“It is much too dangerous,” Elliot said. “It would be really dumb to go out there.” He paused. “Well, even I can’t be smart all the time.”
He got up quickly, before she could stop him, dropped a kiss in her hair, and went out the door into the chaos of a battlefield.
It was obscene, his camp becoming the backdrop for this horror. There was someone dead on the ground, facedown: Elliot could only be thankful. He did not want to see if it was someone he knew. There was a man in chainmail bearing down on him.
“I come on a mission of peace,” said Elliot, and got backhanded with a chainmail fist. Elliot tasted blood and saw stars in a gray daytime sky. “Did I stutter?” Elliot asked, feeling his mouth fill with blood. “I said I come on a mission of peace, moron.”
The chainmailed guy drew his sword. Elliot hated his life, especially when he saw two of the guys’ buddies closing in to help him slaughter an unarmed student. Elliot tensed, wondering if he should run toward the sound of fighting, where there might be assistance, or away.
The chainmailed guy collapsed, spat blood, and dropped his sword: Luke had his own blade out of chainmailed guy’s back and in the chest of the second man before the group realized what was happening. In less than three seconds the three men after Elliot were dead.
Elliot tried not to be sick, and tried not to think of how Luke had been sick once, killing someone. Now Luke had been through a war and killed people easily, effortlessly, as if it was routine.
Luke grabbed Elliot’s arm, which led to there being blood and dirt on Elliot’s arm. This was not routine for Elliot. “What are you doing out here?”
“I need to get to the—”
“You need to get back inside right now!”
“No!” Elliot shouted back, since they were shouting, which he found to be unnecessary and rude. “I need to get to the commander’s tower. Take me there right now.”
“And if I don’t?” Luke bit out.
“Then I’m going on my own!” Elliot snapped. “And I bet I get stabbed, and Serene will be annoyed with you.”
He wrenched his arm out of Luke’s grip and strode toward the tower. He heard the sound of Luke killing someone else behind him, so he presumed he was protected: Luke caught up with him, and nobody else stopped them until they reached the commander’s tower and the four unfamiliar guards at the door.
“I urge you to surrender,” said Elliot, and stood aside.
Three guards down, and the fourth had his hands up, weapon loosely clasped in one of them, but his intent clear. Only Luke was a whirlwind of murderous movement: blade shining and singing through the air.
“Not that one,” Elliot said, and when Luke didn’t listen Elliot had no choice but to eel his way in between the two men and their blades. “He’s surrendering!”
Luke was already swinging his sword: Elliot was very glad he trusted Luke to be fast enough to catch his own swing. As it was there was a nasty moment where Elliot felt Luke’s sword graze his throat and the other man’s swordpoint at his back.
The enemy soldier could have run Elliot through right then. But he put up his blade, and Elliot opened the door and went into the commander’s tower, Luke following him.
“Oh my God,” said Luke, and sat down heavily on the stone steps, in the dark, his head in his hands. “He could have killed you. I could have killed you!”
“No, no, I had every faith in you,” said Elliot. “I did think he might kill me, but there was a life to be saved in the balance, so you see it was worth it.”
Elliot also found war very traumatizing, but he’d thought that Luke would be more used to it by now. He reached out in the dark, found Luke’s shoulder, and patted it.
“I know, violence is terrible,” he said. “I’ll be more supportive later. I have to go see Colonel Whiteleaf now. Don’t let anyone come up these stairs.”
He ran up the stairs and into the commander’s office, where Commander Woodsinger should have been. Instead there was a man, burly around the shoulders with a fiercely bristling black beard.
“They send brats from council training to offer surrender and command to my son?” barked Colonel Whiteleaf, hand on his sword hilt.
“No,” said Elliot, and took the rolled-up pieces of paper from his belt.
He found ripping pages out of books sacrilegious, but not as sacrilegious as letting people die.
“I read this interesting account of your battle with the mermaids long ago, Colonel Whiteleaf,” he said. “The one in which you first won acclaim as a military leader. The battle on which all your fame is based. It’s funny, because your account of how the mermaids behaved was not at all in accordance with a book I read in the Sunborn library called 1,000 Leagues Across a Sea of Blood. Have you read it? It’s very good.”
“What does an ancient book have to do with me?” Whiteleaf snapped, going rigid.
“Moreover,” said Elliot. “A few years ago, an explorer from my world called deWitt went on a voyage to the same place you claimed you fought your battles, and he saw there no sign that they had ever taken place. There were mermaids there: their numbers had not been decimated and their habitat had not been destroyed. It was very clever of you, Colonel Whiteleaf. You can’t claim to have had a battle with trolls or harpies or elves—people will expect to see evidence, people will expect to see bodies. But a battle with mermaids, out at sea? Nobody but you and your sailors would ever know the truth. Or so you thought.”
“No one will pay attention to what a stupid cadet claims,” bluffed Whiteleaf, his eyes less confident than his voice. “Or to a stupid book, or to a voyage of exploration, whatever foolish thing that is. I’ve never heard of one, or this deWitt fellow either.”
Elliot raised his eyebrows. “You’re right, the voyage isn’t very famous, because exploration isn’t as exciting as war, and deWitt is regarded with suspicion since he wouldn’t even take an otherlands surname. But Rachel Sunborn was one of the soldiers with the explorers. She described what she saw to me very accurately. I think she could do the same for anybody . . . and I think a Sunborn would be believed.”
Whiteleaf’s face was red as dawn.
“One more thing,” Elliot added casually, and saw Whiteleaf turn pale. “I know the birthdate of Captain Whiteleaf. He’s not your son. He can’t be. By your own account, he was conceived while you were at sea. But you know that, don’t you? You and your wife never had any other children. You wanted him to be your heir, and you wanted him to have command of the trainees’ camp, which is a stepping stone to real military command. You wanted a lot of things, and you’re not going to get all of them. So now you have a choice. I left a letter describing the truth of your long sea voyage, just so I wouldn’t get murdered.”