Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  I wander away from my plaster man and sit on the ground beneath the nearby fountain. I’m not sure what to say to him after yesterday. It’s enough to make me wonder if I want to fall in love at all. First Mama and Grandmama, and now Prince too?

  “Does love make everyone nuts?” I mutter to myself, and pick up the dog-eared copy of my latest book: The Master and Margarita. I thought the cover looked interesting, and I knew I was right when Wolfboy (who owns that bookshop Elsewhere) held it for nearly a minute and eyed me like he was making sure I was worthy of the purchase.

  North of me, a bunch of kids are chalking a big mural onto the cracked flagstones. It looks like a maze, the kind where you imagine the Minotaur around the corner. I stand up and ask the closest one—a halfie boy who looks about my age, though who knows—if I could borrow a piece of chalk. He tosses a green stick to me without a word. I go back to my fountain and my plaster man and my strange graffiti.

  A princess in a tower? I write, because the brambles made me think of the fairy tale. Who’s sleeping? And then, Nice start.

  I could just give this up, I think when I return the chalk. Grandmama’s right: Rabbit is just a kid, though she can get positively uncanny at times. Even if it was a prophecy, no one said I had to fulfill it. I could finish my book, help Grandmama teach Rabbit long division, wonder about the Border and the Way with the rest of town, and forget entirely about my plaster prince, so hopelessly in love.

  I stuff the book in my patchwork messenger bag and pull out another communication charm. I can feel the magic pulsing inside the plastic eye, the unwound teeth. It says, Speak, speak, listen.

  There are two pigeons roosting on Prince’s shoulders. I nod at them, just in case, and set the teeth to chattering.

  No one has talked to me so much since she died, he says.

  “I think you’re beautiful.”

  Of course. I’m a prince of the Orient.

  “Is that where you were made?” I ask. “On the Silk Road? In Samarkand?”

  No. Northern Pennsylvania.

  I blink. “Is that … in the South?”

  I do not believe so. It was difficult to get a grasp on geography.

  We’re silent for a few minutes. One of the pigeons flies from his shoulder and pecks at the ground near my hand. I don’t have any bread on me; I don’t know why she bothers.

  “I think you’re old,” I say, fingering the stylish outline of the painted thorns encircling the name of my home. “I think you’ve been missing her for a long time. And, right, who am I to say that you shouldn’t? You remind me of my mama. The way she talks about love … She says it’s the best feeling in the world, but she won’t let herself have it again. Sixteen years, and my dad’s all she thinks of. She was fourteen when she had me. Her dad, my grandfather, he was a bad man, you know? He beat my mom and my grandmother, and when he found out Mama was pregnant, he chased down my dad and tried to kill him. They ran away. Mama told Dad we were going to Bordertown, told him to find his way there when it was safe, but he never came. Whenever she sings “Another Star,” I swear she hopes she’ll see him in the audience. Sixteen years. I thought that was a long time to wait for someone.”

  Perhaps he’ll return.

  I snort. “And maybe the elves on Dragon’s Tooth Hill will pass out candy on Allhallows Eve. I think their chance is gone, Prince. I think Mama just holds on to it because she doesn’t know what else to do.”

  Prince stays silent. But the chattering teeth are slowing; I can feel the spell winding down.

  “I have a deal for you, Prince. I can’t promise anything, but I can try to turn you human for a few hours. We could have sex—you know, if you wouldn’t mind. And maybe you’ll like it? Maybe you’ll find a way to let her go?”

  She created me.

  “She’s gone.”

  The spell is fading and twisting, but I catch one last word, and it’s enough for me.

  Try.

  * * *

  Days pass. The Peya girl comes and goes, but none of her attempted magic does more than brush off his cool plaster. He enjoys her company, but he resigns himself to her failure.

  But then one night: “Don’t tell Peya.” It’s the other girl, the one with the silver-shining skin and wild hair, the one they call Rabbit.

  Why are you here? he asks, but she doesn’t hear him.

  “It’s the last day tomorrow,” she says, worry in her voice that belies her age. “No one knows what’ll happen. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for Peya to fall in love with you, Plaster Man, but she wants it, and this is her last chance.”

  The prince wonders if he will miss Peya.

  “The wind’s good,” says the girl. “Whoever put you here, they knew this was a deep pocket. Holds the magic tight. So I’m gonna try, but don’t you dare tell Peya. This has to be hers.”

  The little girl raises her chin high, keeps her back straight. He thinks she looks like a princess, a queen. Then she opens her mouth. The words aren’t English, so he doesn’t understand them, but he recognizes their power.

  Sometime after she begins—more than a minute, but not much—his fingers prick.

  He has never felt his fingers before.

  Then his arms, then his feet, then his nose and the back of his neck. His previous sensations have only been the most general: the vertigo of being lifted and carried, the jolt of being set back down. But now he throbs, he aches, he burns and burns.

  Is this birth? he thinks, but he cannot move or cry or be comforted as a baby would. He can only feel.

  The Rabbit girl keeps speaking; sweat hangs in thick drops from her chin, stains the armpits of her smock. Her deep breaths turn to sharp gasps, but she scrunches her eyebrows, drops to her knees, and gives him her words.

  He doesn’t want them. The pain is unbearable. She has decanted his past; years of sadness stream from his eyes, his nose, his ears and mouth. He chokes on it, and he feels the sensation deep in an impossible plaster throat. He strains against himself, he contradicts himself, he will crumble to chalk and die and be grateful for it.

  With a cry, the girl collapses to the painted flagstones. The words have fallen with her; the unbearable pain subsides to nothing he has not felt before.

  He is still a plaster man, but he feels changed, like she has stuffed his chest full of heart and lungs, his body full of quicklime blood.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl sobs. “I’m so sorry.”

  It’s okay. You don’t have to cry.

  Eventually she falls asleep, curved like a half moon beneath him.

  * * *

  We find Rabbit at dawn, asleep beneath my plaster man. He’s as clean as a new-made penny. She’s drooling on the flagstones.

  “Are you all right, honey?” Grandmama asks, picking her up.

  Rabbit glances at me and nods. “Sure, Mama,” she says. “It’ll work out.”

  Mama and I share a worried glance. “You don’t want to ask what she’s gotten herself into?” Mama asks. “Smells like magic to me.”

  Grandmama sucks her teeth. “Oh, hush, child. Can’t you see she’s exhausted? We can hash out the whys and wherefores later.”

  We take her home. She sleeps most of the way back, but when Grandmama lays her on the bottom bunk of our bed, she opens her eyes and tugs on my shirt.

  “I’m sorry, Peya,” she says, and a few tears leak out the sides of her eyes. “I tried. I thought the magic was deep enough, but it didn’t go all the way. It just wouldn’t move. I tried.”

  I had wondered what Rabbit was doing beneath my plaster man, but I didn’t want to say so in front of Mama and Grandmama. I make sure they’re out of earshot and lean down. “What did you do, Rabbit?” I ask.

  “Tried to make him for you,” she says. “It’s the thirteenth day.”

  I had forgotten that somehow during the frantic search when Rabbit didn’t come home. Now it sinks like lead in my stomach. But I force a smile and brush her forehead with my hand. “Don’t worry, bunny,” I say.
“I can wait a bit longer to fall in love.”

  I steal three biscuits on my way out the door.

  Grandmama sees, but she just raises an eyebrow. “Don’t suppose you know anything about what Rabbit was doing out there,” she says from her perch on the porch swing. Mama is sleeping on the hammock.

  “Yeah,” I say. You don’t lie to Grandmama.

  “You care to tell me?” she asks in that way that isn’t really a question.

  “Tomorrow,” I say. “Just let me wait till tomorrow.”

  “It’s the thirteenth day,” Mama says, a sleepy voice from deep inside the hammock.

  I can hear cicadas buzzing as the morning heats, can smell the bloom of honeysuckle on the bushes alongside the road. Honeysuckle doesn’t bloom anywhere in Bordertown but here in Parkside, and I swear we have our own symphony orchestra of cicadas.

  “Let the girl fall in love if she can,” Mama says.

  Grandmama rolls her eyes. “Althea, you need to learn how to fall out of it.”

  “Leave me alone, Ma. We all know how you feel about Derek. I just believe different, that’s all.”

  You believe in a fairy tale, I think, a little angry, because even if I’ve never met him, he’s still my dad, and I believed Mama for years when she told me he’d come back for us.

  Grandmama shrugs and turns to me. “Take some of the tea with you, Peya. The fridge is out again, and we can’t drink it all.”

  There’s a work of art on the flagstones by the time I get back to Fare-You-Well Park.

  “Bordertown LIVES,” nearly as tall as I am, a blocky, interconnected graffiti scrawl. And intertwined with the words are a hundred faces: elfin, human, halfie. I recognize a few of them: Dancer, proprietress of Danceland; Poplar; the elfin artist Camphire; even that kid Orient and his elfin friend who died a while back. I realize, as I look at it, that what I had assumed was regular graffiti has been some strange magic all along. Even in Bordertown, it would be impossible for someone to paint something this intricate, this meaningful in the hour I’ve been away.

  That means magic. No surprise, really. But then I see something small painted in the corner.

  A signature.

  Cash in Hand, Detroit, Michigan

  “You painted this in the World?” I whisper.

  The blue message I got Rabbit to scrawl more than a week ago is still there, though so faded I have to squint and pray to make out the words. But in fresher paint, someone has scrawled beneath:

  I learned to draw.

  I hope I’ll see you soon

  —Cash

  Cash. A boy’s name, I think, though you can never tell in this town. I wonder how he knows these faces. Has he been here, or is he waiting out in the World, hoping to get in?

  There’s some chalk in my bag. I put it there a few days ago, but the spell that called for the circle worked about as well as all the other spells I tried to turn the plaster man human. I pull it out, fall to my knees, and write:

  Ask for Peya Windbreaker, daughter of Althea, daughter of Lillian. Or just ask where to find the best buttermilk biscuits in Parkside.

  I lean against my plaster man’s legs, take a bite of Grandmama’s raise-the-dead biscuits, and wait.

  * * *

  Come sunset, the earth begins to move. Peya doesn’t feel it, drowsing a little by his booted feet. But then, she’s human, and he’s a creature of many magics. The movement isn’t physical, not quite, but it’s a changing, and it is felt as deeply by those with the senses to mark it as any earthquake or hurricane would be in the World.

  “Prince,” she says, levering herself to her knees. “Would you mind if I tried one last time?” She has run out of those chattering teeth that let him speak to her, but he tries to nod regardless. His muscles seem to tense, but he is as still as ever.

  I am a statue, he wants to tell these stubborn girls. I’ll never be anything more.

  Peya pulls out the postcard of a tree, the one that seems to leap off the page and into the world if she holds it in the right light. She tried this once before, but though he felt the magic surge through him like electricity going to ground, his aspect did not change. “What have I got to lose?” she says, mostly to herself.

  She shakes out her thick hair and flashes the tree at him. “Prince,” she says. “I wish to transform you. From inanimate to animate.”

  The earth moves; the magic strikes; he steps off the pedestal.

  “Oh,” says Peya. The postcard—now a simple two-dimensional image of a cat—flutters to the ground.

  “It worked?” says the prince, and so he knows that it did. His skin is still the color of a duck egg, but it feels like skin. His clothes conceal a true body beneath. He is not human, and he will never be. But he has always been something more than a statue.

  Peya stands on her toes and kisses him.

  He has never done this before, but something in him quickens at her touch, and he recalls why she longed to animate him in the first place. “Shall we do it here?” he asks.

  “On the Green?” She looks around, sees that everyone is gone. She shrugs. “Why not?”

  The spells—both hers and Rabbit’s—have cleansed and remade him. There’s no more pigeon shit on his shoulders, no more mud on his legs. The grief inside him has drained away. As he lowers Peya to the grass, as he gently removes her clothes and watches in wonder as she removes his, he wishes more than anything to see his beloved. But the grief passes clean through.

  He thinks only of Peya when they make love.

  * * *

  I lie in the grass, my hand entwined with his plaster-pale one. He’s warm, which you wouldn’t expect from how he looks. I am languid and content and contemplative.

  But I’m not in love.

  “There’s one last spell,” I say, looking up at the sky. There are lights in it, pinks and blues and purples, not quite like fireworks and not quite like stars. I wonder if Rabbit’s thirteenth day means something more than just my deflowering. I wonder if something is happening to Bordertown.

  “Spell?” Prince says softly.

  “Like the teeth I used to talk to you. It’s a conjure wand, supposedly. Would you like it?” I ask.

  “I could call up anything I like?”

  “You could try.”

  Prince sucks in air and blows it out noisily, like someone still amazed they have a breathing passage. His breath smells like the inside of a limestone cave, of damp and cool stone. “I would like that very much,” he says.

  I slip my shirt back on as I walk to my bag. The wand looks as silly now as it did when I pulled it out of the bucket, but Prince takes it reverently. He’s just as beautiful naked. His clothes look like plaster casts that fell on the grass, but when I touch them, I can feel the embroidery, the fraying hemlines.

  Magic is a funny thing.

  “Thank you, Peya,” he says. “And thank Rabbit, too.”

  “Prince, what are you—”

  “I conjure death,” he says.

  A woman rises from the earth.

  * * *

  His beloved had a terrible voice, but she would sing sometimes when they were alone together. Dirty songs that she overheard in the harbor market or old Irish ballads that her mother had taught her. She sings one now, and her voice is still terrible, and her voice breaks his heart.

  “The pipes, the pipes are calling,” she croaks.

  To his surprise, however, a stronger voice joins hers, catching the stumbles, bearing up the song.

  “From glen to glen, and down the mountainside.”

  He doesn’t know why his beloved sings, only that it seems she has come for him. He cries tears of sediment and lime; he has longed for this since that summer behind the velvet drape, since the wails upstairs told him she was dead. “Please, please, please,” he says as she folds him in her arms.

  She cries, too. Eventually her voice stops altogether, leaving only Peya’s.

  His beloved lifts his living chin, stares deep into his weeping eye
s, kisses his soft lips. She feels more solid with every passing second. Peya’s voice fades. He last hears “’tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,” and then it’s only the voice of his beloved in that place where the dead go when they have lived enough to die.

  * * *

  Plaster dust cakes the grass and slides between my toes. I don’t mind. I’m crying, at least half from happiness. My plaster man has found her. His beloved.

  The lights in the sky are growing brighter. Even from this deep in the deserted park, I can hear the growing rumble of confusion and alarm that’s gripping the city.

  In thirteen days, you’ll lose your virginity and fall in love.

  In thirteen days, you’ll kill your prince.

  In thirteen days, your home will never be the same.

  I tie my skirt more securely around my waist and go hunting for my shoes. I find them upside down on Cash’s mural.

  I wonder if it’s a play on words. No longer “LIVES” the verb, but “LIVES” the noun.

  “Did you find your way here, Cash?” I ask to the empty air.

  The streets are mad by the time I find my way back home. Shouting in the street. Screaming and muffled sobs. I want to know what has happened, and I don’t.

  Mama is crying on the porch, rocking back and forth with Rabbit in her arms. Grandmama is talking to someone in the kitchen. He’s eating a plate of biscuits, which means he’s important. I can only see the back of his tight afro, a smear of red paint forgotten behind his right ear.

  My stomach feels like the sky, popping with blues and reds that burn and then linger.

  “Thirteen years,” Grandmama says, like she’s repeating something.

  “Yes, ma’am,” says the boy.

  His voice is deep, but I can tell it likes to laugh.

  “So you must be one of the first to get through,” she says.

  He shrugs. “I’ve tried every year for the last ten,” he says. “Your granddaughter helped me out.”

  “Cash?” I hear myself saying. My throat feels too warm, the air too thin.