“It’s not as if you make a habit of it.”

She lifted her head. “It’s easier,” she said, slowly, “to be angry on someone else’s behalf than on my own. And yet I find I have a well of anger in me, that I have been filling for years from my own hurts. If I spill it out in defense of another, I can deny that it’s mine.” She swung the bike up to the curb outside the Hard Luck Cafe and killed the engine. “Does that make sense, or is it a purely fey madness?”

“Oh, no,” I answered. “It makes a lot of sense.”

She smiled with half her mouth, the little wry twist that has as much sadness in it as anything. “Silly question. Of course you understand.”

I swung my legs over the lip of the sidecar and slithered out onto the pavement. “Hah. If we’re so single-minded, why don’t you understand about my tan?”

“But I do, my rambling boy! With my head, if not my heart.”

Elves are given to quicksilver slides from mood to mood, but when you know one of them well, you can tell the difference between that and genuine gratitude for a change of subject. I held the door for her, and we swaggered into the Hard Luck like the pair of reigning outlaws we pretended to be.

It was warm inside in spite of the fans, and busy, and noisy, and remarkably like a combination of farmhouse kitchen, private club, and arts salon. Anyone who makes trouble at the Hard Luck Cafe is considered an incurable misfit, even within the loose social contract of Bordertown, and is not welcome anywhere, to anything. Consequently, the Hard Luck’s habitués include humans, elves, and halfies, people from Dragontown and shimmers from up on the Tooth, painters and gang leaders. It’s such a desirable place to simply be that it’s almost too much to hope that the food is good.

The food is good.

I peered at the back wall and the blackboard that serves as menu. The Hard Luck is a cooperative, and the people working the kitchen cook whatever they feel like that day. Certain things are almost always available—burgers for the philistines, for instance—but if the staff decides they want to do Chinese that day, that’s what’s for dinner. If you don’t like it, that’s—all together now—Your Hard Luck. That day it looked like mixed down-home: fish chowder, lentil and spinach casserole, stuffed peppers, Brunswick stew.

“Bother,” Tick-Tick said at my shoulder, “no booths—wait, other side in the middle.”