In Other Lands

by Sarah Rees Brennan

But Luke looked upset, and Luke’s life was not quite as easy as Elliot had always supposed—not as easy as Elliot had thought it was when he first saw Luke, not even as easy as Elliot had thought it was this morning—and Elliot had promised to be supportive.

Being more tactful was the only possible tactical decision.

It was probably better to know how to interpret what everyone said to you as the best thing they could’ve meant than to know history.

Once you watched out for what people didn’t say, everything became very clear.

“Why are you frowning at me?” “That’s just what my face does when I look at you,” Elliot said automatically.

He had been wishing for love his whole life, and if he’d had just one wish that wish would have been her. He was not sure how it had happened, or why: but the wish granted, he had to prove he could deserve it. He did not know how to be grateful enough.

It was terrifying to have something: he wondered if other people lived their whole lives in this strange state between exultation and absolute dread. He’d never had anything to lose before.

“Luke, please don’t develop an eating disorder,” Elliot begged. “We do not have any therapists in this world!”

“I am pretty intuitive,” Elliot said, with beautiful simplicity. “And sensitive. And New Age.”

Myra was definitely Elliot’s favorite forever.

He was the significant other of an elf, but he hadn’t expected to be made into The Significant Other rather than being Elliot.

One of Elliot’s dorm mates, Benjamin Rainfall, had died in the battle. Elliot remembered how he had always begged Elliot to blow out his candle, stop reading, and let him sleep. Elliot wished he had let him sleep now.

Every year, he thought, things got more complicated, and there were so many ways to lose.

“Do you love your country?” “What, England?” asked Elliot. “Wow. Am I a poet in 1914?”

“Can a country be a home?”

This was the difference between making a bargain and winning a victory. The other side was not getting punished, and Elliot was not getting rewarded. Elliot would still rather make a bargain.

Nobody can understand it, the commander had said, and the challenge echoed in Elliot’s bones, as perhaps the commander had wanted it to. A challenge was more familiar to him than love, and felt close to the same thing, as though one led to the other. He felt his heart beat to the double time of two words. Not yet.

He had not thought about how dangerous it would be, to have all his dreams come true.

“You’re hilarious. Please keep joking until the bandits kill us all.

He didn’t know what the excuse for Christmas was in the story he’d read about the magic land with the important lion.

He had never believed in much, once he stopped believing in her.

“Um,” said Elliot. “Maybe both our societies are messed up, and they each only think one type of person is really a person. And the type of person they think is really a person is allowed to show imperfections and age . . . whereas the type of person they think is an object should show no signs of being a person. We’re socialized to see the imperfections in those objects.”

Elliot had taken much worse than this for no reason at all, and this was for her, for the best reason he knew. He didn’t care what anyone did to him.

“Not cool! Harpies are monsters, do you hear me? They are not like dwarves or even dryads: they are death with wings. They are the owls to your mice. They rip with their claws, they swoop, and they kill, and once you are dead they rend the body until it is stinking offal, because mutilation of corpses is their beast’s idea of sport. And your dumb hair is a beacon.

Elliot sulked. He would keep still since Luke was in a tizzy, but if Luke thought that he could persuade Elliot to stay put when he got a chance to see mermaids rather than harpies, Luke had another think coming.

There was something small and dark folded in her hand. “I thought this might come in useful,” she whispered, and fitted a black woolen cap over Elliot’s head. Elliot smiled, not surprised by her brilliance but by her thoughtfulness, and she smiled back.

“Uh, because we think an animal is obsessed with a ridiculous social construct of purity based on who’s been touched where with what, as if people’s moral worth depends on what basically amounts to a game of Clue?” Elliot said. “Sure it is. Give me a break.”

The unicorn headbutted the tree even more vehemently. Everyone was a critic.

“I can try,” Luke said in the hollow tones of one who had nothing but his duty left.

Serene took a breath, and Elliot almost thought that she might brush this off, instead of him. He almost wanted her to. But his Serene had never been lacking in courage.

I’ve never had anything be easy in my whole life. I don’t want easy. I wouldn’t know what to do with easy if I had it.”

Every world I know of is messed up.”

Her pallor was alarming: she was white as salt, white as exposed bone. There was so much pain in her face that she almost looked like a different person. She almost looked human.

Elliot felt his heart sinking in that cold silence, as if he had thrown it like a stone into a deep dark pool.

Serene was a soldier, before she was anything else. She was brave and never backed down from a challenge. She met his eyes when she spoke, and he saw how sorry she was to say it.

Elliot drew in a long shuddering breath. He’d asked for it, as he had asked to be hit once when he thought she and Luke might be dead. “I understand.”

He had never lied to her before, never acted a part to convince her. She was the only person who had ever liked him before he learned, however poorly, to be tactful and hide some portion of who he was. He felt as if he was losing that, as well as her, as he watched her walk out the door of his cabin.

Elliot clapped and cheered for every win of Serene’s, as he always had and always would.

“We’re shown all this stuff we were trained to want, shown the great adventure, and we jump at it like the dazzled fools we are. We’re too young to know any better, to know that we won’t triumph and be heroes, that we won’t be returned to the other world as if no time had passed, that the lies in the stories aren’t about mermaids or unicorns or harpies—the lies are about us. The lies are that we might be good enough, and we might get out. We could fail at everything we try to do here, and we will never be able to go back home. Even if we wanted to.”

He had enjoyed being the nice one, the one who could afford to be kind. It was easy to be generous, when you had something to give. He missed being happy.

He wanted to be kind to Luke, even if he didn’t feel there was much kindness left in him, and any kindness there was he fiercely wanted to save for himself. But that wasn’t how friendship worked, was it?

He did not know if it was enough to stay for, mermaids and a challenge.

He thought that quite possibly his previous experience meant he would be uniquely qualified to understand how difficult it could be, being someone’s girlfriend, all the small indignities that you suffered when you were trying to be intimate with someone trained to believe you were not altogether their equal.

It was so much worse to be silent and alone in company.

He told her he was really behind on his technology, and she laughed at him, but nicely, as if she thought he was fun and was ready to accept him. They all seemed ready to do that, and it was absolute blissful relief just to have people who would look at him when they spoke to him, who would listen when he replied.

Elliot wanted to shout at him, but he knew better than anybody that you could not fight people into caring about you or being fair to you. This was the punishment he got for trusting Joe, for thinking that because someone would throw a kind word to a kid that they were kind, that they could be counted on. He took the punishment.

“There’s something you should know about me, if we’re going to do this,” Elliot told him. “I always do exactly what I want, and I never care what anybody else thinks about it.”

He wasn’t sure why Jase felt qualified to comment on a basic reality about Elliot.

Then Elliot hooked an ankle behind Jase’s foot and sent him flying backward onto the bed.

“You seemed so sweet that first day. I thought you would be shy and kind of hesitant and in need of guidance.” “My best friends are war leaders,” Elliot pointed out. “Good luck with your thing.”