Welcome to Bordertown by Ellen Kushner, Holly Black (editors)

he?”
    Gurgi pointed to her pack. “Noble mistress give crunchings and munchings to poor Gurgi now?”
    Trish said, “Well, I don’t really have any food. I was on my way down to Riverside; I heard you can pick up some work by the docks, like, carrying things. We could do it together, and then they’ll give us both crunchings and munchings.”
    The creature looked dubious. “Noble mistress saves Gurgi’s poor tender head from fightings and smitings?”
    “Of course I will,” Trish said. “Come on—I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
    That was what she used to tell Jimmy. As she walked downhill with Gurgi trotting by her side, she remembered Jimmy’s first day of kindergarten, when he’d been so scared.
I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’ll never let anyone hurt you.
    What had happened to her little Jimbo? She hadn’t meant to leave him there. Sure, she’d been planning to go away to college, to the banks of the Charles, but she would have come back as often as she could. Hadn’t she promised to be home for Christmas? She would have made sure Jimmy had an escape route, too. That he didn’t have to go work down at the factory like Grampa and Dad and her three uncles if he didn’t want to. That nobody crushed the magic out of him.
    *   *   *
     
    I meet a guy in the stacks at Elsewhere Books who thinks he might have seen Trish. He studies the picture, then passes it to his companion, an Asian girl with her hair in many braids. “I’m sure I’ve seen her. It was at a music gig. Deki, what’s the name of that harper?”
    “You mean Ossian?”
    “Yeah, Ossian. I can’t remember where we were that night. At Sluggo’s, maybe? Or The Grand Conjunction?”
    I add these names to my list of possible leads and thank them for their help.
    I stop by the Poop at least once a day to check the message board. Still nothing there, but on the way out, I see a poster with the name Ossian. He’s playing an afternoon concert in Fare-You-Well Park, so I head in that direction.
    I enter the park through the Ho Street gate, pass the buskers (good and bad) and the sidewalk artists (ditto), the mobile health clinic in its horse-drawn Winnebago, and a demented-looking guywho is standing on a soapbox ranting about the Bordertown High Council. The park’s bandstand sits on a patchy stretch of lawn beyond the playgrounds and the bowling green. I reach it, and a hippie-looking girl in a “Respect the Realm” T-shirt hands me a concert flyer: “Traditional Music for the Elfin and Celtic Harps, Performed by Sashamia Leaves-upon-the-Water-at-the-Harvest-Moon and Ossian Feldenkranz.”
    The audience spread across the grass is small, and it doesn’t take long to see my sister isn’t in it. We’re west of the Old City now, and this isn’t a Soho crowd; it’s mostly old people, a cluster of silver-haired kids from the Elfhaeme Musical Academy (it says so on their bags), and two skateboard punks who look like they belong here about as much as I do.
    The concert has already begun. It’s the tinkling kind of music Trish likes, not me—but it reminds me of her, so I stay to listen, stretched out on the grass beside Rosco with my head propped on my tool bag. The sun pours down like honey, and the harp music floats upward (
plonk
,
plonk
,
plonk
), drifting over the grass and trees and the background roar of the surrounding city.…
    *   *   *
     
    The Fish and Farmers’ Market was all hustle and bustle, but Trish found work with a fishwife who was desperate to fill a huge last-minute order for a party on the Hill.
    “What they want with fresh fish at a midnight garden party I do not know,” she said in her funny singsong voice, “but you clean ’em up fast and you clean ’em up neat, and I’ll pay you in kind.”
    She set up Trish and Gurgi down by the water and left them to their task. Gurgi didn’t say much; he just seemed happy to be with her, happy to help. She found herself pouring out her heart to him as they