As if Anise didn’t have enough on her plate, here comes the gentleman who fell from the sky with his nuts out.
“Hey,” says the amateur magician, coming to a stop next to the packmistress. “You called?”
He’s a youngish half orc, hair cropped, with rose-colored skin. His thick, dark brows and heavy lids give his resting face a grave, intense, almost unkind look. Anise can see the holes along his ears and face where his piercings must have dwelt before his unplanned crossover left them behind. Whatever dose of the blood he has, it wasn’t enough to give him visible tusks, but he has the strong bones of the pack, like he was sketched by a draftsman eager to prove their mastery of the planes of the face.
Dee finds a hat among the pile of supplies and pops it onto his uncomplaining head. “You’re feeling better?”
“Much. This is delicious.” He holds the cider up. “It’s a heavy pour on the whiskey, but I’m not complaining.”
Dee smirks. “That’s the fool’s blanket. Warms your bones up.”
“We call it a booze blanket on Earth.”
“Booze.” Dee turns over the unfamiliar word. “That a word for alcohol?”
“Uh huh.” He blows across the surface of his drink.
She chuckles. “I like that. Sounds how it feels. Booze.”
“Hi. Excuse me.” Anise waves a nervous hand. It’s difficult to move her arms around with how heavily she’s bundled up. High elves were made to live in the tropics. She’s struggling. “We need to talk.”
Beneath his heavy brow, his dark eyes slide her way. “You’re Anise, right?”
“Correct. Anise Cantator.” She sticks out a bundled-up hand, and he shakes it. “And you’re Nicky, says Dee.”
“Nick.”
“Okay. Nick. I feel a maternal responsibility to chew you out for a second. All right?”
She sees him flinch, but the tour needs her in Karen mode right now. “All right,” he says.
“You made a seriously big mistake,” she says. “And there’s seriously a 99.9% chance it would have killed you. You got seriously lucky that you popped out along our travel path.” Her boss jokes he knows she’s had too much coffee when she uses the word seriously this much. “Legally speaking, we’re supposed to escort you back and turn you in as a danger to yourself and others. Doing this stuff unlicensed is a felony.”
Nicholas scratches beneath his shearling collar. “If I was licensed, it’s not like I could show you. I don’t even have my fucking wallet.”
“You licensed, then?” Dee asks.
“I’m…” He rolls the question around. “I was fully intending on it. But how do you know, right? That you can do it, until you do do it. Am I gonna go through the whole thing before I even know I can do it?”
Anise tries to keep her disapproving mom face on, but she has asked these exact questions herself. “Look,” she says. “We’re running a tight ship here, with a lot of eyes on us, from both sides of the Door. But we’re not narcs.”
He smiles gratefully, though his eyes remain shadowed and piercing. Byronic is perhaps the word for those eyes.
“You don’t strike me as the kind of guy we need to drag back in cuffs anyway,” she says. “Even if I had the resources for it.”
“I could do it,” Dee says. Nick gives her a furrowed glance of confused betrayal. She shrugs. “It’s my job, Nicky.”
“I need you here,” Anise says. “We were a lean operation already before the whole Trakor Pack business and now we’re leaner and we’ve lost a day waiting for this guy to thaw.”
Dee frowns at the mention of the Trakors. Anise tries not to feel guilty about that.
“I don’t know who I can even spare,” she continues. “But as soon as we can, we’ll figure out a cover story and get you home, Nick, okay? We’re due at Packland Cross tomorrow; maybe we can spare an orc and a rhino after, if you’re okay with another night outdoors.”
“You should let me stay,” Nick says.
Anise’s green eyebrows shoot skyward. She checks his drink. He’s only had a sip or two. “What do you mean? Why?”
“You’re shorthanded,” he says. “You said so yourself. I can stick around. I can work. Been on tours. You need a stagehand, a merch table guy, a guitar tech, I do that. I’ve bounced too, but, uh.” He glances at Dee. “Don’t know if I can bounce in the Packlands. But anything else, I’m game.” That dagger gaze again.
“Okay. Uh.” She reaches for her phone and remembers that she has no satellite service because she’s in magical la-la land. “Okay. Nick, I’m sorry. That’s seriously kind of you to offer. But you’re a stranger we dug out of the snow because you messed up a felony, and this is a tour for the most famous band on the planets, with an S.”
“You’re not running it like one,” Nick says. “You’re running lean, like you said. This is a proof of concept, right? Nobody’s done this. So you’re being really conservative and you’re being careful. I get that. I can help. I can be careful.”
“Careful doesn’t accidentally transmigrate.”
“I fucked up on that,” he says. “I admit it. But you can’t spare anyone? I’m here. You can put me to work anywhere. And if I piss you off, you can get me arrested.”
Anise puts her face in her hand to rub her temples and remembers she’s wearing a frigid glove. “That wouldn’t be a net gain, Nick. I’d be giving up someone to train you and acclimate you and keep an eye on you, quite frankly.”
“I could do it,” Dee says. It’s Anise’s turn to stare and get shrugged at. “It’s my job, boss.”
“You’re already working really hard, Dee,” Anise says. “You sure you want to take this on?”
“I’ve got headcount to make up to you,” Dee says. “The pack’s holding up. I think we give it a try. If he knows what he says he knows, we can put him to work right away on the roadie stuff, and I’ll train him up on the rest so he ain’t a burden.”
Nick’s face lights up.
“Rest your rhino for a sec there, man.” Dee chuckles. “I got a condition.”
“Whatever you need," he says.
“Swear off your old pack and swear yourself to mine,” Dee says. “I can’t be training an orc who ain’t in the pack. I’ll piss everyone off. Acknowledge me as your packmistress and leader. Be known to all as Nicholas of Pack Voraag, for all your days.”
Nick’s mouth is agape. He does have tusks, Anise realizes. They’re just small. “All my days? Like… all? Like forever?”
Dee nods. “The rest of your life,” she says. “That’s what I need.”
Wind whistles across the snow.
“I don’t have a pack,” he says, quietly.
“Swear off whatever you had, then,” she says. “Family, job, whatever bound you to the new world. And join us.”
She sticks her hand out. Nick stares at it. Anise does, too.
“We’re new,” Dee says. “But we’re on the rise. I need people who ain’t afraid of hard work. You’ll have to learn a different way of living, and how to speak the language and ride a rhino and shoot your dinner. And it’ll make some of my other people mad, and your human half’ll make it harder sometimes, I bet. But I’ll help you. I’ll protect you. And I’ll make you strong. Those are my terms. Otherwise, we’ll find someone to take you home.”
Anise is thankful for Dee’s diplomatic way of turning the guy down. She’s known Nick for all of five minutes and it’s already pretty clear he’s a troublemaker and hey why is he kneeling?
“I swear myself to Pack Voraag,” he says. “And I acknowledge you as my packmistress and leader.” He glances back up. “Anything else I need to say?”
Dee is beaming. “Nah,” she says. “That’ll do. Get on up, Nicky Voraag.” She helps him to his feet. “Didn’t even need to kneel, y’know. But it was a cute touch.”
“Can I ask you to call me Nick?”
“You can, but I’m the packmistress and I’m calling you Nicky.” She slaps him on the back. “I’ve got to be a hardass on you sometimes. Just how it works.” She sticks her thumb up at Anise. “There you go, boss. You’re a witness. Now he’s part of the pack and we can trust him.”
Anise rakes her hand through her hair as she stares at the newest member of Pack Voraag. “How can we just automatically trust him now?”
“If he betrays us, I’m legally allowed to kill him,” Dee says, patiently.
“Oh,” Anise and Nick say.
They leave the half orc with the road crew to get him acquainted with the tour, and meet with Anise’s outriders at the edge of camp. Dee asked earlier today whether Anise might like to join her on the advance team to treat with Taff, the master of Packland Cross North, and the elf had, in a cavalier moment, agreed.
She doesn’t quite understand why she so badly wants to impress Dee. The orc girl is an employee, after all. She ought to keep that in mind.
“You want your own rhino, boss?” Dee asks, as they approach the pen.
Anise plays a pet class in every video game she’s able to, because she wants the escapist fantasy of being good with and respected by animals. In real life, the first time she rode a rhino, a cute little pygmy named Rosebud, she got dumped off three times. “I’d rather not, if it’s an option,” she says.
“No sweat. You can ride with Hammy and me.” Dee swings herself onto Hammer, her destriox, war-bred and massive. She extends a huge green hand. “Front or back?”
“Uh.” Anise takes in Hammer’s cold, alien eyes and her employee’s encouraging grin. “Let’s go front.”
She grips Dee’s forearm and tries not to yelp as the orc yanks her up into the saddle, shifting herself back to make room for Anise. The elf’s petite enough that the back of her head is brushing against Dee’s padded chest.
Dee’s thick arms reach around Anise’s shoulders to take hold of the reins. “Lean back a bit,” she instructs. “Gonna be kinda bumpy. I got you.”
Haltingly, Anise leans back. Plenty of layers between them. No impropriety here.
“All right, folks. Ranva Hok.” Dee clicks her tongue and Hammer breaks into a trot. Her packmates fall in behind her on rhinos of their own, tossing clipped, guttural packtongue back and forth as they head out of the encampment.
Anise is being jostled. “HoW fAr ArE wE gOiNg oN tHeSe?” she stammers, as Hammer bounces her up and down.
Dee laughs. Her thighs squeeze up on either side of her and lock her into stabilizing place. “Gotta teach you to post into a trot at some point,” she says.
Anise’s face goes rather warm despite the chill. She’s very glad the orc can’t see it. “Or just keep my ass in the trailer.”
“This’ll play well,” Dee says. “You do the talking, it’s good to ride up on a rhino, not in a trailer. Shows face. All due respect, boss. It’s just kinda one of them old world things.”
“Speaking of which.” Anise frowns. “Were you serious back there? About being legally allowed to kill him?”
“Serious as far as it’s legal, sure," Dee says. "But now that he knows, I bet I won’t have to. If he darts anyway, I might just have to wing him outta mercy and drag him back. City folks don’t last out here. Can’t imagine Earthlings have a better chance.”
One of her riders—a rangy woman named Graila, if Anise remembers right—sends a few Packtongue words Dee's way. She laughs at whatever her packmate just said and replies, emphasizing the last word with a glottal click of her tongue.
Anise knows the word for elf is midrai. Was she imagining it tucked in there somewhere?
“Anyway," Dee says, as Graila returns to the front of the line. "I got a good feeling about him.”
“I wish I could share it," Anise says. "But I dunno. He’s an unlicensed bard and we know nothing about him.”
“Sure,” Dee allows. “But I put something real heavy on him and he made like he’ll lift it. He’s moving like he owes me his life, which he does. We have that.”
“If he wasn’t just fooling us,” Anise says. “I mean, what kind of guy just drops everything and picks up a totally new life, just like that?”
“You’ve never thought about it?”
Anise frowns. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve never looked at what you’ve got and thought, what if there was something different?” Dee’s thighs shift at Anise’s hips to keep Hammer steady. “We only have the one go-around before it’s off to the bonfires above. You’ve never wondered how it’d be, letting it all go and grabbing onto something else? I have.”
Anise thinks about it. About the ficus in her cubicle and the fading photos on its wall of all the shows she went to when she was a kid. Beaming and throwing the horns next to rock stars in a leather miniskirt. She remembers how she used to be, and how she is now, and the endless pinging tyranny of her inbox. She wonders how many unread messages she has already, and how many will be waiting for her when she’s back in real life, riding subways instead of rhinos.
“It just seems irresponsible,” she says. “Who knows what responsibilities he’s leaving behind to pick up yours?”
“Not wrong,” Dee says. “But he’s been agreeable enough so far. And if he’s got the discipline to get within spitting distance of an incantation, he’s got drive. Pack Voraag needs drive. Gimme a sec.”
They’re riding past a Packland marker—a standing stone with a half dozen wooden beams tied to it crosswise with cord. That one with the three saffron rings on its edge is Voraag’s, Dee’s told her, and there are twenty or thirty notches carved into its length. Dee leans off Hammer’s side and digs another into the wood with a heavy single-bevel knife.
“And he’s pretty cute,” she adds. “Nicky, I mean.”
Anise snorts.
“You don’t think so?”
“He’s not not cute. I just don’t think that being cute makes someone more trustworthy. If anything, it goes the other way.”
Dee exhales a pensive breath. Anise feels it on her neck. “You don’t gotta worry about it, boss, okay? You got enough on your mind. My pack, my problem. Maybe you don’t trust him, but you can trust me, right?”
“Right.” Anise tries to let herself relax about this one. Don’t grip so tight. Don’t try to fix the world. “Thank you, Dee. Just monitor him, okay? Make sure he doesn’t go off incanting again. I don’t want a rogue bard loose in the camp.”
“No sweat, boss.” Dee flicks the reins to steer Hammer around a divot in the well-trod road. “I’ll be keeping a reeeeal close eye on that one.”
“Oh my god, Dee.”
She laughs and winks. “Kidding, boss.”