She smiled at him, and Elliot knew it was an apology for making him feel doubtful and uncomfortable, and he smiled back. She hadn’t meant it. And it wasn’t her fault if Elliot had expressed his feelings wrong. He always did that, as if life were a dance where everybody else knew the moves but Elliot was constantly and fatally out of step.
Myra returned to her book. Elliot sat and looked out of the window, not dreamily this time but feeling a little cold.
He had to be careful not to drive off Myra. He realized exactly what he had said, earlier, even if she did not: that Luke was not Elliot’s friend. And in a way, since Serene was now his girlfriend, she was not actually his friend anymore either. If—something were to happen, if he made too many mistakes and they broke up, Elliot would have nobody.
He had not thought about how dangerous it would be, to have all his dreams come true.
“Come with me,” said Luke abruptly one day, turning up at the library and grabbing Elliot’s wrist and hauling him out of the room.
Nobody protested this outrage but Elliot himself. Myra said, “Hi, Luke! Bye, Luke!” and waved Elliot good-bye with her little finger, not even putting down her book as her friend was carried off. It was scandalous and heartless.
Elliot grabbed at the checkout desk as he went by.
“Uh, help me?” he suggested. “Abduction!”
“Don’t be a silly little thing,” said Bright-Eyes. “Men don’t abduct people. Just boyish high spirits! You should both channel them into embroidery.”
“Maybe I would if I wasn’t being abducted!” Elliot hissed, but his grip on the desk proved futile as he was pulled away.
Sometimes Elliot worried that Bright-Eyes-Gladden-the-Hearts-of-Women disliked him intensely for being a hussy and always in the library until closing time.
“I don’t want to go with you,” Elliot declared. “You seem like a bad man.”
Luke glanced at him over his shoulder, and grinned. “That’s a shame. I was thinking—”
“I hope not unsupervised,” Elliot remarked.
Luke rolled his eyes. “The bandits problem is only getting worse. Their numbers are growing—”
“The bandits are banding together?” Elliot asked.
He knew that the bandits, humans who had reportedly either left villages that were not thriving or gone rogue from the Border guard itself, were not funny. And he was touched by Luke’s concern. But Luke had handed him that line.
“You’re hilarious. Please keep joking until the bandits kill us all. If you insist on getting into trouble, you could at least make yourself less trouble than you currently are, is my point. So your girlfriend and I don’t have to keep getting disciplined for pulling your insubordinate ass out of the fire.”
“I won’t learn how to fight!” Elliot said, pulling out of Luke’s grasp with abrupt anger.
“It’s not that hard,” Luke said patiently.
“That’s not the point! You don’t understand anything.”
“As you constantly remind me. Apparently I should understand someone endlessly putting themselves in danger but refusing to learn even the basics of self-defence—”
“Yes!”
“Sorry,” said Luke, grabbing him again and recommencing dragging. “I don’t understand things that are stupid. All right, look, do you have objections to dodging?”
“What?”
“Sharp objects? If they’re thrown at you, would you dodge them?”
“Are you planning to throw them?” Elliot asked cagily.
“How about running away?”
“And back to the library? I am considering that.”
“No,” said Luke. “Come on. If all you’re going to do is dodge or run, you have to learn to do it faster.”
They had left the cabins, by which Elliot meant the buildings, by which he meant sweet sweet civilization, behind. Elliot eyed the variety of open spaces around—Trigon pitch, javelin throwing pit, archery section, combat rings, endless fields—with trepidation.
“I have always thought of myself as a brilliant mind to be safeguarded by the physical efforts of others.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you left the library.”
“You kidnapped me!” Elliot protested.
“I meant that time you almost got yourself killed and did get all of us reprimanded by our commanding officer.”
So I could help us win, Elliot wanted to say, but going into exactly what he had done still seemed like a bad idea. Luke probably wouldn’t think that blackmailing people was anything to be proud of.
“Oh,” Elliot said. “That time.”
He supposed that it did not matter if he’d been dumb or brave. He could have been stabbed either way, and he didn’t want to be. It was nice that other people didn’t want him to be either.
“We’re going to start by running laps,” said Luke.
Elliot got Serene a present for Christmas, even though neither of them celebrated it. None of them had ever given the others presents before. Luke and Elliot’s birthdays were both in summer and thus missable, and Serene said that birthdays were different for elves, and telling anybody outside your family about the day of your entry into the world was considered dangerous. Elliot had always been glad about their presents rule, since getting Luke a gift would have been awkward.
Now that Serene was his girlfriend it seemed like he should give her a present at some point, however, and though the tradition of Christmas had survived in the otherlands, Valentine’s Day had not, so this was Elliot’s opportunity. He’d figured it would take up the time they usually spent watching Luke open his many presents from his family.
“I was thinking about why a land full of magic, where the humans lead secular lives and there are no churches, celebrates Christmas,” Elliot remarked. “I guess it’s a remnant of what humans bring across the Border with them. The ritual remaining, past belief.”
He didn’t know what the excuse for Christmas was in the story he’d read about the magic land with the important lion. Maybe it was the same deal. He was mostly talking because he was nervous.
Serene unwrapped the gift, and light touched her solemn face. It was a book of the treaties written and long history of cooperation between men and elves. Elliot found it idealized the history too much, but there were detailed and accurate sketches of the elven homeland that the writer had been privileged to see. He knew Serene missed home, sometimes.
“Thank you, petal,” said Serene, and kissed him. “I got you something, as well.”
She put a bracelet into his hand.
Elliot knew her first instinct had been to buy him adornments, but the woven leather bracelet was the kind of thing other boys at the Border camp would wear too. It was a nice compromise, and it was always nice to know Serene was trying too.
“Thanks, snowdrop,” he said, and let her tie it on his wrist, then beamed. “Am I pretty?”
“You’ll do,” she teased, and put an arm around his shoulders. He snuggled up. “Perhaps next year we could incorporate some of the elvish winter festival into this time.”
“I would love to do that,” said Elliot.
“Yeah, okay,” said Luke, unwrapping a crossbow.