“Hi. Hi, wait a minute. Hey, wait. Oi, Dale!”
Dale Wavechaser turned around and looked startled to see Elliot bearing down on him. He opened his mouth to speak, but Elliot forestalled him: Elliot was on a mission.
“I wanted to say,” said Elliot, speaking fast and fiddling with the strap of his bag. “I’m really sorry if I came off badly in class yesterday? I was just surprised. I think it was brave of you to tell everyone, and I totally support you.”
“Oh,” said Dale. He smiled crookedly. “Cool.”
“Also I like you,” said Elliot. “And I want to be friends. Good friends. Can we be friends?”
“Uh . . . sure.”
Dale’s smile got brighter. Elliot smiled back, and in case it would help tried to add charm to the smile, the endearing air he had used on the elven warriors and on the council of war last year. Oddly, it seemed to work.
“The rest of the guys from the Trigon team are coming to meet me, and we’re all going down to the Elven Tavern,” said Dale. “Do you want to join us?”
Elliot shook his head gently. He was devoted to his new life of tactfulness, so he carefully did not say that he would rather be boiled alive in a cauldron of fire ants and cyanide.
“I don’t want to be friends with them, Dale.” He gave Dale the soulful look that he had practised on the elves. “I only want to be friends with you.”
Dale looked surprised, and still a bit puzzled by Elliot’s behaviour, but mostly pleased.
“You should come hang out with me,” Elliot said. “And Luke and Serene and Luke and me. Anytime you see us. Come hang out. Anytime. Also it seems to me that you might need help with your classes. You should come to me about that. Especially about history. No offence meant.”
“I think history’s kind of boring,” said Dale, and Elliot controlled himself and did not flinch. “But that’s really nice of you.”
“Yes,” said Elliot. “We’re both nice. This is why we’re such friends.”
Dale laughed. He was actually nice, not pretend nice like Elliot was being. It was probably better to know how to interpret what everyone said to you as the best thing they could’ve meant than to know history. Probably he and Luke would be great together.
Behind Dale, Elliot could already hear the clatter of boys coming from Trigon, loudly discussing the many imbecilic intricacies of the game. Escape became urgent.
“I’m looking forward to hanging out,” Elliot told Dale earnestly. “But now I must go. Good-bye, friend.”
He thought that had gone excellently. Get Luke and Dale together, be very supportive of Luke and Dale together, and get Dale to like Elliot so that almost all of them could be friends. Elliot’s plan was fiendishly brilliant, elegant in its simplicity, and bound to succeed.
Elliot was feeling fairly good until two hours later, when somebody attacked the library.
Elliot was peacefully looking up facts about mermaids, feeling a thousand leagues away under a cool blue sea, when the smell of smoke and fire made him slam his book shut and jump to his feet. He looked up to the roof and saw it kindle: saw the thatched roof open into a burning hole.
“Don’t worry, children, the women will protect us!” shouted Bright-Eyes-Gladden-the-Hearts-of-Women.
The students, mainly boys, looked skeptical but frightened as well. They were mostly young, in council training because those in war training didn’t spend much time in the library.
Elliot raised his voice. “Come on, follow me.” He strode over to the library door, opened it, and saw fighting in the yard beyond. He slammed the door swiftly shut again. “Never mind that! Let’s not go out there. You and you, behind those stacks, you and you, under the table. You two, help me with the fire. If the fire gets too bad, get out and make for the lake—don’t go back to your cabins.”
A first-year boy helped Elliot pull down one of the heavy curtains and muffle the floor where one burning arrow had hit. The wood smoked and crackled, Elliot coughing in the poisoned air, but he was mainly concerned about the books.
“In my world there’s this beautiful thing called running water,” sighed Elliot.
The boy looked at him as if he was crazy. “We have running water here too,” he said. “In rivers and streams. Where water runs.”
Through the tall narrow windows of the library, like windows in a church in Elliot’s world, Elliot saw the sudden chaos in the courtyard, saw the Border guards in camp and the warrior-training students running out, their weapons gleaming in the light of the sinking sun. He saw battle joined.
He thought for a moment these were the bandits in the eastern woods whom he’d been hearing rumors about, and realized the next moment that this was much worse than a bandit attack.
The people fighting were all either in Border guard uniform or in the uniform of cadets. The people fighting were all human. It was chaos, even worse than battles usually were. Cadets were being cut down by adult guards, and protected by different guards. Elliot could not tell who was on which side, or why they were fighting. He saw people in the battle who looked as panicked and confused as he felt.
There wasn’t time to hang out the window and stare at the battle, even if Elliot had the stomach for it. He turned away and got back to pulling down curtains.
The skirmish was brief, the newcomers in Border guard uniforms receding as swiftly as they had appeared. Elliot saw the blades sheathed almost as soon as drawn out through the windows.
He still tensed when the door was flung open, but it was Serene, who stood framed in the doorway with her braid flying and in the process of sliding her sword home in its sheath, attached to her belt. Elliot had seen Myra and Adara wearing jewelry on special occasions, but Serene’s swordbelt was the only ornate thing she ever wore. She didn’t need jewelry.
“Rest easy,” she said, and Bright-Eyes looked pleased to be rescued by a lady, even if he did clearly think Serene was only a young whippersnapper. “We have beaten back the foul attackers. You are all safe.”
There was a flaming arrow, set deep and burning in the centre of the table. Serene strode over to it and took the parchment rolled around the shaft of the arrow, careless of the fire that licked at her fingers.
She walked out to the threshold of the library, and unrolled the parchment.
It read: HAVE THAT WOMAN GIVE UP COMMAND OR WE COME TAKE IT.
So that was what this was all about. Elliot thought of the whispers about Commander Woodsinger this summer, the captains no longer allowed on missions, the rising discontent. Commander Woodsinger had been the hero of the last war, but people’s memories were short, and there would always be another war.