“Sit,” said Rachel, smiling at him beautifully, and Elliot smiled helplessly back. “Tell me who Dale Wavechaser is.”
Elliot’s smile froze. He could feel it trying to sidle off his face and hide behind his ear. “What?”
“My husband told me that little Luke has a crush on someone called Dale Wavechaser,” said Rachel, nodding to the front of the crowd, where Louise and Michael were standing up to cheer. “But he said he wouldn’t point him out because he didn’t want Luke to think he was betraying confidences. So. You point out Dale, or I will tell Luke that you told his dad!”
She kept beaming. Elliot gazed upon her sadly.
“That one,” he said, sighing and subsiding onto the bench beside her.
Rachel leaned forward in her seat and peered at the crowded benches across the pitch. Dale’s bright enthusiastic face was clear, in the very forefront of the audience.
“Whoo, LUKE!” Dale shouted.
“Aw,” said Rachel, and her smile spread. “He seems nice. Do you like him?”
“I do,” said Elliot, deliberately not referencing any boredom-related stabbings, and Rachel patted his hand. It was nice that she cared what Elliot thought.
Rachel looked pleased. “Then I think that will work out very well.”
She seemed perfectly serene on a lovely morning, about to watch her son fight to the death. Elliot leaned into her steady, comforting warmth as they watched: it was Luke up against the elder elf.
“She’s called Cold-Steel-to-Vanquish-the-Foe,” Rachel said. “Very experienced warrior. This’ll be quite a fight.”
Rachel sounded approving. Elliot looked at Cold’s hair, fluttering like a blood-colored banner in the breeze, and Luke’s hair gleaming like a knight’s helm, and both of their weapons shining like big pointy metal objects of death. He slid off the bench onto the floor and sat there with his arms around his knees, looking up at Rachel.
“I don’t want to watch,” he said. “I’m not going to do it.”
Rachel glanced down at him. “Is something the matter?”
Elliot gave her a look of disbelief, and put his head down on his knees. He’d already seen someone die yesterday. He’d seen people killed before, and he could bear it. But he did not want to be made into an audience, as if this were a game. He did not approve of anything that was happening, and he would not accept that it was necessary.
He could hear the clash and clang of weapons, a remorseless din in his ears, and Rachel’s running commentary on the fight. He wished he could not hear either one.
“Scythed her legs right out from under her, that’s my boy! Oooh, nasty. Oh, that’s going to sting later. Nice, duck and roll! Funny face, you’re missing out.”
Elliot resisted the urge to put his hands over his ears like a child. “I don’t think so.”
Clang, clang, crunch, went the noises, like a giant eating breakfast cereal. Elliot knew the last sound was bone breaking.
“And Cold’s down!” Rachel shouted as the crowd roared. “Luke’s got his sword to her throat! That’s Mommy’s little man!”
“Is he going to kill her?” Elliot asked in a small voice, muffled in his own arms.
“No,” said Rachel, after a pause. “No, he’s letting her up. She’s surrendered. You go, champ!”
There was another cheer. Elliot wondered if it was his own terrible personality that made him interpret this cheer as slightly disappointed, as though the crowd had wanted blood.
He did not have long to wonder, because then Luke vaulted over the rail of the pitch—like he had jumped easily down into the deep drop of the pit, and all Elliot had to say was why, gravity, why—and bounded up to his mother.
“Aw, that little feint that broke her arm made me so proud,” said Rachel, jumping to her feet and giving Luke a kiss on the side of his face. His cheek and his blond hair were streaked with blood, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“Is that your blood?” Elliot demanded, scrambling up.
“No,” said Luke. “Don’t worr—”
He was cut off by the descent of the elf contingent, either bestowing congratulations and caresses—Serene—or obviously consigning their souls to the uncaring trees—literally everyone else. Serene was alight with her pride and her vindicated faith, shining like a blade in the sun.
“Now,” Serene said breathlessly. “My turn to prove myself in combat.”
“What?” Sure snapped.
“What?” Elliot echoed, but nobody paid any attention to him.
“Oh, my son can risk his life but your daughter cannot?” Rachel inquired coldly, folding her arms. “Do go on. Someone hand me an axe.”
Luke, dusty and tired and smeared with blood, looked over at Serene and smiled. “How about you send whoever you like, as many people as you like, out into the field against both of us? We’ll take on anyone you choose. We always do things better together.”
Serene looked at him for a long moment and then she smiled, a radiant wash of dawn over a dark land. She reached out and took his hand when he offered it.
They did not fight on the field again that day, but they walked out onto it, hands clasped, bright and dark heads bowed together, exactly in step. They lifted their linked hands high over their heads and the whole crowd cheered, elves and humans alike, louder than they had for the fight.
And Elliot knew that there was one human in the world who Serene loved enough to defy her clan, to break her sacred traditions, to forge an unbreakable bond with against all reason and all law, and force everyone to respect that bond. He knew who Serene loved best.
The world proved to him over and over again what he already knew: that it was always going to be Luke, and never going to be Elliot.
Luke’s little display over Serene only added fuel to the fire: now Sure-Aim-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle had admitted Luke Sunborn was going to the wars, of course the rest of the humans from the Border guard were going too.
It was simply a case of arranging matters to best suit everyone. Elliot brought up the fact they could draw up a few unofficial agreements.
Elliot tried not to forget what Commander Woodsinger had told him—that it was a privilege to be in here, that he could change something, maybe, even if he could not change enough.
Even though he could see what was going to happen, with a terrible inevitability he did not know how to stop: that the Border guard were going to creep into the elves’ land, and then in five years . . . maybe ten . . . the elves would try to take it back. War coming out of war, over and over, and all Elliot could do was put it off, as if he were bailing out a sinking boat with a leaky bucket. He tried to put in things that would please the elves without hurting the humans, and vice versa. He argued with people who believed nothing should ever change, as if fixing something broken was sacrilege. Surely there was a better way to do things, out in his world, in the civilized world.
Except there were still wars in his world. It was only in stories that there was one clear evil to be defeated, and peace forever after. That was the dream of magic land: that was what could never have been real.
Everyone imagined a battle that would bring peace, and the only thing that had ever worked, ever brought peace for even a heartbreakingly short time, in any world, were words.
Every time he wanted to snap someone’s head off and storm out of the council room Elliot excused himself, found a cool stone wall to lean against, and told himself: Go back and be sweet, be nice, nod and smile, get those clauses in there. He smiled until his face hurt, until his teeth hurt, smiled so much that Cold-Steel-to-Vanquish-the-Foe unbent enough to escort him to the lunchroom after another session with Elliot trying to argue very politely for codicils that everyone else very calmly didn’t care about. He left Cold at the door with a smile.
“You’re in a good mood,” Luke remarked, offering a smile in return.
“No I’m not. I hate you guys,” snapped Elliot. He collapsed on the bench with his head in Serene’s lap, and then peered under his lashes
at them.
Luke rolled his eyes and continued to eat peas. Serene patted Elliot’s head and continued to read. Neither of them showed any signs of leaving.
Elliot was walking back to the commander’s tower and the meeting room and the piles of paper he was trying to use to make peace, as if peace were a house of cards everyone else was intent on upsetting but him, when he saw the cranky medic making for the tent.
“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.
“I don’t have time to talk to you,” said the medic, walking faster. “Or rather I suppose I do, but I don’t want to.”
It was the kind of thing she said which usually made Elliot smile, but he did not smile this time.
“I think you probably have time for me to ask a quick question,” said Elliot. He felt ill, sweat under his collar and his knees trembling, but he could not be a coward this time. “I know who you are,” he continued. “Do you know who I am?”
The medic Elka Pathwind, who had once been Elka Schafer and his mother, looked at him for a long moment. She had brown eyes, dark as pansies: they were nothing like his.
“I know who you are,” she said slowly. “I guess you want to talk to me more than ever. I can spare a while. I suppose I owe you that.”
They could not just stay here, where anyone could walk by and interrupt them. Elliot began to walk toward the edge of the camp, where the fence ran. He leaned against the fence, his boots in the dirt: leaning, he was closer to her height. She was tall for a woman, but shorter than him, shorter than Serene. Her passionless pale face was level with his now.
“Are you angry with me?” she asked. She sounded almost curious.
“No,” Elliot blurted out.
“Good,” she said. “I did the best thing for you, I think, leaving you with your father. He was always—very devoted.”
“He was very devoted to you,” Elliot snapped. “It doesn’t transfer.”
He meant love: that love could not be given from hand to hand like a parcel, that what had been gold from his father in her hand had turned to ashes in his. He could not say the word love, though, not with her looking at him.
She surveyed him. “Was he cruel to you, then? You look perfectly all right.”
“I am all right,” Elliot muttered.
“Just having a tantrum, then?”
Elliot lifted his chin, so he could look down on her. “Was he cruel to you?” he asked in return. “There are a lot of reasons for a woman to leave. I read about them. You were—you were pretty young.”
He’d prepared a lot of things to say to her: that he didn’t blame her, that he forgave her. None of them seemed right, now.
“There were a lot of reasons to stay,” she said. “Have you ever thought, when you’re done here, that you will have no qualifications in the other world? The world did not stop turning when you turned thirteen. It will have left you far behind.”
“I’ve thought about it,” said Elliot.
“Hmm,” said this strange woman. “In the other world, there were two choices for me: I could be his wife. Or I could live in penury and, if I tried to tell the world the truth about where I’d been, be called mad. So I was his wife. He always tried to be good to me, I think. But in this world, I don’t need him. I don’t need anybody. So I came back. The wall we come over, I cut my old name on it with all the other names from the otherlands, and I walked away.”
I carved it on the wall and left it behind, Bat Masterson had said. His mother had left behind more than her name.
“You became a medic,” Elliot said slowly. “You don’t become a medic if you don’t—care about people.”
She shot him an annoyed look. Elliot almost found it comforting, the sign of the cranky medic he’d liked, rather than the distant stranger he’d been speaking to here at the edge of the world.
Then she sighed, and the crease between her eyebrows smoothed as if the sigh had unfolded the skin.
“Do you want me to talk about why I became a medic?” she asked eventually. “I will. Do you want me to talk about why I left your father, whether I considered taking you with me? Ask me what you want to know, and I’ll tell you. Like I said . . . I suppose I owe you.”
Elliot had thought out different reasons she might have had for leaving. He would not hate her, even if she said that she had not considered taking him with her. She hadn’t had a job then, or any money: she might have thought leaving him would comfort his father. She might have been depressed after having him, confused at her lack of maternal feeling. The way his father had loved her was not the way people should be loved. Usually women didn’t have a whole other world to run to, but she had.
He had thought out so many reasons.
“Do you have anything,” Elliot said, very slowly, “to ask me?”
“What, ask for your forgiveness?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. “No.”
“I am not the one who brought up owing, or forgiveness,” said Elliot, his voice very smooth. “Is it on your mind?”
She looked like she wanted to slap him. He wished she would.
“I meant,” Elliot said, after a moment. “Do you want to know how I am? Or how my father is? Do you want to know what I like? What I want to do when I grow up? Do you want to know who I am or who I love?”
“I know who your friends are, remember?” the medic retorted. “Everybody knows that. The elf girl and the gay Sunborn kid.”
Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “There is a lot more to Serene than just being an elf. And there’s a hell of a lot more to Luke than being gay, like that’s what makes him remarkable among the Sunborns. He happens to be their champion. Though,” he added quickly, “value systems based on physical strength and martial prowess are meaningless!”
Elka Pathwind looked at him, her head tilted but her eyes still wide, her expression neutral. “The commander sometimes talks about you. She said you were crazy.”
Elliot hesitated. “Well . . . do you want to know if I am?”
His mother shook her head. “Why are you so eager for me to ask you questions?”
Because in every scenario he’d ever thought through, every time he had waited on the stairs of his house in the terrible silence, she had come back. She had taken steps toward him, every step from wherever she’d been to where he was. He hadn’t stumbled painfully over her. He had known, in his imagination, whatever she did or whatever she said to him, whatever her reasons for going, that she had come back.
This was different. She had not come to him. He had no reason to think she had any interest in him. She had to give him a reason.
“Because I want to know . . . if you care to know anything about me.”
“Not really,” said the medic at last, with a shrug. “You’re no concern of mine.”
It was almost evening, the sun drowning in the clouds. It was later than he had thought.
“Okay,” said Elliot, after a pause. It was a longer pause than he would have liked. He wished he’d been able to speak sooner. “Then I think we’re done here. I just—I wanted to be sure of where we both stood. Now I am.”
She gave him one last look, assessing and coming to a decision. There was a certain easing of her expression that Elliot thought might be relief. She nodded.
“I guess this could have gone worse,” she told him, and walked away.
Elliot supposed she was right. It could have gone worse. He could have tried to have a relationship with her, ignored all the signs and blundered stupidly and hopefully on. He could have forced her to spell out her indifference even more clearly.
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 believe
d in a lot of stories, back then, including the ones he told himself.
He was sure his mother had a story: that there was more to why she had left, why she had come back here, why she had chosen the job she had, why she thought the way she did about the world. He was not going to hear it, though. They were not going to have the bond of shared stories and joined lives. She did not care to listen.
“Hey,” said Luke after some dark indeterminate length of time, wandering up to him.
“I can’t do this right now,” Elliot snarled at him.
Luke stared. “Well, nice to see you too.”
Elliot didn’t want to be cruel, he thought suddenly. This was the moment to tell everything, if there had ever been such a moment, when all his defences were burned down. He had to say it: 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.
It would be a miracle if he could get all that out, but after that he thought he could manage to say: Take me to Serene, and maybe: I think I’m going to cry.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said, and tried to work out how to say everything else.
“It’s hard sometimes, with my family,” said Luke into the silence.
“Oh,” Elliot said, his voice brittle. “Is it?”
“Being just ordinary, I mean, when they’re all . . . you know.”
That was literally the most ridiculous thing Elliot had ever heard. He did not know what had possessed Luke to come over and start talking random absurdities at one of the most horrible times of Elliot’s life, but apparently Elliot had to cope with this. He felt like a burn victim, having someone come at him with a grater.
Elliot badly wanted to snap at Luke, but he did not dare. If he let himself lose his temper, it was going to be ugly: he was going to do or say something terrible. He did not even know what poison he might spill, but he knew that Luke did not know anything. Luke did not deserve it.