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 held 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.”