unwrapped it tentatively. She was glad he had told her it was a traditional gift. Certainly it wasn't what she expected. She wasn't even sure what it was. It seemed to be a metal bowl, intricately worked as one expected of an elfin work, yet it stood on three legs anchored to a disc of marble. It had quite a heft to it, and what impressed her most was that Windwolf had made it seem so lightweight. She tried not to compare it with Lain's entire garden. The child in her, though, wanted to cry, That's it?
"Do you accept?"
"Yes."
He smiled. It was like the sun coming out. He spoke a word in High Elvish and kissed her on the forehead. The touch of his lips seemed to sizzle on her skin.
Tinker called Lain from her scrap yard. "He brought me a bowl."
"A bowl?"
"Well, I think it's a bowl." She described it at length to Lain, who identified the gift, after some thought, as a brazier, and explained that one burned incense or charcoal in the bowl, and the legs anchored into the marble made it stable and protected whatever it was sitting on from the heat.
A brazier? "Well, it's certainly not what I expected." Tinker eyed her gift. "I'm trying to figure out what the catch is."
A click of keys came from Lain's side of the connection. " 'Braziers are a symbolic gift. " Lain read from something. " 'Great importance is made of the wrapping of the gift, which must be extravagant, and the presentation, which must be subtle. Yes, but what does it stand for?"