“You’re penpals with Serene’s cousin?”
“She’s a very nice lady, and she says she gets lonely out on patrol, on the long, cold nights.” Elliot stopped and frowned. “Actually, now I say that out loud it sounds like something I should report to my chaperone. But I don’t have a chaperone, and besides I’m really getting a handle on troll vocabulary.”
“So you haven’t changed, then,” said Luke, who was sort of drooping with tiredness like a sad dandelion.
“I’ve been told I’m taller.”
“Still kind of titchy,” observed Luke, which was offensive, and then put his head down on the pillow.
“Get up and go back to your celebration, you lump,” said Elliot.
The one eye Elliot could see rolled. “I thought you were trying to be nice.”
Elliot gave up on being nice. “Ugh, you’re the worst, leave and never come back.”
Luke fell asleep instead. After about six minutes, there came a knock.
“Who is that rapping on my chamber door,” Elliot murmured to himself. “What elf could it be? And when shall I read my letter? Nevermore. Come in, Serene!”
She came in, looking a little abashed to be in a gentleman’s bedchamber.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, and came to sit on the bed. “I had to stop and have a look at a treaty.”
Elliot almost hated himself for being so pathetic, but knew he was glowing just the same. “Yeah?”
“It’s pretty good,” Serene told him, in her measured way. “I love the bit about the trolls cooperating on farming in the south fields in exchange for help with mining equipment.”
Elliot shrugged modestly instead of saying “Oh baby, talk treaties to me.” “Well.”
“How’d you do it?” asked Serene, lying down next to Luke, who stirred and slid his arm around her, with what even Elliot could tell was the ease of familiarity and long loving habit.
“I poisoned Captain Whiteleaf,” Elliot announced proudly.
Luke opened his one visible eye. “No,” he said. “No poisoning captains. ’m drawing a line.”
“I poisoned him, and I got the general super drunk,” Elliot boasted in a rush.
“That was very enterprising,” said beautiful Serene, who always understood him, or at least understood him better than anyone else. She shut her eyes.
“Okay, no, guys, now I’m drawing a line,” said Elliot. “This is my bed. I have boundaries. I have a personal bubble. Get off. Go away. I’m serious.”
They lay curled around each other like two leaves in the forest, and about as responsive to demands. Elliot looked at them, so comfortable and close, and felt a jealous pang that wanted to turn to fury or despair. He’d always known where this situation would wind up, he supposed, if he was honest with himself. He knew how life worked. He could call Luke a loser as often as he wanted, but that didn’t make it true.
Elliot sighed and opened his book. It had a map on it that he wanted to refer to.
After he memorised the map, he looked back at them, legs tangled, their slow breathing in sync. Luke was filthy, Elliot noted disapprovingly, and even Serene looked slightly disarranged. Elves did not seem to get as smudgy as humans. They did not look like heroes but like sleepy, dirty children. Elliot felt like a little kid himself, confused and helpless, not able to deal with the world at all. Their heads were leaning together on his pillow, the gold and the dark, ruffled and mingling. Elliot felt like he should maybe smooth them or something.
There was a noise at the threshold. Elliot snatched his hand back. Rachel Sunborn stood at the door. She was in jewels, with her hair neatly braided, and looked as magnificent as she had battle-stained in the rain.
“Hi there,” she said. “I was wondering where you’d all got to.”
“I’m here,” Elliot told her, perhaps unnecessarily. “They stole my bed. They have perfectly good beds of their own.”
Rachel seemed unmoved by her son’s thieving ways. “Little rascals, all tuckered out. And what are you up to?”
“I’ve decided to put an end to all war,” Elliot announced.
Rachel blinked. “That might take a while.”
“I know. I probably won’t be done by the time we’re out of school,” said Elliot. “That’s why I figured I should get started right away.”
Rachel threw back her head and laughed. “That’s good thinking. Well, me and my man and Lou have to get going. There’s clean-up to be done.” Elliot understood that by “clean-up” she meant more killing, and not cleaning up at all. But she leaned over him in the candlelight and looked at him so kindly. “Tell my boy to take care of himself. See you this summer, funny face?”
“I don’t know,” Elliot said awkwardly.
Rachel tweaked his nose and departed. “See you there.”
As the door banged shut behind her, Elliot glanced to the others, wondering if the noise had woken them. He saw Luke had his eyes open, watching the door. There was a certain expression on his face which made Elliot remember that he must have watched his mother leave to go somewhere dangerous hundreds of times.
“You can come if you want,” Luke said. “We’re having a big thing. I mean, whatever.”
“Yeah,” Elliot said. “Okay.”
“Okay,” murmured Luke. He sighed and turned his face into the pillow, covered with Serene’s dark hair. He burrowed against her, and she said something indistinct with Luke’s name in it, and they both fell back asleep.
Elliot felt a little Iago-ish, but mainly he was so terribly glad they were alive. And the school year was almost over, with so much work left to be done. He turned back to his books.
Elliot was meant to go to Luke’s in late summer, so he could go straight back to camp with the others. That meant spending a lot of time with his father beforehand. He tried to call the kids up the street, Tom and Susan, but they were off backpacking with their friends through the countryside. He left a message saying he’d join them, if they thought that would be fun, but he didn’t expect a call back. He started hanging out a lot at an old music shop called Joe’s, run by Joe himself, a grizzled old guy who talked a lot about his nephew who might come to visit him soon and played Elliot vinyl records. He was clearly as lonely as Elliot was.
Elliot bought a lot of old radios, even ones that played tapes, which he thought were hilarious and quaint. He went searching the shops and found a cracked camera that filtered out real paper photos with a whirring sound a little while after you’d taken them. He’d noticed it was the most modern stuff that did worst at the Border. His heart cried out for a proper phone, but the situation called for experimentation.
He came home late from the record shop one day and almost collided with his father going to bed. His father looked at him. He seemed very mildly startled, as if at a near-stranger whose existence he had forgotten, encountered unexpectedly in the street.
“Getting quite tall, aren’t you,” he said, with a faint note of accusation.