“Bring the pot to the table, or you’ll forget it, and we’ll have cold paint thinner to drink. ‘Good’ is a somewhat differently-shaped concept on the other side of the Border. One may pursue one’s own good: that is simple wisdom, a care for one’s own well-being. If one extends that care to the well-being of those one loves—the good of friends and family—one is admired as above the common in honor and in duty, as having an ardent soul. But the public good? There is no ardency in that, no romance; the well-being of unknown persons does not touch upon fey honor nor the fey heart.”

“It touches you.”

“I am a changeling.”

“Mmm. But Linn does want to catch the illusionist.”

“Of course. As he would want to win at tourney. And he does have an ardent soul—the distress of his partner causes him distress. But there is no abstract desire in him, as there is in you, or in Rico.”

“You think he’s not a changeling, too?” I asked her.

“Why would he be?”

“He moved to Bordertown.”

Tick-Tick raised her hand, acknowledging the point. “We are all changelings. All the more reason, however, not to judge him or anyone by yourself.”

I looked out at the ragged line of buildings, trees, and fences that made up the town as seen from Tick-Tick’s kitchen window. “Hey, does it work the other way?”

“Pardon?”

“If people don’t think much of the concept of a general good, over the Border, does that mean they don’t think in terms of public evils, either?”

She frowned and poured out the tea. Then she answered, “Some do. Changelings of another sort, my chick.”

And changelings, as I’d pointed out, gravitated to Bordertown. I sighed. “I wish I knew what to do next.”

“Have you tried simply looking for the wretched stuff?”

“Huh?”

“This drug. Have you been on its trail long enough to know what it is, and that it is, so that you can simply lock on and find the nearest sample of it? Well, it might be a start,” she added, when I stared at her in what must have been a pretty blank fashion.

“No—I mean, of course it would be. I just feel so stupid for not—except I probably couldn’t have done it until recently.” What I’m trying to find has to be real to me. What the specifications of “real” are varies from item to item, but I knew the drug Rico was worried about was real to me now, because I’d seen the girl in the hospital bed. All I had to want to know was where to find a sample of the drug that had killed her. So I wanted that.

Nothing happened. It was as if I’d tried to find the man in the moon; there just wasn’t anything. Tick-Tick was looking at me, hopefully.