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.