She’d been clever as an adolescent, too, he told me, as well as wild and lonely. There were fewer stories that he could tell me from that time, though; an adolescent lives in a larger part of the world than a child, and the prohibitions that keep elves from talking freely about the land they come from applied more often. But from what he said, added to what Tick-Tick herself had let fall now and then, I thought her reasons for running away hadn’t been very different from mine.

In turn, I told him about her adventures in Bordertown, trying to give him some of the aspects of his sister that he’d missed out on. Sometimes he shook his head; sometimes he frowned; but more often he smiled, and I wished, for his sake and hers, that he’d set family tradition aside and shown up on the doorstep a year earlier.

“I did not—stand by her,” Vissa said once, when it was very late and the beer was getting low. “I might have defended her against my father’s anger, against the little cruelties of others. If I had, perhaps…”

I could fill in the end of the sentence as well as he could. Even though one of the endings was, “… she would be alive now,” I couldn’t wish him a different past. If it had been different, she might not have been herself, Tick-Tick, and I might never have known her. But I reached out my hand and laid it lightly over his, and said one of those inadequate things about it being all right.

He turned his palm up and clasped my fingers, hard. “No, it is not. But it is done, and now we must seek our happiness in what we have made, and set aside these phantom joys.”

Back in the World, I had never really sat shivah, when for seven days after the funeral the family gathers to remember and talk about the dead. By the time I was old enough to pay attention, my branch of the family was estranged from the rest, and that we didn’t participate had less to do with lack of respect for the dead than lack of willingness to speak to the living. But Vissa and I remembered Tick-Tick to each other until the sky began to pale, and I understood the custom at last.

•

I’m sure there are funeral traditions in the Elflands, and heaven knows, there are thousands in the World. But the Borderlands haven’t been around long enough for what could be called traditions. Weddings, funerals, births, namings, whatever: either you bring old practices with you and use those, or you take a handful of what you remember, another of what you’ve heard of, a dash of invention, stir until blended, and call it custom. When this works, it does so because the participants come prepared to take their part in an act of creation.