Serene crossed her arms over her chest. “I am nothing like my mother.”
“Whoa, you have like, daddy issues about your controlling parent whose exploits inflame your desire to be like him but whose reform and new steady reputation makes you even more rebellious,” Elliot crowed in English. “And all the elven beauties are warned to stay away from you because you’re mad, bad, and dangerous to know. You’re a bad boy! Right, and Luke’s the good boy—golden boy, boring, you know the drill. This is such an enlightening night.”
“Maybe you could stop defining us by, like, literary tropez,” said Luke. “Bluestocking.”
“Tropes, oh my God, loser, of course you can’t speak elvish, you can barely speak English. It’s pronounced like tropes, not like St Tropez.”
Luke looked a little frayed around the edges, but Swift provided a distraction by asking Elliot what gods he kept calling on, and Elliot had to try and explain being Jewish but not practising to an elf. He wasn’t sure if Swift understood, but while they were talking about cultural differences he asked her if she knew anyone who spoke troll, and she promised to send him a troll-elvish dictionary.
“Write to me anything you learn about trolls!” Elliot said. “Or mermaids. Please write to me about mermaids.”
All in all, it was a successful day.
Later that night Luke grumpily rolled his blanket over to Elliot’s and said: “Fine then. Teach me a few words of elvish.”
Elliot grinned triumphantly in the dark. He’d thought the swordsister guilt trip would work.
An alliance with the dwarves and elves followed the surprise discovery of the treaty, extremely cordial on the elves’s side since the dwarves were graciously forgiving of their territory faux pas. The only thing to do was for the Border guard to form an alliance with the dwarves themselves.
All the people who had been talking about the low cunning of dwarves were shut up. And Serene managed to be attending her kinswomen at a conference and mention that since she, an elf, was training with the Border guard, it should be made clear that full-blood dwarves were welcomed there too.
After being away for a few weeks on a family trip, Myra came back. She was no longer hiding behind her hair.
“Oh, hey,” said Elliot, stopping and standing by her table at lunch. “You look great.”
He smiled. She didn’t have the beard most dwarves wore, but she had a mustache, dark, shining, and clearly carefully shaped, and her painted-pink mouth curled beneath it as she smiled back.
He knew a compliment wouldn’t mean as much to girls coming from him.
“Luke!” Elliot commanded. “Tell her she looks great.”
Luke looked at Myra as if he’d never seen her before, and at Elliot as if he wanted answers. Elliot made an impatient gesture.
“Yes . . . ?” said Luke, questing.
Myra beamed and looked so happy that Elliot permitted Luke to seize him by the arm and drag him away without reminding him of the rules about physical force.
“Who was that?” Luke hissed in his ear.
“What do you mean, who was that?” Elliot asked, offended on Myra’s behalf. “That was my friend Myra. She’s in council training with me. She doesn’t look that different!”
“You have a friend called Myra in council training?” Luke said, as if it was news to him. “Since when?”
“For the whole two years I have been in this godforsaken place, Luke!”
Luke looked unconvinced, but at least he was only being self-centred instead of prejudiced against dwarves.
“I wish I could grow a moustache like that,” Elliot said wistfully.
“Probably a bad idea,” said Luke. “You can’t control the hair you’ve got.”
“Besides,” said Serene, joining them, “I know it’s natural and everything, but don’t you think it looks weird if a man has hair anywhere but on his head? I mean, can they not be bothered to put in the time and effort to look good?”
The only problem came when they were all summoned to the commander’s office, and General Lakelost was there, a man with a white moustache so huge that comparing it to Myra’s was like comparing a white whale to a dolphin. General Lakelost and Commander Rayburn asked how exactly one of them had happened upon the treaty in the first place.
It had not occurred to Elliot before, but it was very clear to him suddenly that breaking into the commander’s office was going to get him expelled. Elliot took a deep breath.
“I found it,” said Luke, and the whole room went silent, either in surprise or in total shock at hearing Luke lie. “In my library at home. The Sunborns have a very extensive library. Then Cadet Schafer and Cadet Chaos-of-Battle realised its full significance.”
The story was extremely plausible, especially since nobody wanted to discuss where the treaty had actually been. And nobody was going to expel a Sunborn.
Commander Rayburn looked beseechingly at the general. Elliot knew that the papers had been in Commander Rayburn’s office, and that meant the commander would be blamed for hiding them, even if the rest of the guard had known exactly what he was doing. The Border guard would want to avoid a diplomatic incident. The commander would be in even more trouble than Elliot if the truth came out.
“The Sunborns do have a big library,” the general rumbled out at last, as if weighing the words for believability. “But . . . why on earth would you be in there reading, lad?”
“Improve my vocabulary, sir,” said Luke.
From the corner of the room where Captain Woodsinger had placed herself, she coughed. “He does read a lot,” she contributed. “In the space allowed him around performing his duties. I have often seen him with his head in a book.”
Elliot stared at Captain Woodsinger. She gazed back, her face impassive.
“Oh, oh, very good,” responded General Lakelost. “Er . . . commendable.” He lowered his voice to what was essentially still a dull roar and said: “Is the boy not any good at fighting?”
“He’s excellent, sir,” put in Captain Woodsinger in her quiet voice. “One of our finest.”
“I don’t understand it,” the general announced. He squinted at Elliot. “That child can’t be old enough to be in the camp. He looks about ten.”
“Fourteen, sir,” said Captain Woodsinger. “Undersized, sir.”
Elliot scowled but refrained from comment, since it was for the best to have everyone distracted from issues like “technical treason.”
“Besides, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” asked Luke. “We all want peace. Don’t we? Sir?”
They couldn’t say they did not. Not one of them could actually say that.
General Lakelost did stop Luke at the door, put a fatherly hand on his shoulder, and say: “Maybe ease up on the reading, lad, all right?”
“All right, sir. I know a lot of long words by now anyway.”
This was too much. Elliot broke.
“Oh, really, you do? Like what? I want you to be somewhat acquainted with the definition of this word,” Elliot demanded.
Luke cast him a sidelong glance. “Provoking,” he said. “And I am pretty well acquainted with the definition of the word.”