Wen Spencer - Wolf Who Rules

She started to shake when the door closed behind him.

"I am sorry, domi. Until you refused him, I could not act."

"Was I right to say no?"

"I am disappointed only in him. He has the years to know that you were upset and could not make such decisions."

She got dressed, annoyed that her hands still shook. Why was she veering all over the place emotionally? Maybe she was going to get her period. Usually she wasn't this hormonal, but she hadn't had one as an elf yet. Oh, she hoped that wasn't the case; thousands of years like this would drive her mad. How often did elves get periods? It had been over two months since her last one as a human. Oh gods, what if she was pregnant? Of course that made her feel weepy again.

"I need something to drink." She said. "Can you ask Poppymeadow to find us a bottle of-" What was that stuff called again? "Ouzo?" Wait, if she was pregnant, should she be drinking? And if she was just getting her period, what did elves use? Pads? Tampons? Magic? Hopefully a period only lasted the normal five days - surely even elves couldn't do-that-for more than a week. Damn it, when Windwolf made her an elf, he should have given her an owner's manual for her new body.

She fumbled with her necklace and failed to get it off. "Oh please, Pony, get this off me."

Pony undid the necklace. "I will get you something to eat and drink, and then perhaps you should take a nap. You have been through much lately, domi, and you are worn down."

"I want to practice magic." She needed to learn how to protect her people.

"It would be difficult and dangerous the way you are now."

She supposed that was true. "Okay, okay. Something to eat and a nap - and I need to talk to Stormsong about - female - things."

Wolf had watched his domi retreat with concern. He expected her to be gnawing at the prince's ankles instead of breaking down into tears. He felt guilty for chiding her as he had. The oni must have affected her more deeply than he originally thought. He felt badly too that he had been pleased that she hadn't bedded Little Horse while they were prisoners together; he wanted her to himself as long as possible. Perhaps, if she had slept with Little Horse, she would have fared better.

At least she had turned to her beholden when she lost control of her emotions. As much as Wolf wished he could have taken her back to the enclave and comfort her, all of his people and the humans of Pittsburgh needed him to stay and deal with Prince True Flame.

Is this how the humans lived all their life? Having things that they desperately wanted to do - comfort their love ones, teach them what they needed to know-but with no time to do it? No wonder they seemed to rail at life so.

True Flame sat watching him, expression carefully neutral.

"Being the pivot-" Wolf sighed and shook his head. "It has subjected her to extraordinarily difficult choices. She's only had hours to recover her center."

"This is recovered?"

"No, and it worries me."

True Flame glanced away, as if embarrassed by what he saw on Wolf's face. "Forgiveness, Wolf. We get along because we both have no need for empty politeness - but I remember now that politeness can render much needed gentleness to the soul. I will keep my sword sheathed from now on."

"Thank you."

"There will be nothing that I can do when the Stone Clan arrives except to remind them that she is under my sister's protection. She will have to interact with them, and they will take advantage of her."

Wolf nodded unhappily. "It will be like trying to keep wargs from the lambs at this point. I wish there was some way I could keep her safe until she has had time to heal from whatever the oni has done to her."

True Flame shook his head. "They'll arrive tomorrow with my troops. I can delay the aumani a day, on the pretense of giving them time to settle in."

"Thank you." In their current situation, a day was most he could have hoped for. "Who have they sent?"

"Earth Son, Jewel Tear, and Forest Moss."

Wolf breathed out; the threesome was tailored for hostile opposition to him. He knew nothing of Forest Moss and thus could not foresee what danger lay there. Judging by the others, there was a good possibility, however, that this was an ancient member of the Stone Clan, to offset Wolf's youth. Earth Son's father was one of the three children of King Ashfall used to ally the strongest of the clans to the crown via marriage. Obviously Earth Son's inclusion was to eliminate Wolf's advantage with True Flame - at least in theory.

The Stone Clan had always misunderstood the nature of the alliance, and considered it a failure. The alliance had only produced Earth Son. While he showed his father's gene type in his height, his eyes, and his temper, his gene expression did not include attunement to the spell stones. Earth Son could not use the fire esva. When Earth Son came to court, he treated his Fire Clan cousins as strangers, and was regarded as such by them.

In comparison, Wolf's parents produced ten children, half of which inherited their mother's genome and pledged to the Fire Clan. Wolf grew up seeing the royal family an extension of his own and when he went to court, he fell under his older brothers and sister's protection. Earth Son seemed to fail to understand the slight differences in their position. He only saw the younger elf being rewarded with favor he thought he was due, and held it against Wolf.

The Stone Clan could barely find a delegate more ill-suited to deal with Wolf - but they had managed. Wolf spent a decade at summer court, thinking he and Jewel Tear were soulmates, the other half of each other, and all the other lyrical nonsense you thought while blindly in love. A hundred years and meeting Tinker had taught him that he'd been wrong about the entire nature of love. He and Jewel Tear had drifted apart soon after he came of age and his ambitions took him to the wilderness of the Westernlands. That the Stone Clan included her in the delegation probably meant he misjudged their relationship.

So these three were coming to his holdings and dealing with his people?

True Flame looked out at the sod covered clearing and the dense forest of tower ironwoods beyond. "What the god's name were you thinking of, leaving everything behind for this wilderness?"

"I was thinking of leaving everything behind for this wilderness."

"I've never understood why you're wasting yourself here."

"What would I be doing at court? Nothing has changed there since we last interacted with humans. We had completely stagnated. We had the same base of technology as the humans, and yet we didn't develop the car, or the computer, the telephone or the camera."

"We have no need of them."

"It doesn't bother you that we sat completely still for hundreds of years while they raced ahead?"

"Less than three hundred years, pup. It passed like a lazy summer afternoon in my life."

Wolf clenched his jaw against this. He'd heard the like all his life from elves younger than True Flame's two thousand years. "Every agricultural advance since the days of poking the holes in the ground with sharp sticks, we've stolen from the humans. The plow. Crop rotation. Fertilization. You're old enough to remember the great famines."

True Flame gave him a look that would have silenced him as a child.

Wolf refused to be rebuked. The events of the last three decades had proved him right. "It's as if we get locked into one mindset - this is how the world is and can't conceive or desire something more. I tracked back all our advances while I was at court-"

"I've heard this theory of yours, Wolf."

"Have you? Have you really listened to my words and thought it through?"

"True there were times of famine, and yes, we went to Earth and saw how to increase crop production and put those techniques to use. But we have lived in peace for thousands of years with all that we could want - why should we clutter up our lives with gadgets?"