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“Hello,” said the beautiful elven maid. “I was just thinking, and I mean no offence, but—how can any fighting force crowded with the softer sex hope to prevail in battle?”
Please say mermaids, he thought. Please say something cool with wings.
The boy’s happy smile melted away, like ice-cream in relentless verbal sunshine. “I don’t know . . .,” said Surfer Dude helplessly, “what most of the words you just used mean.”
jerkin. He and Captain Woodsinger and Luke Apparently-Not-Sunburn and many of the other humans were dressed like that, in a lot of leather and straps. It looked pretty ridiculous to Elliot, especially compared to Serene’s form-fitting clothes, soft and green as moss.
Dale continued making cheerful oblivion an art form.
I want to read books and never, ever to fight. I’m a pacifist.”
The others called his clothes a tunic and breeches: Elliot called them a dress and leggings, and it looked pretty terrible combined with the fact that Elliot’s wild curly hair needed cutting and there was no hairdresser apparent in this magic land.
“My mother always said men’s minds were unsuited to the rigors of command,” Serene murmured. “With respect, sir.”
given that all his annoying roommates were doing was begging him to “get into bed” and “stop torturing us like this”—Elliot allowed himself to smile.
Teachers in the council-training course had the sad desperate look of old biscuits dunked in tea, who wanted to crumble but were too soggy. All the councilors Elliot had seen so far had the same defeated look.
“If you sail into the deepest ocean, you are killed by giant mermaids,” Peter said flatly. “Fascinating,” Elliot sighed. “You’ve made me very happy.” He contemplated the atlas in his hands, which also made him very happy. There was a place where the actual words HERE BE DRAGONS were written, and it was probably true.
Besides, is Mr Dustlaid going to punish me? Really? He can barely summon up the will to live.
Nobody has to make a rock.” “Says who?” asked Luke. Elliot squinted. “Luke, are you being metaphysical?” Luke looked alarmed. “I don’t think so.” “Pity,” said Elliot. “I would have been very impressed.”
“Everyone has a choice, if they choose to make one, and I choose not to do this. The value of people does not rest on their ability to hurt others.”
“I am not winning any arguments because I know how to hurt someone. How does that prove that you’re right? How does being stronger or more vicious prove anything, except that all this talk about honor is stupid? Where’s the honor in being better at hurting somebody? Telling me I have to do this is insulting, as if I can’t win any other way. As if I can’t win in a better way.”
“Yes, your point was extremely clear,” said Luke. “You’re just making the whole thing laboured and awkward now.”
“And you called enormous amounts of attention to yourself, which is not the way my mother taught me gentlemen should behave.” She was wearing her tiny smile, designed to be missed, except that Elliot never missed it.
She was very grown-up looking—she was eighteen, Luke had said—and her hair was all done up in a coronet of braids, and she was about the most beautiful person Elliot had ever seen. Weird magic land might not have electricity, but he had to admit it was full of hotties.
He sat with her and tried to make her laugh instead. It must be nice, to have a mother like that.
Neither of them seemed to realize how different it would have been if the spoiled son of an important man hadn’t wanted their mission to go smoothly, or if the treaty had affected the Border camp directly—if they’d had something to gain—rather than involving a village and a community of dryads. Neither of them seemed to realize that an idiot like Captain Whiteleaf should not have had the last word on the treaty.
“You’re not like her,” he added. “You’re like me. Nobody will ever love you enough to stay.”
antagonizing everyone in sight, being too short, too smart, too awkward, too unguarded, too wildly unused to company, until it was easier eventually to antagonize people on purpose.
He supposed it didn’t matter if someone left because you weren’t good enough or left because you actually drove them away. The result was the same.
Nothing changed, not permanently. Elliot had known that even when the miracle happened, and he was taken away to somewhere fantastical. Every bit of reality in the fantasy reminded him that miracles were not for him.
They looked like practise sketches of Luke, before the artist had got him right.
He only had so much time left, and he had so many books to get through.
Tattoo?
“The way,” Serene said, after a pause, her voice fierce so it would not shake, “they looked at me. As if my skin were sin, and theirs never could be, and I should have known.”
Fourteen wasn’t horrible, but it was more complicated, and sometimes that felt like the same thing.
Why would any human woman agree to have a child?”
“The more she talks the more sense it all makes,” said Elliot. “Has anyone else discovered that?”
That was how all Luke could do, all he was celebrated and adored for, ended up: these dead bodies in the dry path before them.
Does it get easier? Elliot thought, looking at her still pale face. Or is it just that you shut doors in your own heart and never open them again for fear of what is behind them?
He remembered thinking that the grave, older air she had was beautiful, was something elvish and wonderful, and felt sick of himself.
corpses. Apparently nobody but him thought it was at all suspicious that as soon as the humans had decided they wanted the land,
this conflict between the elves and the dwarves had arisen.
He wanted her to have a home where she was safe and warm and loved.
None of the councilors were actually allowed in the council room. They sat in an antechamber, and documents were sent out to them to put into proper language. After the big decisions were already made.
In another moment he was sure of it, and sure she had seen him. She began to run, faster than any human could, racing elven-fleet across the grass. Elliot ran down the hill toward her, stumbling as he went, lent speed by the slope and not caring if he fell. He fell into Serene’s arms. She flew at him and he stumbled into her, and her hands held on to the back of his shirt, clutched handfuls of it as if he were trying to get away. He wasn’t. He clung to her, felt her slim and strong and safe against him. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and the sheltering dark veil of her hair. And
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“No,” Luke said loudly, and the boys paused in the very act of pulling him onto their shoulders. He offered Serene a hand, courtly as if he were helping her into a carriage. “Serene was with me every step of the way. I did nothing she did not do as well, and better. Serene too.”
Elliot was left to trail behind. As he did, he thought about Luke talking about literary tropes—the fearless hero, the valiant heroine, and where did it all leave him? Sidekick: a horrible indignity, Elliot refused to accept it. And the other idea was some sort of lurking, jealous figure: an Iago, a pathetic pseudo-villain waiting in the wings to plot and bring the hero down. He wasn’t going to plot against Luke, who had dumb daffodil hair and said “tropez,” for God’s sake.
She patted his hair with her heavily ringed hand, and he hoped she had not felt him tremble.
Sunshine painted them all in warm strokes, the song told them that fantasy could never be so giving, and Elliot sang along.
They had set this up like a game, they acted like it was all a game, like honor or glory was an acceptable exchange for a life.
“Sorry, um. It’s not you, it’s me,” Elliot said. “I don’t like you.” Elliot was beginning to suspect he was not smooth in these situations. He truly did not like Adam, but it was flattering, he supposed: he couldn’t quite get his head around the idea that it might be possible for him to hurt somebody, but if it was, he didn’t want to.
Nobody had ever loved Elliot, but he was really smart. He was smart enough to know the difference.
Elliot was slow to learn, that was all: he always had been, well before he ever came to the Border camp, when he kept hoping that his dad would start liking him and kept doing everything wrong so his dad never did.
It didn’t matter what they thought. It was no use Elliot sitting around making himself wretched over it. This wasn’t even about Elliot feeling bad: if Elliot had been the one to make Luke feel bad, it was his responsibility, and it was Luke’s feelings that mattered.
This loyalty was even more impressive, Elliot told himself, on a new quest to be understanding and kind, considering he didn’t think Luke knew their names.
“Why do you walk inside when nobody’s told you to come in?” asked Luke. “I don’t want to spend my whole life waiting outside closed doors,” said Elliot.
Luke shrugged, the last of the tension going out of his shoulders. Serene looked relieved. Elliot knew that she lived in the constant fear that one of them was going to go off into hysterics.
