Terri Windling

by Borderland

  The Dancing Ferret looks pathetic by daylight. The sun is merciless in exposing every crack in the wall, every stain on the floor. Tonight the room will glitter with lights and music and fairy-dust as though enchanted by some elvin spell and she’ll give the best performance of her life, wait and see, and Lari will calm down again. For now, she replaces the brilliant smile with her abashed yet charming hand-caught-in-the-cookie-tin look, and saunters over to the stage.

  Raven has got the arrangements to a new song spread out on the synthesizer. He doesn’t look at her as she picks up a sheet, he is suddenly very interested in studying the designs on his gem-studded boots. This must be the music she heard coming up the fire escape—a good hard bass beat, just her style. “So where’s the lyrics?” she says. “Look, I’ll stay late today and learn them.”

  Raven looks like he wishes he was invisible, thin shoulders hunched beneath his New Blood Review T-shirt. Sprite is busy fussing with the strings on his guitar. Even the decrepit old wizard Farrel Din kept around to keep the electricity running looks away, embarrassed, hiding behind his wine bottle. Only Lari will meet her eyes, and the look he gives her is not encouraging. He is fidgeting with the ruby stud in his right ear like he always does before a gig ... or a blowup.

  “There aren’t any lyrics. Just music. Aren’t going to be any lyrics either—until we get a new singer. We’re doing an instrumental set tonight, just dance music. Farrel Din agrees.” The portly elf who owns the Dancing Ferret looks up at the mention of his name, then turns his back and goes on polishing the bar. This is between Wicker and Lari then. Oh lordy.

  “Aw, come on, Lar . . . cut it out, okay? Look, let’s just get to work, cut the shit, you won’t have any more trouble from me—”

  “Until we get on stage and you happen to decide to change the play list, or turn one of my love songs into a comedy routine, or weave a spell into the lyrics that gets everybody dancing till they drop of exhaustion three days later—”

  “I’m the best goddamn singer this crummy band has ever had and—■”

  “And you’re still more trouble than you’re worth. Forget it, Wicker. We all talked it over; we’re all agreed. Do a solo act, start a new group, find some human band looking for elf bait to front for them ... or go jump off of Dragon’s Claw Bridge yourself. I don’t care what you do. But you’re out of the Review.”

  She glares at him, glares at all of them. They can’t be serious! Are they serious? She’s made them the hottest band in town; the old Review couldn’t get beyond the elvin clubs, and now they share top billing at the Ferret with Magical Madness and the Guttertramps. They can’t just kick her out.

  “Now wait a minute, Lari. Raven. John Thomas .. .” The big halfie bassist gives her a sad smile and lumbers out of the club. Sprite is packing up his equipment; it is past noon and the rehearsal is over. She’s missed the entire thing—up all night fighting with Eadric, then cleaning up the smashed crockery after he’d tied down the stairs, then pacing her flat until dawn thinking about what he had said and what she had said, what she should have said and he could have said ... until she’d fallen asleep over a cup of tea at the kitchen table while trying to wake up enough to catch a cab to Soho. ...

  "Look, Lar,” she begins again. But he’s not even listening now. He’s packing up and out the door. Raven glances back at her as he leaves, looking like he wants to say something, pausing uncertainly in the

  doorway.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me,” she says sarcastically, and immediately regrets it at the look on his face. Why pick on Raven when it’s Lari she wants to slug?

  She sits on the empty stage, wondering what she’s going to do now, too tired to care. From the hottest band in Soho to nothing in Five minutes flat, that had to be some kind of record even for her. Sometimes she thinks her parents are right about her. She sighs and lights up a cigarette, watches the gray smoke drift lazily in sunlight slanting through the Filthy windows. In the back of the club, Farrel Din is studiously ignoring her. Even the little wizard is gone.

  Behind the stage is the room where bands keep equipment and costumes. Two of the members of Magical Madness are there, hacking around on guitars, but not Eadric. She doesn’t know whether to feel sorry or relieved. She opens the mouth of her knapsack up wide and sweeps her makeup off the countertop into it without bothering to check if the lids are screwed on tight. She hauls clothing off hangers and jams that in her bag, too—they aren’t going to give her stuff to some new singer, some cute little girl from the Hills with a voice like an anemic chicken. That’s what Lari wanted for his love songs—sweet and sentimental. No fire and no guts.

  Underneath her makeup table, the bowl of milk and Fish she’d left out the night before is still sitting there untouched, except for the roaches. The tabby kitten has disappeared again, back to wherever it came from, no doubt—and just when she’d decided to take it home before the poor thing starved to death. She could have used the company today, some cheering up. She checks the dark corners, behind the doors, to see if it’s still around sleeping somewhere; it has been hanging around the club for the better part of the last month. But no luck. This is definitely not one of her better days.

  She walks all the way back to Fare-you-well Park, mindful of the money she won’t be earning tonight after all, or any night for a while. Ho Street is empty this early but for a couple of runaways hanging out on an abandoned stoop, a little girl who cannot be any older than nine or ten with snot running down her nose and a ragged sweater too thin for the cold, and an older boy who is probably her brother. The glamorous Bordertown life. She wonders what draws them here, from the farthest corners of the Elflands and the World; she wonders if they ever find what they are seeking. She never has.

  The old city is like elvin silver by daylight, revealed for the cheap illusion that it is. When night comes, it will be transformed. The avenue will sparkle with lights, glitter with a bright crowd of flamboyantly dressed kids on parade: the elvin Bloods in red leather, the color of madness and poets; their human rivals, the Pack, cruising Ho Street on motorcycles that look like they are held together with chewing gum and chicken wire; the Slummers from Dragon’s Tooth Hill, children of the Bordertown bourgeoisie come to be fashionable and rub shoulders with Soho low life . . . for it is fashionable in Bordertown to at least pretend to live life dangerously, even if you take your risks in measured doses and go home at night to Mummy and Da and the hired nanny. . . .

  North of Ho Street the city begins to rebuild itself; the buildings are newer and in better repair, policed by t he City Guards and serviced by City Cabs. Fare-you-well Park is in the northernmost corner of the city, in itie Hills, and she must pass through Traders’ Heaven, the Scandal District, and Courthouse Square to get there.

  It is not a distinguished neighborhood, a working-class elvin borough of the sort that is common at the edge of Bordertown and that humans tend to forget exist, thinking that all elves live in elegant state on Dragon’s Tooth Hill. She did not grow up in Fare-you-well Park, but in a neighborhood just like it; she doesn’t know whether it is perversity or familiarity or just laziness that keeps her from seeking out a better place to live, particularly with the kind of money she’d been pulling in at the Ferret.

  Hers is an old building with a new one growing out of it, the straight lines and hard angles favored in the past topped by the fanciful turrets and towers preferred now. Although it is an elvin neighborhood, her landlady is human. All Wicker knows of her is the omnipresent smell of cabbage soup that hangs in the stairwell and her statue in the lobby, a white marble monstrosity called “Madonna and Fish.” This she has decorated with blinking lights and dead tree branches. Humans, Wicker has decided, are deucedly weird.

  She climbs the narrow stairs to her flat under the eaves, hoping Eadric is home for a change and in a good mood for a change. She wishes she had brought the kitten home; her flat seems suddenly dark and dreary as she opens the door. There is a letter waiting for her on the m
at. From Eadric. Telling her in print what he would not admit in person last night, that he’s moving in with the halfie girl who plays the electric dirge in his band. Lots of vague excuses and mumblings, but the message is clear: Get Lost.

  Wicker sets her pack on the floor. Sits down on the floor beside it.

  “Aw shit,” she says.

  Definitely not one of her better days.

  The darkness stinks of fish and decay and there is something unpleasantly soft underfoot. Gray hangs on the back of Sammy’s coat as he leads her down dusty corridors and up creaking stairways. A floorboard gives way under her step, a balustrade crumbles at her touch, and by the time she’s through the building and out the other side, climbing through the gaping emergency exit onto the fire escape beyond, she is bleeding, bruised, limping, and sneezing from the dust. “Wait!” she gasps as Sam begins to climb the metal ladder. She sinks down onto the metal grating and cannot stop sneezing. There may be Rats waiting below, but she has to catch her breath before she goes on.

  Sammy squats down beside her, turns one corner of his mouth up in a sour grin. His dark curly hair just about covers his eyes in the front, making it difficult to read his expression; no doubt he does this on purpose.

  “One of these days you’re going to have to learn to take care of yourself, kid. What do you think I am, your guardian angel or what?”

  “I can,” she wheezes, “take care of myself.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You got anything to eat, Sammy?”

  “Oh yeah, sure, kid; I always walk around with dinner in,my pockets.”

  “I was just asking.”

  “Maybe if you came home nights once in a while . . But he can see the pinched and desperate look of hunger in Gray’s expression and he relents. He pulls a flask from the hip pocket of his jeans. “Drink

  some of this; it’ll warm you up. But not too much on an empty stomach, mind.”

  It is a dark red wine, not sweet enough for her taste—which means it is probably decent and not the stuff he calls swill that she prefers. She often wonders how a boy raised on the streets of Bordertown came to be such a snob about what he eats and drinks. She raises the flask for another gulp, but Sammy reaches for it, “Hey, not too much now,” and the flask slips from her hand, does a little dance in the air, and smashes three stories below, leaving a stain like blood on the pavement.

  “Oops,” she says quietly, looking up at him with wide eyes.

  He’d been about to say something vicious, but that look stops him; and he can’t help it, he begins to laugh. She looks so damn pathetic, covered with soot and fish offal, her jacket cut to ribbons, her knees bloody, a bruise shadowing her left eye and cheek, scratches across the other cheek. She is sitting hugging her knees as if she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and his laughter tips the balance. She laughs so hard her slight body shakes with it and she can’t stop sneezing, which sets them both off again.

  The Rats are either gone, or deaf.

  “C’mon now,” Sammy says finally, rising and offering her his hand. “The sooner we get out of here the better; with the kind of luck you’re having today, I ain’t taking any chances.” She feels limp as a rag as he pulls her to her feet. “Just remember you owe me one.”

  “A timely rescue?”

  “No, a bottle of Brigot 37. That cost me a bloody elvin fortune.”

  She reaches into her jacket pocket, hands him the gleaming gold bracelet, soft as butter. “Are we even?” she asks smugly. But his reaction is as unexpected as the fishwife’s. He stares at it as if she’s just put rat turds in his hand, his expression sour, and he makes a move as if to throw it out over the rooftops.

  “What are you, nuts?” she protests, snatching it back from him.

  “What are you doing with a thing like that?”

  “Thing like what? What are you doing? It’s mine. I swiped it fair and square off some guy this morning.” Sammy shakes his head. “That’s faery gold, Gray. You don’t want that stuff. It’s magic—red magic. That ain’t for people like you an’ me, see.” He curls his mouth with distaste. “That’s your bad luck following you around. Only bloods can carry that crap, no human would touch it. Let me get rid of it for you before any other disasters happen.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” she says, “it’s just a lousy bracelet. Bet I can get a lot for it, too.”

  “No way. No human’ll buy it.”

  “I stole it off a human guy.”

  “Yeah? Well, look at the great luck he had—getting robbed by you. Then you run off with it and have half the Rats of Riverside on your sweet little tail, not to mention nearly gutting me with that fish scaler of yours, not to mention practically breaking a leg or two in there, not to mention—”

  “I get the picture, Sammy.”

  “I’m telling you, Gray, you stay away from that elf crap, you hear?” He’s practically yelling at her now. Every Rat in five miles will hear. “Give me that thing and I’ll get rid of it.”

  “I’ll get ‘rid’ of it myself. And get a good price for it too. If humans won’t buy it, i’ll sell it up in Elftown— gold is gold. And it’s pretty.”

  “And it’s pretty,” he mimics, hands on his hips, glaring at her, stubbornness matched against stubborness. “Oh, bloody hells, I tried. You get yourself in trouble again girl, I ain’t gonna be there to get you out of it. You understand that?”

  “Who asked you to?” she says, glaring back. Whoever asked him to?

  They don’t speak again all the way back to the old city. She’ll be damned if she’ll speak first, or ask for his help though she is limping badly; and he doesn’t offer it. He is a bigot, a bully, and a jerk—even if he is practically her only friend in Bordertown. Even if he did practically save her life. He probably wouldn’t even have bothered if he suspected what she’s known all along.

  That she may be half elvin herself.

  They are still not speaking by the time they turn up Chrystoble Street toward the Lightworks; but they are walking inches rather than feet apart—some silent half truce has been reached. Gray feels she could practically weep with relief to see the huge Electra Lightworks Building looming at the end of the block, the ugly remnant of a more extravagant age. It is one of the few buildings in Soho more or less intact, except for a chunk of the upper-right-hand floor, which looks as though a giant rodent has nibbled at it. The building’s name is carved in stone in letters six feet high above the door.

  Like most salvageable Soho buildings, this one is inhabited by squatters, runaway kids mostly, or members of the gang Sammy belongs to—the Pack—whose territory extends from Chrystoble to the wall, and north as far as Ho Street. The City Council doesn’t seem to care that children have taken over the old quarter of the city. Nobody wants these crumbling ruins anyway.

  Gray gets herself up the stairs to Sammy’s flat by concentrating on her bed at the top of them; by now she is so tired she has forgotten her hunger. Only sleep matters. Sammy lives on the third floor up. She was on the.fifth until a few weeks ago, in a small flat she had more or less to herself since the Devinish girls she shared it with were not connected enough to reality to count. But Bloods or vandals have stolen the tin off the roof to sell up at Traders’ Heaven, and now the fifth floor leaks when it rains.

  As she limps in the door behind Sammy, Big Will Hernandez is just putting a kettle on the Magic Fire for tea, and Devinish Girl #1—their names are Polly and Pijin but Gray still can’t keep them straight—is sitting in the bathtub that doubles, with a board on top, for their kitchen table. She’s got all her clothes on, and there is no water in the tub; she is just sitting there, staring at her fingers. If Gray had ever been tempted to try fairy-dust or the river water, the Devinish girls would have cured her of that notion. But drugs have never appealed to her anyway.

  Big Will’s cat, Little Will, hisses as they come in, bringing the cold air with them. Will laughs. “He really don’t like you, Gray. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Tea, babe?”
<
br />   She shakes her head, peels off her ruined gloves, and puts them in the trash pile. Her jacket belongs there, too—and probably her jeans as well. She sighs. Tea would be nice, but it will take too long to boil over the weak flame of the Magic Fire, the elvin gadget Sammy stole from some fancy house on Dragon’s Tooth Hill. Funny that for all his prejudices he doesn’t mind making use of their magic; the little lightbox he reads by, the spells that fuel his beloved bike, now this. It is supposed to heat an entire room, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. Elvin things rarely do, here on the Border, so close to the magicless World.

  Gray runs her hands under ice cold tap water, wincing as the running water hits her scratches. She washes the grime off her face and, taking a deep breath, plunges her whole head under the tap and washes that, too. She dries herself on her shirttails, runs her fingers through her hair to make it stick up around her face in the way she likes. That’s enough for now. She turns and finds Sam watching her from the doorway, with that same silent, unreadable expression he puts on when she stumbles home at dawn, unwilling to explain where she’s been all night. She does not meet his eyes as she walks past him into the room she is sharing with the Devinish Girls.

  The room gets no sun and is always cold. Ancient, moldy wallpaper of vine leaves and leaping goatmen is peeling off the walls, exposing cabbage roses beneath, reminding her of her family’s overstuffed home back in Stratton-on-the-Pike. Devinish #2 is sitting before a cracked vanity mirror, dreamily combing her long black hair. Gray catches a glimpse of herself behind the older girl and grimaces. A purple bruise is swelling her eye, and she looks as though the Rats had gotten hold of her after all. Her clothes are definitely a dead loss. She puts her bloody shirt and her torn jeans in a pile to throw away, her slime-covered sneakers aside to clean, her knife and the elvin bracelet on top of the neat stack of meager belongings on the chair beside her mattress. She feels curiously better without the weight of the bracelet in her pocket; perhaps Sammy wasn’t overreacting entirely ... or perhaps he’s simply spooked her with his story of curses and bad luck.