Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  The witch—the painter—had made mock of him. No witness had stood by, but she herself could tell the story, how he’d feared her, and she no witch at all. Her tale could pluck power from his grasp.

  But what power did he have in this place? By the bitterness of the thought, he guessed he’d had or coveted power in the True Lands. Here, what did he have but his wits and his hands? His wits, it seemed, were sad stuff. Had he been so great a fool when he’d had a name to answer to, and was that name spoken with scorn in the place he’d left?

  Still, some childish voice inside him whispered, Perhaps she was a witch in truth.

  So he went cautiously into the streets that sunk deep between buildings. It was only wisdom to be wary of meetings in strange places.

  A man of the Blood passed him on foot. He was marked by age: a dulling of the skin, a dimming of the light in the eyes, a softening of the face’s planes. His hair was matted into dense pewter serpent coils, and his belly bulged under his long flapping coat. He was scowling, as if he would scorch the world from his path with his frown. The man carried a cloth bag over one shoulder; a wedge-shaped, sleek-furred head popped out the open top suddenly, with small round ears and bright black eyes set in a dark mask.

  A ferret. He recalled the creature’s name. Had he seen one before?

  A dark-skinned human woman piloted—and powered—a bizarre cart, from a tiny seat behind a narrow front wheel that she steered with a horizontal bar. Her feet turned another wheel, which moved two more behind her on either side of a cargo box full of some kind of glossy red fruit. On the tail of the box perched a human girl-child, hanging on with one hand and eating one of the fruits with the other. The child’s bright gold hair whipped and tangled with the cart’s passage. The woman rang a bell at him, to warn him out of her path, but she did not speak.

  With a roar that shook his ribs, a pair of two-wheeled vehicles rounded a corner ahead of him, so swiftly that he had to lunge aside or be run down. They glittered with bright paint and metal, and reeked of burning fuel. He was startled to see the riders who straddled them were of the Blood. They passed without a nod or a wave.

  He turned into a narrow way where the shadows were already long. By the time he heard the voices, he was too close to turn away.

  “So it crapped out.” The first voice seemed to grit and crunch like footsteps on gravel. “Magic does that around here all the time. Sorry you didn’t get the memo—”

  “Stop your tongue, thief, unless you mean to use it to make all right with us.” A voice from the Realm, surely—all silk and song, and broken glass beneath.

  “I sold you a working key. Not my problem, lady.”

  “Oh, but it is. Hold him.”

  The sound of a scuffle, a grunt. Three figures, two of them tall, slender, with shining white hair. The third shorter, darker-skinned, and hair cropped and black. One of the Blood-kind held the human’s arms; the other waved something that glinted like a sliver of ice.

  He had no business with any of them. He was indeed a fool, for only folly could prompt him to step forward and say, “Does one take one’s justice at will in this city? Or is that blade named Magistrate, and you an officer of its court?”

  His words turned three heads toward him. The one with the narrow leaf-blade dagger was a woman. Her fine pale hair was dull with dust and tied back with a bit of leather lace. She wore a rough cloth coat, stained and too large for her, leather leggings, and glossy tall boots. Her cheeks were hollow, her nose and lips were thin, and her eyes were bright and sharp as her knife. Blue veins showed like the ghost of lace in the milk-colored skin of her temples.

  Her companion in the Blood was square-jawed and grim-faced, though his long, thick lashes softened his narrowed stare and his cheeks flushed like a child’s, dark on his pearl-white flesh. Dark, too, was the bruising that lay like brushstrokes in the inner corners of his eyes and over his swollen nose. Was he quarrelsome, a brawler? Or merely misadventurous? His fierce mien belied his slender frame, frail-seeming even for their fine-boned kind, though there was often much strength even in the sparest body. He had little stones and bits of wood knotted in his straight cream-white hair, and they clattered together when his captive struggled.

  And his captive most certainly struggled. It was a human male, young, perhaps. The man’s eyes were dark as his black hair, and his skin was golden-brown. He was sturdy in a way that fey-kind never were: wide of shoulder, broad of chest, his hips barely narrowing before meeting with strong thighs. He wore coarse blue trousers and a knitted shirt like the one from the painter’s clothesline, but black; on his back he carried a large pack made of glossy fabric, bulging here and there with its contents.

  “Why, see who it is!” the woman said with a mocking edge, looking him up and down as if she meant to buy him. “Hello, my pretty, strutting cockerel. Have you come all the way from the Realm to try to take back your boots?”

  The tall, shining boots she wore, made of fine-grained leather, too rich for her stained and shabby garb. The sight of them roused no memory in him.

  But the woman’s voice did. He’d heard it raised in scorn over the clamor of a crowded room, back beyond the Border, while her comrade tried to stem the tide of a bleeding nose with both hands, and he himself clenched the handle of a broken stoneware mug in his fist.

  He had wanted something, or wanted to be rid of something, and had been thwarted. His patience, such as it was, had been tried. He had also known himself at fault—for being there, with the sweet-sharp taste of wine on his tongue?—which had made him angrier still. It seemed he was the author of the square-jawed Bloodling’s broken nose. Was that the source of the stain on his own cast-off shirt?

  He gathered his wits in haste and asked, “If those boots are mine, how come your feet to be in them?” For she might tell him more: his name, his home, his reason for leaving it.

  Her smile was merely a show of teeth. “Why, you took them off yourself. You were not so stupid with drink that you could not manage that. And since you’d cast them off …” She shrugged, her pointed chin lifted and outthrust. “Did you wake sober, in your leafy nest, and wonder if you’d left them under a doxie’s bed?”

  He grasped at the fragments of knowledge and assembled only one whole fact: they had stolen from him. Had they fallen upon him, struck him? No, he had no wound. Did you wake? she’d asked. They’d stolen his boots while he slept. They were sneak-thieves, cowards, taking like carrion-eaters on a battlefield.

  Rage clenched his fists, narrowed his vision. Rage cleaved his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Imagined scenes painted the room behind his eyes: the cocky woman lying bleeding on the wet stone of the alley, the bruised-faced man broken and weeping at his feet. His heart pounded, urgent, ready.

  Behind the woman’s insolent words and threatening smile he saw something he knew. He saw it behind her companion’s glower as well, and in the face of the sturdy human male, whose features he ought not to be able to read as he could one of the Blood.

  He knew the thing he saw, because he had felt it, tried to hide it behind proud words and a stiffened back in the lamp-lit room beside the Gate. It was a bottomless, night-black fear, of things unknown and out of control. And he shared it with two thieves and a human-born man.

  His rage turned bitter on his tongue and drained away. It took its bosom friend, his pride, with it. He felt suddenly weakened to the bone. But he could breathe, and speak. And he remembered how the painter had spoken her curse, on a deep breath and with the force of prophecy.

  He lifted his right hand, grateful that it did not quake. “Not for all the world,” he told the woman, who still smiled like a cornered fox. “You’ve more need of them than I. For you will run now, and your comrade, too. You will run as quick as you can, and it will be only the first of many flights. For that, one needs good boots.” He stepped toward her.

  The bruised-faced man let go of the human, who sidled close against the wall, out of reach. The woman held her ground for a m
oment longer. Then her left foot scuffed backward. Her right moved to join it—and the balance that held them all shifted and snapped. The pair turned and fled, out of the byway, out of sight.

  He gave himself up to the weakness and sank down on the cold, oily pavement, his knees drawn up to pillow his forehead. This was who he was, then: a sack puffed full of temper and willfulness, pride and posturing. Use those up, and all that remained was a little hard lump of fear, like a last worm-eaten nut. Perhaps he had crossed the Border to escape the truth, and it had followed at his heels, capering and flying banners for all to see—all but him.

  He felt warmth beside him, and smelled the human smell, soured with fear but still curiously pleasant. He heard the human man drop down beside him. “Thanks. I think you saved my life.” A trembling puff of air from human nostrils, which might have been meant to be laughter. “Wow, there’s something I never got to say before.”

  “She would not have killed you. Her fear was too great.”

  “You think?” said the man. “Seems to me when somebody’s scared shitless, the bodies freakin’ pile up.”

  He raised his head, thinking to glare at the young man who was so quick to dispute. He found himself studying the arch of the black brows, emphatic in a way pale fey ones could not be. They seemed like a drawing of a word, but what word, he could not say. It made him smile. “Perhaps you have the right of it, then. I’ve no knowledge, only seemings and speculation.”

  That silenced the man, but only for a handful of time. “My name’s Macys. What’s yours?”

  “Page.”

  Macys appeared to weigh the word. “Good name,” he said at last.

  “Is it? I cannot tell. I chose it under duress, when I could not remember my own.”

  “You couldn’t remember your name?”

  “And cannot yet. I lost it, perhaps, in the fabric of the Border.”

  Macys’s brows bowed low at the top of his nose. (Even a frown became a novelty in a human face.) “I don’t think it works like that. I mean, there’s stuff elves can’t talk about—actually can’t, it’s some magical censorship thing—about back home. But I never met anyone who couldn’t remember it.” The human’s voice was like his eyebrows, emphatic and flexible.

  He pressed his fingertips to the orbits of his eyes, rubbing away the weariness. “It would seem I am a singular creature, then, and of singular experience.”

  Macys winced and raised one shoulder. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to sound like … Yeah. That’s got to be weird. But it kind of cuts to the chase for you.”

  He knew the words’ meanings, but taken together they were so much bibble-babble. He shook his head.

  Macys hunched forward, as if to share secrets. “Not a lot of people come to B-town wanting to stay the person they’ve always been. And here you are—you can’t. That’s maybe not so bad, right?”

  “Oh, I am not so sick as death would make me,” he snapped.

  Macys rocked backward to sit on his heels, and his gaze was as cool and shuttered as if he were of the Blood. “That would be my point. It didn’t kill you. Guess you better find a way to live with it.”

  He had walked blinkered into this strange new city, clutching his trouble to him, nursing it like a babe at the breast. It had thrived, claiming all his notice. He had fed it with his own strength and freedom of will, and it would take all he had if he went on so.

  He felt like a new-landed fish, flopping on the shore, starving for air while enveloped in it. He did not know who he was. So he could be someone else instead: a fool aware of his folly, a fearful man who chose not to be a coward, a proud man who took pride only in what he could do well and rightly. He could dig a tree from a woman’s garden, and protect a man from those who would prey on him.

  And his name could be Page.

  He had not noticed Macys rising and moving away until he returned to stand at Page’s shoulder. He cleared his throat, and Page looked up.

  Macys was offering him a pair of … Page was not sure what they were. They smelled faintly of tar or the fuel burned in the Border guards’ lamps. The flat material was wider on one end than the other, and rounded on both, and a thick strip of moss-green fabric and sueded leather sprouted from it and swept back, like the wings of birds. Then he recognized the shape: shoe soles.

  “Flip-flops,” said Macys. “Not like they can replace those boots. But you can’t go around barefoot in the city.”

  Page took the shoes—yes, they were some kind of shoes—and held them to the soles of his feet.

  “Um. Other way,” said Macys shyly. “The part that sticks up goes between your big toe and—oh, here, I’ll show you.” He fitted the shoes on Page’s abraded feet with his own hands.

  Page was torn by the host of things he knew he should say, but he could utter only one. “How do you come to have these?”

  “It’s what I do.” Macys swung his head like a pointing finger at his pack, now leaning against the wall beside him. “Peddler. I pick up useful-looking stuff and sell it to people who want it.”

  “Then … then I should give you payment.”

  Macys frowned again, that enchanting expression. “You saved my life, and I’m giving you a pair of six-dollar flip-flops. Excuse me if I think I’m a little ahead on this deal.”

  “Then I thank you. May fortune meet you at every turning.”

  “De nada.” Macys squatted before his pack, slid his arms through the straps, and stood. It was a heavy object, but Macys made little of it. “Well. I should, you know. Be going. You okay?”

  “Okay?” The word made no more sense on Page’s lips than it had in his ears.

  Macys flushed. “Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

  “No. No, I will be well. Perhaps … perhaps we shall meet again.”

  Macys smiled, and though his teeth showed, there was such brightness in it that it could not be anything but pleasure. “That’d be cool. I mean, I’d like that.” He pointed at Page’s chest. “Maybe I’ll see you there. The ribs are great.”

  Page laid his hands over his torso, feeling for the bones beneath.

  “OMGWTFBBQ,” Macys said. “On Onion Road in Soho. Can’t miss it.”

  The knitted cloth under Page’s fingers reminded him that his shirt was new and strange, and printed. That was what Macys had pointed at. The letters named a place, and the ribs in question were not the sort under Page’s skin. At least, he hoped not. “I shall seek it, then.”

  Macys turned, straight-backed, and strode to the end of the short, narrow street. He turned and waved at Page; then he disappeared around the corner.

  Page walked carefully (the sandals required a certain knack to travel in, but he mastered at last how to grip with his toes) into the part of the city that lapped around the base of the hill. Bordertown seemed to wear a glamour it had lacked before—or perhaps, a glamour had been lifted. He saw brilliant-colored cloth at windows and in doorways, wild plants rioting in barren spaces between the old structures, buildings devoured by flowering vines until they seemed made not of stone but of leaves and nodding blooms.

  A sound like the rolling of an ocean swelled ahead of him. As he drew closer, it sorted itself into elements: conversation, music, the growl of wheels on paving, shouts, and the creaking, clattering, grunting chorus of weighty objects being moved. Then he rounded a building painted with a mural of a beautiful blue-skinned man, and stopped on the shore of a sea of sound and scent and color.

  Bright awnings sheltered stalls down the center of the street. Smoke rose from cooking fires beneath the awnings, and the mingled odors of food made a strange and delightful banquet for his nose. A massive structure framed with heavy pillars and floors but almost without walls rose many stories above the street on one side. In its shaded confines merchants hawked clothing, cooking utensils, lumber, and objects Page was certain he could not have named even before his memory was snatched away. Pennants and merchandise hung from the upper floors as if in galleries or display windows.
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  Across the way another building seemed devoted to trade. So was the building beyond it—indeed, as far as Page could see along the street, people were buying, selling, or trading. And when his gaze finally climbed high enough, he found he stood under an arch of wrought metal of many kinds, twisted to form the words “TRADER’S HEAVEN.”

  Did Macys sell or buy here? It seemed the sort of place one might linger and at last see every person one had ever known.

  He passed beneath the arch and into the tide of people.

  They were of the Blood, and half-Blooded, and human. They exchanged gossip, japes, and laughter as well as currency across bins of vegetables and baskets of eggs. They wore brilliant silk or armored leather or ragged cotton—sometimes all three—and shouldered good-naturedly through the press of bodies unmindful of riches or rank.

  A human woman, cooking cakes on a sheet of heated steel, began a song demanding the listener not speak ill of her baby. At her side a woman of the Blood, scooping dough from a bowl and patting it flat with her long white hands, joined a harmony to her melody, passing words between them like a tossed ball. The scent of the frying cakes made his stomach ache and his mouth water.

  He could beg for food or the coins to buy it—he saw others doing so—but for all his resolve, he found he had yet too much pride for that. So he found a human who kept a sewing shop, who was pink and sweating and scurrying like a distressed quail, and asked him, “Have you simple work I could do, to earn the price of a meal?”

  Page swept dust, scraps of paper, trimmings of cloth, bits of thread, and lost pins and buttons from the floor. He sorted through the sweepings for the pins and buttons and put them in a tin dish before he disposed of the rest in a bin behind the shop. And the shopkeeper smiled and gave him three engraved gold beads, a spool of strong thread, and a packet of vivid red spice he called paprika.

  Page offered his pay at the market stall that smelled strangest and most exciting. The half-Blood man who accepted it looked a little like Macys, with his fine dark skin and black hair. He took the thread and the spice and returned the beads to Page.