Where Do You Think You're Going
Of its own accord, the afternoons on the hill had become a time for reading. Elliot, who bent over the printed word whenever a spare moment opened, hardly needed mentioning; even Anna, who had never spared a glance for books or newspapers, had begun little by little to make a show of reading. The volumes he had gathered one by one from the secondhand shop in the village, lest she grow bored, were having their hour at last.
"I want to look at the paper too."
Today, as ever, Elliot sat planted at the table with the newspaper. Anna, who had been racing about the garden with Gorgolio, came in only once the afternoon had grown late and took the seat across from him. He poured her a cup of tea, then passed over the paper he had been reading.
A hushed stillness settled over the house again. Elliot read a novel he had taken from the shelf, drinking the tepid tea a sip at a time while his long fingers turned the pages without a sound.
Anna lifted only her eyes above the newspaper and watched him. He read as if he had been left alone in the world—so quietly, so secretly, that he might never have noticed if the person right beside him came entirely undone.
"......And what are you curious about this time."
At the voice that broke the hush all at once, Anna's shoulders flinched. The gaze that left the book and found her felt rather detached, and a little on edge.
"Curious about what. The news that they've secured Gramlin Airport? The foreign minister's dismissal? Or Ricky Tyler's divorce?"
"Not those. Something else."
"Come here."
He let out a short, low sigh and drew toward himself the teacup that had been sitting at the place beside him.
Anna made a show of folding the newspaper and laughed under her breath. She had always loved this moment past all bearing—the moment when Elliot, who tried every way he could to ignore the fact of her, at last let her in.
She slipped around the table and sat down at his side.
"This person, Roy Cliff. Is he very famous?"
A celebrity wedding clamored across the second page. The article carried a photograph nearly the size of a door: a handsome man in a tailcoat, smiling wide, and a woman in a pure white wedding gown.
"He's one of the most celebrated actors on the Castleleigh stage."
"Ah. It says so right here. For the past several years, Roy Cliff has reigned as the crown prince of the Mermaid Company."
Anna set her finger to the article and read it aloud just as it stood.
"So he belongs to that company."
"Have you seen him?"
"Seen whom? Roy Cliff?"
At the question turned back on her, Anna nodded. Elliot sorted through his memory a moment, then spoke.
"Some years ago, I saw a play he was in. Once."
"What was it like?"
"Well. The truth is, I fell asleep in the middle of it......"
Elliot rubbed the back of his neck, looking sheepish.
"Hmm. Wasn't any good, then."
Anna, her interest gone as quickly as it had come, propped her chin on her hand and turned the pages with a lukewarm air. Then, all at once, she set her index finger to the top of the paper.
"Is this man the prime minister of Fala?"
Her finger indicated a black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged man. Elliot, who had glanced down at the paper without a thought, was thrown, and his mouth shut tight.
Anna leaned in so deeply she seemed about to fall into the newsprint, and read the small type printed beneath the photograph.
"Prime Minister Philip Maynard? If he's prime minister, he's the highest one, isn't he?"
"......Not so much the highest as the man who represents Fala. He's the head of the cabinet."
"The cabinet?"
"The body that decides the important affairs of the nation."
At the plain, brief explanation Anna nodded easily. Elliot watched her profile a moment as she gave herself over to the article, then read it himself, struggling to hide how unsettled he was.
Word has come that the armistice negotiations between the allied nations of Fala and Rohn and Köbel are locked in painful deadlock. Last year, in an address to Parliament, Prime Minister Philip Maynard declared that the talks would be brought swiftly to a close; this paper's reporting, however, has found the disagreement between the Allies and Köbel to be profound. In particular, unlike Rohn—whose territory has suffered catastrophic damage, and which is pressing hard for an end to the war—Generalissimo Andreyev of Köbel is understood to be willing to resume hostilities should the negotiations fail to go his way, a revelation that has set a storm of controversy turning......
Allied nations. Armistice talks. Anna tilted her head over news she could not begin to understand, and decided she would have to ask Elliot after all. But when she turned, his face was cold enough to frighten her.
"......Elliot?"
He did not stir, not even at the careful sound of his name. Anna, who had been gazing steadily at him, slowly took hold of his arm. At that briefest touch he flinched and looked back at her, his face blanched white, as if he had seen a ghost.
"Are you all right?"
Elliot, staring at her blankly, nodded. Cold sweat stood at his temple, like a man fresh out of a nightmare. In the instant Anna hesitated, meaning to wipe it away, he sprang up from his seat.
"Give me a moment...... I'll go down to the village and come back."
And he was gone from the kitchen in a rush, as if someone were chasing him from behind. Anna, who had only listened, docile, to the footsteps fading, rose quietly and went to the window in the sitting room.
Beyond the front garden, where petals shivered in the spring wind, she could see his back hurrying down the dirt path. She set her elbows on the sill, rested her chin upon them, and watched that retreating figure in silence before murmuring, low.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Fredrick asked it with a face like a sheet of ice. The teacup in his hand tipped further and further, pouring a steady stream of tea onto the carpet underfoot.
"Wouldn't it be wiser to set the cup upright first......"
"Answer me."
At the cold snap of it, Elliot let out a long sigh.
"I'm joining up next week."
"You're what?"
"Joining up. Don't you know what that means? I'm going into the service. I've even got the commission. Here."
Irritably, Elliot drew a sheet of paper from inside his jacket. Fredrick stared a long while at the crumpled page, then slowly opened his mouth.
"Second Lieutenant Elliot Olivier. There's only one Elliot Olivier I know."
"Right. And he's the one talking to you now."
"So what you're telling me is that Second Lieutenant Olivier is going off to war."
Fredrick said it steadily, having packed his panic away in a hurry.
"You've lost your mind."
"......I knew you'd say that. Even so, do you mean to keep it up to the very end? I don't know when we'll see each other again."
"No cure for a madman, they say. Seems it's true."
Fredrick flung the commission from him as if he had touched something filthy, and his face twisted hard.
"Grow up, for God's sake. Do you think a battlefield is a playground for children?"
"Why would you say a thing like that?"
"Enough. Drop it. Go back to your studies and get into a university, or else fly passenger planes with that precious flying they taught you at the academy. If you're truly that hard up for work, I'll speak to my father—"
Fredrick, who had been carrying the speech along without a hitch, shut his mouth all at once. His dark eyes, gone cold, fixed on Elliot with a sharp stare.
"You. You're not going to listen to me, are you."
"......"
"No matter what I spit out, you're going to that damned battlefield. That's it, isn't it."
Elliot picked the commission up off the floor without a word. Only after he had folded it in half and slipped it back inside his jacket did he turn to Fredrick, who sat on the sofa with his legs crossed.
"It's a decision I came to after thinking it through. Seriously."
"Oh, I'm sure."
"If this was how you were going to be, why didn't you say a word when I entered the academy?"
"Back then I thought you were only going off to learn how to fly some airplane or other. A scholarship had just come through, as it happened, thanks to your late mother."
Fredrick drained what tea remained and grumbled to his heart's content.
"How was I to know you'd raise hell about actually enlisting? And how exactly do you mean to talk your father round? You already turned the house upside down just getting into the academy, and now it's enlistment on top of it. Ha."
"Why would I try to persuade a man whose face I haven't properly seen in years."
Elliot said it in passing. Fredrick, who had been about to let the remark go, looked stricken.
"You're leaving without even a word to your father?"
"Yeah."
"Hey. You're still underage. You need his permission to enlist, you know that?"
"I drew Father's signature and turned it in. That's why the commission came through like this."
Fredrick stared at him, blank.
"You really have gone mad."
"Can you stop with the have-you-gone-mad?"
Elliot snapped, and dropped heavily onto the sofa opposite. Fredrick, past stricken and now frankly appalled, with no time to get his face under control, forced an answer out.
"Even so...... You have to think of your father's feelings."
"What good is thinking of the feelings of a man who won't spare a thought for mine."
"Elliot."
He turned his gaze aside, stubborn. There was a sadness he could not shake in the face that stared a hole through the abstract painting on the wall.
"......He'll think I'm a failure, too."
"What are you talking about. You know how worried he is about you."
"Worried his reputation might take a stain, more like. You know perfectly well what that man did to my mother. To me."
Elliot turned only his eyes and glanced at Fredrick. At a look that could not quite hide its hatred, Fredrick could not bring himself to go on.
"Mother didn't fail. I'm going to prove it."
Even if it meant walking, step for step, the very road she had walked.
With that resolute murmur to himself, a chill silence came down. Fredrick, sighing hard enough to empty him, his lips stirring and stilling, barely managed to speak.
"I know how you feel. I saw every fight you had with your father. How could I not."
"......"
"Even so, you can't enlist. A battlefield isn't a place you survive on a feeling like that. However strong your will is, it doesn't hold there. It isn't a place you stay alive by will alone. That's what I'm telling you."
Fredrick whispered it, pleading.
"Keep on like this and you really will die. You didn't fight with your father and learn to fly just to go out this emptily. There are any number of ways to prove Aunt Judith wasn't wrong. Why does it have to be that road? Would Aunt Judith have wanted this? What parent looks on, eyes wide open, while the child they love walks into death? I'm begging you. If nothing else, then for the sake of your mother, who's gone—think again. Won't you?"
At the tone gone noticeably gentler, Elliot slowly turned his head. For a moment, under the gaze that met him at last, Fredrick let himself hope—and the foundering of that hope took no longer than a breath.
"You don't get to say that."
Elliot said it in a voice with nothing in it.
"Everything you're living on now—in the end, you have it because a war is being fought somewhere in the world. I doubt even this sofa is something you could buy by selling a single gun. When the war with Köbel turns fierce, won't your family be raising a toast? A fortune's about to come pouring in. Anyone else, maybe. But you don't get to talk like that."