Covington waited as if there was more he needed. Wolf turned to him.
“I’m not sure what to do with the oni,” Covington continued their conversation. “Do you know their practices?”
“I am told that they in times of plenty, they feed their dead to their hounds,” Wolf said. “In times of famine, they eat both their dead and their dogs.”
“I don’t believe that’s true. That’s the kind of sick propaganda that always gets generated in a war.”
“Elves do not lie.” Wolf paused to consider the areas he just paced off. He believed that the one section of the clearing was large enough for the dreadnaught to land easily, even in high winds. The other sections, however, were deceptively small — they should mark the areas in some manner.
“Everyone lies.” Covington demonstrated in two words the humans’ greatest strength and weakness. They were able to look at anything and see it as human. It gave them great ability to empathize but it also kept them from seeing others clearly.
“Our society is built on blind trust,” Wolf said. “Lying is not an option for us.”
But Covington couldn’t see it. Perhaps it was too big for him to grasp. The need for truth came from everything from their immortality, to their fragile memory, to the ancient roots of the clans, to the interdependency of their day to day lives. Tinker, though, seemed to understand it to her core.
“Treat Sparrow as you see fit.” Wolf knew that Covington would be true to his human nature, and treat her with respect, but unknowingly consign the dead elf to the horrors of embalming fluid, a coffin and a grave instead of open sky. “Ask the EIA what to do with the oni bodies. Be aware that there will be more. Many more.”
Tinker’s grandfather always said that you needed a plan for everything from baking a cake to total global domination. He taught her the minutia of project management along with experimental and mathematical procedure. Over the years, she had put the skill to good use, from starting a small salvage business at age fourteen, to thwarting the oni army with just her wits and one unarmed sekasha.
The truly wonderful thing about focusing on a complex project was there wasn’t time to think of messy, extraneous details like elfin wedding customs. Just trying to drain off the buildup of magic out of the cooler required creative scavenging for parts and guerilla raids across the city for workers. She designed four jury-rigged pumps that used electromagnets to siphon magic into steel drums of magnetized iron fillings. Unfortunately, the drums would slowly leak magic back out, so they would have to rotate them out, letting them sit someplace until inert. While the siphons were inside the cooler, she sat the drums outside, so whoever changed them didn’t need to enter the locked room. The walls seemed solid enough — she would have to check the architectural drawings to be sure, but certainly reinforcing the door wouldn’t hurt.
The more she considered safety procedures, the less sure she was this was a good idea. The project, however, was rampaging beyond her ability to stop it. The Reinholds’ employees were searching out drawings and adding bars to the door, the EIA was sending a tractor-trailer truck to Lain’s, a dozen hastily drafted elves were gathering to help with the move, and she’d given out her promises like Halloween candy.
Why was she doing this again? Was her only reason some nonsense out of a dream? Or was she really focusing on the tree so she didn’t have to consider that Tooloo was right?
Afraid that she’d fry any of her computer equipment, she had stuck to low-tech project management. Settling on the loading dock’s edge, she wrote ‘domi’ on her pad of paper and then slowly circled it again and again as her thoughts spun around the question.
Without question, she was Windwolf’s domi — the queen herself had confirmed that. Tinker had assumed that domi meant wife; for a long time she simply translated it as wife. Later, she had sensed that it didn’t mean quite the same thing. And Windwolf never used the English word ‘wife’ or for that matter, ‘married.’ He’d given her some beans, a brazier and a dau mark. She rubbed at her dau between her eyebrows, feeling the slight difference in skin texture under the blue glyph. What the hell kind of wedding ceremony was that? And nothing else? Hell, when Nathan’s cousin Benny had been married by the justice of the peace, they still had a wedding reception afterwards. Surely the elves did something to celebrate a marriage — so why hadn’t there been something?
If domi didn’t mean wife, what did it mean? She had talked to Maynard two months ago about it, she’d gotten the impression it meant she was married, but now she couldn’t recall the exact words that Maynard had used. What she remembered distinctly, was how Maynard had been carefully trying to keep his balance on the fence between the humans and the elves. Had she heard only what she wanted to hear? Certainly it would make a neater package for Maynard if Windwolf married Tinker instead of just carried her off to be a live-in prostitute.
Whispering in the bottom of her soul was a small voice that called her a glorified whore. She couldn’t ignore the fact that the only thing she did with Windwolf was have sex. Great sex. Wives did more than that — didn’t they? Nathan’s mother and sisters went grocery shopping, cooked for their husbands and cleaned up the dirty dishes but Lemonseed handled all that for Windwolf. Wives washed clothes — Nathan’s sisters actually had long discussions on the best ways to get out stains. Dandelion, however, headed the laundry crew.
Without thinking about it, she started a decision tree, branching out ‘wife’ and ‘whore.’ What difference did it make to her? She never worried about being a “good girl” but at the same time, she had always been contemptuous of women who were either too dumb or too lazy to do real work, using their bodies instead of their brain to make a living. Could she live with all of Pittsburgh knowing that she was a glorified whore?
Stormsong squatted down beside her, took the pencil from her hand, and scratched out ‘whore’ and ‘wife’ and wrote ‘lady.’ “That, domi, is the closest English word. It means ‘one who rules.’ It denotes a position within the clan that oversees households that have allegiance to them but are not directly part of their household.”
“Like the enclaves?”
“Yes, all the enclaves of Pittsburgh owe fidelity to Wolf Who Rules. He chose people he thought could function as heads and supported the building of their households. It is a huge undertaking to convince people to leave their old households and shift to a new one. To leave the Easternlands — to come this wilderness — to settle beside the uneasy strangeness of Pittsburgh —” Stormsong shook her head and switched to English. “You have no fucking idea how much trust these people have in Wolf.”
“So why did he choose me? And why do these people listen to me?”
“I think that he sees greatness in you and he loves you for it. And they trust him.”
“So they don’t really trust me?”
“Ah, we’re elves. We need half a day to decide if we need to piss.”
“So — I’m not married to him?”
Stormsong tilted her head side to side, squinting as she considered the two cultures. “The closest English word is ‘married’ but it’s too — small — and common.”
“So, it’s grand and exotic — and there’s no ceremony for it?”
Stormsong nodded. “Yup, that’s about it.”
A hoverbike turned into the alley with a sudden roar. Stormsong sprang to her feet, her hand going to her sword. Pony checked the female sekasha with a murmur of “Nagarou” identifying Tinker’s cousin Oilcan as the sister’s son of Tinker’s father.