In Other Lands

  “I’m certain your tale of stellar combat was riveting,” said Serene. “And I’m certain you’ll change your mind. Most men long for children, due to their selfless and nurturing natures.”

  “I don’t have one of those,” said Elliot.

  “What about Smooth Jazz?” asked Luke meanly.

  “What?” asked Serene.

  Elliot was about to echo her, but then he recalled his conversation with Luke about the hypothetical names for his and Serene’s hypothetical children that he’d had before he was acquainted with any actual children and their horrors. He did not think Luke bringing up this evidence of Elliot being absurd in front of Serene was playing fair.

  “Ix-nay on the abotaging-say of my elationship-ray,” said Elliot, kicking him, but that just made Serene and Luke both look at him as if he was speaking in tongues. He had so much to teach them about the other world: he’d forgotten the crucial aspect of pig Latin. “Anyway,” he said hastily. “Do you two have selfless and nurturing natures? I mean, hypothetically: Kids, yes or no?”

  “Women have so many other things on their minds,” said Serene. “I’ll decide when I’m older.”

  Elliot hoped she decided no. He really had not enjoyed Cyril’s hyperventilating.

  “I obviously can’t,” Luke snapped.

  “Uh, you obviously can, loser,” said Elliot. “We live in a military society frequently torn by conflicts and all. You’re telling me that somebody wouldn’t hand over a war orphan to a Sunborn and their life partner whose name might rhyme with Sail Cravefacer?”

  Luke had looked thoughtful when Elliot started speaking, but by the time Elliot was done he looked only flushed and embarrassed.

  “Shut up!” he said. “What if he heard you!”

  He got up and stormed away to whatever physical activity he’d decided he simply had to practice at lunchtime that day. He might be on to the javelin by now. Elliot suspected the system was alphabetical.

  As if Elliot had not already checked that Dale was nowhere in earshot. Elliot was sneaky and on the diplomatic track. He made a mental note to ask Dale about his opinion on children some time.

  “You embarrassed me a little in the commander’s office,” Serene said, and her voice was soft: loving but chiding, and Elliot truly did appreciate how hard she was trying not to overstep the boundaries of their new relationship, but he actually liked it better when she was being brash and open about her attitude toward men.

  It was difficult, this way, to separate out affection and condescension, and he didn’t want to reject the affection.

  “You know me, Serene,” he said, and pulled her hand away from his face, linked his fingers with hers instead. “I’ll be embarrassing you a lot soon enough.”

  She took it well. “Probably,” she murmured, and kissed him. “I don’t mind it too much.”

  They had a lovely ten minutes together, until Elliot sent Serene off to practise with Luke.

  He found something to occupy himself with while they were being bros. For the times when Elliot was not teaching, there was the library and, surprisingly enough, Myra. The first time he went there outside his usual study hours and found her there, he thought it was a happy coincidence. The third time, he was fairly sure there was something going on.

  “Never a bad time to get ahead on your studies,” she said when he asked, shrugging it off.

  Elliot raised his eyebrows. “And yet.”

  “Oh, fine,” said Myra. “If you must know—”

  “I must!” said Elliot. “Because I’m nosy and have no consideration for the feelings of others.”

  “I’m trying to avoid spending so much time with Peter,” Myra told him, a light flush creeping into her cheeks. “I think—he has feelings for me, and I don’t feel the same way.”

  “Why, Myra!” Elliot was delighted, though sorry for Peter. “You heartbreaker.”

  “I like someone else,” Myra continued, her blush deepening. “So it isn’t fair to lead Peter on. I’m hoping that if I put a little distance between us, he’ll get the message without me having to say anything.”

  Elliot wanted to know whom Myra liked, but the shadow of her mustache did nothing to hide the firm set of her mouth. He could tell when someone was not going to talk.

  “Well, I’m happy to keep you company,” he said. “Serene’s spending time with Luke, and I don’t want to get in the way of that.”

  Myra frowned. “I thought you were all friends.”

  “Not technically,” said Elliot. “I mean, not reciprocally.”

  Myra looked even more confused. Elliot gave it up, even though he felt personally that it was perfectly clear.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “Serene doesn’t want Luke to feel left out now that she and I are dating, so I am giving them space.”

  “Aw,” said Myra. “I think that’s really nice of you.” She paused. “So, you’re really serious about Serene?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  Elliot’s tone was more snappish than he’d intended, but Myra didn’t seem to take offence.

  “You know, you’re kind of a dramatic person, Elliot,” she said mildly.

  “I am not. How dare you!”

  “It’s not a bad thing,” Myra said. “But when a guy calls a girl the nightlight of his soul, other people might be forgiven for thinking he’s being intentionally over the top.”

  “I wasn’t being over the top,” Elliot argued. “I was way under the top.”

  Myra giggled. “Whatever you say, Elliot. And hey, it all worked out, didn’t it? You’re with her.”

  Elliot looked out the window. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, I am.”

  “And you were serious about her the whole time,” Myra said.

  “Yeah,” Elliot said, even more softly. “Yeah, I was.”

  “And she knew,” said Myra. “That’s what counts. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thought.”

  She smiled at him, and Elliot knew it was an apology for making him feel doubtful and uncomfortable, and he smiled back. She hadn’t meant it. And it wasn’t her fault if Elliot had expressed his feelings wrong. He always did that, as if life were a dance where everybody else knew the moves but Elliot was constantly and fatally out of step.

  Myra returned to her book. Elliot sat and looked out of the window, not dreamily this time but feeling a little cold.

  He had to be careful not to drive off Myra. He realized exactly what he had said, earlier, even if she did not: that Luke was not Elliot’s friend. And in a way, since Serene was now his girlfriend, she was not actually his friend anymore either. If—something were to happen, if he made too many mistakes and they broke up, Elliot would have nobody.

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

  “Come with me,” said Luke abruptly one day, turning up at the library and grabbing Elliot’s wrist and hauling him out of the room.

  Nobody protested this outrage but Elliot himself. Myra said, “Hi, Luke! Bye, Luke!” and waved Elliot good-bye with her little finger, not even putting down her book as her friend was carried off. It was scandalous and heartless.

  Elliot grabbed at the checkout desk as he went by.

  “Uh, help me?” he suggested. “Abduction!”

  “Don’t be a silly little thing,” said Bright-Eyes. “Men don’t abduct people. Just boyish high spirits! You should both channel them into embroidery.”

  “Maybe I would if I wasn’t being abducted!” Elliot hissed, but his grip on the desk proved futile as he was pulled away.

  Sometimes Elliot worried that Bright-Eyes-Gladden-the-Hearts-of-Women disliked him intensely for being a hussy and always in the library until closing time.

  “I don’t want to go with you,” Elliot declared. “You seem like a bad man.”

  Luke glanced at him over his shoulder, and grinned. “That’s a shame. I was thinking—”

  “I hope not unsupervised,” Elliot remarked. br />
  Luke rolled his eyes. “The bandits problem is only getting worse. Their numbers are growing—”

  “The bandits are banding together?” Elliot asked.

  He knew that the bandits, humans who had reportedly either left villages that were not thriving or gone rogue from the Border guard itself, were not funny. And he was touched by Luke’s concern. But Luke had handed him that line.

  “You’re hilarious. Please keep joking until the bandits kill us all. If you insist on getting into trouble, you could at least make yourself less trouble than you currently are, is my point. So your girlfriend and I don’t have to keep getting disciplined for pulling your insubordinate ass out of the fire.”

  “I won’t learn how to fight!” Elliot said, pulling out of Luke’s grasp with abrupt anger.

  “It’s not that hard,” Luke said patiently.

  “That’s not the point! You don’t understand anything.”

  “As you constantly remind me. Apparently I should understand someone endlessly putting themselves in danger but refusing to learn even the basics of self-defence—”

  “Yes!”

  “Sorry,” said Luke, grabbing him again and recommencing dragging. “I don’t understand things that are stupid. All right, look, do you have objections to dodging?”

  “What?”

  “Sharp objects? If they’re thrown at you, would you dodge them?”

  “Are you planning to throw them?” Elliot asked cagily.

  “How about running away?”

  “And back to the library? I am considering that.”

  “No,” said Luke. “Come on. If all you’re going to do is dodge or run, you have to learn to do it faster.”

  They had left the cabins, by which Elliot meant the buildings, by which he meant sweet sweet civilization, behind. Elliot eyed the variety of open spaces around—Trigon pitch, javelin throwing pit, archery section, combat rings, endless fields—with trepidation.

  “I have always thought of myself as a brilliant mind to be safeguarded by the physical efforts of others.”

  “You should’ve thought of that before you left the library.”

  “You kidnapped me!” Elliot protested.

  “I meant that time you almost got yourself killed and did get all of us reprimanded by our commanding officer.”

  So I could help us win, Elliot wanted to say, but going into exactly what he had done still seemed like a bad idea. Luke probably wouldn’t think that blackmailing people was anything to be proud of.

  “Oh,” Elliot said. “That time.”

  He supposed that it did not matter if he’d been dumb or brave. He could have been stabbed either way, and he didn’t want to be. It was nice that other people didn’t want him to be either.

  “We’re going to start by running laps,” said Luke.

  Elliot got Serene a present for Christmas, even though neither of them celebrated it. None of them had ever given the others presents before. Luke and Elliot’s birthdays were both in summer and thus missable, and Serene said that birthdays were different for elves, and telling anybody outside your family about the day of your entry into the world was considered dangerous. Elliot had always been glad about their presents rule, since getting Luke a gift would have been awkward.

  Now that Serene was his girlfriend it seemed like he should give her a present at some point, however, and though the tradition of Christmas had survived in the otherlands, Valentine’s Day had not, so this was Elliot’s opportunity. He’d figured it would take up the time they usually spent watching Luke open his many presents from his family.

  “I was thinking about why a land full of magic, where the humans lead secular lives and there are no churches, celebrates Christmas,” Elliot remarked. “I guess it’s a remnant of what humans bring across the Border with them. The ritual remaining, past belief.”

  He didn’t know what the excuse for Christmas was in the story he’d read about the magic land with the important lion. Maybe it was the same deal. He was mostly talking because he was nervous.

  Serene unwrapped the gift, and light touched her solemn face. It was a book of the treaties written and long history of cooperation between men and elves. Elliot found it idealized the history too much, but there were detailed and accurate sketches of the elven homeland that the writer had been privileged to see. He knew Serene missed home, sometimes.

  “Thank you, petal,” said Serene, and kissed him. “I got you something, as well.”

  She put a bracelet into his hand.

  Elliot knew her first instinct had been to buy him adornments, but the woven leather bracelet was the kind of thing other boys at the Border camp would wear too. It was a nice compromise, and it was always nice to know Serene was trying too.

  “Thanks, snowdrop,” he said, and let her tie it on his wrist, then beamed. “Am I pretty?”

  “You’ll do,” she teased, and put an arm around his shoulders. He snuggled up. “Perhaps next year we could incorporate some of the elvish winter festival into this time.”

  “I would love to do that,” said Elliot.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Luke, unwrapping a crossbow.

  The table in front of him was crowded with weapons, but this one was from Louise and she had her current kill count engraved on it, with an encouraging message that said KEEP UP, LITTLE BROTHER! Louise was a terrifying person, and it made them all smile.

  “We can do the thing with the funny lamp too,” Luke continued.

  “Menorah,” Elliot corrected. “We don’t have to.”

  He’d told the others about being Jewish, and tried to explain all that entailed, but he was not sure he understood perfectly himself. They had never practiced. His father had never celebrated anything with him. Theirs was not a house that ever had celebrations.

  It was just something that Elliot had understood his mother would have wanted him to know about. He had learned all he could, hoping to please her, in the days when he still believed she would come back. But she had never come, and he had never done any of the things he’d read about. He had never believed in much, once he stopped believing in her.

  Serene looked dreamily off into the distance, her fingers lingering on the embossed cover of the book Elliot had given her. “In the winter festival, my mother would wrap my father in a mantle of beautiful snow-white fur. And for that one day, the trees will respond to us and give us fruit once more, their colors like jewels in the frost. Also, of course, there is the blood ritual.”

  “The blood what now,” said Luke.

  “Maybe all traditions are overrated!” Elliot suggested.

  Luke unwrapped his next present, which unlike all the other terrible pointed gifts of death was a soft blue jumper.

  “My dad knits,” he explained as Serene nodded with complete understanding and Elliot beamed in astonishment. “He says it’s soothing to have something to do with his hands in between battles. When it was just him and me because Mum was on her three-year mission and Louise was in the camp, stationed out in the north, it was freezing. All the men wanted Dad to knit them something warm.”

  It was a nice note to end the present-opening on, and Elliot did not find one particular tradition overrated. He arrived late to his next class—and Serene went late to hers—due to mistletoe in the doorway of the lunch room.

  “Oooh, is the elf giving her girlfriend jewelry,” mocked Natalie Lowlands, Adara Cornripe’s best friend, as Elliot slid into the seat next to her.

  Elliot gave her a big beaming smile and pushed his sleeve down a little to better display the bracelet. “Sorry you’re lonely!”

  In his imagination, being with Serene had been perfect. It wasn’t: people were constantly passing comments, insulting either to him or to Serene—and he preferred the ones insulting to him—even the teachers sometimes made comments, he hardly saw Luke, and he had to weigh every interaction between himself and Serene carefully, trying to get each one right.

  Sometimes he got it right without having to tr
y too hard, though.

  Even in winter, Elliot and Serene spent most nights outside the Border camp so they could not be caught by teachers, camping in a tent out in the woods. Serene made fires, which meant it was just as cozy as in the awful cabins anyway, and there was Serene under the heaped-up blankets to keep him warm. That night they read through the book Elliot had brought, and Serene pointed out all the places she was familiar with from the pictures and told stories of her childhood in those faraway settings. They laughed and whispered, legs tangling, and exchanged kisses every time they turned a page.

  Serene for a season: Serene’s warm skin, the growing-easy slide of his hands up her smooth back, the fall of her hair all around him, the low approving sounds she made as he kissed his way from the curve of her mouth to the curve of her neck down to all the curves of her slim body. Serene as the world edged toward spring, with moonlight turning her bare skin to pearl and her eyes to diamonds. Lying with Serene in the darkness when it was easiest to speak and murmuring secrets and dreams.

  Serene eventually did go with just him to the Elven Tavern, where they wrote up detailed suggestions for how to improve the décor. Serene also accompanied him to the blacksmith’s, where the lady blacksmith also had the printing press, and Elliot dropped his old camera on the ground while making loud comments about how exactly it worked and how much the Borderlands would benefit from some sort of daily paper about current tidings.

  Being with Serene was worth everything. He could only hope she thought so too.

  The first time Elliot managed to run a four-minute mile he promptly toppled over onto his back in the scanty springtime grass. Serene and Luke were waiting for him at the finish line, and Serene applauded.

  “Thank you for your support, sunflower of my soul,” said Elliot, once he could breathe again. “As for you, I can’t believe you’re making me do this. I hate you, and I hate your face. I actually think I might be allergic to it. Or maybe that’s the lack of oxygen and hay fever talking, I don’t know.”