Welcome to Bordertown (4 page)

Ouch.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said lamely. “It’s a really competitive school. Not everyone gets in.”

She sat down at the counter next to him. “That’s why I came here. Anything’s better than staying in Milltown, right? I mean, I love my family, but they don’t understand. They just want me to find a nice guy with a good union job, settle down, make babies and Sunday dinners and—and—”

“And you wanted a nice Harvard boy?” He grinned his most charming grin.

The girl shut up. He watched her face freeze over like he’d just killed her dog or something.
Nice going, Anush
, he thought.
No wonder you can’t get elves to talk to you, either.

“Hey,” he said gently. “I didn’t mean it like that. Of course you wanted a good education. My parents think that’s the most important thing on the planet.”

She kept on twisting her fingers together on the counter.

Boy, he’d really stepped in it this time. “So what other schools did you apply to?” he asked, feeling a little desperate.

“Just Harvard. Everyone knows it’s the best. It’s where I’ve always dreamed of going.”

“But what about your safety school?”

“Safety school? What’s that?”

“You know, the school you know you’ll get into if you don’t get your top pick.”

“You mean the state university? Where I come from, that’s just a party-and-football school. I wanted to go to Harvard and actually learn about things.”

“But there are plenty of good schools besides Harvard,” Anush said patiently. “Didn’t your guidance counselor suggest any others?”

Trish shrugged. “The Milltown school district is broke. We haven’t had a guidance counselor in years.”

“Okay, but—”

“My parents say I can do the two-year course at the community college down the road. But what’s the point? If I’m not good enough for Harvard …”

Anush opened his mouth and shut it again.

“Do you want some coffee?” he asked.

“Tea,” she said stiffly, like she didn’t trust him but was willing to oblige. “I drink herbal tea.”

He nodded over at Cam, held up his cup for another lassi, and started again: “So why Bordertown instead of college?”

“I thought … I thought it would be like in the books,” she muttered to the countertop. “You know—magic. And … and beauty. Like in the olden days, or in a fantasy novel. There’s supposed to be poetry here, and stories, and beautiful elfin music.” She stirred honey into her tea. “But it’s all just gangs and drugs and messed-up kids. Like at home. Just with no parents, and no cops.”

“You haven’t been here long enough to find the beauty, that’s all. There’s a great harper playing this week at The Wheat Sheaf—”

She looked up, her face pale, her eyes bright. “A harper? Like Taliesin, or Thomas the Rhymer?”

She sure knew her Celtic mythology. He risked, “Or Fflewddur Fflam.”

Her eyes glowed like stars. “You’ve read those, too? The Prydain books? By Lloyd Alexander?”

“Of course. I love Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, and poor old Gurgi, and Fflewddur with his magic harp. But trust me, Ossian Feldenkranz is no Fflam. He’s a good musician, the real thing. You’ll like his stuff.”

“Which one’s your favorite?”

“I haven’t heard them all yet—”

“No, I mean the Prydain books.” Her face was shining now, her eyes focused, like the smart kid in class she must recently have been. “I used to think
The Black Cauldron
, but I just reread them this year, and now maybe
Taran Wanderer
.… Is it true they’re based on Welsh mythology?”

“Oh, yes,” Anush said, “the Mabinogion. I took a whole class on Celtic Myth in Fantastical Literature, and we read that along with Yeats and Synge and Lord Dunsany and Evangeline Walton and R. A. MacAvoy—”

The girl leaned forward. “You can
study
those? In
college
?”

“Oh, yeah. My parents weren’t thrilled—they wanted me to do engineering—but I placated them with a double-major in—”

“Tilien!”
thrummed a woman’s voice by his ear. “Is that tilien you’re drinking, mortal?” Anush swiveled on his stool to look into eyes the color of violets on the first day of spring. “Here, let me try it.”

The impossibly slender, pale fingers lifted his metal cup, carried it to rose-petal lips that parted like the gates of Paradise to take a sip of his lassi. As she drank, her lashes fanned her cheeks like the peacock feather fans of a prince’s wife.

“Not tilien.” The lassi-scented breath was almost in his own mouth, so close were her lips to his. “What call you this drink, mortal?”

Cam plunked a juice can down in front of the elf goddess. “It’s yogurt lassi made with guanabana. Also known as soursop.”

“Gua-naaaaa-bana.” In her mouth, the word was a poem.

He leaned forward to savor it.

“Very nearly as good. I will taste it again soon.” She smiled at him. “What is your name, mortal man?”

“Anush Gupta.”

“No!” the scruffy girl next to him cried. Maybe her tea had gotten cold.

“Then come, Anush Gupta,” said the Trueblood elf. “Come with me. For we have much to discuss.”

*   *   *

“Never mind, honey,” said the ponytailed waitress. “He was too old for you, anyway.”

Trish flushed. “It’s not that. I wanted him to tell me about Harvard! And myth classes. And safety schools. And that Welsh thing. Where Prydain comes from.”

“Try Elsewhere Books. Someone there will know.”

“He shouldn’t have told her his real name,” Trish fretted.

“Probably not.”

“Doesn’t it give them power over you?”

“Kiddo, she didn’t need his name for that.” The waitress held out her hand across the counter. “I’m Cam, by the way.”

When Trish saw the tips of her ears, she tried to suppress a gasp.

“It’s cool,” said Cam. “I’m a halfie.”

“I’m, um, Tara.” Trish hadn’t really gotten used to the false name yet. She’d thought about being Eilonwy, but no way did she qualify as the feisty redheaded princess from
The Book of Three.
And besides, she wasn’t really sure how you pronounced it.

*   *   *

This is it
, Anush thought as he left the Hard Luck Café with the elf—the Trueblood—woman. He was dizzy with desire for her, and as strong as a hundred bulls with the certainty that the courtship rituals of exogamous elves would soon be within his grasp. Sure, a trained anthropologist wasn’t supposed to get data this way, but he felt sure his professor would understand.

He followed her down Ho Street and into a tangle of alleys he didn’t recognize. At a narrow side door, she paused and passed her hand over the latch. It turned from iron to gold. She opened the door and led him up shadowy, uneven stairs and into a room that reminded him of a forest, and of a ship, and of something he’d been promised once and never gotten.

When they lay together at last, peaceful and quiet on a bed of bracken that rustled like silk, she said, “You are beautiful, Anush Gupta. Like the night sky in an autumn wood. Ask me something, and it shall be yours.”

Anush sighed deeply. He thought of asking for a notebook, but that might be blowing his big chance. Instead he said, “I do have a few questions, actually.”

She was fine with the first three. She didn’t mind discussing Trueblood hierarchy or scarcity or isolationist self-segregation. Even the relative ages of mate selection just made her laugh. But when he got to “And how many sexual partners would you say you have in a year?” the woman reared up over his head, her hair falling like frozen water around them both.

“The counting of favors is a cruel thing, Anush Gupta. As well count the breaths it takes to speak your name, or the hopes that bring a hart to the well.”

“I’m sorry,” he said hastily. “We can skip this one if you want.”

“Like skipping stones over a lake? But words are not stones, mortal man. Once spoken, they cannot be sunk below waves.”

“Really”—he tried to catch her eyes, as he had when they were making love—“I said I was sorry.”

She turned away from him huffily. “I should have heeded my mother. She said mortals all were thus. I thought you were different.”

“But I am!” He was actually on his knees. “I
am
different. I’m not like all the rest—”

He was almost weeping with frustration. Because it was true. He was. Always. Everywhere. Different. He was the Indian kid who loved Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He was the American kid who loved his mom’s spicy
bhelpuri.
He was the dutiful son who studied the wrong subject. He was the serious scholar who studied imaginary beings. He was different as could be. Trying to defend himself to an elf was just about the last straw in a lifetime, a haystack, of them.

“Different, are you?” she said coldly. “Then different you shall be.” She raised her hands, began to speak, and stopped. “But wait, my night traveler. I have not wearied of you yet. You and your questions. Clearly we both have much to learn. And your skin is like a river that runs deep and swift after a storm in the
mountain. So I give you this choice: whether you shall be different by day or different by night. Choose one, that I may enjoy you the other.”

“Day or—?” he choked, but she said, “So be it. Roam freely in the day, rude as you will, in a form that rudeness allows—but at night, you are mine: all your pleasures, and your questions, and your beauty, all for me.”

“Wait,” protested Anush, “I know this story! It’s kind of the Beastly Bride, and kind of Thomas the Rhymer—with a little Stith Thompson folklore motif number tw— Ouch! Wait a minute, what are you d—”

And that was the last thing he was able to say for a while.

*   *   *

Trish went to The Wheat Sheaf that night. The place was crowded with all kinds of people—elf, human, even halfies. The other girls at Carterhaugh had told her to steer clear of elves, that they were clannish and mean and ran with dangerous gangs, but everyone here seemed to get along all right. She sat quietly in a corner with a glass of ginger beer and waited for the music to start.
Osheen
somebody, the Harvard guy had said. A harper. A minstrel. Like in the books.

He didn’t look like the books. He was just a guy with scruffy hippie hair and jeans. But when he lifted the harp and played, the room went still.

Trish let herself live in the music. She was a lady now, sitting in her high hall, her greyhound at her feet while the minstrel played for her and her court.

There was a soft rustling as everyone turned to stare at the striking couple who had just come in: a glorious lady with hair like moonlight and a dress as gold as the sun, and at her side, a dark prince—

Anush. The Harvard guy. Dressed now in a skintight shirt that showed off his well-made chest. He had his arm around the lady and was nuzzling her neck in that stupid, boys-in-the-halls-between-classes way, paying no attention to anyone or anything around them.

Trish looked away. Bad enough that they’d just made her miss the last verse of the Riddle Song, which ended with a flourish and applause. Now she’d never know the answers.

Ossian Feldenkranz stood up, setting the harp aside, and shook out his arms. “And now,” he announced, “I’d like to invite up to the stage a buddy of mine, a
landsman
from the old country—and a great musician:
Yidl Mitn Fidl
!”

From the back of the room, a short, scrawny guy with wiry arms and a little goatee came leaping up onto the small stage, brandishing a violin in one hand and a bow in the other. “Hey-
upp
!”
he shouted, or something like that, and the music exploded into a dance tune. It sounded a little like that Polka Variety music her uncle Al liked, and a little like she’d always imagined gypsies would be: wild and happy and sad, all at once. Her feet beat time on the floor. She wished she knew some steps so she could dance.

Some of the people did. Chairs were pushed back. Kids were forming a circle, joining hands, dancing and stamping to the music. Their heads were thrown back, they looked so happy—she realized she was happy, too, just watching. It was like being at the seashore with the sun shining down and the waves beating time.

The music slowed and changed. People drifted back to their seats. The violin played soft now, and slow. Gentle.

“By the hearth, a fire is burning,” Ossian murmured over the fiddle’s tune. “An old
rebbe
, a learned man, is teaching the children to read: ‘Learn, children,’ he says; ‘don’t be afraid. Every beginning is hard.’ ”

He started singing in a strange language. Yidl closed his eyes, fiddled and swayed. She looked across to where the Harvard guy sat with the elf lady. He was staring at the musicians, longing on his dark face.

What distant land had his people come from, and how had he gotten to go to Harvard? He knew all about books and fantasy and college. Trish wanted to know what he knew.

Learn, children; don’t be afraid. Every beginning is hard
, Ossian sang in the language she didn’t know yet.

She went over to the table where the dark prince sat with his elfin lady. “Hi,” Trish said.

He looked at her blankly, like he’d never seen her before.

“I met you yesterday,” she said bravely. “At the café?”

He looked confused. Enchanted? The elf lady was ignoring her completely. Snotty bitch.

“You’re Anush, right?”

“Yes.” His face cleared a little. “I’m Anush.”

“I’m Tara,” Trish said. He frowned. “Like Taran? In the Prydain books? Only a girl?” Anush smiled at her with beautiful white teeth. “So I was wondering,” Trish went on. “I mean, I just wanted to ask you—”