Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  She kneeled in front of the Star, who looked at her hazily.

  “Mother,” she said. “Do you know me?”

  Then she took the Tide’s dagger and sliced off her mother’s left hand. The hand turned at once into starlight, dissipating in the air, and the ring shivered into droplets that pattered to the earth. The Star said nothing and looked at no one. In a liquid silver rush she leapt back into the sky.

  The Tide watched her go with a look of great calm. “I’ll win her again,” he said. “Stars have hardly any memory at all. Did no one think to tell you that?” With a tilt of his hand, the droplets of his ring drew themselves together and swelled into a wide blue wave. It picked him up and carried him over the top of the misty woods, toward open sea.

  Hansa stood alone on the sand, her skin weathered and her bones curved by the years she hadn’t lived, that she’d lost in the mist of the woods.

  I’m sorry, said the Moon.

  She said it from very far away, but Hansa heard her all the same.

  I cannot return your years to you, the Moon told her. But I can offer you a kind of eternity.

  What kind? Hansa might have asked. And How? but she wasn’t given the chance. Before she could speak or think, the Moon took her fragile body and flung it up among the stars.

  Hansa was an old woman with her feet on the ground, then a different thing rising through the sky. Her skin peeled back, her bones boiled white, her thoughts came apart like the beads of a broken necklace. All the pieces of her that were left separated into new stars, picking out the shape of a girl. And so Hansa the traveler was granted her eternity.

  On moonless nights, the stars that were Hansa let go their grip on the sky. They fall into the sea and shine beneath it, harrying the Tides. They rise like foam and come together into the body of a blue-eyed girl. She dives past the silver, through the blue, into the black. She runs her fingers through the seaweeds there, and remembers when her life was sunshine and captivity. She wonders which prison is preferred, a sealed cottage or the silence of the sky.

  THE CLOCKWORK BRIDE

  The toymaker arrived in town on the back of rumors so vicious they cut the tongue. Fanciful, unsavory tales: that his hands could make anything, from clockwork assassins to skeleton keys. That baroque misfortunes befell those foolish enough to become his enemies, and kept him from roosting too long in one place. Most impossibly, it was whispered he had recently courted a daughter of the king. When the girl rebuffed him, he’d answered her rejection with a gift: a clockwork so enchanting she followed it out of her room one night and down to the hushed black ribbon of the river, where she followed the thing into its waters and was gone.

  But the shop the toymaker opened overnight, packed to its corners with living dreams, was too beautiful to be the work of wicked hands. Though it was odd, the townspeople admitted, that no one could claim to have met the man himself. Behind his counter stood an aproned girl in a tidy braid, who smiled at the children and took their parents’ coins. More than a few found themselves slowing as they walked by the shop, hoping for a glimpse of her face. Such a beauty wouldn’t work for a monster.

  It was decided, then. They were lucky the toymaker had come. And over time the dark cloud of rumors that nipped at his heels was forgotten.

  Only Eleanor did not forget. Thirteen years old, she should’ve been past the point of longing for toys. Yet often she wondered what manner of toy was bewitching enough to coax a princess from her bed. A wee prancing stallion, perhaps, with a foaming mane, and flat metal teeth to pull the girl into the water.

  Eleanor would risk anything to receive such a gift. She would follow it anywhere.

  In a threadbare cloak and a dress she’d long ago outgrown, she walked between her mother and her brother, Thomas, through the kind of winter day that dulled its teeth on your bones. Everything she laid her eye on was damp or dim or scorched with cold—all but the toymaker’s shop. Her mother’s gaunt hand tightened on hers as they passed it, a silent warning not to stop. But a crowd of children stood out front, and that could mean only one thing.

  “New toys today!” a boy called out, running past them. Eleanor tugged free of her mother and ran over the icy cobblestones, pushing her way toward the shop’s bright window.

  Inside she saw cut-paper ballerinas that spun on strings. Whole towns carved from wood and populated by tiny porcelain people. There were feathered masks and tin swords and dolls with clever eyes that blinked. But best by far were the clockworks. Animals and fairies and carriages and ships, butterflies that lifted the delicate glasswork of their doubled wings. Today the toymaker had added to his menagerie a poppy-red dragon, a pair of tussling fox kits, and a marvelous hare, which hopped and twitched its mottled ears just as if it were alive.

  Eleanor could almost feel the greasy give of its brindle fur beneath her fingers, and smell its oiled-metal musk. As Thomas shoved in beside her, the scent of his hair—sweat and smoke and liniment—pulled her roughly from her daydreams.

  “Why bother looking if you cannot buy?” one of the children said nastily.

  Thomas dropped his head, but Eleanor favored the speaker with a knife-point smile. “Say one thing more,” she said. “I beg you.”

  “I only mean to warn you,” the girl replied, her voice a smooth blue river with rocks beneath it. “The toymaker punishes thieves. He’ll drown you. He’ll come for you in the night with his silver calipers.”

  I wish he would, Eleanor thought fiercely, her neck burning with shame and her fingertips pressed to the glass, their warmth turning its frost to wet jewels. I wish, I wish, I wish.

  * * *

  “Did you see the tin soldiers?” Thomas whispered from the pillow beside hers.

  Eleanor shook her head.

  “Or the forest made of glass? The kites? You only looked at the dolls, didn’t you?”

  She shook her head again. She didn’t want to speak about the clockworks. Their clever brass pieces and neat metal chests, the places you could see their machinery and the places you couldn’t, so they seemed like magic. The way their ticking perfection made her mouth dry up and her stomach twist around the part of her that always felt hungry.

  Thomas squeezed her wrist. “Do you hear that?”

  Eleanor shook her head a third time. She was tired of listening to her mother weeping behind the curtain that shielded her bed.

  “Not that,” he said. “That.”

  She listened, and the sound repeated itself. A sound too small to be heard, surely, but she heard it all the same. It was a clump and a thump, like a boot breaking through the crust that hardens over snow. She crawled from their bed to peer out the window, and wondered if she was already dreaming.

  On the street below crouched the wonderful hare, the one she’d seen through the toy shop window. It had grown as big as a draft horse, and on its back sat a life-size tin soldier. Through the glass Eleanor saw his beckoning hand, the moonlight catching on the blond metal of his mustache.

  She sprang back, already reaching for her cloak.

  “What are you doing?” Thomas said.

  She paused in the act of pulling on a boot. “What are you doing? Get your coat!”

  “It’s a trick,” he said. “It must be.”

  All the sudden, delicate joy in her turned like old milk. “Stay behind then,” she hissed, “and just see if I’ll share with you.”

  Her brother lingered a moment, looking wounded, then gave in as he always did, pulling on his shoes and following her down the stairs.

  Outside all was quiet, but for the mechanical breathing of the hare. Up close it was enormous, its sides giving off a steady machine heat. The soldier on its back, trim in a white uniform with blue piping, held tight to the velvet sails of the creature’s ears.

  “Come quickly,” he said, in a high, sweet voice. “You’ve been invited by the toymaker to play!”

  He lifted them onto the hare’s back, his flexing fingers hard over Eleanor’s waist. No sooner were they seat
ed than they were off, bounding over the snow in great leaps. Eleanor felt the hard ticking of the hare’s heart as her body in nightclothes slid over its fur. Beside her Thomas was taut as greenwood, his breath a cold white scuffle. When they reached the toymaker’s shop the hare ducked its head, sending the children tumbling onto the frostbitten cobblestones.

  The shop nestled among darkened buildings like a lit birthday cake. From its open door poured tinkling music-box notes and thick golden light. Gripping her brother’s hand, Eleanor walked over its threshold.

  There before them were all the toymaker’s treasures. The paper ballerinas had grown to the size of children, with the small heads and slim limbs of women. They pirouetted in skirts of taffeta netting, their laughter scattering like light. The hare shrank down to size and rejoined the menagerie, which danced on hind legs and bumped friendly noses against the children’s knees. The apple-cheeked woman who worked for the toymaker held out plump arms, moving from behind the counter to greet them. Eleanor laughed at the sight, triumphant at uncovering one of the shop’s secrets: the woman was a clockwork, her lower half a solid wedge of unworked metal.

  Shyly Thomas approached the soldiers, and soon he was leading a company of them in battle against the red dragon, whose muzzle licked with real flames. Pixies made of lantern light scurried over the walls, and the little ballerinas pulled Eleanor to her knees, touching her eyelids with glitter and her lips with paint, and nestling a paste-and-tin crown into her hair. When she rose again the tin soldier waited for her. His arms held and spun her so lightly she might have been a soap bubble. The laugh that broke from her lips seemed stolen from a different girl.

  The hours wore on and Eleanor thought nothing of the hard, poor world beyond the toy shop’s doors. The night was almost through when she remembered to ask after the toymaker, sensing dimly that she must thank him. She hoped he might send her home with an armful of gifts.

  “The maker does not show his face,” the animals sang, surging around her in a giddy whirl.

  “Look for him behind his children,

  We’re his offspring, every one

  Look for him behind the daydream

  See his face before we’re done!”

  A host of rats swirled beneath the hem of Eleanor’s nightgown. She shrieked at the tickle of their tails and the chatter of their little metal teeth. As the song’s last note faded, the soldier dropped his hands from her waist. In two blinks he was toy-size and marching over the floor. The rats ran in a wet black line into an open toy box, followed by the soldiers. The ballerinas leapt skyward and caught hold of their strings, shrinking into flat paper figures with their arms outthrown. Soon the whole shop was tucked away and still. Early light tapped at the windows, and all that was left of the night was the crown in Eleanor’s hair.

  Her brother was nowhere to be seen.

  “Thomas?” she whispered. Then she said it louder. Soon she was circling the shop, crying his name, fear tightening its grip on her throat.

  “Have you lost him?”

  Eleanor spun toward the back of the shop. The voice had come from behind a painted screen, made to look like a theater stage with its curtains tied back. Through its fabric she could see the figure of a man, too long and thin as a finger bone. He spoke again.

  “Little girl who thought she had nothing, have you lost your brother, too?”

  “What have you done with him?” She would not allow her voice to tremble.

  “What have I done? I’ve given him the gift of all his dreams come true.” The figure bowed, his spidery outline folding nearly in two. Then he stepped from behind the curtain.

  He was a man unnaturally tall and extraordinarily dirty, his skin as oil-stained as his suit. Under the filth he was handsome, in a curdled, wicked way: eyes keen, bones sharp, mouth as wide and fleshy as a rotten fruit.

  “Where is Thomas? Give him back.”

  “As you wish.” The toymaker kneeled, heaving open a chest to reveal her brother curled inside it, fast asleep. Eleanor rushed to him, shaking his shoulder and calling his name, but he slept on.

  “What have you done?” she cried. “Wake him up!”

  The toymaker watched the slumbering boy, his face tender. “Would you interrupt his dreaming? And then how would my pretty things run? I can only do so much with ribbons and ratchet wheels. My creations feed on the dreams of children who lie asleep, spinning the enchantments I pluck from their heads. How many things might I make from this sleeper? And what would you give me to wake him instead?”

  Eleanor reached for her brother, then stopped. He looked so peaceful. Here she stood, shivering in her nightgown, as he lost himself in visions that carried him far beyond the reach of long nights and bare cupboards and their mother’s endless crying.

  Envy wrapped cold green hands around her heart. Thomas had always been the easy child. Easy to love, at ease in the world. A comfort to her mother in ways she would never be. He could soothe her sorrows when Eleanor could not.

  “Myself,” she said. “I would give myself.”

  The toymaker twitched one hand, dismissively. “I have no use for hungry girls. I make beautiful things, curious things. What would I make of dreams with claws and teeth?”

  Eleanor flushed. “I have nothing else to offer.”

  “Aha.” He put up a finger. “You have nothing else yet. But one day you’ll be a bride. On another you’ll become a mother. And when your first child comes of age, it will be mine. Do you agree to my terms?”

  Eleanor considered the life he laid out for her. A girl, then a wife, then a mother. A life in which the only mysteries open to her lay beyond the place where Death waited, tapping his pocket watch.

  “I will have no children,” she said. She’d seen her own mother in childbed twice. One baby was buried before it was old enough to speak, the other given to its father to live a kinder life somewhere else. Eleanor would never, ever become a mother.

  “Have children or not, my terms are unchanged. Do you accept them?”

  “I do.”

  Gently the toymaker touched Thomas’s cheek, leaving a smudge of oil behind. The boy opened his eyes at once. It took longer for the dreamer’s smile to leave his lips.

  Sister and brother walked over the diamond-hard streets in their nightclothes and cloaks and boots. They let themselves into their quiet apartment, the whole place gone gray with their mother’s sleeping breath. Eleanor lifted the toy crown from her hair and hid it away, then lay beside Thomas. He reached for her hand.

  “Eleanor,” he whispered. “I was having the most wonderful dream.”

  * * *

  Thomas died at the end of winter. Since their night at the toymaker’s he’d been dozy and drifting, and slipped so easily into fever he was gone before anyone knew he was ill. The sickness that took him swept through town and stole away more than half its children. By spring the toy shop had closed its doors and the toymaker moved away. No one could bear to see the playthings glinting through his windows with so many little ones lost.

  Eleanor grew up. The night she spent playing in a wakeful toy shop faded to memory, then dimmed to a dream. She didn’t think about the toymaker and her promise. Two summers after Thomas’s death their mother, not so old and still beautiful, married a widower twice her age, and they moved into his house. Two more years came and went, and the old man took an increasing interest in giving his stepdaughter away. Soon there were dances held in his hall, one a week until Eleanor determined it would, in fact, be better to accept a young man’s suit than to spend her life in clumsy courtship.

  The boy she said yes to had a richer father and a softer heart than she deserved, and a romantic streak that allowed him to love her on the basis of her dark eyes and the moods he interpreted as shyness. Even Eleanor knew she was lucky.

  On her wedding day her mother dressed her in a burden of white lace and combed her hair, looking into the glass over her daughter’s shoulder. Though they were safe now, her mother’s face still held th
e shadows of the hard years. “I have a gift for you,” she said, her mouth almost smiling.

  The thing she lifted into the light was made of tin cut delicately as lace, studded with paste diamonds. She settled it into her daughter’s hair.

  “I found it among our old things,” she said. “Who knows where it came from. It’s just a plaything, but isn’t it pretty? It’s good luck to wear a piece of the past on your wedding day.”

  The crown’s fine teeth dug into Eleanor’s scalp as she gripped her intended’s hands and listened to the judge who married them. Its false stones threw little lights against the walls of his chambers. When she closed her eyes she saw a yellow-haired soldier and the warm speckled back of a clockwork hare.

  Her new husband winced, then winked at her. Don’t be nervous, he mouthed, turning his hand to show her where her nails had bitten into his skin.

  * * *

  There was always going to be a baby. Eleanor didn’t accept that until she was too far gone to deny it, knuckles between her teeth to hold back the hysteria that threatened to leak from her throat. Her husband’s face went so soft when she told him. There was nothing he wouldn’t forgive her now: her impatience, her forgetfulness, her formless anxiety.

  “All you must do,” he said soothingly, “is take care of yourself and our child. Do nothing that might harm it, or you.”

  She tried not to laugh when he said that. She tried not to scream. In her dreams she was a child still, not yet pregnant, and Thomas lay in a toy chest. His fingers curving over its rim were bone white, were bones; he was trying to escape but he was too weak to rise. When he managed to pull himself out, he turned to show Eleanor the key in his back.

  It would’ve been so easy, he said in his ticking, whirring new voice. You could have saved me just by winding my key.

  She woke soaked in sweat. Soaked in more than sweat; her water had broken. For three breaths she thought she could outrun it. On the back of a brindle hare, the thighs of a soldier pressing on either side of her.