Page 11 of Wings of War

Halting before the door to the office, Pip took a moment to wash her hands in the slop sink just outside of the door, using the pumice stone scrub to scour as much grease as she could off her skin. She scrubbed her hands on her coveralls to dry them, though all she succeeded in doing was coating her hands with dust. Oh, well. The dust was better than grease.

Straightening her shoulders and standing as tall as she could manage, she opened the door and strolled into the office vestibule.

The walls were formed of living branches, a few twigs formed into coat hooks on the inside wall while a root formed a long bench along one side.

The elf official wasn’t waiting on the bench. He stood in the center of the room with his arms crossed, his nose in the air, and a curl to his lip as his sharp gaze darted between her dacha and her muka.

Her dacha was a tall, lithe elf with an angular face, long brown hair braided along the sides in the style of the elves of western Tarenhiel, hazel-brown eyes, and skin so silver pale it was somewhere between porcelain and moonlight. As with many elves, he was handsome to the point of almost beautiful while his life behind a desk hadn’t given him the muscles of the warrior elves.

Next to him, the top of her mother’s head barely reached above his elbow. Muka—dwarven for mama—had a well-endowed figure that was all bosom and hips with no waist in between while her arms were well muscled. Her dark brown hair spiraled around her head in thick curls while her neat, feminine beard was curled and braided. Her skin was a bronze-brown with wrinkle lines around her dark brown eyes.

They were an odd pair. To the elves of Tarenhiel, Pip’s mother was far from what was considered feminine beauty. Then again, to the dwarves of the mountains, Pip’s dacha was far from the pinnacle of male strength.

As Pip stepped inside and closed the door behind her, the official elf gracefully turned to her. The curl to his mouth deepened as he swept a glance over her, as if assessing her from the dirt-smeared goggles in her messy hair to her dust-covered hands, and finally to her grease-begrimed coveralls.

Typical arrogant attitude from an elf from the capital, Estyra. He, clearly, wasn’t the type to get dirt underneath his prissy-clean fingernails.

In general, elves tended to have a superiority complex, and the elves in the central forests especially so. While dwarves weren’t hated like the trolls had been nor were they seen as utterly inferior the way humans had been, dwarves were disdained as filthy and uncouth. Thanks to the Alliance, attitudes toward the trolls had drastically changed and even humans were seen with a little more tolerance. At least, the humans of Escarland were generally well-regarded.

But attitudes toward dwarves hadn’t changed all that much.

Then again, dwarves didn’t exactly like elves in return either, so it wasn’t like elves had a monopoly on bad attitudes. The ability to be prejudiced was one thing that didn’t discriminate.

“Are you Pippak Detmuk-Inawenys?” The elf official stumbled over her dwarven-sounding first name and the first part of her family name before he hit the final, elven half. Her parents’ decision to combine their dwarf and elf family names created a mouthful.

He probably wouldn’t appreciate it if she offered for him to call her just Pippa, which she’d found was easier for elves and less exotic for humans. She’d gone by Pippa for years while she had been away from home, studying magical engineering.

Though she wasn’t going to offer her nickname of Pip. He didn’t deserve that.

“Yes, I’m Pippak.” Pip glanced from the official to her parents. Their somber expressions didn’t give any more indication of what was going on than the official’s did. “What’s this about?”

“You attended Escarland’s Hanford University and have a decree in magical engineering.” The official said it somewhere between a question and a statement, that curl to his mouth both doubtful and disdainful.

“Yes.” Pip wasn’t sure if he was looking for confirmation, but she gave it anyway, holding the elf official’s gaze while she did.

The prestigious Escarlish university had become the place to study magical engineering after Tarenhiel’s Prince Farrendel Laesornysh—Pip had to bite back the instinctual squeal—attended there for a magical engineering decree.

Pip had been a young half-dwarf, half-elf child when Tarenhiel and Escarland signed their peace treaty and Prince Farrendel of Tarenhiel married Princess Elspeth of Escarland.

And Pip had become obsessed. There was something romantic about the king’s own brother in a mixed elf-human marriage. Until then, Pip’s parents had seemed like the only ones. Sure, there were others scattered all along the borders of Tarenhiel, mostly troll-elf pairs or human-elf pairs. But they kept their heads down, staying away from the public eye.

When the news broke that Prince Farrendel was attending Hanford University to get a magical engineering decree, his status as Pip’s childhood hero was cemented into place. From that moment on, Pip had dreamed of attending Hanford University herself. She’d even had a poster of Prince Farrendel on her wall while she’d been saving up to go.

Traveling across Tarenhiel and Escarland had been quite the experience, as had living in Escarland for four years among humans. While humans still had prejudices, mixed marriages were more common in Aldon. For the first time in her life, Pip hadn’t felt like as much of an oddity as she did when among the elves of her home village or the dwarves when visiting her mother’s family.

At the end of those four years, she’d returned to her backwater home at the edge of Tarenhiel and continued to help her family keep the trains running as if her little jaunt to Aldon had never happened.

“Hmm.” The elf official didn’t look entirely convinced, though he lifted the sealed envelope he had been holding. The green wax seal glittered with edges of gold and was pressed with the oak tree symbol of the king. “As preparation for a likely war between the Alliance Kingdoms and the Mongavarian Empire, the Flying Corps of both Escarland and Tarenhiel are recruiting mechanics to form an auxiliary mechanic unit to repair the aeroplanes, flyers, and all assorted flying vehicles of the joint operations of the Alliance Flying Corps.”

Her heart squeezing in a strange way in her chest, Pip took the letter, holding it in her grimy hands for a moment. Was she supposed to break the seal and read it in front of the official? Or wait until he left? Did he need an answer right away?

Before she could do more than awkwardly stand there for a long moment, the official straightened and nodded to Dacha. “Thank you for your hospitality. I will take my leave. I will await a response in Morne.”

He named the local village, which boasted a single boarding house to accommodate the occasional visitor they got all the way out here.

With that, the official swept from the office. Through the window, she caught sight of him climbing onto his bicycle, then pedaling off along the forest path that wound from the railyard to the village.

“Well, that was something.” Muka rested her hands on her hips just above her tool belt, which held everything from a hammer to her favorite wrench to a tin of grease.

---