“I can’t believe you,” Luke said after a moment. “I cannot believe what you told Commander Woodsinger. I cannot believe the things you think it’s all right to say and do, just so you can get your way!”
Elliot had no idea what Luke was talking about. Elliot had not been getting his own way when he was forced to run all those miles. Elliot might have got his own way about this mission, but it wasn’t like Elliot had never done anything like this before.
He had not expected, he realized, that Luke would truly not want him there.
The realization kept him silent for a while. There was nothing Elliot could do to make Luke want him. And Elliot still had to be there, for the treaty, despite what Luke wanted.
He hadn’t intended to make anything worse for Luke, though. He had no idea how he managed to mess things up, every time. Surely it was some sort of reverse special talent.
They were all quiet, for a long time, Elliot because he did not want to make things worse and Serene in a strong, womanly, supportive way. Elliot did not know why Luke was being so entirely silent, with that absorbed, desolate look on his face. It couldn’t be only because of Elliot. He had to be nervous about meeting the harpies. He must want to talk about it.
“Why are you being so quiet, loser?” Elliot asked at last.
“I’m not being quiet,” Luke said. “I’m not talking to you. Because you used my actual feelings to get yourself on this trip, and you made it so I’m not sharing with Serene, and you lied to our commander. I didn’t ask you, I don’t need you, and we’re not friends.”
That made everything very clear.
Elliot had, in fact, made what was already a difficult time much worse for Luke. He absorbed that, took a deep breath, and apologized extensively and at length. He explained that any sort of a treaty with the trolls was proving impossible, and the harpies were the only alternative. He wanted to make sure Luke knew that tormenting Luke had not actually been Elliot’s plan. He promised to make it up to Luke.
After Elliot was done talking, Luke looked a little less angry.
Elliot told himself things were all right, or would be all right. Elliot would make Dale and Luke happen. Luke would be in a much better mood then.
“I read some of your notes,” Luke offered, after a moment. Elliot wondered how far Luke had read. “About Caroline the Fair.”
Not very far, then. Elliot nobly refrained from pointing this out.
“Who was Caroline the Fair?” asked Serene.
“She was a half harpy famous for her beauty,” said Elliot. “She had wings the color of pearl and gold. She couldn’t fly, so they ended up being decorative, but obviously they really worked for some people. Forty rich men battled for her hand, and each promised Caroline a milk-white steed if they could have a walk with her down by the seashore and a chance to win her heart. Several of the men were drowned by mermaids, with whom Caroline may have had an agreement. She died single with forty milk-white horses. What I’m saying is, she was a fox. A fox with wings. What I’m saying is, as half harpies go, we could do way better.”
He was worried a minute later that this would only upset a newly touchy Luke further, but Luke just rolled his eyes and almost grinned, so that was all right.
“I’m not making any agreement with mermaids,” Luke said. “I’m tired of mermaids.”
“He who is tired of mermaids,” Elliot said, “is tired of life.”
“He who is tired of mermaids has been hearing about them every day for almost four years,” said Luke. “No arrangement with mermaids. Forget it, mermaids.”
Elliot and Serene laughed. Luke looked pleased. Sometimes Elliot thought that Luke believed he wasn’t funny.
Of course, sometimes Elliot told Luke he wasn’t funny.
Elliot remembered sitting in the shadowy privacy of his cabin, writing notes about harpies as exhaustion made the candlelight blur in his vision. 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.
The books had agreed on one subject. Half harpies tended to be very good-looking. There was much discussion of fine bones, high cheekbones, and aquiline noses. Elliot remembered meeting horrible Neal and Adam, and thinking of how they looked like Luke, but lacking something.
Elliot felt this was a real bright side to harpy heritage.
Though it was not always the case. Some half harpies, like some harpies, had beaks. Not everyone was into beaks.
He thought Luke might be comforted by the idea that his wings might not work: that he might carve out a normal life among humans who would not avoid him as the Border camp’s cadets had been.
Of course he could, Elliot wanted to tell him. All of the cadets would get used to it. It was only now that things were new, and strange.
The forest they were walking through was new and strange, too. Elliot had never walked this deep into the woods before. He was used to trees which were not very much bigger than people, but now there were trees so tall that Elliot thought their tops were wreathed in cloud, like the tops of mountains. Elliot could not imagine how the dryad of one of these trees would be, how tower-tall and removed from any semblance of humanity. 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.
Then they reached the old battlefield where harpies and trolls had once tried to reclaim territory from humans—though human records said the battle had been a treacherous attack. Elliot was not sure whose records to believe, since nobody could be trusted when they wanted something.
The ground that humans, trolls, and harpies had all wanted stretched gray and bleak and uninviting before them. Elliot heard Luke make a low, disgusted sound in the back of his throat. He had stepped on a human skull, half embedded in the earth.
Elliot’s notes had not focused too much on the harpies’ relationship with the dead. Harpies’ lives were intertwined with the dead as mermaids’ lives intertwined with water: they tore apart the corpses of their enemies, carried off their enemies’ bones to decorate their own bodies and their own nests. They cast the remnants of their loved ones into the air, and kept mementoes of them: the hair of the loved and lost braided into their own hair. Love and hatred endured long past death, for harpies: death changed nothing.
Elliot had thought Luke might be disturbed.
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.
Past the battlefield was a new forest which humans called the Forest of the Suicides, to mark how many had died on its borders. Elliot wondered what the harpies called it.
There were harpies soaring above the trees, like vast birds or strange clouds. They were waiting for them, Elliot thought. They were waiting for Luke.