I wrote the disconnected fragments of this in 2012, and put some time into it last year to finally try to join them up. (I posted decontextualised snippets on here as I was working on it, before I was posting actual fic.)
Posting in parts because a) it's somewhat long, and b) I might decide to do extra work on it as we go.
Once a week, in celebration of the coming together of elf and human within the hallowed halls of academia, the long tables of the dining hall are graced with human renditions of classic dishes. Waybread. Stuffed leaves. Trail soup.
Oh, gods, the soup.
Lilliana Smooth-Stones-Beneath-Clear-Water politely dips her spoon. It's good. It is. Rich, savoury. Stuffed with nutrition. Meltingly soft shavings of meat. Fat chunks of lowland tuber. It's even got hints of spice, which she knows is difficult for their palates.
It's food for invalids.
Calling this trail soup is like calling the great oak-beamed hall a campsite. Trail soup is barely more than boiling water, with a handful of whatever edible you passed in the day dumped in it. And tjeng, the vicious spice-burn of tjeng root.
They're trying, trying so hard to make her feel at home. It makes it so much worse.
Lilli lifts her eyes from the soup. Across the table sits Professor Amaranth Pepperidge, paying no attention whatsoever to the food, or the people, or to Lilli. A spoon dangles from her fingers, and occasionally she will remember it long enough to transfer a mouthful of soup to her lips. Mostly, however, she scowls at the slim book of philosophy lying open by her bowl.
Her shoulders are broad. She is elegantly neat. There is a deep furrow of annoyance carved between her brows.
Three incidents define the Professor within Lilli's memory:
The first when Lilli arrived, and the Dean first fawningly attempted to usher her into a faculty meeting. Pepperidge was the one to say — clearly, calmly, without animosity — "But she's not a faculty member, sir. What business does she have here?"
And Lilli looked at the clear-eyed, upright, square-cut scholar and instantly resolved to be in the room for every single meeting from then on, just to see what she'd do.
"Oh, as a...visiting scholar..." which is true, so far as it goes; true enough — "I thought I might better understand, if I observed. We don't have universities." Lilli palmed the quill from her sash, producing it with a twirl. "I might take notes on proceedings — for practise, for my fluency, if I may?"
She directed the question not at the Dean, who salivated at the prospect that an elf, an actual real-life elf, might be there for some time. No, to Pepperidge, the lone sceptic.
Oh so dryly, the Professor said, "I'm sure the Dean can think of no possible objection to that." Her stance said volumes, that she was not fooled for an instant by Lilli's naïf-enmeshed-within-bureaucracy pose, not for the twinkling of an eye.
The second occasion: the first time that Lilli knocked, heart fluttering, at the door to Pepperidge's chambers.
"I despair," Lilli told her dramatically, when the woman answered the door, inkstained, tired and suspicious. "I was trying to read — " She mimed a book, held before her and studiously leafed through. "The words themselves I understand. The sentences I am sure of. The paragraphs I nod wisely over, then when I finish the whole — nothing! I understand nothing!
"Your people are not my people. The mind — " Lilli clutched at the air in frustration. "I know not what I know not of, only glimpse that things there are. I must take your class. I beg, Professor, I prostrate myself...."
Pepperidge's attempt to forestall Lilli's drop to one knee presumed a degree of hyperbole on the elf's part; they toppled to their knees together, clutching at one another for balance.
Inches from Lilli's pleading eyes, the professor cleared her throat several times, and visibly set herself against her own consternation. "My class is not to be disrupted," she said sternly (if a shade breathlessly).
"Never," Lilli swore, prompt enough to remove either's doubt that it would prove untrue.
"I shall expect you to work at it."
"Always!"
Pepperidge paused, as if thinking of further conditions.
"Very well," she said finally, instead. "Help me up."
Thirdly and finally, that very morning: several years after being thrown out of Pepperidge's classroom for good, one or two years after first turning up at her chambers with a small jug of wine and a disingenuous request ("I thought a study of pastimes might reveal the human mind to me. Do you know this board game?"); perhaps six months after the lone occasion when Pepperidge, in the midst of a wine-lubricated discussion of political geography, accidentally and without seeming to notice called her "Lilli"...as they companionably crossed the quad in the direction of Pepperidge's morning lecture, a smartly-cloaked unit of rangers loped in through the main gates of the campus.
Lilli knew them instantly for what they were. Human onlookers took a few breaths to recognise a detachment of the, to them near-mythical, elven far patrol.
Up they came, closer, closer, until they halted neatly before Lilli and the astonished Pepperidge. Their leader flung back his grey-green hood, revealing an angular, handsome face. He treated them to a sparkling smile full of elvish charm, and hailed her cheerily. "Heyo, poet!"
"Captain!" Lilli returned warmly, and turned to introduce the Professor, only to be stopped in an instant.
Pepperidge was rigid, face a picture of dismay so desperate to be concealed that it screamed itself aloud. Lilli faltered, and it was too late.
"Well, this is quite astonishing," the Professor said, in a voice barely strangled at all. "Truly. The Dean will be delighted, and doubtless my morning students will scarce show up at all, so I may as well convey the news to him directly."
"This is — " Lilli attempted.
"This must be Captain Taelin Quiet-River-Through-Wheatfields. You've spoken of him." (Had she? Whatever can she have said?) "Charmed, sir, charmed." (The Professor's sincerity suggested he could fall in a pigsty and be eaten alive.) "Good morning to you, gentlefolk; I'm sure the Dean will be along with a welcoming party shortly."
Away she swept.
"Well," Taelin said cheerily, after they had watched her disappear, ramrod-backed, into the University buildings. "I see you're doing an excellent job on relations between our peoples." And then, as she turned a disconsolate look on him, "Oh, cheer up, poet! They're odd folk, you know, it'll be fine."
It is not fine.
Lilli knocks on Pepperidge's door, some flimsy pretext in hand, and the Professor opens it only to say that she has too many student essays to read, and to close it again. Lilli slinks away.
"If I only knew what I've done," she explains to Taelin for the fourth or fifth time, over a sixth or seventh small copper cup of tea laced with cherry schnapps.
Taelin, having given up on recounting thrilling gossip from home, rolls his eyes conspicuously. "They're not like us," he says, again. "How should I know?"
She chews her lip. "But if I knew — "
"Oh, enough. Listen, have you ever heard them telling stories to their children? It is the strangest thing."
Lilli sips and glares at him. "What is?"
He smirks. He was always annoying — they learned to walk and talk together, were skiving greenhorns together during their national service with the rangers; never have they stopped needling one another.
"Our stories are full of bees," he explains, when he's done milking the moment for all it's worth. "Theirs are full of wolves."
It's a good insight. Lilli regards it for a second in silence before deciding that she doesn't care. "But I don't understand *what I've done — *"
"Oh, fine, fine! I share my gems of wisdom, I share my schnapps, you just want to whine—!" He plucks the cushion from beneath him and flings it in her general direction, missing entirely. "Also, you must have noticed that they think in..." he gestures vaguely, frowning. "Not in the streams of what-follows-what, you see? Not the branching of what-might-follow or what-might-have-prefigured. Always now, but in terms of...territory."
"But what has that to do with — "
He flings up his hands, not seeming to notice that he sprinkles himself with the dregs of his tea. "Only to illustrate that nobody is ever going to understand them! I'm astonished that they even understand themselves!"
She draws a quick breath. "I am not wasting my time here!"
There is considerable scepticism at home about Lilli's chosen study. And true, it is hard going....
"Oh, no. Poet. Lilli." He gesticulates rapidly. "I meant not a thing, I swear. If you say it's a fruitful line of enquiry — how many years have you been at it, now?"
She flings the pillow back, rather harder and much more accurately. "Pigswiver!"
He clatters about in a fallen tangle of cup, cushion and limb. "Oh, that aim!" he remembers ruefully, rubbing his nose. "Such a loss to the service! No, no, fine — I understand the challenges of the scholarship, poet — but see? You have been here a while, particularly by their standards. May they just have got used to you? This must put even them in mind that someday you'll go home."
Lilli pauses midway through drawing back the cup to launch at his forehead.
"Oh," she says thoughtfully.
"Aha," Taelin says smugly, so she flings the cup after all, but pulls the shot a little. He has tried, after all, to be helpful.
