Welcome to Bordertown (22 page)

She fixed him with an examining look, like the stare she’d given him when he’d named her “witch.” But unlike, too. Her seeking eyes were cold and bright as flecks in granite. “Get a job, you say? Okay.” Her lips stretched in a smile that never knew mirth. “As of now, I’m a witch. And my first spell is …”

She planted her feet wide, raised her arms, and spread her fingers over him. Why did he still sit, frozen as a rabbit fearing the dogs?
Flee before she calls down your death!

“This is my curse on you.” Her voice still wandered the scale, but as if the hands that plucked the notes were strong from work or warfare. She drew herself up straight, took a breath that filled her chest, and declared, “You’ll learn who you are from the next person you meet.”

He crouched before her and felt … no different. Should he sense the rush of sorcery? Or did sorcery touch one like air on skin, merely
there
? He didn’t know.

Her arms fell. “There you go.” She nodded and smiled, cheerful as if there had been no offense between them. “Now I’ve got work to do. An apple a day makes a really slow still life, you know. Scram! Have fun!” She flapped her hands as if herding a flock of hens.

He staggered to his feet and started toward the stone embankment he’d climbed.

“Not through the herb garden, you bozo!” she shouted. “Round the house to the front walk!”

He did not know what a bozo was, but by her tone, it was not much sought after.

He stumbled down the front steps to the street and chose a direction at random. Down, down the hill to where the tumult of trade and traffic made a steady rattle that knocked his thoughts awry. The pavement seemed made of the same poured stone as that which formed the base of the Border Gate; it was gritty and cold and scraped his bare feet. Where the pavement failed, there was broken stone and sometimes mud to hide the sharpest rocks. Before long, no matter how he labored to make his stride even, he was limping.

Wounded things were prey. Well, should anything pounce, he would show it its error. He thought he could manage that.

The witch—the
painter
—had made mock of him. No witness had stood by, but she herself could tell the story, how he’d feared her, and she no witch at all. Her tale could pluck power from his grasp.

But what power did he have in this place? By the bitterness of the thought, he guessed he’d had or coveted power in the True Lands. Here, what did he have but his wits and his hands? His wits, it seemed, were sad stuff. Had he been so great a fool when he’d had a name to answer to, and was that name spoken with scorn in the place he’d left?

Still, some childish voice inside him whispered,
Perhaps she was a witch in truth.

So he went cautiously into the streets that sunk deep between buildings. It was only wisdom to be wary of meetings in strange places.

A man of the Blood passed him on foot. He was marked by
age: a dulling of the skin, a dimming of the light in the eyes, a softening of the face’s planes. His hair was matted into dense pewter serpent coils, and his belly bulged under his long flapping coat. He was scowling, as if he would scorch the world from his path with his frown. The man carried a cloth bag over one shoulder; a wedge-shaped, sleek-furred head popped out the open top suddenly, with small round ears and bright black eyes set in a dark mask.

A ferret.
He recalled the creature’s name. Had he seen one before?

A dark-skinned human woman piloted—and powered—a bizarre cart, from a tiny seat behind a narrow front wheel that she steered with a horizontal bar. Her feet turned another wheel, which moved two more behind her on either side of a cargo box full of some kind of glossy red fruit. On the tail of the box perched a human girl-child, hanging on with one hand and eating one of the fruits with the other. The child’s bright gold hair whipped and tangled with the cart’s passage. The woman rang a bell at him, to warn him out of her path, but she did not speak.

With a roar that shook his ribs, a pair of two-wheeled vehicles rounded a corner ahead of him, so swiftly that he had to lunge aside or be run down. They glittered with bright paint and metal, and reeked of burning fuel. He was startled to see the riders who straddled them were of the Blood. They passed without a nod or a wave.

He turned into a narrow way where the shadows were already long. By the time he heard the voices, he was too close to turn away.

“So it crapped out.” The first voice seemed to grit and crunch like footsteps on gravel. “Magic does that around here
all the time.
Sorry you didn’t get the memo—”

“Stop your tongue, thief, unless you mean to use it to make all right with us.” A voice from the Realm, surely—all silk and song, and broken glass beneath.

“I sold you a working key. Not my problem, lady.”

“Oh, but it is. Hold him.”

The sound of a scuffle, a grunt. Three figures, two of them tall, slender, with shining white hair. The third shorter, darker-skinned, and hair cropped and black. One of the Blood-kind held the human’s arms; the other waved something that glinted like a sliver of ice.

He had no business with any of them. He was indeed a fool, for only folly could prompt him to step forward and say, “Does one take one’s justice at will in this city? Or is that blade named Magistrate, and you an officer of its court?”

His words turned three heads toward him. The one with the narrow leaf-blade dagger was a woman. Her fine pale hair was dull with dust and tied back with a bit of leather lace. She wore a rough cloth coat, stained and too large for her, leather leggings, and glossy tall boots. Her cheeks were hollow, her nose and lips were thin, and her eyes were bright and sharp as her knife. Blue veins showed like the ghost of lace in the milk-colored skin of her temples.

Her companion in the Blood was square-jawed and grim-faced, though his long, thick lashes softened his narrowed stare and his cheeks flushed like a child’s, dark on his pearl-white flesh. Dark, too, was the bruising that lay like brushstrokes in the inner corners of his eyes and over his swollen nose. Was he quarrelsome, a brawler? Or merely misadventurous? His fierce mien belied his slender frame, frail-seeming even for their fine-boned kind, though there was often much strength even in the sparest body. He had little stones and bits of wood knotted in his straight cream-white hair, and they clattered together when his captive struggled.

And his captive most certainly struggled. It was a human male, young, perhaps. The man’s eyes were dark as his black hair, and his skin was golden-brown. He was sturdy in a way that fey-kind never were: wide of shoulder, broad of chest, his hips barely narrowing before meeting with strong thighs. He wore coarse blue trousers and a knitted shirt like the one from the painter’s clothesline, but black; on his back he carried a large pack made of glossy fabric, bulging here and there with its contents.

“Why, see who it is!” the woman said with a mocking edge, looking him up and down as if she meant to buy him. “Hello, my pretty, strutting cockerel. Have you come all the way from the Realm to try to take back your boots?”

The tall, shining boots she wore, made of fine-grained leather, too rich for her stained and shabby garb. The sight of them roused no memory in him.

But the woman’s voice did. He’d heard it raised in scorn over the clamor of a crowded room, back beyond the Border, while her comrade tried to stem the tide of a bleeding nose with both hands, and he himself clenched the handle of a broken stoneware mug in his fist.

He had wanted something, or wanted to be rid of something, and had been thwarted. His patience, such as it was, had been tried. He had also known himself at fault—for being there, with the sweet-sharp taste of wine on his tongue?—which had made him angrier still. It seemed he was the author of the square-jawed Bloodling’s broken nose. Was that the source of the stain on his own cast-off shirt?

He gathered his wits in haste and asked, “If those boots are mine, how come your feet to be in them?” For she might tell him more: his name, his home, his reason for leaving it.

Her smile was merely a show of teeth. “Why, you took them off
yourself. You were not so stupid with drink that you could not manage that. And since you’d cast them off …” She shrugged, her pointed chin lifted and outthrust. “Did you wake sober, in your leafy nest, and wonder if you’d left them under a doxie’s bed?”

He grasped at the fragments of knowledge and assembled only one whole fact: they had stolen from him. Had they fallen upon him, struck him? No, he had no wound.
Did you wake?
she’d asked. They’d stolen his boots while he slept. They were sneak-thieves, cowards, taking like carrion-eaters on a battlefield.

Rage clenched his fists, narrowed his vision. Rage cleaved his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Imagined scenes painted the room behind his eyes: the cocky woman lying bleeding on the wet stone of the alley, the bruised-faced man broken and weeping at his feet. His heart pounded, urgent, ready.

Behind the woman’s insolent words and threatening smile he saw something he knew. He saw it behind her companion’s glower as well, and in the face of the sturdy human male, whose features he ought not to be able to read as he could one of the Blood.

He knew the thing he saw, because he had felt it, tried to hide it behind proud words and a stiffened back in the lamp-lit room beside the Gate. It was a bottomless, night-black fear, of things unknown and out of control. And he shared it with two thieves and a human-born man.

His rage turned bitter on his tongue and drained away. It took its bosom friend, his pride, with it. He felt suddenly weakened to the bone. But he could breathe, and speak. And he remembered how the painter had spoken her curse, on a deep breath and with the force of prophecy.

He lifted his right hand, grateful that it did not quake. “Not for all the world,” he told the woman, who still smiled like a cornered fox. “You’ve more need of them than I. For you will run now,
and your comrade, too. You will run as quick as you can, and it will be only the first of many flights. For that, one needs good boots.” He stepped toward her.

The bruised-faced man let go of the human, who sidled close against the wall, out of reach. The woman held her ground for a moment longer. Then her left foot scuffed backward. Her right moved to join it—and the balance that held them all shifted and snapped. The pair turned and fled, out of the byway, out of sight.

He gave himself up to the weakness and sank down on the cold, oily pavement, his knees drawn up to pillow his forehead. This was who he was, then: a sack puffed full of temper and willfulness, pride and posturing. Use those up, and all that remained was a little hard lump of fear, like a last worm-eaten nut. Perhaps he had crossed the Border to escape the truth, and it had followed at his heels, capering and flying banners for all to see—all but him.

He felt warmth beside him, and smelled the human smell, soured with fear but still curiously pleasant. He heard the human man drop down beside him. “Thanks. I think you saved my life.” A trembling puff of air from human nostrils, which might have been meant to be laughter. “Wow, there’s something I never got to say before.”

“She would not have killed you. Her fear was too great.”

“You think?” said the man. “Seems to me when somebody’s scared shitless, the bodies freakin’
pile
up.”

He raised his head, thinking to glare at the young man who was so quick to dispute. He found himself studying the arch of the black brows, emphatic in a way pale fey ones could not be. They seemed like a drawing of a word, but what word, he could not say. It made him smile. “Perhaps you have the right of it, then. I’ve no knowledge, only seemings and speculation.”

That silenced the man, but only for a handful of time. “My name’s Macys. What’s yours?”

“Page.”

Macys appeared to weigh the word. “Good name,” he said at last.

“Is it? I cannot tell. I chose it under duress, when I could not remember my own.”

“You couldn’t remember your
name
?”

“And cannot yet. I lost it, perhaps, in the fabric of the Border.”

Macys’s brows bowed low at the top of his nose. (Even a frown became a novelty in a human face.) “I don’t think it works like that. I mean, there’s stuff elves can’t talk about—actually
can’t
, it’s some magical censorship thing—about back home. But I never met anyone who couldn’t
remember
it.” The human’s voice was like his eyebrows, emphatic and flexible.

He pressed his fingertips to the orbits of his eyes, rubbing away the weariness. “It would seem I am a singular creature, then, and of singular experience.”

Macys winced and raised one shoulder. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to sound like … Yeah. That’s got to be weird. But it kind of cuts to the chase for you.”

He knew the words’ meanings, but taken together they were so much bibble-babble. He shook his head.

Macys hunched forward, as if to share secrets. “Not a lot of people come to B-town wanting to stay the person they’ve always been. And here you are—you
can’t.
That’s maybe not so bad, right?”

“Oh, I am not so sick as death would make me,” he snapped.

Macys rocked backward to sit on his heels, and his gaze was as cool and shuttered as if he were of the Blood. “That would be my point. It didn’t kill you. Guess you better find a way to live with it.”

He had walked blinkered into this strange new city, clutching his trouble to him, nursing it like a babe at the breast. It had thrived, claiming all his notice. He had fed it with his own strength and freedom of will, and it would take all he had if he went on so.

He felt like a new-landed fish, flopping on the shore, starving for air while enveloped in it. He did not know who he was. So he could be someone else instead: a fool aware of his folly, a fearful man who chose not to be a coward, a proud man who took pride only in what he could do well and rightly. He could dig a tree from a woman’s garden, and protect a man from those who would prey on him.

And his name could be Page.

He had not noticed Macys rising and moving away until he returned to stand at Page’s shoulder. He cleared his throat, and Page looked up.