Welcome to Bordertown (51 page)

I put my face in my hands.
What have you done, Mouse?
I thought. And then:
What did I do by letting you?

I looked out at the mob through the spaces between my fingers and dropped my hands. There he was, at the head of the pack, his face smudged with ash, a bloody gash across his forehead.
He’s done it
, I thought, and for some reason I laughed, only a little at first, then full on, like someone whose life has been changed by a tremendous tragedy or a miracle in an instant.

As the mob approached, I heard a faint whistling come from above me, as if a bird were perched somewhere overhead. No bird flew by when I looked up, though. Only the music. Only the music flew overhead, sifting through the smoke, waiting for me to take it, to shape it, if I would.

I’m not sure I’ve ever moved so fast as I did right then, taking my case from under my arm to release my violin. I stood there for a second and listened to what the music was trying to tell me, then I tried to play it—no,
let
myself play it—a song for Mouse, for Aleksander, the Voice of the Nameless, who stopped when he saw me and ran across the street to join me, while the mob marched on without him.

“Thank you,” he said, after I finished my song for him, after I took the violin down and looked at his soot-smudged face and laughed at him, shaking my head.

“You’re crazy,” I said.

He only smiled and shrugged. “Seems like I have to go to extremes to get your attention. I knew you would come through for me, Marius.”

“Well,
I
certainly didn’t.”

“I knew,” he said, and put his hand on my shoulder where the violin had rested, pulled me down so he could kiss me.

I could turn you in to one of the elf gangs
, I’d told him that day in the shop.

You won’t, though
, he’d said.
I know you, Marius.

No
, I’d said,
you don’t, actually.

But perhaps, to my surprise, he did.

Translator’s note: “Sweet Mistress Mab” is a fairy jump-rope rhyme. Playing with jump ropes—or skip ropes, as they are sometimes called by the Truebloods—is something the fairy children in Borderland have borrowed from their human counterparts. Their rhymes are often patterned after the human rhymes. For example, the following closely follows the rhythm of “Miss Mary Mack,” a popular human jumping rhyme. But it does not have the silly nonsense of that rhyme. Instead it begins with something akin to a murder or a mob hit and ends with a warning.

—Durocher, L., and Sharpe, Mary Elizabeth
The Streets of Bordertown: A Festschrift
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press

A
shley watches Renata take a last deep drag and then stub out her comfrey cigarette on her dressing table. It’s already covered in spilled glitter, matches, paint, and the burned craters from other cigarettes. Ashley can hardly remember the fine wooden vanity Renata found on the street and dragged back to the Magic Lantern. It’s suffered a lot since then.

“Open the box already,” Renata says, pulling a lip liner from one of the drawers.

On the wall, a cracked mosaic of mirror fragments reveals Ashley’s face, filled with trepidation.

The Magic Lantern was one of the first places Ashley came to when she arrived in Bordertown. She’d sit in the back and watch whatever was playing or doze because she was sure she’d be safe. Once Alain Bach Glaimhin took over from O’Malley and started casting for simultaneous live shows, Ashley knew that she wanted to be on that stage more than anything.

Ashley loves working at the Magic Lantern. Her hands hesitate over the ribbon on the large package, the one woven with sprigs
of rosemary and ragwort. She knows the more gifts Alain gives her, the closer she is to being asked to leave.

“He really likes you,” says Renata.

“Alain?” Ashley laughs. “No, he just likes the chase. It gives him something to do when he’s not lying around on that scroungy old sofa like—” She was going to say “a prince in a fairy tale,” but realizes how silly that sounds, considering what Alain is. She yanks at the ribbon instead, and as it comes apart, the box comes apart cleverly, too, shedding glittering petals. Inside is a folded length of fabric.

She picks it up and it unrolls in her hands: a scarf, ice-white, as light as cobwebs and spangled here and there with bits of shimmer—not as light as sequins or as heavy as actual jewels, they are like bits of trapped light, like the sun sparking off an icicle.

“Ooh,” says Renata. “Pretty.”

Of course it’s pretty—everything Alain gives her is pretty. Elves are incapable of giving ugly presents; it offends their sense of aesthetics. Ashley’s cheap, mostly bare room in the crash space she shares with most of the other actors at the Magic Lantern is filled with pretty things Alain has given her: silk slippers too delicate to actually wear, a brooch that seems to trap the colors of the Mad River inside it, a starlike prism that fills her room with rainbows.

Someday he will ask to be given something in return for all these presents. Perhaps her heart or maybe the rest of her—possibly both.

“I shouldn’t keep it,” Ashley says, although she knows she will. She sets the box aside and starts to slick back her short black hair so that none of it will be visible underneath her long, honey-brown wig. It’s not dress rehearsal yet, but Ashley has learned from experience that wigs take more than one performance to get used to.

“You can’t. There’s probably a serious violation of elfin custom—maybe even a deadly insult.” Renata smiles as she spreads lipstick over her already bright mouth. “Besides, Alain is so cheap! You see that new tech guy? He’s so clearly detoxing from the Mad River water. You can smell it when he sweats. Alain never hires anyone but addicts, criminals, and weirdos. You, my dear, are his one indulgence.”

An indulgence. It is strange to be thought of that way. Alain certainly doesn’t spend his money (and Ashley knows he has to have quite a lot, since he comes from one of those fancy Trueblood families with their big houses up on Dragon’s Tooth Hill) on the Magic Lantern. She isn’t even entirely sure why he bought it—maybe some kind of misbegotten rebellion against his seldom-mentioned father. The dingy glamour of the Magic Lantern is a far cry from the highborn elegance of the Truebloods.

It’s the only place in town that even tries to show movies. With Bordertown’s electricity being the way it is, the film projectors only work about half the time, even with spellboxes in place. So that the stories won’t be interrupted, Alain employs a cast of real-life actors who act out the movies as they take place, in front of the screen, and whose performances continue in the event of electricity failure. Over the months, along with presents, Alain has given Ashley some of the best parts. She’s been Mia from
Pulp Fiction
, Lara from
Dr. Zhivago
, and Thelma from
Thelma and Louise.

The troupe acted the same pieces over and over, because those are the film reels they were able to obtain, but with the Way reopened, there’s a flood of new material.
The Matrix
.
Titanic
. The new set of
Star Wars
movies (though no one likes those). And
Lord of the Rings
, which Alain seems to think is a comedy. For their first new production, he picked one called
Pirates of the Caribbean
,
though why an elf would be a fan of a film based on a theme park ride is unclear.

When Ashley and Renata get to the stage, the rest of the cast is already there, looking at the screen with awe. There’s a flood of new technology, too. One of the tech guys must have gotten the little machine that played shining silver disks to finally work. Waves crash against the hull of a ship, and the arm of a monstrous octopus twists toward it, suckers undulating. The actors gasp in unison.

Kit, who plays nearly all of the leading male roles because of his square jaw and long legs, spots Ashley. He waves her over. “It’s going to be a
good
show,” he says, bouncing from one foot to another with barely contained glee. “But I wish I was playing Jack. He gets all the best lines.”

“But not the girl,” Ashley says with a small smile. They kissed a few times in front of a packed house when she played Thelma and he played the hitchhiking thief, so she figures it’s okay to flirt with him. Kissing sets a precedent.

Besides, he’s never given her a thing.

“There’s a sequel,” says Kit easily.

Ashley glances toward the wings of the stage, where Alain reclines on a scavenged couch, beautiful in a way no human can be beautiful. His eyes are barely open. He dozes, barely seeming to register when the movie finishes. At first she thought he didn’t care when she flirted with other people in front of him; now she realizes he doesn’t even notice.

Alain looks like what he is—a highborn elf slumming until he gets bored with human things and moves back to the Realm to do whatever it is that elves do there. Ashley likes Alain. He is good-humored, for an elf. Nothing ever bothers him much. He’s beautiful, he gives her good parts, and he sleeps a lot—like a cat.
She likes him, but she doesn’t respect him. It’s hard to respect someone who doesn’t care about anything. Even the way he courts her is lazy.

Alain waves an arm languidly from the couch. “Go on, then,” he says. “Rehearse. Only five days until opening night.” He yawns and closes his eyes again.

“Inspiring,” mutters Renata.

They take their places on the stage. They are rehearsing the scene where Elizabeth, Ashley’s character, is saved from drowning by Jack. The ocean is represented by a blue circle painted on the floor. Ashley pretends to gasp and tumble into it, and is hauled out by Nat, the skinny teenager to whom Alain has inexplicably given the role of the pirate captain. His wig of multiple black braids has slipped to one side, and his eyeliner is smeared. He presses down hard on Ashley’s chest, pretending to revive her.

“Ouch!” Ashley shakes her head. “Not so hard, there, big fella.”

“Sorry.” Nat hangs his head. He’s one of the nicest members of the troupe, even if he isn’t a very good actor. He’s got big wide eyes like a startled baby animal and reminds Ashley of her little brother back in the World. A swaggering, half-mad Jack Sparrow he is not.

The troupe finishes the scene. No one forgets their lines so badly that they have to wake up Alain to paw through the script. He rouses halfway through anyway, to argue with himself about some blocking, but on the whole, everything is going according to schedule.

Until the bleeding girl staggers in.

Everyone freezes. Ashley scrambles up from the floor. When no one else does anything, she moves toward the girl, who has collapsed on the ground. Slowly the others gather around—everyone except Alain, who hasn’t moved from his couch, although
he is at least sitting up, watching what’s going on through slitted silvery eyes.

The first thing Ashley notices as she drops down beside the girl is that she’s obviously a halfie—the pointed ears, the white-blond hair, and the pale eyes are married with a human softness. The second thing Ashley notices is that there’s a
lot
of blood. It’s already starting to pool under the girl.

“Get a doctor!” Renata yells. “Get someone!”

The girl blinks once, heavily, and opens her mouth. She groans. “Robert said to wait for the Rowan Gentleman, but I was too scared. I—” she manages to say, then gives a terrible choking cough. Red dust comes from her throat, a fine powder that dusts her clothes, sticking to her lips and cutting off any further speech.

“The Silver Suits are coming,” someone shouts, but the words come from far away. Ashley is focused on the girl, who has stilled. Her eyes go dull, her mouth slack. Nothing moves but the tide of blood.

“All of you,” Alain says in a voice she has never heard him use. “I want all of you out of here. Right now.”