Terri Windling

by Borderland

  “Oh?” The elf girl smiles, showing pearly, iridescent teeth. “And did you find out? What we’re really like?” “Well . . . no. You’re the first I’ve ever talked to.” She peers sideways at Wicker, sitting across the table in her T-shirt and panties. “You’re not exactly like I’d imagined. ...”

  Wicker laughs, setting the copper disks in her hair clattering. “What did you imagine?”

  “Um, you know. Well, you know. What they say about elves.”

  Wicker raises an eyebrow.

  “Enchanting mortals, stealing babies, turning men into worms—that sort of thing.” Gray runs her hand through her hair again, making all the chopped-off strands stand on end. She pulls the elvin robe tighter around her.

  “What rot!” Wicker says. “Turning men into worms! Where did you hear this rubbish?”

  Gray thinks about that. “My mom. She’s from Bordertown, she should know. She used to sing me all these spooky songs, all this fairy-taley stuff about lords and ladies and turning people into monsters and stuff . .. you know.” Gray is embarrassed. “She said she’d heard them growing up here, near the Border.”

  “Sing one,” Wicker demands.

  “Well, um, I don’t—”

  “I don’t care what you sound like. Just sing one. Nobody’s listening but me.”

  Yes, but that’s bad enough, Gray thinks. Most of the songs her mother taught her make elves sound . . . bad. What if Wicker is offended? The elf girl is looking at her expectantly; Gray searches her memory and pulls up a song about a beautiful elvin queen. Her voice sounds strained and husky in the quiet of the elf girl’s flat, and she stares at her toes as she sings.

  True Thomas lay on the grassy bank,

  And he beheld a lady gay,

  A lady that was brisk and bold Come riding over the fernie brae.

  Her skirt was of the grass-green silk,

  Her cloak made of velvet fine,

  And braided in her horse’s mane Were fifty silver bells and nine.

  True Thomas he took off his hat And bowed him low down on one knee.

  “All hail the mighty Queen of Heaven,

  Your like on earth I’ve never seen.”

  “O no, O no, Thomas,” she said,

  “That name does not belong to me.

  I am the Queen of fair Elfland And I’ve come here to visit thee . .

  Wicker sits still, with her cup of tea growing cold, forgotten in her hand. She is remembering a night long ago, when she was just a child, when a man—a cousin, an uncle, she can’t remember—came out of the Elflands and visited her family. He sat by her bed one night telling fantastic stories—of knights and ladies, of creatures that lived in the seas and rivers and winged serpents that lived in the clouds—while she and her sisters shivered under the covers in delicious, fascinated fright . .. until her mother came to take the man away, scolding him for filling their heads with dreams and nonsense. His tales were like this song—magic, enchanting.

  “You must come with me now, Thomas;

  True Thomas, you must go with me.

  And it will be seven years and a day Till you win back to your own country.”

  She turned about her milk-white steed,

  And took True Thomas up behind;

  And when they crossed the Borderlands,

  Her steed flew faster than the wind.

  For forty days and forty nights,

  They rode through red blood to the knee,

  And they saw neither sun nor moon But heard the roaring of the sea . ..

  As Gray sings, she is also remembering. She remembers her mother, whom she prefers not to think of these days, for she is the only thing Gray misses about Stratton-on-the-Pike. Her mother’s passion was her garden, filled with exotic plants brought from over the Border—though this was a thing whispered in Gray’s ear, never spoken aloud where the servants could hear. Her mother would sing as she worked, as she dug in the rich black soil with strong, sun-browned hands.

  Unless Gray’s father came by. Then she grew silent. And sad.

  They rode on and further on,

  Until they came to the Border green.

  “Light down, light down, you fair laddie,

  And I shall show you wonders three.

  “O see you not that narrow road,

  So thick beset with thorns and briars?

  That is the road to Righteousness,

  Though after it but few inquire,

  “And see you not that broad broad road That lies across the lily leven?

  That is the path of Wickedness,

  Though some call it the road to heaven.

  “And see you not that bonnny road Which winds about the fernie brae?

  That is the road to fair Elfland Where you and I this night shall go.. . .”

  “A human in Elfland?” Wicker shakes her head derisively. She sips her tea and is startled to find it cold.

  “But Thomas, you must hold your tongue Whatever you may hear or see.

  Thomas, you must not speak a word,

  Or you’ll ne’er win back to your own country.

  Thomas, you must hold your tongue Whatever you may hear or see.

  Or I’ll tear out your bonny blue eyes And put in two of stone and tree. . ..”

  146 Bellamy Bach “Oh gross,” Wicker says.

  Gray sings the song of Good King Henry, forced to wed a monster bride, who turns into a beautiful lady in his bed; and the story of the girl Jennet whose lover is stolen by the Fairy Queen.

  “Tonight it is All Hallow’s Eve When the Fairy Folk ride;

  Those who would their true love win At Mile’s Cross must hide.

  “First let pass the horses black,

  And then let pass the brown;

  Quickly run to the milk-white steed And pull that rider down.

  “I’ll be on the milk-white steed Nearest to Bordertown,

  For once I was a Worldly knight,

  They give me that reknown.

  “They will turn me in your arms, Jennet,

  Into a newt or a snake;

  Hold me tight, fear me not,

  And do not me forsake.

  “They will turn me in your arms, Jennet,

  Into a lion bold;

  Hold me tight, fear me not,

  And we’ll live to grow old.

  “They will turn me in your arms, Jennet,

  Into a naked knight;

  You must cover me with your grass-green cloak And keep me out of sight.”

  Now this is a tale Wicker has heard before— but the way the stranger from over the Border told it, it was an elvin girl who had to save her elvin lover from a cruel queen of the World, not a human knight destined to be sacrificed as a Tithe to Hell by the fairies. As if the fey would do such a thing! Or would they? Superstitiously, Wicker glances northward in the direction of the Border—though the northern view from her window is the brick of the building next door—as Gray sings of the wrath of the Fairy Queen after Jennet steals her lover away.

  Up then spoke the Fairy Queen,

  And an angry queen was she!

  “Woe betide ye, ill-starred lass,

  And an ill death may you die!”

  “Had I known, good man,” she said,

  “That this lass would claim thee,

  I’d have taken out your two gray eyes And put in two of tree!”

  “Big on tearing folks eyes out, are we?” Wicker asks. She is delighted. “What a lot of nonsense! No wonder they don’t like us out in the World if they believe all that shit! Who made this stuff up? A tithe to hell for the gods’ sake.”

  “Nobody made it up. I mean, these songs are old, real old, older than the Border, my mom always said .. . though that might be a figure of speech.”

  “But Elfland isn’t really like that, I’m sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well ... I don’t.” Wicker looks thoughtful, tracing the woodgrain in the table with a fingernail painted with fairy-dust.

  “Wicker
?” Gray sounds shy again, using the elf girl’s name. “Do you ever wonder what it’s really like?” She is staring at Wicker from over her mug of tea, steam clouding her features.

  Wicker pours herself another cup, attempts to sit cross-legged in her chair as Gray is doing, finds that her legs are too long for this. She leans over the table with her chin in her hand, pink hair framing her alabaster face, and sighs.

  “Of course I do. How can you live on the edge of it and not wonder? No, scratch that. I grew up with people who have lived on the edge of it all their lives and never really wanted to know what was on the other side; I grew up thinking I was odd for asking. That there was something wrong with me for not being content in Elftown. I’ve thought about crossing the Border someday, but . . She laughs, shakes back her hair. “But I’d be terrified,” she admits. “I’ve never been out of Bordertown.”

  “You wouldn’t be scared,” Gray says seriously, “or at least only at first. Then things get too . . . interesting ... to remember to be scared all the time, or to want to run back home. At least that’s how it was when I left the Pike. I would go if I were you. I’d have to. Just to find out.”

  “If you do turn out to be a halfie, you could cross the Border yourself. Hell, we could go together; that might not be so bad.” She is startled to hear herself say this. She’s only just met this kid, who may not even be of the blood. A human, gods! And Wicker has always been a loner, never gotten along with other girls very well . . . or for that matter—she makes a wry face, thinking of Eadric and Lari—with boys either.

  “I really want to,” Gray is saying, her round human eyes shining beneath the tangle of silvery gray hair.

  “That’s one of the reasons I have to find out. If I’m a halfie. Most people wouldn’t want to be—I guess most elves, too, huh? But I think ... I think I’d be glad.” “You need to talk to a wizard. A real one, not one of those spells-for-hire amateurs. Only an elf mage could tell you if you’ve really got the blood, even a drop of it.” “They cost a fortune.”

  “Ummm.”

  Sitting there in the elvin red brocade robe Eadric left behind, Gray could almost pass for true blood, and certainly looks as elvin as many halfies in spite of her small size. And there is something . . . odd about Gray, a lingering smoky resonance as of enchantment and spells, a kind of shimmering at the edge of sight, like when one tries to look straight at the Border. Yet Wicker cannot feel blood calling to blood. Odd.

  “Wicker,” Gray says, “have you ever seen bracelets of faery gold? They’re about this thick around, and have a pattern of vine leaves and—”

  Wicker is up and out of the room, rummages around in a drawer, dumps half its contents on the floor before producing a duplicate of the bracelet Gray stole the day before. “Like this?” she says as Gray follows her into the bedroom.

  “Yes. Only maybe a little wider. I think.”

  “A man’s bracelet then. This is a woman’s. What about it?”

  “I’ve got one.”

  Wicker sits down on the bed, plumps pillows behind her, lights a cigarette. “That doesn’t prove you’re an elf. And you know, Gray, it’s not supposed to be good for those not of the true blood to wear faery gold. ..

  “I know,” Gray says ruefully, fingering the purple bruise on her cheek. “But do you think maybe I could trade it to a mage in exchange for—”

  Wicker cuts her off with a snort of laughter. “You can buy them all over Elftown for a half-moon apiece.” “Oh.”

  Gray sits down on the edge of the bed looking deflated, looking like a woebegone child in the overlarge folds of Eadric’s robe. Wicker grows thoughtful.

  “Look, Gray, maybe there’s a way you ... we ... could earn some money. I’m sort of out of a job myself . . . You interested?”

  “Well, it depends on what it is. I don’t sleep around and I’m not a very good thief.”

  “Oh gods, nothing like that. Wait here a minute.” Wicker disappears into a closet, reappears with a pair of star-covered trousers on and carrying a harp. She touches the strings lightly, and they make a soft, electric sound. “I’ve got to get the spell recharged on this,” she mumbles as she tightens the strings. Slowly, she picks out the tune for Thomas the Rhymer and, once she’s playing it confidently, begins to change it. She adds a beat that would have horrified Gray’s mother but sounds familiar to the patrons of the Dancing Ferret. “What do you think?” she says to Gray.

  Gray smiles at her but shakes her head. “I can’t sing, or play, or anything.”

  “And you probably have all the stage presence of a rock. I don’t want you to perform, kid, just teach me the songs. Okay? Teach me the words and tunes, and we’ll work out new music together. I can get a band to back me up; I know some of the best unemployed elves in Soho. Maybe some humans, too ... a mixed band, we can start a whole new fashion! We can magic up special effects, create a whole new look—something Elfland-y, like the silver gown that elvin lady was wearing at the Ferret last night, only wilder. .. .”

  She is already picking up and discarding clothes from the floor, creating her new image as she talks.

  “We’ll be famous clear up to the hill!” she says, smiling conspiratorially at Gray, assuming Gray’s compliance.

  Gray smiles back at her, caught up by the elf girl’s enthusiasm, but she is thinking:

  God’s slimy breath. What’s Sammy going to sayf

  I have always wanted a child.

  It was a great joy to me when the nurse explained that stomach cramps were neither a virus nor food poisoning nor one of those strange wasting illnesses that thrive in certain parts of the Borderlands, but merely a condition I had waited for so long and given up hoping of ever attaining so that 1 didn’t even recognize it when it finally happened.

  Warran, too, was glad—a child, perhaps a son, at last, to carry on the Haugh name and titles, inherit the Haugh fortune, which was sizable by now due to my husband’s hard work and unspoken of connections north of the Border. For the first time since our early years in Bordertown he became a friend to me again, watching my belly grow round and delighting in the signs of life inside me. Suddenly I was once again more important than cloth or trade, and I confess that I forgot all about Archer.

  What can I say, my dear? I have never pretended to be better than I am, only insisted that I am not as bad as they say. Archer became once again a teenage fancy, a middle-age foolishness; the little box that held the silver ring he gave me as he left Stratton-on-the-Pike, vowing to return when he could, grew dusty. 1 did not marry him back in the Bordertown days because he was an elf, beautiful and unpredictable, and I believed he would not be true to me as I aged in the quicker human fashion and lost my beauty. Yet it is I who have been fickle, who have been untrue. Not to Warran, as everyone believed, but to Archer.

  * * *

  Gray Changes back again in the back room of the Ferret. Thank the Gods there is no one there. The gray light of false dawn illuminates the single window; a cold wind blows through the crack in the pane. She wakes naked, curled on a pile of stage clothing. Her fingers are bunched tight like cats’ claws, her flesh feels strange without the protection of fur. She has vague memories of alleys and moonlight and other cats and a contest over fishbones. . . . She has clearer memories of the evening before the Change, of watching Eldritch Steel rehearse, her mother’s midnight lullabies transformed almost beyond recognition by power amps and a synthesized beat.

  She was not impressed. Little Maggie Woodsdatter’s skin drums sounded good with Wicker’s harp but were drowned in the wailings of electric bass and fiddle. The penni-whistle player Wicker had found in a bar in Fare-you-well Park didn’t seem to know what he was doing there at all, and the lead guitarist spent more time posturing than playing. Even Wicker was a disappointment. Raven, who’d been enticed away from the Review and perhaps now regretted it, had assured Gray that Wicker was never at her best without an audience to draw energy from, yet he seemed worried himself, particularly when Wicker announc
ed that their first gig was already set up. Tomorrow night. At the Ferret.

  As she’d sat watching them in the empty Ferret—a young elf pushing a broom around her to ready the place for the night’s customers, Farrel Din lounging at his bar behind her—she’d felt the Change steal over her. Too suddenly, too soon. She’d barely had time to mumble excuses and leave.

  Wicker will be worried about her. Or pissed off. Or both.

  She searches among the piles and racks of clothes for something inconspicuous to wear. She comes up with tight black trousers, a black sweater that hangs almost to her knees, and elvin boots that pinch her toes. Her eyes in the mirror look large and smoky, her face pale, and there is a new scratch across one eyelid. Cat fights.

  Farrel Din is smoking a pipe in the next room. Does he ever sleep? He is the only pudgy elf Gray has ever seen, yet he is known to be full blood, born in the Elflands. He smiles at her but it is an unfriendly smile. “Sleeping it off, my little one?” he says. Gray suspects he gave Wicker tonight’s gig because it would amuse him to watch her fail.

  She climbs down the fire escape to the alley, finds her clothes where she left them in a neat pile behind the dumpster. The morning air is heavy with rain, with the briney smell of the river. The sun rises weakly over the Old Wall as she turns down Ho Street toward Chrystoble.

  The Lightworks is quiet as if the very concrete blocks of the building are as deep in slumber as everyone inside it—everyone except the person she hoped would be asleep. Like Farrel Din, he never sleeps. He is always there when she comes staggering home after these four-footed evenings, always gives her that same look, that flat stare that makes her feel like a child caught out by her parents. He runs the Pack and he thinks he can run her life as well. Just who does Sammy think he is—her mother?

  “Good morning,” she says as she comes in the door, with more belligerence than friendliness in her voice.

  He pours her a cup of tea without a word. She puts her bundle down on the bathtub-table, her discarded clothing, and he gives her another one of those looks, noting the sweater she is wearing, made for someone much taller than she, and the elvin boots. She wishes he would say something, just once, so she could tell him it’s none of his business where she spends the night. Better that he should think what he is thinking, anyway, than guess at the truth. But he doesn’t say anything. He picks up the cracked old book he is reading and ignores her.