In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
For Holly Black, who knows many things, yet seems sometimes
not to know she is both kind and clear-eyed, sharply
hilarious and bone-deep sweet, and a bona fide genius.
I know.
I
Elliot, Age Thirteen
So far magic school was total rubbish.
Elliot sat on the fence bisecting two fields and brooded tragically over his wrongs.
He had been plucked from geography class, one of his most interesting classes, to take some kind of scholarship test out in the wild. Elliot and three other kids from his class had been packed into a van by their harassed-looking French teacher and driven outside the city. Elliot objected because after an hour in a moving vehicle he would be violently sick. The other kids objected because after an hour in a moving vehicle they would be violently sick of Elliot.
Elliot ignored the other kids and hung his head out of the window. In a disdainful way.
Then they arrived at their destination, which could only be described as a classic example of a “random field in Devon, England.” Much like any other random field in England.
“Why are we in a random field?” Elliot demanded.
“I will thump you,” promised Desmond Dobbs. “Zip it.”
“I will not be silenced,” said Elliot.
He would not be silenced, but he was feeling unwell and being thumped usually made him feel worse, so he stood a little way off from the others and observed their surroundings.
The random field boasted a stone wall so high Elliot could not see over the top, and a woman wearing extremely odd clothing who appeared to be waiting for them. She and their French teacher had a quiet conference, and as Elliot watched them he saw money change hands.
“Excuse me, did anyone else see that?” Elliot asked. “I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but get alarmed, because I think our French teacher just sold us!”
“They haven’t sold us,” said Ashley Sinclair. “Nobody would want to buy you.”
That did silence Elliot. It seemed so indisputably true.
The woman in odd clothing “tested” him by asking him if he could see a wall standing in the middle of a field. When he told her, “Obviously, because it’s a wall. Walls tend to be obvious,” she had pointed out the other kids blithely walking through the wall as if it was not there, and told him that he was one of the chosen few with the sight.
“Are you telling me that I have magical powers?” Elliot had asked, excited for a moment, and then added: “Because I can’t walk through walls? That doesn’t seem right.”
The woman had told him she was prepared for questions, but she did not seem prepared for that one. She blinked and told him to come away with her to a magical land.
“By a magical land,” she told him, “I mean a place that not everybody can see, a place with—”
“With mermaids?” Elliot asked. “I don’t need you to explain to me the concept of a magical land filled with fantastic creatures that only certain special children can enter. I am acquainted with the last several centuries of popular culture. There are books. And cartoons, for the illiterate.”
“Look,” said the woman, “are you prepared to come away with me, or not?”
Normally, Elliot refused weird propositions from potentially demented strangers. But there was the wall, and the undeniable fact that other people could not see or touch it, and this really was like something out of a book. Elliot did not think he would be able to live with the curiosity if he did not go.
“Okay,” Elliot had said finally, brandishing his phone in the woman’s face. “But I have the number of the police, and I will have my finger on the call button at all times, in case you are a child predator.”
She rolled her eyes, but she let him keep the phone with no objections.
Nobody else had any objections when it was explained that the strange woman would be driving Elliot back to school later. Nobody pointed out there was no sign of the strange woman’s car. Desmond Dobbs said “Hurray!”
“Do you have family who will miss you?” asked the woman while everyone else piled in the van.
“Ha!” said Elliot. “That is a serial-killer question, and I refuse to answer it.”
“Any family you have will be told you were offered a last-minute scholarship to a prestigious military school,” said the woman. “If you choose to stay. Will anyone be worried about you?”
The van set off down the road. It seemed to get smaller very fast, heading toward the distant gray horizon of the city. Everything Elliot knew seemed terribly small, and terribly gray, and terribly far away.
Elliot hesitated. “No.”
Once the van had disappeared around a bend in the road, the strange woman led Elliot up a narrow stone stairway built into the wall. They climbed and climbed, and when they had gone so high that they were surrounded by clouds, they walked through a shining hole in the wall and onto soft grass.
Actually, the magical land seemed to be mostly grass.
There were fields, more fields, several more fields, a couple of rough, round stone towers which men with weapons were exiting and entering. Elliot had cheered up when he saw a man walk by, books under his arm, who had long hair and pointed ears—there were elves—and dwarves—like from fairy tales, men and women alike with beards and carrying elaborately carved hammers.
He looked around for other marvels.
Mostly there were other kids. Some of them were quite big, and some of them looked no more than Elliot’s age—he was thirteen, though everybody thought he was younger because they made cruel assumptions based on height. All the kids had lined up at different tables to be signed in, and now the kids Elliot’s age were all standing together in a cluster waiting to be told what to do.
Elliot turned to the woman who had led him here. Her clothing did not look so strange here where a lot of people were wearing breeches and buckles all over. He had only known her for five minutes, which made her five minutes more familiar than anyone else. Under cornrows that ended in a black coronet of twisted hair, her face was impatient but not unkind.
“Is this the part where I get told that only I can save the magical land?”
“This is the part where you get trained,” said the woman. “Or not. You choose.”
“Trained for what?” Elliot demanded, but the woman had already strode off to be cryptic elsewhere and left him with the group of kids his age.
He was slightly alarmed. The wall on the other side had been low, but carved with graffiti so he suspected there were vandals about, his phone was sizzling, and now this.
It was so unfair. Elliot had not expected a magical land to be all fields—some of the fields had cows in them, and he was pretty sure they weren’t magic cows—and other kids.