“They’re not terrible,” Myra said. Elliot beamed, gratified, and she patted Elliot on the back. “Luke’s right, you should definitely change into your uniform before the commander sees you, but even though your garb is outlandish I think it looks quite nice.”
“Yeah, actually,” Dale agreed. “What do you call those?”
“Jeans,” said Elliot.
“Would all of you shut up!” Luke snarled.
“What is wrong with you?’ Elliot asked. “Why are you being such a moody baby?”
Myra took a discreet step back. Dale aimed an appalled look at Elliot. Luke’s shoulders bunched under his shirt. For an instant Elliot really thought, against everything he knew about Luke, that he was going to be hit.
He did not take a step back.
Luke did not hit him. “Elliot, I need to talk to you,” he ground out instead. “Please.”
“Yeah,” Elliot said. “Okay. Of course. Myra, see you later. Dale, take this and go back to the game.” He pushed the ball at Dale, and Dale opened his mouth. “No, no don’t argue with me,” Elliot told him. “You don’t want to go and do a rash thing like that. Just run along.”
He grasped Luke by his upper arm and towed him toward Elliot’s cabin. Elliot really needed to put his bag down, and Myra and Luke were right: he should probably change before the commander spotted him. But he uneasily suspected that he had to hear this first.
Luke was silent as they walked. Dread drew a cold finger down Elliot’s spine. Luke had been with his family all summer: something could have happened to any of them.
“You have me kind of worried,” he said as they approached the cabin, shrugging off his bag and holding it in one hand, trying to keep his voice light. “What’s going on? Where’s Serene?”
He looked at Luke. Luke looked back at him, the anger gone from his face. He looked helpless. Elliot let his bag drop from his fingers into the dust.
“Luke,” Elliot said, and heard his voice shake. “Where’s Serene?”
Luke sat down, heavily, on the step in front of Elliot’s cabin. Elliot stood over him, his shadow touching Luke. He could see the silhouetted outline of his hands. They were shaking too.
“She didn’t come back to school,” said Luke. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if she’s going to. She’s with her mother, fighting in the eastern woods. The brigand problem got worse and worse, and all the elven troops were rallied, but they don’t want humans coming. The brigands are human—some people say they’re Border guards turned traitor—and the elves don’t like humans much right now. I should be with her. We swore an oath so we would always ride into battle together and always have each other’s backs. But the elf commanders—Serene’s mother—they all say it doesn’t matter. The oath doesn’t count, because I’m human and a boy. They’ve expressly forbidden me to go. There are, um, orders to shoot me on sight. Serene felt she had to go without me, for her people. She didn’t have a choice. And then you weren’t here, and word came back that the fighting had turned—that it was really bad. I haven’t had any word from her. I don’t know what to do.”
Luke put his face in his hands, as if he was tired beyond words. Elliot stared at his bag in the dust, at his shadow. He went and sat beside Luke, leaning against his shoulder. He looked at his own hands, hanging empty between his knees. He did not know what to do either.
Serene, Serene, Serene. If he had never come back, he would always have imagined her back at school with Luke, riding, fighting, laughing her rare sweet laugh. He would have believed she was safe.
He had lived all summer in a world where the idea of death was so far away it was laughable, and now he had come back here. He had wanted to.
The next few days were devoted entirely to an elven outreach program. Elliot wrote to every elf he’d ever met in Serene’s company, including Serene’s mother, and sent a particularly forlorn yet flirtatious letter to Swift.
Then he made Luke write down every elven contact that Luke or any of the Sunborns had.
Once he’d forced Luke to wrack his brains, Elliot was surprised by the array of results. The Sunborns got around.
In some cases literally. Gregory Sunborn had spent years in the elven woods being a celebrated courtesan. He had a list of contacts that stretched to the sea, and after receiving a nicely worded note from one of his favorite young cousins, he promised to leave no stone unturned until they had news of Serene.
Luke dropped Gregory’s letter on the pile. “I don’t want to talk about it!”
“Great, because we don’t have time,” said Elliot. “I’m going to dictate another letter to you. Listen up.”
They spent a great deal of time in Commander Woodsinger’s office, Elliot going through her correspondence while she shouted at them not to go through her correspondence.
Elliot used a retired councilor’s room beneath the commander’s to write his letters, so he could bother her with greater ease and efficiency. He sat and wrote there, freezing in the stupid stone room with rickety doors leading to a wind trap of a balcony and thus forced to borrow Luke’s jacket, and he counted the days by noticing when the sun lit the windows and when he lit the candles.
“Have you noticed that the teachers for the council courses don’t get replaced when they retire, while there are more captains who teach us every year?”
“There are a lot more people in the war-training course,” Luke said absently, sitting at the other end of the desk and methodically going through letters from various aunts, uncles, and cousins.
“And why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know, Elliot, maybe some people in this world actually want to be useful.”
“I know, education and diplomacy is so stupid compared to knowing how to stick the sharp end of an object in someone.” Elliot scrubbed a hand over his face. “Though I’m not sure I can talk. I don’t remember what happened in class today.”
“We didn’t go,” said Luke.
“Ah. That explains that. When we get word back about Serene, I’m going to take a break and be cultured and educated. I’m going to help Myra with her play.”
Luke gave Elliot an interrogative look. Elliot rolled his eyes.
“Myra of the Diamond clan,” he said. “She’s very nice. You have met her many, many times. And she’s working behind stage on a production of Radiant and Jewel, which is—I’ve heard, I haven’t read it yet—a genre-defining classic tale of elven love and tragedy, possibly the most influential fictional romance of all time. It will be very interesting to see what approach a human production takes to not only the dialogue but the costumes and setting: this is a real opportunity to present a balanced middle ground for both species through art.”