Terri Windling - [Bordertown 02] - Borderland

by Mark Alan Arnold (epub)

  It doesn’t matter. Only sleep matters .. . and a good meal, but she’ll think about that later. She curls like a kitten in the nest of her blankets and falls asleep immediately. Little Will slips into the room, edges warily up to the mattress, sniffs, and then settles himself against the small of her back.

  When they knocked on the door and I saw his face, I nearly gave it all away right then and there. Like a ghost, a piece of my past, standing on my doorstep looking just as he used to . . . well, not quite. He was in disguise, of course, passing for human with his hair dyed an unlikely red and lenses turning his pale eyes blue—but I would have recognized him anywhere. I’ve never understood why some people say they can’t tell one elf from another.

  Being fey, he’d barely aged in all that time, as though it had been ten days since our parting scene on Dragon’s Claw Bridge and not ten years. Ten years. And I, being human, had aged, standing beside my respectable husband in the foyer of our respectable house, with gray in my hair and more than a few extra pounds on my hips, even then.

  Our steward was fretting at the door, unaccustomed to unannounced midnight visitors who would not go away until a civilized hour, whose calling cards made his master blanch. Archer was with two other elves who were unfamiliar to me, an overly pretty young man who wore too many bracelets on his wrists and a cold-faced woman whose silvan features were not diminished by the false black curls she wore. Archer never let on, by glance or word, that he recognized me. I don’t know what I would have done if he had.

  My husband was not pleased to see them. It had been years since he’d set foot in Bordertown, and no one in this distant place knows the distinguished Warran Haugh fortune was built on elvin trade. I think he would have turned them out if he could have, if Archer had not been so insistent; and to this day I do not know if it was fear or, as I'd like to think, a fleeting moment of old loyalty that caused Warran to let them in, to send the steward to the cellars for one of the best bottles of Brigot and the upstairs maid to make up rooms for them.

  . They did not talk business that evening. Instead, we sat around the fire with the Brigot, while outside an ice storm raged with a severity I've become accustomed to in these climes but that was clearly a trial for our guests. Warran showed them every hospitality, as though they were the simple human travelers they appeared to be, delayed by the storm; yet he was clearly nervous. And think how much more nervous he would have been if he’d even guessed at the truth about Archer and me. . . . He’d forgotten I, too, had once lived in Bordertown. In ten years, he’d perhaps grown too accustomed to forgetting me; / was as necessary and as invisible as the steward or the upstairs maid.

  I have always thought the steward a good man. He has been with Warran’s family for so long. Yet it must have been he who betrayed us.

  They stayed a week. Warran told Cook and the maidservants to stay at home during the inclement weather; the steward and I looked after the visitors ourselves. I don’t know precisely what business they had with Warran; something involving cloth and trade routes and the movement of goods into and out of the Borderlands. Warran does not discuss these things with me, not since those long-ago days behind the stalls at Traders’ Heaven. I shouldn’t complain; in truth, he was the one I chose and I was making the best of it, had even convinced myself that I was almost happy . . . before Archer came.

  I was not discreet, I must admit. I should have been more careful. All I know is that that week, so tense and fearful for my husband, was like a week of summer sunshine to me, for suddenly I remembered what it had been like to be sixteen, stealing kisses behind my father’s stall and running off to the old town at night, where the elvin boys would buy me cheap wine and tell me pretty lies.

  I was beautiful then. You won’t believe me to look at me now, a portly and proper Stratton-on-the-Pike matron. But I was beautiful enough as a girl that a true blood wanted me, headstrong enough that I almost said yes in spite of my father— and I felt beautiful again when Archer brought those memories to life. God forgive me, I have paid for that week every week I have lived since.

  Yes, it must have been the steward who betrayed us. First me to my husband. Then my husband to the World.

  Wicker had known it was a mistake to come. She had felt it in her gut as she stood in front of the mirror, decking herself out in metal and velvet, felt it again as the cab let her out three blocks above Ho Street, the farthest south the cabbie would go.

  There is tension in the air tonight, a brittle sort of excitement and the sharp knife-edge of danger that so many kids thrive on, come to Soho looking for. Ho Street and Carnival are transformed with the glitter of fairy-dust and the sparkling crowd: elvin girls with painted faces and prisms hung from their silver hair; human girls with scarves and rags tied around ankles, knees, and wrists, aping the style of the lead singer for the Guttertramps, who in turn stole it from the members of the Pack. The Pack is out in force, cruising the avenues on stripped-down bikes, ignoring the Bloods gathered in the parking lot of the Dancing Ferret— though clearly each gang is just waiting for the other to make a single wrong move. Slummers from the hill are out in numbers, too, dressed in expensive imitations of old city styles, trying so very hard to fit in that in another mood it would have made Wicker laugh. There is an unusually long line waiting to get into Farrel Din’s club—mostly Slummers, looking excited, like they are expecting something to happen. If it weren’t for Lari, that line would be waiting to see her.

  Maybe she should just go to another club—the Wheat Sheaf over by the Old Wall, or the old Factory, where she’d have to hide her silver hair. But no—the Dancing ferret is the place to be tonight, where Lari and Eadric and Farrel Din are at any rate . . . and if it isn’t for them that she’s dressed like quicksilver, to prove to them that nothing can keep her down for long, then why has she bothered?

  She needn’t have bothered. No one notices her anyway; no one looks at her twice at the Ferret because moments after she enters the room she is followed by the most extraordinary elvin woman she’s ever seen, a beautiful lordling leaning on the woman’s arm, the pair of them looking like they’ve stepped straight out of the Elflands. Nobility from the Hill, perhaps, come to observe the Soho scene like it’s some quaint tourist show put on for their benefit. It makes her want to puke.

  At least it gives the gossips something to talk about besides the fact that the New Blood Review is minus a lead singer, and that the old lead singer can be observed sitting in a dark corner getting herself royally smashed on a lethal combination of Chimera Milk and gin.

  She does not stay to hear the Review play, or Raven’s new song; watching Eadric perform with Magical Madness is bad enough . . . she’s not a complete masochist. There is some commotion on the dance floor as she leaves, with the elegant elvin pair in the center of it, but she’s too drunk to figure out what. She’s too drunk to walk straight. The last thing she remembers is climbing down the back fire escape, calling, “Here puss-puss, here puss,” into the shadows, and the little tabby cat that’s been hanging around the club trembling under her fingers, meowing pitifully for something to eat, its fur warm against her as she tucks it into the opening of her shirt and heads up Carnival to find a cab before she passes out. The Mock Avenue Bell Tower clock chimes one o’clock. The evening has barely begun.

  She hums one of Eadric’s songs to calm the kitten as she sways drunkenly up the dark avenue. Two elvin teenagers, from Dragon’s Tooth Hill by the looks of them, pass her and giggle—because hers is a famous face and because she’s wandering up the street talking to herself.

  “I was that young once,” Wicker whispers to the kitten, watching them turn onto Ho Street and disappear in the direction of the clubs.

  In fact she is that young still, younger than either of the teenagers from the Hill.

  She wakes in a strange place. That’s the worst thing, never quite knowing where you’re going to wake up, or quite remembering what happened the night before— except in foggy patches like a dream, tr
ying to interpret reality from a cat’s-eye view.

  This time Gray’s really done it. She’s lying at the foot of someone’s overly soft bed. That someone is a girl, judging from the outline of the body beneath the blankets, and an elf, judging from the cloud of silver hair across the pillow. An elf. My god. What has she gotten herself into now?

  Gray rises carefully, feeling the ache of Changing in every bone of her small body. She has no clothes. Usually even the muddled feline portion of her brain can remember to stay in the general vicinity of wherever she left them at the time of the Change—but the last thing she remembers clearly is dancing at the Ferret, Magical Madness playing a riff that is hot and fast, sweat drenching her T-shirt, sliding down the back of her neck, and then the Change comes on so suddenly she’s not even sure she made it safely out of the club before it happened. So where is she now? There are trees outside the window and a rose garden three floors below. Wherever she is, it sure isn’t Soho.

  She borrows a man’s brocade robe of elvin red, lined in black satin, tied around the waist with a braided cord. She must find something more practical to wear and some shoes, or even slippers, and get out of here . . . but instead Gray finds herself wandering through the elvin rooms, fascinated, curious. So this is how they live, she is thinking.

  There are soft rugs underfoot patterned with leaves, moss, and mulch like a forest floor. The walls glow with a sheen like the inside of a shell, and the sun pours thick and heavy through rose-colored window glass, lighting a bower of ferns and trailing vines, of dusty books and dirty clothes. In the largest room, the parlor, there is no furniture, just embroidered pillows scattered thick around the fireplace and books, yellowed with age, standing in precarious stacks. There are rocks and shells and a bleached animal skull on the mantel, beeswax candles and silver goblets on the windowsill, piles of laundry everywhere. Above the mantle is a very old, very faded print called L'Embrace—though it is not clear whether the man and woman locked eternally in the embrace are elvin or human. It hangs in a frame of heavy red gold worked with a pattern of leaves, like the bracelet Gray stole.

  There is a small kitchen with tall wood cabinets, a bathroom much like any human bathroom, and the bedroom where the elvin girl sleeps looking like an enchanted princess from a fairy tale. One kiss . . . Bits of lace and glitter and satin are draped over the bedposts and litter the floor around the bed—a solid, human-looking four-poster with dragon’s claws carved onto the feet. The girl on the bed has skin white as bridal satin and hair streaked a color like pink rose petals. Stains of makeup are smudged across and beneath her eyes. As Gray stands hesitantly in the doorway the eyes open.

  “Whoever you are, be an angel and get me some head pills, will you? I’ve got the Border’s own worse hangover. . . . They’re in the bathroom.”

  Gray finds the bottle over the sink, brings it back to the elvin girl. The girl peers at Gray fuzzily, swallows the pill with red water from a fluted glass. “I must have been drunk last night,” she says apologetically. “I don’t even remember your name.”

  “Gray.”

  “A girl?” The elf girl’s pale eyes widened. “Gods. I must have been very drunk.”

  Gray blushes. “I don’t think—”

  “Hey, where’s my kitten?” the elf girl interrupts. She rises from the bed, naked and so beautiful in the rosy light that Gray’s breath catches in her throat. “I meant to put some food out. Oh damn.”

  “It . . . um, it got out. This morning. I mean, I let it out. I’m sorry.” Gray runs her fingers through her tabby-colored hair, a nervous habit. She has never been a good liar. What if the girl guesses the truth about the Changing? But the other girl just sighs.

  “Damn. Poor starving little thing. Maybe it’ll find some scraps in Missus B’s garbage . . . Damn.” She picks up a shirt from the floor and says, as she’s pulling it over her head, “Well, look, I’m famished myself; you want some breakfast?”

  Gray knows she should go, and quickly. All of Sammy’s warnings about the true blood are running through her head. But she cannot resist the offer of food. She is always hungry. Last night she caught a mouse, but that is not enough to sustain her in her human body. And she is fascinated by the tall elvin girl, who is wandering around the small, bright kitchen looking elegant somehow in a torn New Blood Review T-shirt and elvin red panties, her white arms weighted down with dozens of silver bracelets. She fills a kettle with red water from the tap, lights the stove with a mumbled spell and a match. Gray recognizes her suddenly.

  “You sing with the Review.” Gray has seen her perform at the Ferret dozens of times.

  The elf girl—Wicker Something-or-other, Gray remembers now—grimaces, and says, “I used to.”

  Wicker sets bread, hard cheese, honey, and a crock of butter on the table. She has to dig through the dirty dishes in the sink to find plates and mugs, rinses them off, and dries them with the hem of her shirt.

  ‘Not anymore,” she adds.

  “How come?” Gray asks, sounding shy.

  “I was bored,” Wicker answers shortly. This isn’t the whole truth, but it’s at least part of the truth. If she hadn’t grown so bored with the band she wouldn’t have screwed around so much. They were hot when she joined up with Lari a year ago, but now the fans seem to want the same thing over and over . . . and Lari seems willing to give it to them. Now the Guttertramps are taking over the Review’s lead as old-city fashion setters. It galls her to be eclipsed by a human band.

  The human kid is looking at the plate in front of her like she has never seen food before, doesn’t know what to do with it. What the devils do humans eat, Wicker wonders, besides cabbage soup? “Look, you don’t have to eat if you’re not hungry. Have some tea.”

  But the kid, Gray, gives a funny laugh and claims to be starving. She attacks the food as if this is the literal truth—as perhaps it is, if she’s some runaway, some elf-obsessed groupie living on handouts and petty theft down in Soho. Wicker sits down with a sigh. So she’ll feed this odd, skinny, beaten-up-looking kid, clean her up, and send her on her way again—and maybe, as some sort of cosmic reciprocation, someone somewhere will do the same for her poor skinny, beaten-up-looking kitten. Her kitten. It makes Wicker smile to realize she is already thinking of it that way. Hell, a girl needs something to love, and guitar players have proven to be a bad risk.

  The human kid keeps staring at her with big blue human eyes like she is having a holy vision. From the street below is the sound of the trash carts come to collect the garbage and elvin children chanting spells to make a jumping rope go round. A cold wind is blowing from the Border, rustling the vines around the window and chilling the room. Wicker rises to close the window, cutting the sounds of the street off abruptly. When she turns back, the kid is still staring at her. Gray looks as though she is about to say something, thinks better of it; then she blurts it out anyway:

  “What’s it like beyond the Border?”

  The question takes Wicker by surprise. “Damned if I know.”

  “But you’re—”

  “A true blood, sure. But Bordertown born and bred. Hell, I’ve never been farther north than Dragon’s Tooth Hill.”

  “Oh.” Gray looks disappointed.

  Wicker says defensively, “Have you ever left the Borderlands?”

  “I grew up outside. I’m from Stratton-on-the-Pike— that’s, um, pretty far out in the World.”

  “You ran away from home.”

  Gray nods.

  “Because your parents didn’t understand you,” Wicker adds sarcastically.

  Gray nods again, and grins around a mouthful of cheese. “I know,” she says, swallowing, “I’m a walking cliche.”

  Wicker laughs and decides she might like this skinny human after all. “I don’t know many—well, any humans,” she admits. “The World seems as exotic to me as the Elflands.”

  “It’s not. It sucks.”

  Wicker laughs again, pours tea into a mug with a hobgoblin’s face. “Are th
ere elves in ... in wherever the hell it was you said you’re from? I’ve heard that some of the fey live in the World, even though they can’t use magic there . . . / would never do that.”

  “Not in Stratton-on-the-Pike you wouldn’t. They don’t go for elves there. They don’t even like my mother—and she’s human—because she’s from the Borderlands. . . . And I think maybe because of me.”

  “Are you a halfie?” Wicker is surprised. Usually she can tell the blood.

  “I ... I think so. But my mother won’t say.”

  “Aw, crap,” Wicker states. “I bet every human girl with a streak of silver in her hair thinks she’s the Lost Princess of Elvindom. You’ll get over it. If you had the blood, you’d know it.”

  “How?”

  “You’d just know. You’d be able to work magic, you’d feel it in your bones. Look, can you do this?” Wicker puts down her tea, extends her hand, stares intently at her palm. In a moment a tiny flare of light like a will-o-the-wisp dances above it. Gray’s round eyes grow rounder, and Wicker is torn between pleasure and disgust at finding herself showing off with a school-yard trick in front of a human. “It’s not good for anything,” she says, blowing the flame out. “You can’t even read by it. Any halfie kid can do it. Can you?”

  Gray just shrugs. “I can’t do anything like that. But maybe I could learn.”

  Wicker snorts. “You want to do magic, go hire a wizard.”