“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 clouds 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.”
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.