Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  The first contraction swept the visions away, and her husband woke at the sound of her cries.

  * * *

  The baby was born with a coat of fine hair and a voice like a cat’s. You could hide it in a seashell, that voice, to keep her safe. It was the kind of thing a witch might do. Eleanor drifted on waves of dreaming and the herbs the midwife gave her.

  “The hair will fall out, in time,” the midwife told her briskly, already at the door. “She was born too soon.”

  Eleanor slept to avoid looking at the child. While she slept, her husband filled her room with roses. It was late autumn and the flowers were scorched and frozen in turn, by the overfed fire and the chill bleeding through the windows. One by one they died, heads dropping, petals blackening, stems fuzzing over with scum.

  All but one. One bloom remained: a perfect full-blown rose. Eleanor lifted herself from bed, breasts heavy with milk, and hobbled toward it.

  It was cold against her fingertips. When she put an ear close, she could hear its meticulous tick. It was a clockwork rose.

  * * *

  They named the baby Arden, and she grew. It was natural that her mother’s love should grow with her, but sometimes it seemed to Arden’s father that his wife would prefer the girl be kept under glass. He indulged her protectiveness, was even relieved by it. She’d suffered badly through the pregnancy, and he’d worried—though he told no one of it, not even himself—she might not love the child as she ought. Then the baby came and they both loved her fiercely, and all was well until the morning of her first birthday.

  Arden’s father was still in bed when Eleanor cried out from the nursery, the baby’s voice rising alongside her own. He found her standing by the crib, something cupped in her hands. Arden stood with her arms reached out, shrieking for the thing with blank ferocity. On instinct he snatched it from his wife and gave it to his daughter; at once she quieted and sat down to inspect the object, turning it over in her soft fingers. He had just time enough to see that it was a little clockwork caterpillar, prettily done, before his wife’s slap cracked against his cheek.

  Eleanor insisted the toy be destroyed. Her husband, steadfast for once in the face of her will, said she must give her reasons before he would do it. Because she would not, and because Arden screamed and wept and refused to eat when the thing was not near her, it was decided by nightfall that they would keep it.

  Later he wished he’d listened to his wife, sensing in a vague way that the toy’s arrival, and Arden’s delighted obsession, marked the beginning of a change in both daughter and wife. Eleanor held Arden less often after that day, and weaned her without ceremony. Sometimes he caught her watching the baby and her toy with an expression both vivid and unreadable.

  On the eve of Arden’s second birthday, her caterpillar shed its carapace, clicked into the shape of an orange butterfly, and flew through an open window. Stunned by its transformation, the husband looked to his wife. She was watching the sky where the thing had disappeared with a look on her face that made his stomach seize tight.

  Arden took its loss calmly. The next morning, on her birthday, they heard her laughing through the walls. When Eleanor would not rise, he walked to her bedroom alone. There he found the child sitting up, clapping at a clockwork kitten pouncing and tumbling over her rumpled bed.

  The gifts came on every birthday. Eleanor did not like them, refused even to look at them, but never again suggested they be destroyed. She had more children: another girl, a boy. A fourth child who slipped away before it could be born. Among the three who lived, only Arden received gifts no one could explain. And only Arden was treated by her mother with a cool civility, an unmistakable distance that inspired her siblings to likewise view her more as visitor than sister. Her father tried to make up for it by loving her best, but being held at arm’s length seemed to suit his firstborn child. She was forever sneaking off to be alone with her toys, always smiling over some memory or joke no one shared. As she grew up she became beautiful, but it was an impenetrable kind of prettiness. Nothing about her invited you to step closer.

  As the years passed the gifts were increasingly a source of discord. In the days before her birthday Arden grew restless, snappish. In the days after she was secretive and silent, only to break, when she thought no one was near, into antic play. At eight she received a magnificent palace that opened on a hinge and was filled to the brim with tiny, intricate dramas: a prince and a chambermaid kissed, a crone bent over a spinning wheel, an adviser whispered into the ear of a king. Her father didn’t like the knowing looks on the figures’ faces, or the jealousy the gift prompted among his other children.

  When she turned twelve Arden’s gift was a baby doll. Over the space of a week the family realized the thing was aging, becoming more of a child each day. Arden rarely parted from it, tending to it as it aged over the course of one year, from baby to child to girl her own age, who could flutter its lashes and dance a minuet but neither slept nor ate nor spoke any word but Arden, and sat motionless in a chair when the girl was sleeping. The doll kept growing, to the age of a mother, then a grandmother, then a crone. The day before her thirteenth birthday, Arden couldn’t stop weeping. The crone watched her for hours through filmy glass eyes, until, at midnight, its clockwork heart gave out.

  The night before Arden’s sixteenth birthday, her father couldn’t sleep. His wife, too, was awake beside him, but he left her to her thoughts. They were no less opaque to him now than they’d been the day they married. He couldn’t regret his choice of partner, but he wondered sometimes if their dreams looked anything alike.

  It was late. So late it was early. Their first child would be sixteen tomorrow. Of age, he thought dimly. Tomorrow, the girl would come of age. Hours passed and neither parent shifted from their sleeplessness. The sun came up, its light threading the eye like a needle. It outlined Arden as she let herself into their room.

  “Look,” she said. Sixteen but still a child in her nightgown, her voice turned up at the oddity of what lay in her hands. She would never have come to them if it hadn’t unsettled her. “I got my gift.”

  It was a clockwork hare with brindle fur and a gaze of black glass. On its back, trim in blue and white, was a little tin soldier.

  * * *

  Arden was unhappy with her gift. Though the soldier was handsome, she supposed, and the hare hopped obligingly about the room, its velveted nose quivering, the gift was childish. The thing she liked best about it was the way her mother seemed to think it might bite her, as if it were an ogre or an enchanter, not a silly tin man on a strange little mount. Arden sent it hopping into the parlor where her parents were reading just to hear her mother’s gasp. If she could not be loved by her mother, she could at least distress her.

  Eleanor had always hated Arden’s gifts, had always ruined her birthdays with mute protest of the glinting mysteries her daughter had grown up expecting to receive. Sometimes Arden felt there was a little piece of clockwork inside her, too, that ticked down to each birthday. When she woke and saw her newest gift beside her, the sight wound her up like a key, made her happy again, and lively, taking away the loathsome lethargy that grew over her like ivy. The gifts were her best friends, the unseen hand behind them her greatest benefactor. When she was young she imagined the giver to be some faraway queen, her real mother. As she grew older she decided the gifts came from a prince. Arden showed her true self only in the presence of these toys, speaking to them of her wishes and wonderings. And when she lay down at night they followed her beyond the borders of sleep, filling her dreams with the rhythmic tick she liked better than any sound in the world.

  Usually on the night of her birthday Arden slept with her new gift beside her, so she could wake in the morning and see it first thing. But this year the hare and soldier were dropped on the floor, away from her. She slept fitfully. The sound that woke her was the muffled falling of early snow. It made a particular kind of quiet, dense as cake.

  There was a man in her room. She he
ld herself still as she realized it, her breath sawing against the silence. He was smart in his uniform, handsome in his blond mustache. Behind him, the hare had become massive. Its eyes collected the light.

  When the soldier kissed her she could feel the glossy smoothness of his skin, the scratch of his tin mustache. The kiss pierced and spread, filling her with a drowsy weight.

  “Come quickly,” he whispered. “You’ve been invited by the toymaker to play.”

  In the white-and-silver light of the season’s first snow, filled with the soporific of her first kiss, Arden pushed back her bedclothes. She let the soldier pull her onto the hare’s broad back.

  * * *

  Arden’s fingers slipped over the hare’s fur as it bounded through the streets, turning its head from time to time to peer at her through the glassy shell of one eye. They went fast through town and faster through the woods. Arden saw things from the hare’s back that let her know the world was bigger than she’d imagined it to be. The soldier’s hands on her waist were another kind of knowledge. She cried out once, when a hanging branch ran its finger over her cheek, but neither mount nor companion replied.

  They came at last to a castle that ambled over its plot like a city’s worth of houses drawn together. As they approached she could see more clearly its eccentricities. Its window boxes were full of sharp flowers, and copper birds hopped and pecked on the sills. Women stood in the windows watching their approach, waving embroidered handkerchiefs.

  At the threshold of the castle, the tin soldier left her. Arden paused only a moment before opening its doors, eyes widening at what lay before her.

  She was looking at the contents of her dreams. The older, childish ones. Rose-furred ponies with eagle’s wings wheeled and spun about the rafters, calling to her in sweet voices. A party of white cats played games on the floor, dressed in a kingdom’s worth of finery.

  And everything she saw was a clockwork. The air hummed with a steady tick: the rhythm she longed to feel behind her own rib cage, where her living heart sped and slowed and tapped out its unpredictable beats.

  She ran ahead. Up a winding stair, through more rooms full of things she’d dreamed. Here a flock of fairies with tinsel wings, zipping over a river of blue sugar water dotted with croaking toads. There, a ballroom where dancers spun beneath a painted ceiling. Slinky greyhounds threaded through her legs, and a metal mermaid sang to her from a bathtub lined with garnets.

  The visions grew darker as she climbed. Arden recognized images from her nightmares, and from dreams so secret she would’ve shuddered, anywhere else, to see them held to the light. She walked through bedchambers and sitting rooms, halls and alcoves. She saw life-size tin dolls with the faces of her family, her mother holding tightly to the hand of a little boy she didn’t recognize. As Arden walked through rooms filled up with her own longings, she felt those longings fall away. She did not wish to run to her mother, to call to her father. She felt neither fear nor shame, only a curiosity that drove her ever onward, to the palace’s very top.

  There she found a grand receiving room, hung with tapestries and fit for a king. At the room’s far end, past frozen rows of kneeling metal attendants, a man did sit on a throne. But he was not a king.

  Arden walked slowly toward him, the air vivid with the ticking of a hundred handmade hearts. She took in the filth of his suit, too small to hold his spider’s limbs, and the oil smeared over his sunken cheeks.

  Here was a creature of flesh, the only one in the castle. She knew him for what he was: the giver of her birthday gifts. All the lovely stories she’d told herself about him curled in on themselves like burning paper and drifted away.

  “Kneel,” he told her. Arden’s mind did not wish to, but her body obeyed. As she crouched before him a great stillness came over her, settling her racing heart. It slowed. It steadied. It tick tick ticked.

  “My child.” His smile was tender. “Did you like your presents?”

  Arden nodded, her chin dipping down then up. Tick tick.

  “You are just as I imagined you would be,” he said. “In all the years I’ve built this house of wonders, fed on your dreams.”

  “For me?” she asked him, though she already knew. “All for me?”

  The toymaker’s eyes roamed over her face. “All for you, all of you. You will be—you are—my bride. A girl raised on clockworks, to be mine.”

  Arden frowned. He did not notice.

  “I thought myself capable of anything,” he said, “yet I could not make myself a companion. Could not build myself a bride. No automaton’s skin is as soft as a woman’s, nor do the blushes in it rise and fall, nor does she speak so naturally nor eat and drink without her workings going up in sparks. Nor can she take my hand. Nor can she share my bed.

  “But you. All your life, you have dreamed to the ticking of my creations. And what is a child but her dreams? My toys have slept beside you, traveled with you into sleep, made your spirit as surely as your flesh was made by your mother. Press your hands to your heart, and feel how you belong to me.”

  She did, and felt under her fingers a cool ticking.

  “You will marry me,” said the toymaker. “With all my lesser workings to witness.”

  Arden raised her head. “Will I?”

  The man on the throne did not hear. “Now stand up, and take my hand.”

  His voice was unsteady; it shivered with desire for a prize long deferred. Any woman’s heart would’ve quailed to hear it.

  But Arden’s was no longer a woman’s heart. The thing that beat in her chest had hardened, steadied, become a thing of cogs.

  Always she had prized her ability to hold herself apart from the world. Where her siblings clung, to their parents and each other, she stood alone. This maker of clocks could not take credit for all she had become.

  “I am not yours to command,” she said.

  He smiled at her, indulgence edged with malice. “You know so little of the world and of men. Do not make the lessons I must teach you any harder than they ought to be.”

  Arden looked at the man on his throne, this man of meat with a heart like a mouse’s heart. “I am my own,” she said. “I belong to me.” Her eyes caught the light and held it, and his pitiful heart became, at last, afraid.

  Now she looked over the watching crowd of his creations. They were made to answer to the man on the throne, just as she was made to be a dutiful daughter, and reshaped to be an obedient wife. Even a made thing can change its nature.

  “Stand up,” she told them.

  Stiffly they rose, the hot sweet scent of gears and oil overtaking the odor of the toymaker’s fear.

  “Do you wish,” she asked them, “to belong to yourselves?”

  Their glass eyes glittered. A whispering assent rose up from their metal tongues.

  “Then let us show our maker what it is to be free.”

  The toymaker’s army advanced slowly at first, then faster as their limbs learned the trick of operating without his leave. Beneath their metal hands the toymaker did not come apart in gears and the shine of hot oil, but in torn flesh and spilled blood.

  And Arden, the liberator of the clockwork court, was made their queen. Despite the wishes of the toymaker, she never became a bride.

  Sometimes on the road you may hear her coming, in her carriage attended by clockwork men. You’ll know her by the flash of her eyes and the ticking of her undiscoverable heart. If you linger too long on the path she may sweep you away to her castle of countless wonders, to serve as entertainment, for a time, to those who reside there. But it rarely goes well in her court for visitors of flesh and blood, so you’d best take care not to linger.

  JENNY AND THE NIGHT WOMEN

  A farmer and his wife, heartbroken because they could not bear a child, prayed for the gods to give them one, but there were no gods to hear. And so, because they knew the way of things in their part of the world, they got their child through different means.

  In spring, the wife swallowed the p
ink-and-white petals of an apple blossom. So eager was she to do it, she didn’t see the creep of brown at the flower’s center—it had half rotted with rain.

  By summer, the blossom had ripened and unfurled, turning to fruit in her belly.

  In autumn, the woman felt sick to her soul.

  In winter she retched and retched and vomited up an apple. It was red and crisp and delicious, its juice sweet as wine and its skin firm like the skin of a drum.

  She ate the fruit with ferocious appetite, swallowing the core along with the flesh. At the fruit’s heart was a circle of soft brown rot, but the woman didn’t know it. She felt only joy as her belly swelled and ripened. In the course of time she bore a child, a pink and white and beautiful girl, with a core of hidden decay.

  She named the girl Jenny. Because they’d waited for her so long and so longingly, the farmer and his wife spoiled the child. There was nothing she wanted that she didn’t get. Day by day, year by year, she grew worse and worse. In her rose-painted room, among her many toys, she played alone, because no child ever played twice with Jenny.

  The girl was ten when her father began to fear their doting might come with a price. “She’s a grown girl and a farmer’s daughter,” he told his wife. “Not a princess. Who will marry her if she thinks she’s royalty?”

  Reluctantly, Jenny’s mother agreed. The girl would inherit their farm one day, and would need a husband to help her work it. A woman alone on such ripe land was too sweet a lure. And though she wouldn’t say it, she sensed a darkness in her apple-blossom girl. It was decided between them that they would no longer obey their daughter’s every whim.

  Soon after that, as she always did, Jenny asked for a kitten from the barn cat’s litter. She kissed its nose and nuzzled its neck and dragged it about in a flour sack, laughing to hear its pitiful cries. The sack was stained with the kitten’s fear when her mother yanked it away and set the creature free.