Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  Analise screamed for a while after that, and then she cried, and then she fell silent and wouldn’t say anything at all. That was when the strange half-bus half-coach came clanking by again, heading west this time. I helped Analise inside and onto a red cushioned bench. I was out of brownies, but the driver didn’t ask for payment. I heard the steady clop-clop of hooves outside, at odds with the uneven way the vehicle jerked along.

  Only after we got off by Taco Hell did I remember there wasn’t any horse to make the clomping sound.

  * * *

  It’s been six weeks since Analise and I met Lankin, and in all that time Analise hasn’t spoken again. Ms. Wu, the healer who looked at her, said it wasn’t just fear keeping her silent. She said it was good that I’d taken Lankin’s knife, but that I should have taken Analise’s blood, too. “All the Lankins use blood for their magic,” Ms. Wu explained. The last one had preferred infants, but this one liked girls. The healer didn’t know what Lankin had done with Analise’s blood, but it had broken something inside her, and only he could tell us how to fix it. No one’s seen him or his mansion again, though, not even the Silver Suits who went to investigate, when my report matched some of those coming down from the Hill.

  I found a squat and got Analise and me settled there, then wrote to Papá and Mamá and found a trader to deliver my letter. My parents hadn’t left yet, and Papá tried to come to Bordertown himself to talk to me. The washes only led him out into the desert, though, so he and Mamá wrote back instead, saying I should come home and leave with them. They said we’d get by somehow, and that at least we’d all be together. Writing back to tell them why I couldn’t was hard, too, almost as hard as writing to Analise’s mom. I hope they get my letter. I hope they understand. I miss them, I do, but I can’t leave.

  I run with Janet’s Bards now, telling this story to whoever will listen, but especially to other newbies like you. I don’t know what you came to Bordertown looking for, but I hope that you find it. I hope that it’s real, and that it works out how you planned. I hope that you’ll let me hear your story, too, but that’s up to you. I understand, better than anyone, that some stories are harder to tell than others.

  Every time I tell mine, though, it becomes easier to believe what Analise said, that I’m brave after all. That’s a sort of magic, too.

  Analise mostly stays inside now, especially since the weather’s gotten so cold. She stares at the walls of our squat, day and night. Sometimes I think she only sees peeling paint and dripping water, but other times her gaze goes soft, and I wonder if she sees another, grander room. Once in a while she manages to sleep, and when she does, she wakes screaming. I hold her until her sobbing and shaking ease—until she looks up at me, sees me, and silently mouths my name. I know what she’s asking for then.

  So I give it to her. “Long ago,” I say, my storyteller’s voice steady and sure, “there were two best friends who had a plan for their future: one of them would marry a vampire, and one would marry a werewolf, and they would all live happily ever after. But even if that didn’t work out—even if the werewolf had a girlfriend, even if the vampire’s stories were all horrid illusions—they knew one thing most of all.”

  Analise always smiles at this part, so I do my best to smile, too. Of course I won’t leave her alone here. “Most of all, they knew they would always be friends.” Sometimes Analise’s lips move silently with mine. “Forever and ever and ever.”

  NIGHT SONG FOR A HALFIE

  BY JANE YOLEN

  Translator’s note: This night song is clearly modeled after some of the human lullabies that threaten rather than console howling children. We know it to be sung by an elfin mother because of the chorus, which is made up of elfin nonsense words common in other songs. How the singer and her partner hooked up we cannot know from the words, but her reference to jewels may be one of two things: either she is a fairy princess wooed by a human who ran off with the family’s fortune, or the jewels are a false glamour and must be sold before dawn comes to turn them back into pebbles or acorns or a handful of sand.

  —Durocher, L., Songs of the Borderlands New York: Random & Rowling

  Hushabye baby, my sweetling, my dear,

  I’ll sing you a song in your half-elfin ear.

  I’ll rock you and knock you and give you a tear.

  Kris-nah-no-hany-ne-moreg.

  Hushabye moaner, I’ll give you a sweet.

  If you cannot be still, we’ll be out on the street.

  I’ll sell you for pennies to change into meat.

  Kris-nah-no-hany-ne-moreg.

  Hushabye wailer, there’s no more to eat.

  This squat has no power, no stove, and no heat.

  If I could, I would give you a Bordertown treat.

  Kris-nah-no-hany-ne-moreg.

  Hushabye groaner, your dada and I

  Have business to do in the soon by-and-by.

  I need all my magicks, so please do not cry.

  Kris-nah-no-hany-ne-moreg.

  Hushabye howler, be still or be gone.

  Your dada has taken my jewels to the pawn.

  But he will be back here before it is dawn.

  Kris-nah-no-hany-ne-moreg.

  Hushabye monster, if I get no sleep

  I’ll drop you into a lake peaty and deep.

  And this is one promise I surely will keep.

  Kris-nah-no-hany-ne-moreg.

  OUR STARS, OUR SELVES

  BY TIM PRATT

  Allie Land cursed at her phone as she stood in the gathering dark at the end of a cul-de-sac lined by feral houses. She had only a knapsack stuffed with clothes (and under the clothes some other things), an acoustic guitar in a case that got heavier every block, a phone that was failing her, and a growing ball of worry in her gut.

  Her phone was kick-ass, bought with her last crappy retail job paycheck instead of paying her rent, and it was supposed to make her life easier, but instead it had gotten her lost—in a place where getting lost was a Bad Idea. She was supposed to be outside The Dancing Ferret, which was the traditional first stop for new arrivals to Bordertown, but instead she was alone on a dead-end street looking at houses so covered in vines and ivy that they might have been the ruins of some ancient jungle city founded by sentient gorillas. There were no streetlights here, just one old wooden utility pole with rotting-into-whiteness pumpkins impaled on every step-spike. The sight was at once sinister and sort of pretty.

  Allie slid her thumb across the map on her phone’s screen, trying to find out where she’d gone wrong, though with the built-in GPS, getting lost should have been impossible. The BorderMap Project was an application developed from the frequently contradictory guides to Bordertown that circulated through independent bookstores, ’zine shops, and cafés in the World, with cartography based on an aggregate approximation of the most plausible accounts from those who’d returned from the Border and talked about it coherently. When Allie first heard rumors that the Way to the Border was open again after more than a dozen years, she’d downloaded the map pack (the developers had suddenly started charging for it, natch, but it was only a couple of bucks) and hit the road. She was sorry to leave the rest of her band: moody guitarist Steve; dreamy-eyed bass player Rodge; and her percussionist Pete, a grizzled guy with a ponytail who’d been around during the birth of the New York antifolk scene in the eighties, a good seven or eight years before Allie was even born. Their loss. None of them were willing to take this kind of risk, so they’d never be stars anyway.

  Now that she was finally here, the map was about as much good as a 20-watt amp at Madison Square Garden. The quiet guy in the prismatically painted pickup who’d given her a ride through the dusty scrubland just outside the city had looked at her strangely when she asked to be let off a few streets away from here, but she’d just waved the phone at him and told him she had it covered. She’d heard technology could be hinky at the Border, but she’d figured the phone would just stop working, not that it would work wrong.

&n
bsp; Though maybe the geography of the city had changed in the years since those maps were made. There was magic here, right? She had to get used to the idea.

  But for right now, she needed to get away from the increasingly dark, no doubt increasingly cold, and definitely increasingly creepy Land of Feral Houses.

  “You look lost.” The voice, right in her ear, was as smooth as river stones, and Allie stiffened. Borderland is dangerous—she’d heard that plenty of times, but had she listened? Had she, hell.

  Allie threw her elbow back hard and pivoted on her heel at the same time, wishing she’d signed up for a self-defense class at some point—all she knew about fighting was seeing her mom and dad beat on each other before the one died and the other went to jail, and they weren’t exactly fancy moves she could imitate.

  Turned out she wasn’t a natural, either. Her elbow whiffed through nothing, and she wound up doing an ungainly pirouette instead. On the bright side, there wasn’t a leering crackhead—or, wait, the junkies here did water from some magical river, right? That must be nice, way cheaper—standing behind her with a knife. Instead there was a—

  “Holy shit, you’re an elf,” she said.

  The man—the elf—wasn’t even close to her. He was leaning against a sagging tree a good ten feet away, next to what had once been a driveway and was now more or less a wildflower garden with some chunks of asphalt among the stems. “And you are new here. We don’t … care for that term. Elves are a human idea. We are simply Truebloods.”

  Pointy ears, silvery hair—long and feathered, no less. If it looks like an elf, I say it’s an elf. There’s a really popular TV show about vampires called True Blood. You might want to rethink your branding.

  Allie knew better than to assume she could read an elf’s expression—she wasn’t totally stupid; she’d read some books before she came here and knew they weren’t human, despite how sorta human they looked—but if she’d had to guess, she would have said annoyance. But that was swiftly replaced by a look of wise serenity that just had to be 89 percent bullshit.

  “You speak of matters in the False Lands beyond the City of Illusions—what you would call the World. That World matters not to my kind. You are on the Border now.” Allie could hear the capital letters dripping off what seemed like every other word. “Though it might be wise to fear vampires. I have never encountered one here, but among these fallen houses, who knows what dark things dwell?”

  “Eh, I’m so over vampire stories. These days they either wear tight pants and try to integrate with humanity, or they star in tween abstinence porn and sparkle in the sunlight. I bet you wish you sparkled, don’t you?” Allie thought about toning down the bitchy, but this guy—elf, whatever—had seen her spin around and fling her elbow at nothing like a moron, and that was embarrassing, and when she got embarrassed, she got a little mean.

  “Why do you speak of stories, when you are here, where stories are lived? In a place suffused with possibility? You must leave the World and its fripperies behind.”

  Fripperies? “Oh. Then I guess you don’t care about the World’s opinion regarding your jacket?”

  He smiled, running his thumbs down the red faux leather. “You like it?” The jacket had a high collar with a black stripe around it and was festooned with countless zippers running at random angles.

  Allie let a beat go by, then said, “You know Michael Jackson’s dead, right? And his Thriller-era look died with him. At least you aren’t wearing a sequined glove.” He was wearing a faded black T-shirt and artfully shredded acid-washed jeans, looking pretty much like a refugee from the kind of eighties music videos that had found new life on YouTube.

  Now the elf just looked confused, like he was a toddler and she was a childproof cap. “What? I don’t …” He rallied, smiling and showing perfectly straight white teeth. “Perhaps you’d like to come with me to my home. We can drink spiced wine, and I will build a fire and tell you tales of war and romance from beyond the Wall.”

  “That’s a big ‘no thanks.’ I didn’t come all this way to get date-raped by an elf.”

  He frowned. “I told you. I am a Trueblood, and a knight of the Realm. I am captivated by your beauty. Allow me to compose an ode to your cheekbones—”

  “Sorry, I’m not interested. But if you’ve got a hot elf— Sorry, not intentionally being a dick, just forgot. If you’ve got a hot Trueblood sister, feel free to hook me up.”

  He brushed a chunk of that glam-rock hair out of his face and pouted. He was pretty enough to be a girl, maybe, but he couldn’t have passed for one. He had what Allie—who really hated all that woo-woo new age vibrations and auras shit—could only think to call a “very masculine energy.”

  “A sister? Do you mean—”

  “Yep, I mean nice to meet you, I’m Allie Land, lesbian future rock star for hire. But since you’re done hitting on me, maybe you can point me to The Dancing Ferret? I hear they give away free beers there.”

  He approached her, and Allie started thinking about her options if he got nasty. Fight, flight, scream in fright? But he stopped a few feet away, head cocked, and said in this low, syrupy voice, “Surely you’d reconsider your orientation. For me?”

  “You’re not the first guy who thought he could bring me over to the other team, but I got all my second thoughts out of my system before I was done with junior high. Sorry, no. Now, about those directions …?”

  He slumped, and some of the glamour—or, who knows, maybe literally Glamour—seemed to go out of him. “You don’t feel any … particular interest in me?”

  “Uh, I mean, I’ve never met a Trueblood before, so that’s interesting, but if you mean like romantic interest, you’re just not equipped. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s getting boring, and I’m about to start walking, so if you won’t help me, take care.”

  “You’re one of the newcomers,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps new arrivals have some kind of … but, no, that doesn’t make sense, I don’t …” He shook himself, his zippers jingling, and said, “It’s dangerous to wander here if you don’t know the safe paths.”

  “Is that a threat or an offer to escort me where I need to go?” She kept her voice level and reached for her key ring. Not a great weapon, but she was pretty sure sticking a house key in his eye would make an impression.

  He drew himself up. “I would not threaten you. I am Alaunus. A knight and a lover.”

  “Cool. Lead the way, Alopecia.”

  “Alaunus. Or rather, Alaunus is what you may call me. My true name is difficult for human tongues to pronounce.”

  “That’s enough about tongues, Al. Hey, Allie and Al, how about that. Now, less talk, more walk.”

  “You might benefit from being more courteous.”

  Allie said, “I guess we’ll never know.”

  He shook his head. “Come, Allie Land. I will show you the way.” He beckoned, and they walked along the sliver of sidewalk that hadn’t been reclaimed by the savage flora of the encroaching lawns. Allie followed, glancing at the screen of her smartphone and the map, which now said, “Here Be Dragons” in Comic Sans font. She turned the phone off.

  “The Way was closed for nearly a fortnight,” Alaunus said. “It’s gratifying to see new arrivals. This town thrives on novelty.”

  “No shit, only two weeks? It’s been more like thirteen years on our side.”

  He nodded. “So I heard. Time in the twilight lands can be strange. Humans tell stories of men who sleep on a hill and wake to find years gone by, do they not?”

  “So the whole city pulled a Rip Van Winkle? I wish I’d known. I would’ve brought more stuff to barter—flash drives full of Internet porn, comeback albums by geezer bands, anti-retrovirals, the last few Stephen King novels, the rest of the Harry Potter books, designer drugs.” She had, in fact, brought some of the latter, as well as some prescription drugs. From the stories, B-town was all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and while she wasn’t interested in selling sex, she figured she could make a goo
d living off the last two. Sure, they had free river water for drugs here, but it was supposed to be nasty, addictive stuff, and the shorter, more manageable highs and lows and altered states she had to offer would surely find buyers.

  Eventually she would run out of drugs to barter, but music was forever, unless the drugs got hold of you, and they’d never gotten hold of her. Seeing her mom’s and dad’s excesses had cured her of any urges in that direction, except for a little weed.

  “I suppose there would be a demand for those things,” Alaunus said. “Though I myself need only moonlight, and love, and wine, and poetry, and you.”

  He was doing her a favor now, so Allie let that bit slide. He led her to a ramshackle-looking motorbike with rusty wind chimes dangling from the handlebars. “Climb on,” he said, mounting the bike. “And be sure to hold on to me very tightly.” Allie rolled her eyes but got on.

  They drove away from the feral houses, the bike’s engine humming rather than roaring. After winding through various streets and passing a block of sagging warehouses filled with broken windows and flickering firelight, they turned a corner and—poof!—there were lights, and competing blares of music, and sidewalk touts in exotic leathers and feather boas, and street carts full of sweet-savory-spicy flavors, and neon signs, and graffiti in sparkly paint, and a street jammed with lurching, listing, laughing drunks of various ages and degrees of elfishness and humanity. “Carnival Street,” Alaunus said. “The Dancing Ferret is just there. You said you were a musician? I know most of the important players here. You’ll be interested in the clubs and—”

  “True words, Trueblood. Thanks for the ride. I can take it from here.”

  He put one of his oddly delicate hands on her shoulder. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather find a quiet place to—”