Tick-Tick gave me a wide smile. “I’m sorry; I’d quite forgotten that wasn’t your long suit. Now wash your hands.”

I used the lemon.

“Now, slice those,” she said, pointing at a cutting board heaped with ghost-white Border strawberries each the size of my thumb, “and pour some of that on them.”

I uncorked the That bottle and sniffed. “Hey-yah. I’m already hung over.”

“Fear not. We’re going to set breakfast on fire before we eat it.”

There was a label on the bottle, a brown, brittle, faded paper one. It was about as legible as a fallen leaf. I sniffed again. The fumes breathed out memories of seasons past, spring in strawberry beds, summer among raspberry canes, autumn in orchards full of plum and peach and apple. “ ‘Sweeter than honey from the rock,’ “ I murmured. Then I remembered the source of the quote was Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and that it was one of a class of stories that wasn’t exactly complimentary to the Fair Folk.

But the Ticker laughed. “ ‘Men sell not such in any town.’ Just so, my lad. It’s from over the Border.”

I looked up quickly, and the liquor slapped the side of its bottle with a little chiming note. “I thought—” And thought better of asking, and shut up.

She didn’t. “That I’d not go back? I haven’t, and I won’t. I took this in payment for fixing Mother Mayeye’s sewing machine. I believe it began life in my father’s cellars, and when I think of how little pleased he’d be at where it is now and what I did to earn it, I treasure it even beyond its deserts. Blessed Isle, my father would rather have cut my hands off at the wrists than see them used to make and mend foul Worldly machinery.”

“He’ll never know.”

“No, indeed he won’t—I’d heard he died a year or two ago. My brother, I think, still lives. And if my brother objected to the provenance of that bottle, I doubt he’d have the backbone to say so to my face. So there; time has robbed me of these childish pleasures.”

It made me uncomfortable, to hear her speak of the past. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

She turned away to pour batter on the hot iron, and over the hiss she said, “I know. If I had to, I’d fight it like death itself. But with you, I don’t have to. So I can.”

“Ah.”

The Ticker cast a look over her shoulder. “Nor do you have to reciprocate.”

I knew I should. She was my friend, and even if she’d just said that I didn’t owe her the story of my personal road to Bordertown, who the hell else did I owe it to? Rico?