Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  Page was certain, for all his lack of past, that he had never had anything like a “roti,” nor anything as good. The filling built a fire on his tongue, and the wrapping bread cooled it, and when he had eaten the last of it he felt as if he were dancing and laughing, as if the food had become an engine of joy inside his belly.

  “Young sir!” an urgent voice called from behind him, and a white hand dropped on his shoulder.

  Page sprang up—the wobbling marketplace stool clattered to the pavement—and spun, half-crouched, to face a threat. To be touched without invitation—yet he had seen others touch and be touched here in the market, and none thought ill of it.

  The man behind him was of the Blood, as was the one a step behind him. They were dressed richly, soberly, their long jackets plainly tailored in dark, dull shades and fine stuffs.

  In their faces and bodies, Page read uncertainty and fear. He’d seen too much fear of late, and was coming to hate it. Was he the cause of it?

  “I beg pardon, young sir,” said the man who’d touched him. He was older than Page, perhaps older than the man with the ferret he had seen in the street. “I cannot—I would address you properly, but the Silencing prohibits me, it would seem. We had not meant to leave you exiled for so long.”

  “We have searched this benighted place for hours,” said his long-faced companion, disapproval laid as a guise over his fear. “Were you not to take a residence near the Gate and await word that the quarrel was mended?”

  Page recognized neither of them. “Strife was the cause of my journey here?”

  The two men shared a look between them that seemed to give them no comfort. “Did you not understand, young sir?” asked the elder.

  “Nor care?” added the disapproving man. “Strife is your familiar in all things. Why should it trouble you now?” Then his eyes grew wide, and he pressed his fist against his thin lips. “Your pardon, young sir,” he whispered, bowing his head. “My words were too hot and my wits too cold.”

  Did he delight in strife, that boy he’d been beyond the Gate? But Page had mastered his anger at the two who’d stolen from him and taunted him. “My memories were taken from me when I passed out of the Realm. I know you not.”

  He watched as horror slid across the men’s features, mixing with fear like two colors of paint.

  “Young sir—” the older one began, and his face was that of a man approaching a wild animal.

  “This place is changeable and unchancy by nature,” the one who had chided Page spat out. “But to work such a woe as that—Came you through the Gate, as you were directed?”

  “Was I so directed? Aye, I passed through, and a fine trick it played me. It bore me no ill will, I’d venture.” Page smiled. They seemed as little used to confusion as he had been at daybreak.

  The chider wrung his hands. “Ill fortune matched to folly! Perhaps, had you not broken the journey to drink and wench and brawl—”

  “Mirasal,” snapped the older man, his voice sharp with warning.

  “Oh, this was a madman’s venture all along!” the one named Mirasal wailed.

  “Enough.”

  Mirasal closed his lips and frowned at the cracked paving beneath his feet.

  “We will take you home,” said the older man to Page, like one used to leading. “The crossing will give back what it stole. And if not, there are those who can heal your mind and return you to yourself. Young sir, your father and your kin wait for your return, now that all is settled.”

  Had he a father? And kin? Were they proud? Did they take what they pleased, offer haughty words in return? Were they quick to anger and offense? Had they modeled for the boy he’d been when he passed through the Gate, or was that boy of his making alone?

  If he had made that boy, he could unmake him.

  “Come, young sir,” the older man bid him firmly. “Let us hope the hours of the Uncertain Lands have passed much as the Realm’s do, this once. You will be home and in your proper place by fall of night.”

  “No,” said Page. “I thank you, but no.”

  The older man stood with mouth agape, but without words.

  “I am home. Though I look like the man you seek, I am not he. I was born in this city, today, in a witch’s garden and a street in shadow. My name is Page.”

  They argued, coaxed, demanded, but in the end, they could do nothing but admit to failure and return whence they had come.

  * * *

  Page could not retrace his steps from the market, aimless as they had been. He had to begin from Elfhaeme Gate. The guards on duty were not the two who had brought him kicking into the world.

  At last he found the embankment, and the many-colored house at its top. He followed the street to the front steps, then the flags to the front door. It was painted blue as the afternoon sky. Beside it was a copper bell, green with age, with a bright braided cord tied to its clapper. He pulled the cord and made the bell shout.

  She swung the door wide (no fear in her pale, cheerful face) and stood framed in it, head cocked like a listening sparrow. “Oh!” she said at last. “Maybe-Blank Page!”

  “I have come to thank you, Lady Witch, for your great service.” He drew the bouquet from behind his back and offered it with a good bow. The flowers, he thought, were the right ones: no careful palette, but a frenzy of blooms, blue, magenta, red, orange, yellow, pink, white, purple.

  She turned her eyes upward, a gesture she must have learned from humans. What did it mean? “My name’s Camphire. Not a witch. Painter. Really, really, really.”

  Page tried to contain his laughter, but it slipped out the corners of his mouth and bent them. “No, Lady. I have had proof of your powers. All passed as your curse foretold. I learned who I am from the next person I met.” He stretched his arm, until the flowers were almost in her hands. “And from you. And for that, I shall never fail in gratitude, or in any service you may ask.”

  She took the flowers, peered down into their vivid wilderness as into a puzzle she meant to solve. She sniffed at one and smiled wide, showing many teeth, and he knew it was a gesture of delight. “All’s well that doesn’t end with somebody falling off a building, I always say.”

  He wondered what events would give her cause to say so with any frequency, but he feared it would be rude to ask. “Should you require a strong arm and a weak wit, send word to Page, and I shall serve happily according to my name.”

  The look she cast him across the bright blooms was suddenly clear and piercing. “You were a blank page. But now you’re not. Could be a good story you’ve got there.” As quickly as it came, the acuteness in her face was gone; her smile was wide and vague. “Thank you, Page. Have a swell life.”

  “I shall endeavor,” he said. She closed the door.

  Overhead the stars were appearing. Page wondered if somewhere in this city full of new magic there was a place he might go to dance.

  RUN BACK ACROSS THE BORDER

  BY STEVEN BRUST

  The Border’s got no place to hide

  Run back across the Border

  But your mama’s waiting on the other side

  Run back across the Border.

  You better run, run, run

  I’m giving you an order

  You better run, run, run

  Run back across the Border.

  Soho runs from here to there

  Run back across the Border

  No room for you in it anywhere

  Run back across the Border.

  Hear my drum, it makes a din

  Run back across the Border

  It’s made out of your brother’s skin

  Run back across the Border.

  Hear my horn, it rings so clear

  Run back across the Border

  May be the last sound you will ever hear

  Run back across the Border.

  See your boys all dressed in rags

  Run back across the Border

  They drink River water till they gag

  Run back a
cross the Border.

  All your friends are just a joke

  Run back across the Border

  They drink River water till they choke

  Run back across the Border.

  My motorcycle runs on gas

  Run back across the Border

  You can shove your spellbox up your ass

  Run back across the Border.

  If you do not like my song

  Run back across the Border

  It just proves you don’t belong

  Run back across the Border.

  A PRINCE OF THIRTEEN DAYS

  BY ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON

  —a true son of Samarkand, and I won’t go for less than three dollars, not even to that sweet-talking Mayor Crenshaw.

  That’s what he says to me, the plaster man with his long embroidered cape and big-knuckled hands. I jump back, almost far enough to fall into the fountain, because no one warned me that the communication charm I found in the bargain bucket at the back of Snappin’ Wizards actually worked.

  I clear my throat. “Mister Statue Man,” I say, because I haven’t grown up on the Border without learning to be polite around magic. “Do you think you might have sex with me?”

  * * *

  After so many years in the park, the prince’s thoughts run slow and sticky; they burrow into the past like the moles beneath his pedestal burrow into the earth. He remembers the idyllic days with his beloved in the house by the lake; he remembers the mud-and-granite smell of mixing plaster, of the way it would smear her nose and hair when she was deep in her work, and then she would pause and turn and smile—a sudden, beneficent gesture—and say, “Well, what do you think, my prince? A good day’s work?”

  He’s a century away from the World and the pain of all those years, but the soul his beloved gave him still stretches in answer: Yes.

  “Yes?” repeats the girl who is not his beloved.

  The prince turns from the past. The girl is dark, like the illustrations of slaves in his beloved’s edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He has never seen such skin up close before, and he wonders at how it resonates with him, at how it feels much like his own, though he knows himself to be no darker than a duck egg. No one has spoken to him in a very long time. On the Border, people tend to leave well enough alone. He has liked that.

  Who are you? he asks, not expecting her to understand. Not even his beloved understood his thoughts.

  Somehow, this girl understands.

  * * *

  The statue said yes, but I don’t think he was answering my question, because a moment later the whirl of his thoughts pauses. It feels like he’s seeing me for the first time.

  Who are you? asks the statue. His voice comes to me truer now, though at first it faded in and out like a secondhand impression ball. His face is as expressionless as ever, but I can feel him behind the rigid, noble mask, like he’s trapped.

  “I’m Peya … uh … daughter of Althea, daughter of Lillian, family name Windbreaker, though I’m pretty sure Grandmama made that up when she came here.”

  Too many years, he says, and I know his tone from the Mad River, or maybe just the rats who loiter nearby: desolation, like hope, has rotted inside him. He’s sadder than I thought he’d be, my plaster man.

  “What’s your name?” I ask. I’m expecting something different from what we usually get down here in Soho, newbie runaways styling themselves Shadesong or Spartacus or whatever.

  But he says, She called me her prince.

  I say, “Well, at least it’s fitting.”

  How … talk to me … He says this as a rush of something like water drowns his deep and formal voice in my head.

  I didn’t expect the charm to work at all, so it’s no shock to me when he fades out. The city itself seems to speak in his place: In my head, I hear the laughter of a rat about to take his last drink of red, boys screaming, girls laughing, bricks cracking on pavement, bells tolling a hundred thousand funerals.

  “Crap!” I say, and drop the charm in the fountain. It was a simple-enough trinket: a plastic azabache eye attached by a leather thong to a pair of windup chattering teeth. I laughed when I found it in the bin at Snappin’ Wizards Surplus and Salvage, but then I could have sworn that eye blinked at me and Rabbit (my sister—sort of) gave me that look of hers, the one that means magic.

  Rabbit’s never wrong about magic.

  The teeth chatter for a few seconds in the water, but the whole spell has guttered by the time I get the nerve to reach into the murky green-black depths of one of Fare-You-Well Park’s crumbling fountains. Why they still have water is one of Bordertown’s mysteries, I guess.

  Like my plaster man.

  “Why are you here?” I ask, knowing I can’t hear him without a working charm but wondering if he hears me. “Who would have given you away, Prince?”

  Maybe the she who haunts him, like the he who haunts my mama?

  On impulse, I reach out and touch his shoulder, though it’s covered in pigeon droppings, green with age. I always assumed the artist had made him naked beneath that proud throw of embroidered cloth, but I see now that he’s wearing a loose tunic beneath it, and there’s a vein, stark beside his collar, where a bit of the stitching has started to come undone.

  “I really want it to be you,” I whisper. “I’ll be back.”

  * * *

  Few know the moment of their own creation, but the prince recalls the morning his beloved named him better than he recalls his last hundred Sundays in Fare-You-Well Park. She told him of her ambitions, how he was surely her prince, her true creation, her best work with her stamp on the sole of his boot. She used quicklime plaster, that most ancient and sturdy of materials, favored by the Romans in buildings still standing. Inspired by a childhood love of the tales in A Thousand and One Nights, she had determined to create a prince of the Orient, a man so hale, so noble, with such a glint of intelligence implied in his plaster eyes that all who looked on him would love him as she did.

  Her love had a kind of magic; the prince took on a kind of soul, and if it was not the most robust of such things, it wasn’t so weak as the garden gnome’s. But in the end, for the security of his position, she married a man she’d called a scoundrel and a liar: Seymour Crenshaw, mayor of Twin Falls, Pennsylvania. Crenshaw said, “He’s a bit … exotic to have in our living room, dear, don’t you think?” and put the prince in the back hall, behind a velvet drape. The prince did not see her very often after that. He resigned himself to the imperfection of his beloved.

  Sometimes she would pull back the velvet drape. Sometimes she would look up at him on his pedestal and push back her hair and sigh. “We were good together, weren’t we, my prince?” she said late one night, her belly swollen past the point where garments could conceal it.

  We could be again, he thought, and knew it for a lie.

  “I’ve asked Seymour if he might purchase quicklime and sand from a distributor in Baltimore,” she said, and for a moment the hope! and the joy! was like unto life, and it seemed that his broad hands flexed, that his noble brow softened, that perhaps he even bent his neck toward her.

  “Prince?” she said, her voice too high, too soft, too scared. “Lord, but this child has made me mad.” She rested her hands on her belly and spoke as though the baby inside could hear her. “How restless you’ve been this past week. I’ll be glad enough when I can see your face as well as feel you.”

  Her smile was not for him, though it had once been.

  “Prince?” she said again, surer this time. “It must be the moon.…”

  And she stood, raised herself to her toes, and kissed his perfect plaster lips.

  “Seymour says he can’t possibly consider it in my condition,” she whispered, mouth between his ear and cheekbone. “I’ll ask again after the baby is born.”

  She died a week later.

  * * *

  “Sit down,” says Grandmama. “I have biscuits in the oven.”

  In some parts of Soho, a half dozen of Gra
ndmama’s buttermilk biscuits can fetch at least a pound of coffee. I’ve seen them raise a ghost on the Day of the Dead. Biscuit day is serious business.

  I sit down.

  Even if she didn’t tell me, I would have known: Grandmama’s biscuits smell of crackling lard and fresh-churned butter melting into dough, and a little of the myrrh she burns as she mixes it together with her wooden spoon. Sodium bicarbonate and buttermilk culture need help here on the Border. Sometimes just the incense will do it, and sometimes I’ve seen Grandmama go into a full-on spiritual “Oh Happy Day” or “Didn’t It Rain” just to conjure a rise. She’s got a beautiful voice, but my grandmother doesn’t sing much otherwise. I’d never tell her, but I always like the taste of those biscuits best.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” she says, like someone else might say, “Don’t fuck up,” and she opens the oven door for exactly one second. She’s smiling when she sits across from me at our kitchen counter (a dark mahogany slab carved with ivy—formerly a door from some posh building from the place Parkside, our neighborhood, used to be before the Border). “It’s a good one,” she says. The tension has left her shoulders, which is the only thing that ever makes her look even a little old.

  I’m not so shabby myself (and Rabbit’s too young), but I live with two of the most beautiful women in Bordertown, no lie. Both Mama and Grandmama have skin to match our kitchen counter, with big lips and big hair and cheekbones that could cut pastry. They came sixteen years ago from the World, when Mama was pregnant with me. They ran away from a bad man and a good man and a place they call the South.

  I’m glad I live here.

  “So what’d you do today, Peya?” Grandmama asks, one bare foot on the stool, the other dangling beneath.