Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  On that night Hansa steeped the herb in the syrupy tea. She kept her face turned toward the fire as her grandmother drank it down. The old woman nodded her head, slowly, slowly, until it dropped to her chest and she was sleeping.

  The moment her eyes blinked shut, a wind came down the chimney. It swept past Hansa and set all the curtains in the house to twitching. One moved aside just long enough for Hansa to spy something through it: a bright button pinned to the night sky like a medal to a general’s chest.

  So this was the Moon, her enemy. Though Hansa had never seen her before, she recognized her at once: she knew the Sun had a sister, and a whole host of nieces that sugared the sky at night. Hansa ran to her room, peeled back the curtain, and used one of her grandmother’s knitting needles to pick the lock on her window.

  Night air poured over the sill. It reached in like a hand with starry rings on every finger and scooped her up. She lay on the roof in her nightgown, gazing at the Moon and her daughters. Though she was not unafraid, she was the happiest she’d ever been.

  Hello, Moon, she said in her mind. Why is it I must fear you?

  Hello, granddaughter, the Moon replied. There is no need for fear. Indeed, I am your greatest friend.

  Hansa was not surprised. In the endless, unfamiliar realm of night, it felt natural that the Moon should speak to her.

  My grandmother is asleep downstairs, she said drowsily, without opening her mouth. Why do you call me granddaughter?

  Your father’s mother sleeps inside, said the Moon, but I am the mother of your mother, and now is not my time to rest.

  Hansa’s heart quickened. Nobody ever spoke of her mother, not even to curse her for her absence. Hansa had always felt as motherless as a tree.

  But even a tree has roots, said the Moon. And the seed that births it. You’re young still, but old enough. If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you a tale of your mother.

  It was a moonless night when your parents met, a night so calm and clear that the Stars, my daughters, could see themselves in the water. Because your mother is vain as a mermaid, she drew too close to the sea. Your father was looking into the water when he saw her face reflected over his shoulder. Her beauty was such that he caught her by a hand, and he caught her by a heel, and he pulled her onto his ship.

  If I’d been close I would have stunned him with my light and sent him to the sea wolves. But the night was moonless, as I said, so he and my daughter had their foolish way with each other.

  It was another such night, when he was homeward bound, that she stepped onto his deck and gave him a child wrapped in a blanket woven of storm clouds, bits of thunder trapped in its folds to soothe the little one’s sleep.

  “Hide her from the night,” your mother told him, for it was you wrapped in that blanket. “Hide her from the Moon. If my mother learns of her, she’ll tell my husband of our congress. He’s a Tide, and in his jealousy will drown you both.”

  Stars do not make good parents, nor do they make good wives, but your mother was trying to protect you. And sailors make their living by the tides, so your father was too fearful of their betrayal to risk your ever being seen. Foolish daughter, foolish man: I would no more give up a baby to a jealous Tide than rise in the morning. But Stars cannot keep a secret, and I learned of you soon enough. Long have I watched for you, long have I waited to tell you this tale.

  Now, the Moon said. Now that you’re grown, and able, I must ask something of you.

  Am I grown? Hansa asked. Her mind’s mirror was silvered over with storm clouds and sea voyages and tides.

  You’re grown enough. Now I’ll tell you of the night another Star, silliest of my daughters, told your mother’s husband of her indiscretion. His rage roiled the seabed. It lifted shipwrecks and their ghosts and sent them sailing. It tilted the pan of the sky. The jealous Tide dragged your mother from her constellation and took her to the rim of the world.

  She lives there still, his captive. I do not know the form of her imprisonment, for even the Moon cannot see what lies at the rim of the world. Will you go to her? Will you set her free?

  The sea, Hansa thought. The way to the world’s rim lies by sea. She thought of the broken glitter the sea made of the sun’s light, and imagined what it might do with the coolness of the moon. It would, perhaps, make a road she could walk upon.

  Not quite, the Moon said, sounding amused. You’ll go by ship.

  She tilted her head over the girl and cried three tears. They shone in her lap like hard white eyes as the Moon gave her instructions:

  Pack what you must and go to the harbor.

  Ignore the first merchant who approaches you. Bow to the second. To the third, offer one of my tears in exchange for whatever they’ll give you.

  Find a ship with a maiden’s name, and trade a second tear for passage.

  Then the Moon gave her a cold kiss. All that night Hansa slept with her window open, in a pool of her grandmother’s light. When she woke between moonset and sunrise, three tears lay in her hand, and the Moon’s instructions were fresh in her head.

  She rose and packed her cloak, a loaf of bread, two books, and the Moon’s three tears. She crept past her father’s mother, still asleep before the cold hearth, and slipped out into the day. When she reached the harbor, the first merchant to approach her was a man in shabby clothes, selling all manner of charms: dried seeds he called serpents’ tongues, a string of stones he claimed were the Moon’s own tears, which Hansa would’ve known for river pearls even if she hadn’t the proof of his lies in her pocket. She passed him without a look.

  The second merchant was a green-dressed woman, very tall, whose one eye watched Hansa carefully. Hansa bowed to her deeply, and the lady seemed satisfied.

  The third merchant was a girl of about fifteen, who informed Hansa cheerfully that her mother had a taste for drink and for sailors, and all they had to live on was what the girl could take from the men’s pockets while they were sleeping. When she saw what Hansa had to trade—a brilliant white tear the size of an acorn, chased with all the colors of sunset and sea—she snatched it up.

  “That’s my fortune made,” she said, and in exchange gave Hansa a compass, a waterskin, and boots to trade for her flimsy shoes.

  “May the boots never waterlog,” the merchant girl said. “May the waterskin never empty. And may the compass never lead you astray.”

  Now Hansa set out to find a ship with a maiden’s name. She saw the Luckjoy. The Greengage. The Ondine and the Azarias. When she spied the Lady Catherine, she approached. Its captain was a woman with a shaved head, a crew of tattooed sailors, and a narrow look for Hansa when she traded the second of her Moon’s tears for passage.

  “It’s worth my entire ship,” she said, and took it.

  The tear bought Hansa a bed belowdecks and the right to sit in the rigging. She loved her life at sea. The crew’s sun-lined faces reminded her of her father’s, and the briny air of the scent of his coat, and the movement of the ship of dreams she’d had, in the airless rooms of her grandmother’s cottage. Every night she crept from bed to lie beneath the open sky, and the dancing forms of all her mother’s sisters, and speak to the Moon.

  Hello, grandmother.

  The Moon told Hansa of the Winds and the Tides and the arrogant Sun, who spent his nights in a fiery country unreachable by land or sea. She told her of the rare white flowers that grew on her own hills and valleys, and of all their magical properties. Hansa wanted to pick those flowers. She wanted to wade in the Moon’s wide rivers, and set sail to every unmapped island.

  So you will, said the Moon. My granddaughter was not made to have dirt beneath her feet.

  But even the Moon’s protection was limited. She was sleeping the afternoon a storm came out of a cloudless sky. Beneath the Sun’s hot eye the water rose, the sea whipping itself into waves that spun the ship like a toy.

  The captain shouted into the squall, sending her sailors scattering over the deck. Hansa found herself trapped in the crow’s nest as the
ship tilted low, so perilously close to the water she knew it must touch, and all of them drown. She held on tight and looked into the frothing sea. Out of the murderous chop rose a face with a boiling white brow, eyes like whelks, and a mouth as wide as a whale’s.

  “Star’s daughter,” the face boomed. “I am the Tide who keeps watch over the waters when the Moon is young. What foolish errand has sent you to die at sea?”

  “Are you my mother’s husband?” she shouted, her words nearly lost beneath the water’s crashing.

  “I am his youngest brother,” the Tide replied, each word a ship’s-horn blast.

  “Then you’re very nearly my uncle,” she said, squinting against the spray. “Will you help me, out of family feeling? I seek my mother at the rim of the world.”

  The Tide paused before giving a laugh that spun the ship a full turn, nearly flinging Hansa from her perch.

  “I have no heart in which family feeling might reside. Nonetheless, I’ll give you some advice. My brother keeps his secrets, and I don’t know how to reach the world’s edge. But our other brother might. He keeps sea wolves to serve him, and they swim farther and faster than any other creature. Seek him out. If he doesn’t kill you, he just might help you.”

  His black-and-white face fell apart into foam, and the sea settled like a cat beneath a hand. Soon it was smooth as watered silk.

  Hansa descended the mast into a crowd of hard-lipped sailors. They hadn’t seen the Tide’s face or heard their conversation. What they’d witnessed was a girl holding tight to the mast in an impossible storm, leaning over the sea to preach calmness until it listened.

  They should’ve been grateful, perhaps. But Hansa was a captain’s daughter and knew they wouldn’t be. No one is more superstitious than a sailor at sea. She was very nearly unsurprised when, late that night, four rough hands dragged her from her bunk and up to the deck.

  “Grandmother!” she cried, but the sailors were too quick. Hansa slept in her boots and was still trying to kick them off when she was thrown over the side of the ship. Compass, she thought as she fell, naming the things she had on her person. Boots. Waterskin.

  The Moon’s last tear.

  She slipped it into her mouth for safekeeping just as she hit the surface of the sea. The water was mercury bright with moonlight above and all sharp teeth below, and the shock of it made her swallow the tear.

  Grandmother! she screamed in her mind, fighting her way to the surface.

  Patience, granddaughter, said the Moon. This is all part of the tale. Her light fell on the sea, and on the ship that was already too far to swim to, and on the four water-black heads that bobbed up around Hansa.

  Mermaids. Their skin was gray, their hair painted colorless against the night. The nearest sliced Hansa’s leg with a twitch of her serrated tail.

  “Pretty little Star-child,” she said, her voice syrup and salt and a seagull’s scream.

  “Not so pretty,” the second one sniffed, moonlight catching on the points of her teeth.

  The third dipped below the water to run a rough tongue over the fresh cut on Hansa’s calf.

  “And only half-Star,” she said when she resurfaced. “You should have chosen land or sky. The sea doesn’t want you.”

  “No last words, little mongrel?” said the fourth mermaid, mockingly. “You’ll have less to say soon enough. Now!” she cried out, and dove. The rest dove with her, each tugging Hansa by a hand or a foot.

  But the girl had stayed quiet for a reason. The tear she’d swallowed had melted on her tongue like jellied blood, tasting of sea wind and oysters and ice. It slid down her throat, rooting in her belly and sending out shoots: into her arms, the skin there shading to gray. Into her legs, fusing them together, frosting them over with scales. Her eyes grew a shining skin to keep the water out and her rib cage broadened, hardened, becoming a treasure chest even the sea couldn’t crack.

  When she breathed in, she breathed the sea. Her throat and lungs were gilded into little waterways, so she could live on both air and ocean as the mermaids did.

  “She’s played a trick on us,” one of them said sourly.

  Another whipped Hansa’s new tail with her own. “If she won’t play fairly, neither will we,” she said, and the four of them spun away. Hansa lost them quickly in the water.

  There was nothing for it but to swim. Past fish with animal faces and down into a forest of sea fronds curved and carved like wooden screens. Her lashing tail carried her through cold that would scour the flesh off a sailor’s bones, but Hansa was no sailor. All night she wound through the grasping sea forest, on and on, until the sun rose and turned the water pale. By its light she found a clearing where a roofless coral palace grew up from the sand. She swam through its mosaicked halls to a receiving room, where sat a throne made of the masts of drowned ships, lashed together with sea wrack. On it drifted a man the size of a giant, with black skin and sea-green hair. He watched her approach with interested eyes.

  “Stars don’t live long beneath the water, and little girls even more briefly,” he said. “Yet you’re alive. How interesting.”

  Hansa could feel how the sea responded to his voice, how even her fishtail drifted in time to it. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I am the Tide who keeps watch over the sea when the Moon reaches her middle age. And you are the Moon’s granddaughter. What would you have of me?”

  “My mother’s freedom. Your brother holds her captive at the rim of the world.”

  “I make it a point never to step between husbands and their wives. However.” He leaned in, and the sea did, too. “My older brother has grown altogether too powerful. So long as he holds the Moon’s daughter, he holds the Moon in his thrall as well. I will help you travel to the rim of the world, and I will tell you how to release your mother from her marriage bond.”

  He whistled and a hound came forward, or what must pass for one beneath the waves: a rippling thing of silver scales, holding in its mouth a sea-glass dagger.

  “There is one way to break their bond: you must remove your mother’s hand, the one that bears his wedding ring. This dagger will cut through any manner of bone, even that of Starfolk. Will you take it?”

  Hansa nodded, but still the creature did not give her the dagger.

  “It’s a long way yet to the rim of the world,” the Tide told her. “My wolves will only take you to the beginning of the end, for going any farther does strange things to travelers. They say you lose pieces of yourself, that far from the world’s heart. Be wary, Hansa the traveler.”

  The wolf dropped the dagger into her hand and took her by the neck. It was joined by two of its sisters, and the three bore her up, out of the palace, into the great expanse of water overhead.

  Hansa’s skin began to burn. The arms of the sea were tightening, threatening to break her in their grip. As the tear’s protection faded, the water was no longer alive to her. She took in a mouthful of salt just as the wolves broke the surface of the water.

  They pulled her through the warm skim at the sea’s very top, and let her sleep on their backs when she tired. They dove down to catch little creatures for her, briny things that slept in seashells and crackled between her teeth. Though she drank often from her waterskin, it never emptied. Mermaids paced alongside them for miles, calling out in their curdled voices, but did not dare come close. At night the stars broke from their dancing to blow Hansa kisses, and by day she watched the Sun and was curious. Great-uncle, she said to him in her mind. Will you speak to me? But the Sun is haughty, and rarely recognizes even his own children.

  On the third morning Hansa felt her boots dragging over the rising seabed, before coming to rest in the shallows. The Tide’s hounds had carried her over a journey’s worth of sea, and must leave her now at the beginning of the end. They nosed around her hips, crafty eyes shining, and sped in three silver dashes back toward the deep.

  She watched them go. Behind her lay the entirety of the sea and sky: here the fickle Sun, pulling c
louds nearer to him, then burning them away. There the Moon, forever showing different versions of her face, and all her daughters dancing their ancient dances around her, with an empty space among them from which Hansa’s mother had been torn. Behind her was day and night and sea and land and all the pages of her own history, before she became a traveler.

  She turned her back on it and faced the rim of the world.

  At the world’s edge is one last wood. It’s a foggy, tricksy place, where fine white mist turns the air to tulle. Hansa took her compass from her pocket and let it lead her through the wood.

  It was full of more than mist, she learned. The Tide’s second brother had warned it might take pieces of her away, but first it returned to her things she had lost. She followed the sound of her other grandmother’s voice, and the landlocked scents of hot heather and bread and fire. There came the strains of a song she’d never heard, but knew. Her mother had sung it to her, in the handful of days they’d had together after Hansa was born. The mist meant to beguile her, but her compass led her through. At last she reached the end of the last wood, and stepped onto the rim of the world.

  The journey did take pieces of her away, but it was only after leaving the mist that she knew what those pieces were: they were her years, stolen away as she wandered. She walked into the woods a child and walked out an old woman, bones aching and vision dimmed. She held off grieving by telling herself this was one more enchantment she could undo.

  At the world’s end was a little house, two figures standing before it. The woman had blue eyes like Hansa’s and the man gray hair to his hips. They did not touch each other, or speak, but there was peace between them. Hansa had gained age without much wisdom, and still she could see it.

  “Who are you, who has traveled so far to see us?” the man asked pleasantly.

  The woman said nothing. On the third finger of her smooth left hand, a ring of blue water spun.

  “I’ve traveled far,” said Hansa, in her cracked old woman’s voice, “to release my mother from her marriage bond.”