Elliot found them a little thrilling.
Then they reached the old battlefield where harpies and trolls had once tried to reclaim territory from humans—though human records said the battle had been a treacherous attack. Elliot was not sure whose records to believe, since nobody could be trusted when they wanted something.
The ground that humans, trolls, and harpies had all wanted stretched gray and bleak and uninviting before them. Elliot heard Luke make a low, disgusted sound in the back of his throat. He had stepped on a human skull, half embedded in the earth.
Elliot’s notes had not focused too much on the harpies’ relationship with the dead. Harpies’ lives were intertwined with the dead as mermaids’ lives intertwined with water: they tore apart the corpses of their enemies, carried off their enemies’ bones to decorate their own bodies and their own nests. They cast the remnants of their loved ones into the air, and kept mementoes of them: the hair of the loved and lost braided into their own hair. Love and hatred endured long past death, for harpies: death changed nothing.
Elliot had thought Luke might be disturbed.
And so much of what Elliot had read came from outside sources and not the harpies themselves. He wanted to talk to them, to hear them tell their own stories, to find out the truth.
Past the battlefield was a new forest which humans called the Forest of the Suicides, to mark how many had died on its borders. Elliot wondered what the harpies called it.
There were harpies soaring above the trees, like vast birds or strange clouds. They were waiting for them, Elliot thought. They were waiting for Luke.
When they entered the Forest of the Suicides, the leader came.
She came flying, in a rush of wind and wings, and for a moment Elliot thought Luke might run. Elliot went around Serene, so that Serene and he were flanking Luke, so they were on either side, ready to support him. Elliot saw the flash of Luke’s blue eyes, registering his presence, and then saw him look at Serene. Luke lifted his chin.
The leader of the harpies was beautiful and bizarre, her clothes bones, her body a lion’s, an eagle’s, a woman’s, and yet wholly her own. She had braids and an air of natural authority that reminded Elliot of his commander, and she had eyes only for Luke. Her eyes were blue, as well.
“I am Celaeno, the leader of this flock,” she said.
Luke said, his voice polite but challenging, hesitant but unafraid, and sure of who he was in the face of any claims otherwise: “I’m . . . I’m Luke Sunborn.”
Sunborn must be a name she knew: a name the humans must have shouted on that long-ago battlefield beyond the trees. Maybe they should have advised Luke not to say his surname. Maybe he would not have listened, if they had.
Celaeno hesitated. Then she bid Luke, and all who had come with Luke, welcome.
It should have been easy. After a round of introductions the harpies had made them welcome and left them to eat and rest, the tents had been set up, and all that was left to do that evening was make Luke happy.
Elliot went to the cooking fires and fetched Dale over to Luke’s side. Then Elliot made a massive, heroic sacrifice and initiated a conversation about Trigon. Luke was glowing. Dale looked so happy, it was almost sad.
Elliot concentrated on not bleeding out of the ears with boredom. He waited, like a matchmaking panther, to pounce on the precise right moment, and then excused himself. He invited Serene to excuse herself, too.
“I’m comfortable here,” said Serene.
It was possible Elliot should have explained his scheme to Serene before now. Still, Serene loved Luke and was occasionally capable of tact: surely she would be driven off by Dale and Luke’s undeniable chemistry.
Elliot had been gone for approximately two minutes, lurking by the cooking fires and making conversation with Delia Winterchild, when Dale fled.
“Excuse me,” Elliot said. “I see an emotional situation going wildly awry.”
“Yeah,” said Delia. “That’s life.”
She looked amused. She had never liked Luke, Elliot knew, not since the wars that had killed her twin and made Luke a hero. Elliot had always understood that, but Darius’s death had not been Luke’s fault. He didn’t want her kicking Luke when he was down.
He did not have time to argue with her right now, because he had to go back and scold Luke for letting Dale get away. Elliot could not, he felt strongly, help those who would not help themselves to some sweet sweet loving.
Telling Luke off did not go well.
“Excuse me if I’m a little hesitant when I know I can’t even take off my shirt in front of somebody,” Luke snarled. “Because I’m turning into a monster!”
Elliot was so shocked by this view of what was going on that he went silent. There was nothing he could say to Luke to make this better, he thought. Luke did not care what Elliot’s opinion of him was. Elliot had to insure that Dale proved to Luke that Dale did not think of him that way: that Dale still wanted Luke, more than anyone else.
That night, in their tent, Elliot said anxiously: “But you did have fun, talking to Dale?”
If Luke had not had fun, Elliot was out of ideas. Luke had seemed so pleased, just to be having the conversation. Elliot did not know where it had all gone wrong.
“Yeah, it was nice when we were all talking. But then you left for no reason,” Luke said accusingly. “And Dale ran away.”
“Okay, I get it,” said Elliot. “It’s all my fault.”
The next day, Luke had a private meeting with Celaeno, and that meant Elliot had free time to make friends with several very nice harpies, then cut Dale off from the rest of the troops and tell him what he thought about that running-away business.
He was very unhappy that he had to leave the harpies, since several of them seemed startled and delighted by his inquiries about their customs. He might have been slightly sharp with Dale.
“It got very awkward after you left,” Dale mumbled.
“I’m going to have to leave at some point when you get together,” Elliot said. “Unless you and Luke have some very specific exhibitionist fetishes, which I would not judge you for, but I have known Luke a long time and I find the idea vanishingly unlikely. You have to pull yourself together. You can’t go running off like that again. You have to think of other topics which will engage Luke,” Elliot instructed. “I think it would be nice if you played a pick-up game of some sort. Also maybe a romantic picnic in the Forest of the Suicides. I don’t think the name should put you off. Besides, the harpies have a different name for it. I don’t know what it means yet, but the sound is very pretty. You should ask one of them how to say it. And you should try to strike up a conversation with Celaeno. You do realize she is related to Luke, right?”
Dale looked badly startled.
Elliot nodded. “She’s one of his biological father’s nestmates. Though harpies don’t have words like ‘aunt.’ That does mean, however, that Luke is technically of high rank among the harpies, which is cool, don’t you think?” He gave Dale an expectant look. “What a catch.”
“Elliot!” Dale screamed. “Stop!”
“What?” Elliot asked defensively. “I’m just making a scheme for your future happiness. You don’t want to be happy in the future? What’s your objection to the future? What’s your objection to happiness?”
“I don’t have an objection to happiness,” Dale said. “It’s just—Luke.”
“You have an objection to Luke?” Elliot snapped. “What possible objection could there be to Luke? He’s smart—and he’s champion—and he’s radiantly good-looking—”
“He’s great,” said Dale.
Elliot frowned. “Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
Dale gave Elliot a look that said he was surrendering when Elliot was not aware they were fighting a battle. Many people seemed to approach conversations with Elliot this way, so he shrugged it off and gestured for Dale to speak.
“He’s just a little—”
“Constantly eternall
y insistently in your face twenty-four seven?” Elliot cut in sympathetically.
“Distant?” said Dale.
“Well, obviously we’re having a slightly different Luke experience,” said Elliot. He folded his arms and regarded Dale, who seemed dispirited. It could simply be an effect of prolonged conversation with Elliot, but in case it was not, Elliot added encouragingly: “Luke is shy! That’s the problem. He’s shy because he likes you so much. It’s beautiful if you think about it. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”
He regarded Dale sternly. Dale nodded.
“Good,” said Elliot. “Good.”
“It’s really nice of you to go to all this trouble,” Dale offered, after a moment. “I mean . . . you’re really nice. Knowing you care that much . . . about me . . . is nice.”
“Ahahaha,” said Elliot. “Sure. And if you follow all the details of my plot carefully, everybody will be happy forever. Won’t that be nice? Now, remember we don’t know each other.”
“Luke knows that we know each other—”
“But we can’t know each other too well!” Elliot warned.
Dale did not look ready for this level of subterfuge.
Elliot gave up on a soothing tone and patted Dale’s (second-most muscular in the Border camp, hello) arm instead. “Everything is going to go great, provided you do exactly what I want.”
He sensed a presence at his side, glanced in that direction, and found himself staring at a dead rabbit.
“Aaaaagh!” said Elliot.
“I’m gonna go,” said Dale, and ran.
The dead rabbit, hanging at eye level, stared at Elliot with a glazed regard. Elliot eventually pulled his gaze away from the creature and looked to the harpy who had alit on the grassy bank beside Elliot and was holding her prey aloft with what seemed to be pride.
“This is for you,” she told him.
“Oh,” said Elliot. “How kind. How did you guess that I love . . . dead things?”
She inclined her head. He could make out the actual pattern of feathers in her hair: it was so fascinating. He found himself smiling with reflexive admiration, even in the presence of dead rabbits. Then he wondered what smiles meant to harpies, when some had human-looking mouths and some had beaks. Surely the greater variety made for a greater range of expression. He wondered if he could ask.
“I caught it myself,” the harpy told him.
Elliot appreciated the harpies’ efforts to bond across the species divide and make this treaty work. He wished she had approached someone else, as even after years on this side of the Border he felt queasy around dead uncooked animals. The rabbit dangled, swaying slightly from side to side. Elliot averted his eyes from its hypnotic swing.
“I am one million percent genuinely impressed,” he said firmly. “You’re Podarge, aren’t you? Celaeno mentioned that you were an expert gardener. I would be so interested to learn the differences and similarities between human and harpy methods. You seem like the ideal person to talk to. If you would care to share your expertise.”
Podarge ducked her head and blushed, color rising around her beak. “If you really want me to.”
Oh. Oh, Elliot understood why he had been brought a dead animal. He brightened up.
“I do,” he said. “Would it be forward of me to add that I really like your hair?”
“I like your hair!” said Podarge. “I can see it from leagues up in the sky.”
“You sure can,” said Elliot. “Like a small localized forest fire, and up until this moment I thought of it as just about as disastrous.”
Luke’s heritage was great, he thought, and forays to make treaties were great, and he, Elliot, might be about to get a girlfriend who could fly! A flying girlfriend! He could not wait to tell Serene.
Then he saw Celaeno and Luke approach. Normally, he would have been pleased to see Luke and his aunt (his flying aunt!), but at this precise moment he felt he could have done without them. He tried to make a subtle gesture to Luke to go away. Luke squinted and frowned at him.
“You have feathers in your hair.”
“Yeah, they get all over, I’ve just learned to accept it,” said Elliot as Luke came over, pulled the feathers out, and threw them on the ground. “Or not.”
Celaeno looked at Elliot, Podarge, and the rabbit. She had a somewhat severe air about her at all times, but it was increased enormously now. She looked at the dead rabbit as if it had wronged her family.
“Podarge, a word in the air, if you would.”
Podarge jumped at the tone of command—literally jumped into the air, so she and the bunny swiftly became nothing more than a speck against the clouds.
Elliot could not work out where it had all gone wrong.
“That was my dead creature,” he said forlornly. “It was for me.”
“Yeah, you’re hilarious and what you told Commander Woodsinger was so believable,” Luke muttered.
Luke had now referred to something that Elliot had told Commander Woodsinger about fourteen times. Elliot could not imagine what he meant, and Elliot was really starting to worry he’d told the commander something ludicrous, like that he wouldn’t cause any trouble. He also didn’t know why Luke thought he was currently making a joke.
Things did not look good in the awesome flying girlfriend department. Possibly Celaeno thought that human and harpy mingling would be detrimental to the treaty. Elliot sighed wistfully. He did not want to do anything that would damage the treaty.
“Did you get on well with Celaeno,” he asked, poking Luke. “Tell me you didn’t say anything stupid. No, wait, it’s you: tell me you didn’t say anything too stupid.”
Luke did not look mildly irritated, as he usually would have. He looked tired, and he still had that certain air of low-lying anger which had hung around him like a shadow since his mother had told him the truth, and which Elliot had never seen on him before.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice heavy. “She said stuff about . . . my wings. I don’t think she knew what she was talking about.”
“She does have a pair of her own, though,” Elliot pointed out.
Luke gave him a dark look. “She gave me a skull to drink out of.”
“Oh, loser, tell me you respected her traditions and drank out of her skull!”
Luke sat down on the bank and ran his hand through his hair, then stayed with his head bowed and his hand in his hair, as if he’d wanted to put his head in his hands but did not want to betray that level of vulnerability.
“I drank out of her skull,” he said. “I tried to be polite. I wish all of this was over and we were going home.”
“I think Dale went that way,” Elliot tempted him.
Luke did not respond to this offered treat.
Elliot offered a different treat. “I think Serene is practising with a couple of other cadets and a longbow in the woods!”
Luke did not go off to excel at physical activities. Luke chose to sit in the dirt, because that was a super fun time.
“Do you want to hear about the significance of the dead and the attitude to mortality in harpy culture?”
Luke lifted his head for just long enough to give Elliot a baleful stare, then dropped it. “Of course I don’t.”
The autumn sun streamed down on the grassy bank, on Luke’s bent golden head and hunched broad shoulders. The stream of sunlight was broken by the moving dark, the fluttering shadows cast by the leaves, and the wheeling, moving shadows cast by the harpies high above, their presence disrupting the whole sky.
“So leave,” Elliot suggested, settling himself on the bank. “Go find something more fun to do, because I’m going to talk about it.”
“Can I stop you,” Luke muttered.
He could, actually: he could have belted Elliot across the mouth to shut him up, which had been done before, though the idea of Luke doing it was so ridiculous Elliot found it actually funny. Luke could have surrendered like Dale or just given up and walked away. But it had been four years now, and he
hadn’t: so Elliot’s priorities were first Luke, then the treaty, and a long, tragic way back, flying girlfriends.
This was not the hilarious situation Elliot had originally believed it was. Luke was upset, in a new and disturbing way. If it meant delivering Dale on a plate, carrying through peace with the harpies singlehanded, or just filling in the time until Serene returned and was able to comfort him in ways Elliot had never learned, they were going to get through this.
“Listen up, moron,” Elliot said tenderly. “There are some things you should know.”
Word seemed to have got out that the humans were friendly.
That evening around their cooking fires, more than a dozen harpies approached Elliot specifically, to tell him details about harpies’ domestic lives and religious beliefs. Nobody made any advances of a sexual nature to Elliot, though.
Not that Elliot expected people to constantly make advances of a sexual nature to him. Podarge’s move had got his hopes up that harpies were into redheads, however, and it was a disappointment when even very attractive harpies his own age treated Elliot in a strangely aunt-or-cousin-like fashion. As if he were one of the family.
“I’m so interested in harpy marriage customs!” Elliot said brightly.
“How lovely,” one harpy with beautiful blond braids told Elliot. “You should wed in high summer and wear one of our oak-leaf coronets in your hair. Celaeno would make you a coronet with her own hands.”
“I’d be delighted,” said Elliot. “Hypothetically. If I get . . . hypothetically married.”
The harpies were weird, but they were nice. They were welcoming, even though too many of the troop remained wary of them. Elliot cast dark glances at Dale and Delia, who both lurked in a terrified clump outside the light of the cooking fires and away from the harpies.
In Other Lands Page 42
