In Other Lands

by Sarah Rees Brennan

Elliot had lost count of all the ways that people could betray you, out of love or indifference. He didn’t know which was the worst way to be betrayed.

It was strange how different the same thing could feel. Serene had dumped him, and he would’ve done anything to get her back, had missed her every day for months. Now Jase had dumped him, and suddenly and simply, Elliot didn’t ever want to see him again.

“Oh my God,” said Elliot. “You can’t handle me now.” He found himself almost laughing in Jase’s baffled face. He knew what was wrong with him: awkward, spiky, occasionally cruel, inherently unlovable, all of that. But he’d always had a certain intense belief in what he could do: write treaties, end wars, throw all the knives away, make people listen to him, accomplish whatever he wanted. He was getting better at it too: by the time he was twenty, someone like Jase would be a haystack in the path of a hurricane.

He walked out. Jase made a discontented sound, almost fretful, as if he’d pictured it all differently, but it was Alice who chased after him, who leaned over the rail to call down to him as he was making his way down the stairwell. “I really do think you’re a nice kid!” she said. “I’m really not,” Elliot called back up. Alice smiled. “Well, I definitely think you’re going places.” “I definitely am,” said Elliot.

There was time to become whoever he chose. There was still time.

Thinking of Jase made Elliot remember Jase’s reaction to Elliot saying he liked girls as well, and that made his lip curl. The odds were better for Elliot than other people: he could look for a boyfriend or a girlfriend.

“People are awful everywhere,” she told him. “Not just kids. Everyone. They tell you people outgrow it, but they don’t. Everywhere you go, you see dynamics just like the petty gangs of youth. Which isn’t to say that school is not a very special hell, as people haven’t yet learned to hide how awful they are.”

“I don’t have a special table,” Elliot protested. “Uh, you, the murderous, man-hating elf girl, and the intense gay kid?” asked the medic. “You’re the weirdo table.”

“Well, I just don’t think that’s true.” “You’re the intense weirdo table. I don’t care what you think is true.”

They’re like—boxes of infinity.

“Good,” Elliot told him. “I don’t like wizard stories all that much. Stories about witches are better, because witches are morally ambiguous and traditionally disempowered. And of course my very favorite is—”

“Cry me a river of blood tears, you ginger whiner!” Adara exclaimed.

“This is a play that will involve a mostly human cast and be played in front of a mostly human audience, and this is not how humans see men and women! It might be good for them to think about how our situation gets flipped around by the elves. I’m not going to have my play ruined by someone who finds it too traumatic to even pretend to walk in someone else’s shoes.”

“You have not learned yet that the light of the world is men burning. The years will pass and you will know what it is to be consumed.”

The only possible response to someone telling you that they wanted to be friends, or that you were a great friend, was gratitude. Elliot had been friendless long enough that he knew friendship was a prize in itself. Myra was lovely, and thought the best of him.

It was never going to be his turn. The world didn’t work by turns: the sun shone on some people and not on others. It was always going to be Luke’s turn, over and over again.

Elliot wondered what this magic land would make them all into, in the end.

But Elliot didn’t want love to be like that. He loved Serene, and he did not want to catch her in his arms if she stumbled. He wanted to help her to her feet.

And he did not want to be loved as a second choice, as a surrender. He had spent his whole life not being loved at all, and he had thought being loved enough would satisfy him. It would not. He did not want to be loved enough. He wanted to be loved overwhelmingly.

He had never been chosen, so he had never had a chance to know this about himself before now: he wanted to be chosen first.

Elliot looked back at her, longing and amazed there was something stronger than that longing.

“Hey,” said Elliot. The late afternoon was warm and glowing. It lent her face something that was almost like softness, but not quite. Her long copper-red braid glowed in the bright light. There were plenty of redheads in the Borderlands: half the elves were redheads. Elliot had never thought twice about her hair. Not before.

Elliot stood leaning against the fence for some time: the first place he had learned about magic, met Serene and Luke, chosen to stay. He had believed in a lot of stories, back then, including the ones he told himself.

I just found my mother, and it turns out that what I always feared is absolutely true. Neither of them ever wanted me at all. I have been unwanted for my whole life. By the way, I like guys as well as girls, and I’d appreciate it if you’d quit implying I hit on everyone. You are one of only two people I love, and I have to know if I have any real value to you.

“No,” said Elliot. “I’m not. That medic, Elka Pathwind? She’s my mother. She left me when I was a baby, and she doesn’t want me now. She looked at me as if I was some years-old mess that she’d thought was behind her, something rotting and useless and—and hateful, and I do not know what to do except maybe prove her right. I’m not—I don’t know how to be—I’m planning on being emotional and too much trouble and everything you hate, so why don’t you just go? Go! Get out!”

She didn’t have to tell him, because he could tell. That was what it meant, when people came to find you, when they cared enough to sacrifice for you, when they supported you, when they came back. He could tell when someone cared.

“Cadet Schafer, how would you describe your conversational style?” “Er . . .,” said Elliot, and grinned. “Drive it like I stole it.”

They looked, and spoke, all night long. She seemed interested in looking closer, Elliot thought, as she held her hand up against his. Her fingers were cool against his, and webbed at the bases.

He only wanted to look at her, and see her looking at him. Her skin felt different than human skin, looked different: her very eyes looked different, lucent in her skull. Those are pearls that were her eyes, Elliot thought, but her eyes had been pearls all along. She was a story made flesh.

“That’s a smile,” said Elliot. “My kind do it before laughing, sometimes. Do your kind not do it?” “No. My kind just laugh, and sing, and . . .” The mermaid looked at him, wondrous and wondering, and then leaned forward. Elliot experienced a thrilling shock like a cold ripple in the water, as he felt her cool mouth on his, felt the press of her sharp teeth beneath her flesh. She leaned away. “Do your kind do that?” Elliot could not help laughing. “Yes. My kind do.”

Meeting mermaids was the one thing about a magical land, in three years, that had finally gone right. Elliot had hoped meeting a mermaid would feel like the end of the story, feel like he could close the book. Instead, he found himself laughing along with Luke, and wishing he could meet harpies.

“I am a stone-cold pacifist,” Elliot claimed.

“Do not have a catfight, boys, even if it is that time of the month,” said Serene, and when she saw them staring at her, she explained: “You know—women shed their dark feelings with their menses every month? But men, robbed of that outlet, have strange moodswings and become hysterical at a certain phase of the moon?”

Tom’s glasses didn’t suit him, Susan’s hairband matched her shirt, and he felt he was caught up on them.

That was love: Elliot couldn’t command it, couldn’t demand it. He could only leave the chill echoing place where it was not.

All over the gray façade of his father’s house in scarlet letters he wrote: ELLIOT SCHAFER. He almost added: “was here” but did not, partly because it was a little too clichéd vandal for him, and partly because it did not encompass all he wanted to say: was here, is no longer here, is somewhere almost unimaginably different, is all right.

Peace was possible, across the whole of the Borderlands, not peace everlasting but peace for years, peace enough so that all of the groups in this land past the Border would know what it was like to live with and work with each other. They could all learn about each other, and every piece of knowledge about each other gained would take them a step further away from being enemies. Elliot had said he wanted peace before he finished school.

Woodland and farmland, sky and sea, and peace for years.

There were too many off-color jokes, remarks in class and whispering outside of class. It reminded Elliot of the way people had acted when he and Serene were going out: little pushes, to make what they did not want to see go away. Except Luke could not make what he was go away.

Luke had no idea how concerned Elliot was about him, in classes they did not share or during Trigon games or last thing at night.

Elliot held it out of his reach, smiling. “What will you give me for it?” “What do you want?” Luke asked, and the way he spoke made Elliot feel very uncomfortable. He sounded like Elliot had sounded when he was younger, negotiating through clenched teeth for the return of his schoolbag. Except Luke couldn’t feel that way. Elliot had done all this research for him: it must be obvious how Elliot felt.

Elliot had tried to bring a lifetime’s supply of Sharpies. If the commander looked in, it was going to seem as though Elliot had a problem.

“I do like to think of myself as something of a dashing pen pirate,” Elliot told him. “The pen is mightier than the sword, you know.”

Elliot laughed. “I can’t believe nobody else knows you’re a jerk.”

He’d liked the stories about Caroline the Fair: he’d chosen someone who had been happy, and whom he thought Luke would find interesting. There were other stories of half harpies who had lived sad short lives, or wicked lives. Elliot had not written about them.

These were the kinds of woods stories warned you not to get lost in, not to venture off the path into. Elliot found them a little thrilling.

And so much of what Elliot had read came from outside sources and not the harpies themselves. He wanted to talk to them, to hear them tell their own stories, to find out the truth.

“Like a small localized forest fire, and up until this moment I thought of it as just about as disastrous.”

There had been a lot of times where Luke, the one who was usually less hurt and more secure, the happier one, had let Elliot get away with snapping at him, had defused situations Elliot was trying to escalate by just accepting whatever Elliot dished out, had not taken what Elliot said in the wrong way or assumed the worst of him. He’d been able to afford generosity. He’d also chosen to be generous.

Elliot had, he realized, been waiting for Luke to hurt him for years.