Or maybe he would just go live in that hole.
“Good for Peter,” said Elliot, and took a deep breath and grimly resumed his walk to the cabin.
He was not enormously surprised when Luke followed and continued to harangue him. “Why do you do things like this?”
Elliot rolled his eyes. “Do things like sleep with gorgeous people? I don’t know, I would’ve thought it was fairly self-explanatory.”
He stormed on. He heard the crackle and snap of twigs under Luke’s feet as Luke stormed after him. Thin sharp spears of sunlight came treacherously through the leaves above, and stabbed at Elliot’s eyes.
He could see how this looked to Luke. Adara had been terrible to Luke and then Elliot had immediately slept with her—taken her side, acted as if he didn’t think what she’d done was wrong at all.
Except that Elliot had been rejected and Luke chosen twice in the last eight hours. Elliot was in no mood to soothe Luke’s hurt feelings when Luke was always going to be the one who was loved best.
There was a brief silence before they reached Elliot’s cabin, at which point another question occurred to Luke.
“Is that my jacket?” Luke demanded.
Elliot’s dormitory mates put their heads under their pillows and sighed in one synchronized movement.
“I have an explanation for what happened to it,” said Elliot.
“What is it?”
“I’m coming up with an explanation,” Elliot amended. “I haven’t thought of one yet, but I’m going to come up with one and it’s going to be good.”
Luke looked slightly amused, but mostly as if he had added “destruction of my private property” to his long list of Elliot’s sins. Elliot rummaged in his bag of illicit goods to fish out one of his T-shirts, since Luke kept looking at all the paint and he’d been scandalized enough for one day. Elliot would plan how to get out of his trousers and into his uniform later, preferably in strict privacy.
“Anyway, why do you do things like this?”
Elliot emerged from his T-shirt to find Luke blinking. “Things like what?” Luke asked.
“Uh, coming and interrupting me at highly personal moments in order to make judgements and ruin my day?”
Luke eyed Elliot with the self-satisfied air that Elliot knew from bitter experience indicated Luke was imminently going to be proven right about everything.
“I told you why I was looking for you last night. Didn’t you wonder why I was looking for you this early in the morning? Serene’s back. I thought you’d want to know. Maybe I was wrong about—”
Elliot never heard the rest of Luke’s sentence. He was too busy running.
Behind him he heard one of his dorm mates shrieking something irrelevant about closing the door.
Elliot threw the door of the meeting room open, and scarcely saw the dignitaries around the crowded table, elves and human alike, all solemn and all staring. She was there, at her mother’s side: tall, straight-backed, clad in green dark as the woods at evening.
Then she was no longer at her mother’s side but in Elliot’s arms, his about her shoulders, hers about his waist, his head bowed into the crook of her neck. He held on hard, breathed in hard, and every sense told him that she was back, she was whole, and he did not ever have to let go of her again.
“Ah well, when virtuous young men are unkind, there is much comfort to be found in the arms of floozies,” said an elf Elliot didn’t recognize, and Serene broke away from Elliot and looked murderous.
“You know that’s right,” said a guy Elliot didn’t know but who was clearly a Sunborn. He was more of a silver lion than a silver fox, and he was speaking in elvish, which was something of a shock. “Gotta love floozies. So which virtuous maidens have been unkind to your young warrior, Sure-Aim-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle? I’d heard she was rather a devil with the gentlemen.”
Sure looked amused rather than stern: Elliot supposed it was beautiful that she found unholy joy in tormenting her only daughter. “Oh, a great many silly gentlemen go sighing after my bad girl. But she has her eye on a very sweet young boy—much too good for my girl—called Golden-Hair-Scented-Like-Summer. Now as battle practice, we have tourneys, and Serene asked leave to wear her chosen gentleman’s colours tied around her arm. She had asked many times before and always been refused. This time her wish was granted and Golden bestowed the requested mark of favor. What Serene did not know as Golden tied the scarf around her arm was that Golden had apparently rolled the scarf in . . .”
“I’m no good at botany,” Elliot said, translating for Louise. “I think the . . . well, from what Sure is saying about the effects, it seems to be a deadlier equivalent of poison ivy. So Serene broke out in a rash and came—last place in the tourney . . .”
“Elliot,” said Serene, “shut up!”
Elliot shut up, but Louise was already laughing, and Sure continued: “Golden said he didn’t believe she was trying to win the tourney for Golden or for anything but her own vainglory, and he thought Serene needs to stop taking men for granted and be—”
“Something like taken down a peg,” Luke whispered in his dad’s ear. “I think?”
“Luke!” Serene exclaimed. Luke looked guilty, but then glanced at his father for approval.
“The lad knows elvish,” said General Lakelost in the hushed tones of one commiserating with friends on a misfortune: “Does he read a lot?”
“No!” said Michael Sunborn.
“His swordsister is an elf,” Elliot pointed out coldly.
“She’s not his swordsister, because he cannot have one, because he is only a boy,” Sure-Aim-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle hissed.
“And so you consider me unworthy,” said Luke in elvish, with a creditable attempt to be formal. “But what if there was a way to prove my worth?”
“Neither he nor my other comrade have the least need to prove their worth,” announced Serene. “And how dare you cast aspersions on Elliot’s virtue while showing yourself to be overly familiar with a famous trollop, Mother! It would break my gentle father’s heart if he knew.”
“Oh, you’re Gregory Sunborn,” Elliot said, gazing at the silver lion in enlightenment.
“The one, the only, the most expensive,” said Gregory Sunborn, former courtesan to the elves, and winked. “It was years before your mother ever met your father, who I am sure is a sweet virtuous creature.”
“He is,” said Serene, boring holes into her mother’s skull with her glare.
Sure looked mildly discomfited.
The elderly elf—and elderly for an elf meant a few lightened tresses among the red hair, and a certain stone-like pallor and fixity of expression—coughed pointedly. “I am uncertain why we have been called to this meeting comprised of harlots and children—”