by Paula Guran
“Easy to spend money you don’t have,” said Eye. “I wouldn’t give her the time of day for that bullshit.”
Perdita seemed to shrink into herself, to grow denser. “Tales my mother taught me,” she said, and there was a different note to her voice, a subtle, pleading music. “Pretty tales. Tales for humans and tales for the Blood. Tales of past and future joy. They’ll pay to hear them, my oath on it. And if they don’t, you’ll only have lost some oatmeal and a night’s sleep.”
“That seems fair enough,” said Bossman. “Whaddya think, Queenie?”
“That she’s as mad as the River and twice as dangerous,” said Queen B. “But I could never resist a challenge. I vote give her a chance. What do the rest of you vote?”
Hand, Christie, and Socks voted to let Perdita stay and try her storytelling. Art said he didn’t much care either way, and Pet said she guessed she’d go along with Christie, but she didn’t much like it. Science, Map, and Eye voted wholeheartedly against.
“I guess you’re in, then,” said Bossman.
“For tonight,” said Queen B.
“Thanks.” Perdita shaded the word just this side of rudeness, then shook herself and tried again. “Thank you. I always depend on the kindness of strangers.”
“Hmph,” said Queen B.
“Now. A teller needs a singer,” said Perdita, making titles of the words: Teller. Singer. “One of you will have to sing for me.” Gravely, she surveyed them, pointed at last to Socks, who was picking at the plastic frill at her ankles. “You. Sing for me.”
Socks shook her head without looking up. “Can’t sing.”
“Can, too.” Perdita’s voice was intimate. “ ’Course you can. More sweetly than the crimson martlets of Elfland.”
“Everybody will look at me.”
Perdita stepped over Map’s outstretched legs, knelt by Socks, and touched her cheek with one well-chewed finger. “The song will hide you, little bird. Everyone will hear your music, but when they look to see who’s made it, all they’ll see is me.”
Socks almost believed her. Certainly all she saw was Perdita, her black eyes wanting a song so badly that Socks just had to give her one.
“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags and some in tags,
And some in velvet gowns.”
The sound that came from her was pure and high and sexless as a reed pipe. It turned the simple tune into a charm, a warning and an invocation against harm. When she finished, everyone was gaping at her. She hid her face in her hands.
“That’ll do,” said Perdita with vast satisfaction. “Now catch some Zs. We’ll be up late tonight.”
Perdita woke Socks at sunset. She herself had obviously been up for some time gauding herself out in bits and bobs of Christie’s second-hand finery. She’d hung herself with scarves like a maypole. When she moved, they fell into pattern after shifting pattern of rust and yellow and pale blue. Her thickly curling hair hung loose with ribbons plaited into it here and there, and beads, and silver bells that chimed thinly when she moved her head.
“Your outfit’s on the bed,” she said. “It’s not perfect for a Singer, but it’ll do. Put it on.”
Socks stared at the pile of material with dismay. “You didn’t say I’d have to get dressed up!” she wailed.
“Try it on, anyway,” said Perdita gently. “Who knows? You may like it. And if you don’t, we’ll just put a big bag over you and pretend you’re not there.”
Socks giggled, and allowed herself to be coaxed into a pair of wide black trousers and a voluminous tunic sewn with fluttering patches of rust, green, brown, and gold that made her look something like a pile of autumn leaves. As a finishing touch, Perdita wound a gauzy black scarf around her head. “A Teller’s Singer has no face,” she said. “A Teller’s Singer is all voice.”
Behind the scarf, Socks grinned. No face sounded good to her.
Perdita gave her a sisterly shove, then stooped to pick up a fat roll of heavy cloth from the floor and handed it to Socks. “Your mat,” she said.
It was rough in Socks’ hands, many-colored like the wristlets Perdita wore, awkward and heavy to carry. Perdita helped her balance it on her shoulder. “There. You look like a real Singer now. Let’s hit the road.”
Standing at the street door with the mat weighing down one shoulder, her feet stinging and prickling and her mouth muffled in gauze, all Socks wanted to do was creep back upstairs to Baby, to silent, red-haired Christie and their piles of old clothes. But Perdita was smiling like a child sharing a rich treat, her scarves tossing around her.
A Teller needs a Singer, Socks thought. Perdita needs me.
“Okay,” she said. “Hit the road.”
Perdita opened the door and they emerged onto Low Street.
It was twilight in Bordertown, the sky a deep, electric blue just tinged at its elfward edge with royal purple. There was a green and living scent on the air that reminded Socks that it was spring, even in Bordertown, even in Soho where few trees grew. A warm breeze pressed her veil against her face. At the end of the street, someone was singing: “O, dear o! O, dear o! me husband’s got no porridge in him. O, dear o!”
Socks began to feel better.
They walked towards Water Street, Perdita skipping every few steps as though she couldn’t help herself. “Everyone needs a stage name,” she said abruptly. “How about Nightingale?”
“Nightingale,” breathed Socks.
“Nightingale it is, then. Do you think you can carry the mat to Ho Street?”
Socks felt that she could carry the mat, and Perdita too, all the way to Ho Street, over Dragon’s Claw Bridge, and up the Hill if Perdita asked her to, but contented herself with hiking the rolled-up cloth higher on her shoulder and shuffling after Perdita as briskly as her prickling feet would take her.
By Bordertown standards, it was still fairly early in the evening, but Water Street was already crowded and Mock Avenue an obstacle course. All Bordertown was out tonight, it seemed to Socks, laughing and swaggering and telling her to watch where she was going when they ran into her or the awkward, heavy roll over her shoulder. As they passed O’Malley Hall, every step was like walking on ice, and the strange, loud faces that parted and washed over her as she struggled forward were like pounding waves. Where were they going again? Had Perdita even said? What if Socks lost her in the crowd? What if she just sat down and died?
Socks looked up just in time to see a scarlet scarf whisking down a sidestreet and panicked utterly. “Perdita,” she squeaked. “Wait for me!”
Perdita spun around, wove through a mixed party of artists in paint-stained T-shirts back to where Socks stood drooping under her burden.
“Baggins,” she said. “The footless wonder. Saving lives our specialty. Now, don’t get yourself all upset—I’m only teasing you. Hasn’t anyone ever teased you before?” She gave the mat a pat. It shifted and was lighter.
“That’s the best I can do,” she said. “You have to carry it—you’re the Singer. Hang in, Nightingale. We’re almost there.”
“There” was The Dancing Ferret, just beginning to wake up and stretch itself for the evening’s exertions. A few cobalt-haired Hill-folk were lounging outside: elves trying to look human or humans trying to look elvin—Socks didn’t dare look close enough to figure out which.
“Here,” said Perdita, indicating a space under a spell-lamp. “Unroll the mat.” And, as Socks looked at her blankly, “What’re you waiting for? Winter?”
Fluttering with rags and tags, Socks felt more like a fool than a nightingale. She began to shiver as if it were winter indeed.
Perdita’s face softened. “Nightingale,” she said. “Song in the branches of night. Do what you were born to do. Unroll the mat and sing.”
Her voice was an incantation, drawing in the world around it until nothing else existed. Safe behind her veil and Perdita’s voice, Socks arranged the mat in the circle of light and sat on the back corn
er. Perdita stood in front of her, hands folded demurely at her waist, ribbons and scarves at rest, bells silent. The Hill-folk poked each other and stared.
“Sing,” she whispered.
“Hark, hark . . . ” Socks cracked the first note, rasped the second, slid into silence. Perdita’s shoulders twitched.
“Sing.”
Socks swallowed, wet her lips, closed her eyes behind the veil, gathered breath into her lungs, and sang. The notes rose through her throat, echoed in her mouth, and flew out into the open air like birds uncaged, rolling with joy in their freedom.
“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags and some in rags,
And some in velvet gowns.
Tales they bring, tales old and new,
Tales for elf and man.
Give them bread, give them wine,
Give them half-a-crown.”
Having sung more words than she knew, Socks fell abruptly silent.
Perdita began to chant: “Tales old, tales new, I’ve got ’em all. What’s your pleasure, gentles? A fairy tale?” She pouted an airy kiss at a tall, lanky human with pale hair half-obscuring the azure thunderbolt painted along one cheekbone. He scowled, then laughed and shrugged as Perdita spun so that her scarves flared around her like licking flame.
“An old one,” someone cried out.
“As you like,” Perdita began. “Once upon a time.”
Socks was too cold and self-conscious to pay much attention to what Perdita was saying. She heard just enough to know that it was about a bear and an aged lord and a foundling child and a cave in the woods, and that it made her feel scared and safe all at the same time. When Perdita had finished it, a crowd of elves and humans, dressed for dancing, stood around them three deep. For perhaps three beats, all Socks could hear was the faint pulse of music from the warm-up band at Farrell Din’s, then a murmur of applause and a patter of coin and dried leaves falling on the mat at Perdita’s feet.
“Gather ’em up, mungfoot,” Perdita muttered as she bowed, the joy in her voice turning the insult into a caress. “And roll up the mat. The pigeons are ripe for plucking tonight.”
Three times that night Socks sang about the beggars and Perdita told about the bear and the foundling child. At the Wheat Sheaf, her audience laughed at the tale. At the Widening Gyre, they wept.
“Money for nothing,” said Perdita happily as they gathered up their take. “Boys for free,” sliding a glance up at a young elf who was watching her with a ferocious intensity. She slid her shoulder back and tilted her head so that the scarves molded her breast and the braided strands of her hair half-veiled her face. The elf licked his lips.
“Perdita,” whispered Socks. “Perdita, you promised.”
Perdita opened her eyes very wide, “It was only going to be for fun.” She stretched suddenly, shook herself decent. “No, perhaps not,” she said. “I should sleep fine tonight without it.” She whiffled her fingers at the elf, said something in Elvish that bared his teeth and clenched his fists. “Better run,” she muttered and, scooping up the mat, dragged it and Socks home through the thinning streets to the squat.
Queen B. was pleased enough with the night’s take that she used some of it to buy Perdita her own mattress. She also let Socks off most of her washing duties. In an incredibly short time, Socks’ days fell into a pattern of sleeping late, telling Christie about her adventures, eating, putting on her Nightingale clothes, and limping through the night streets of Bordertown.
They’d walk along Low Street, Perdita bright-eyed and sniffing the air, her scarves restless behind her. At the corner of Mock Avenue, she’d stop and quiver for a moment, then trot off towards whatever club she liked the smell of. Once there, she’d simply stop and let the scarves settle around her slender body while Socks unrolled the mat and sang a come-hither-and-lend-us-an-ear song.
As soon as the passers-by began to slow down, Perdita would gather them in with her flexible voice and her dancing hands, building the audience and working it for a sentence or two before slipping into her story like a fox into a henhouse.
There was never such a storyteller as Perdita. Socks never remembered much about the stories themselves, except that they were always just the stories Socks most wanted to hear. And the way Perdita told them was miraculous. Every character she spoke for had a different voice, a different way of standing and moving, you could almost swear a different face. Sometimes she would draw the audience into the tale, questioning, answering, challenging, teasing, diverting the story around their responses, no matter how weird. Like the Mad River, her tales flowed with dreams, with eddies of horror and currents of beauty, never twice exactly the same. No one ever walked out on one of Perdita’s tales. Hill-dweller, street rat, gang tough, human, halfie, elf, all stayed to hear her, and when at last she’d bow and fall silent, they shivered and blinked as if waking from sleep.
Once, though, in the middle of a long and complicated tale about a leaf and a jewel and a boy with one green eye, Socks thought that Perdita had gone too far.
They were set up in front of the Wheat Sheaf, a bit of Bordertown that would be forever Elfland. There were maybe four humans in the audience. Usually Socks didn’t pay much attention to the pigeons, wound up in Perdita’s spell as thoroughly as they.
Tonight, however, she was bored. A human boy standing near her was shifting from foot to booted foot; a couple of other humans were trading what-is-this-shit glances. On the other hand, the elves were so silent they didn’t even seem to be breathing, staring at Perdita as if nothing existed in the world except her.
Realizing that they weren’t paying her the least bit of attention, Socks studied the faces through her veil. They were a dressy crowd. One elf had powder on his cheekbones, a diamond dust that echoed the crystal brilliance of his long eyes. Then something—the stillness of his face, perhaps—told Socks that the glitter was not make-up, but tears.
Perdita made enough from that one Telling to buy meat for the soup and a new spell-box for Goblin Market’s amps. She also insisted on treating the whole squat to a meal at Hell’s Kitchen, complete with a bottle of elvin wine.
“Pushing the boat out, aren’t you, girl?” said Queen B. when she saw the tall, tapered bottle. “Order a beer, Bossman. This shit’ll be wasted on you.” She turned the impossibly narrow flutes the horned waiter had set in front of Baby and Hand mouth down on the table. “No way, kids.”
“Come on, Queenie-babe. Let ’em live a little.” Although she hadn’t touched the green-white liquid in her glass, Perdita already sounded drunk. “They gotta drink to my good fortune. And everybody should taste elf’s tears before they die. They’re a real groovy high. Aren’t they, Socks?”
Socks nodded. A real groovy high, all right. Miraculous, inhuman, they’d fallen on Perdita like a glamor, making her too bright to approach. She’d taken flight as soon as the crowd dispersed, leaving Socks to haul the heavy mat and the heavier take through the stony streets of Bordertown all by herself. After they went to bed, Socks had heard her whispering in the dark: “Did you see that, Mom? I made the fuckers cry. Just for you, Mom. I made the fuckers cry.”
Next day, Perdita had been so full of herself that she overflowed, asking Map where to find Bordertown on his stained face, calling Queen B. “Queen Blimp,” shuffling Hand’s carefully sorted stacks of bright paper. And when Socks had presented herself at nightfall, she’d said, “I’m not in the mood.”
So they’d missed one night—two, now. Socks didn’t think Perdita’d be in the mood to tell stories tonight, either. Her thin cheeks were burnished rose-gold in the ruddy light of Hell’s Kitchen’s enchanted flambeaux. She was proposing a toast.
“To the half-bloods!” she cried in her rich, carrying Teller’s voice. Everyone raised their glasses. “May they all prove as barren as the mules they are.”
Socks had taken a sip of wine before she really heard what Perdita had said. The elf’s tears was
acrid on her tongue, like peat smoke and grass. She coughed and set the glass down hastily.
Queen B. slapped her on the back. “I don’t blame you, girl. That toast would choke a horse.”
Art and Eye glared at Perdita, who giggled and flipped them a finger. Pet got up, worked her mouth, got out “Oh, you!” and stamped out. Christie followed her. Baby began to cry.
Bossman rubbed his nose. “You the damnedest girl I ever did meet,” he said wearily. “Don’t you care what you say?”
“Yes,” said Perdita, suddenly sober. “I care very much.”
After the dinner at Hell’s Kitchen, nobody much felt like speaking to Perdita for a while. Apparently, she didn’t much feel like speaking either. She lounged around on her mattress under the window in the common room, reading books she’d filched from heaven-knows-where, sleeping a lot, not going out. About a week later, when the soup and Queen B.’s temper were about as thin as they’d ever been, Pet and Art cornered Socks in the kitchen.
“You gotta do something, Socks. One more day of watching her highness eating bonbons and I’ll kill her dead,” said Pet.
“Queen B. said she could stay as long as she contributed,” said Art. “And she’s not holding up her end of the bargain any more. Somebody’s got to tell her to get her ass in gear or out of here, one or the other.”
“Why are you telling me this? Aren’t you breaking rule three or whatever it is?”
Pet raised a black brow. “We never pay much attention to rule three, tell you the truth. And we’re telling you because you can handle her.”
Socks examined Art’s teddy-bear face and Pet’s squirrelly one, looking for signs of ridicule. They both met her eyes full-on, a little plaintive, expecting her to take care of things. Afraid to tell them no, afraid to tell them yes, Socks felt her heart pounding in her throat.
“She’s going to cop out,” said Pet disgustedly. “Not one of your better ideas, Art, asking the Baggie girl for help.” “No,” said Socks. “I’ll do it. At least I’ll try.”
“Can’t do more than that,” said Art fairmindedly.
Socks put on Nightingale’s autumn tunic and pants, gathered up Perdita’s fiery scarves, and went to stand at the foot of the mattress where Perdita lay covered by a disreputable knitted afghan, reading. Perdita glanced up from her book, groaned, and rolled up into the afghan like a cocoon.