Serene looked at him for a long moment and then she smiled, a radiant wash of dawn over a dark land. She reached out and took his hand when he offered it.
They did not fight on the field again that day, but they walked out onto it, hands clasped, bright and dark heads bowed together, exactly in step. They lifted their linked hands high over their heads and the whole crowd cheered, elves and humans alike, louder than they had for the fight.
And Elliot knew that there was one human in the world who Serene loved enough to defy her clan, to break her sacred traditions, to forge an unbreakable bond with against all reason and all law, and force everyone to respect that bond. He knew who Serene loved best.
The world proved to him over and over again what he already knew: that it was always going to be Luke, and never going to be Elliot.
Luke’s little display over Serene only added fuel to the fire: now Sure-Aim-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle had admitted Luke Sunborn was going to the wars, of course the rest of the humans from the Border guard were going too.
It was simply a case of arranging matters to best suit everyone. Elliot brought up the fact they could draw up a few unofficial agreements.
Elliot tried not to forget what Commander Woodsinger had told him—that it was a privilege to be in here, that he could change something, maybe, even if he could not change enough.
Even though he could see what was going to happen, with a terrible inevitability he did not know how to stop: that the Border guard were going to creep into the elves’ land, and then in five years . . . maybe ten . . . the elves would try to take it back. War coming out of war, over and over, and all Elliot could do was put it off, as if he were bailing out a sinking boat with a leaky bucket. He tried to put in things that would please the elves without hurting the humans, and vice versa. He argued with people who believed nothing should ever change, as if fixing something broken was sacrilege. Surely there was a better way to do things, out in his world, in the civilized world.
Except there were still wars in his world. It was only in stories that there was one clear evil to be defeated, and peace forever after. That was the dream of magic land: that was what could never have been real.
Everyone imagined a battle that would bring peace, and the only thing that had ever worked, ever brought peace for even a heartbreakingly short time, in any world, were words.
Every time he wanted to snap someone’s head off and storm out of the council room Elliot excused himself, found a cool stone wall to lean against, and told himself: Go back and be sweet, be nice, nod and smile, get those clauses in there. He smiled until his face hurt, until his teeth hurt, smiled so much that Cold-Steel-to-Vanquish-the-Foe unbent enough to escort him to the lunchroom after another session with Elliot trying to argue very politely for codicils that everyone else very calmly didn’t care about. He left Cold at the door with a smile.
“You’re in a good mood,” Luke remarked, offering a smile in return.
“No I’m not. I hate you guys,” snapped Elliot. He collapsed on the bench with his head in Serene’s lap, and then peered under his lashes at them.
Luke rolled his eyes and continued to eat peas. Serene patted Elliot’s head and continued to read. Neither of them showed any signs of leaving.
Elliot was walking back to the commander’s tower and the meeting room and the piles of paper he was trying to use to make peace, as if peace were a house of cards everyone else was intent on upsetting but him, when he saw the cranky medic making for the tent.
“Hey,” said Elliot.
The late afternoon was warm and glowing. It lent her face something that was almost like softness, but not quite. Her long copper-red braid glowed in the bright light. There were plenty of redheads in the Borderlands: half the elves were redheads. Elliot had never thought twice about her hair. Not before.
“I don’t have time to talk to you,” said the medic, walking faster. “Or rather I suppose I do, but I don’t want to.”
It was the kind of thing she said which usually made Elliot smile, but he did not smile this time.
“I think you probably have time for me to ask a quick question,” said Elliot. He felt ill, sweat under his collar and his knees trembling, but he could not be a coward this time. “I know who you are,” he continued. “Do you know who I am?”
The medic Elka Pathwind, who had once been Elka Schafer and his mother, looked at him for a long moment. She had brown eyes, dark as pansies: they were nothing like his.
“I know who you are,” she said slowly. “I guess you want to talk to me more than ever. I can spare a while. I suppose I owe you that.”
They could not just stay here, where anyone could walk by and interrupt them. Elliot began to walk toward the edge of the camp, where the fence ran. He leaned against the fence, his boots in the dirt: leaning, he was closer to her height. She was tall for a woman, but shorter than him, shorter than Serene. Her passionless pale face was level with his now.
“Are you angry with me?” she asked. She sounded almost curious.
“No,” Elliot blurted out.
“Good,” she said. “I did the best thing for you, I think, leaving you with your father. He was always—very devoted.”
“He was very devoted to you,” Elliot snapped. “It doesn’t transfer.”
He meant love: that love could not be given from hand to hand like a parcel, that what had been gold from his father in her hand had turned to ashes in his. He could not say the word love, though, not with her looking at him.
She surveyed him. “Was he cruel to you, then? You look perfectly all right.”
“I am all right,” Elliot muttered.
“Just having a tantrum, then?”
Elliot lifted his chin, so he could look down on her. “Was he cruel to you?” he asked in return. “There are a lot of reasons for a woman to leave. I read about them. You were—you were pretty young.”
He’d prepared a lot of things to say to her: that he didn’t blame her, that he forgave her. None of them seemed right, now.
“There were a lot of reasons to stay,” she said. “Have you ever thought, when you’re done here, that you will have no qualifications in the other world? The world did not stop turning when you turned thirteen. It will have left you far behind.”
“I’ve thought about it,” said Elliot.
“Hmm,” said this strange woman. “In the other world, there were two choices for me: I could be his wife. Or I could live in penury and, if I tried to tell the world the truth about where I’d been, be called mad. So I was his wife. He always tried to be good to me, I think. But in this world, I don’t need him. I don’t need anybody. So I came back. The wall we come over, I cut my old name on it with all the other names from the otherlands, and I walked away.”