The Clockwork Heart

[bairnsidhe]

Once Upon A Time, when such things happen, in a magical land that had seen stranger things, a girl was born without a heart. The girl with no heart was not born to a cursed royal couple, but to simple craftspeople in a moderately sized village. Her mother was greensmith who worked copper and fixed pots, and her father made and mended clocks. Once, in his youth, the clockmaker had done a kindness for a fairy, and so she came to them with warning of what would happen when his wife gave birth. Distraught at the idea they might lose their child, they made for her a clockwork heart. The clockmaker drafted the plan, and his wife made all the parts, and together they assembled a gleaming copper heart to save their daughter. She was born screaming, pink and perfect, and they named her Corretta. Thanks to hard work and a little bit of friendly magic, her clockwork heart worked.

Sort of.

Coretta grew like any child would. She was a fussy baby who didn’t care for scratchy lace, or the oily feel of wool. She would screw her face up like a wound clock spring, and when she’d had enough, her scream was louder than the tolling of the bells in the town’s clock tower. Her parents despaired of getting her to dress like the other children, and fashioned her garments of soft leather, tiny and perfect and done up with copper buttons as bright as her eyes. Her parent’s trades were good ones, a greensmith was always needed, and while clocks were not as frequently bought, the work was good enough that nobles with deep pockets would come to buy his wares, and so Corretta grew up, if not in wealth, at least in comfort.

In time, Coretta began to make friends with the other children. They liked the stories she could tell, the way she could always tell it again, exactly as before. She never got tired of telling the same stories, or singing the same songs, the way grown-ups sometimes did. She remembered every detail, down to the time the story happened and the exact words, every time. They liked when she drew the circles for their marble games, so precise and neat that nobody could accuse anyone of cheating. She remembered rules and she could always reset a game exactly where it was before, but she didn’t like to play herself, she preferred to watch. They liked that she could always remember the order to do things when they were sent out with chores, so nothing was left undone, and nobody got in trouble. She was always being asked to come with the other children when it was time to play.

This did not last.

“That is a lie,” said Coretta. “You did say that, last week, right after the quarter hour of the fifth bell.”

“Go away! I didn’t ask you,” said the lying boy.

Coretta turned away. She did not like lying, it was complicated and messy. You always had to know not only what you knew, but what you’d said you knew, and who you told that you knew it. It did not sit well in the narrow passages of her clockwork heart, but instead scraped and pulled like a patina on the gears. It was easier not to lie, and easier not to talk to liars.

“You are cheating,” said Coretta. “Your piece was there, not over here. Also, you have more pawns than you should.”

“You didn’t have to say anything,” grumbled the cheating girl, glaring at the chess game she had almost won. “Why do you care if I’m cheating, I wasn’t playing against you.”

“It isn’t fair,” said Coretta. “You got to move things and your opponent did not. That is not even or balanced. It isn’t right or just. Things should be fair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” snapped the cheating girl, and the girl with the clockwork tilted her head, to see if that idea made more sense on its side.

“No, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it be,” said Coretta.

“Go away,” said the cheating girl.

Coretta shrugged, and went to read a book. The game on the black and white board wasn’t as interesting as she thought it would be anyway. She liked games that were round, the straight lines were too easy.

“We have a test today,” Coretta told the teacher. The teacher had almost forgotten what day it was, and hadn’t given them their test. They had one every week, at the same time on the same day.

“Oh, but since I forgot, it’s alright if you don’t do the test,” said the teacher. Everyone sighed with relief, except Coretta.

“May I please take the test?”

“I suppose, if the class wants to take the test anyways,” said the teacher happily. The other children did not want to take the test, but Coretta did not know why. She liked getting things done when they were supposed to happen. It reassured her that everything was safe, the same as it had always been.

That she wasn’t lost.

Coretta hated feeling lost.

So, as she grew older, Coretta had fewer and fewer friends. Children she had played with no longer taught her the rules to their games, and nobody asked her for stories anymore. So she went to school, returned home, and studied her parent’s crafts.

With her mother, she learned how to forge copper into useful things. She worked hard to learn the names of all the tools, even the ones that made no sense. It was sweaty work that made her itch, so to make it bearable, she made the tool names into a song.

Bellows, Forge, and Anvil.

Tongs Twisting and Lifting.

Hammer Ball and Hammer Flat.

Mallet for softly shaping,

Wire stretches out from plate,

Stamps and dies and graving knives

All in the toolbox wait.

With her father, she learned the parts of a clock, and how they fit together, how the springs coiled and the gears meshed. She learned how to wear the funny glasses that made things bigger, and her steady hands and patience made her very good at watches.

This made Coretta happy, for a time, she loved her parents, and she loved her work. It wasn’t enough though, and sometimes she wondered what it would be like to know how to act, to make people like her. She knew her heart had been blessed by a fairy, so it could grow with her, even though it was made of copper, maybe she could ask the fairy to cast a spell and give her the wisdom to say what people wanted. She sat in the back garden and tried to decide what to say to the fairy, and what to say to ask her father to send for the fairy. Asking wrong tended to make people upset.

“That’s not going to work,” said the woman who lived next door. She had a lovely garden, but the townsfolk stayed away. Some people said she was a witch, but Coretta doubted that. If she were a witch, she definitely would have turned someone into a toad by now, and the neighbor woman was not treated much better.

“What’s not?”

“A spell to learn the hearts of others,” said the neighbor woman. “And can you maybe not think so loud? I moved here because you’re a quiet child, and I like that.”

“Are you a witch?” asked Coretta. It wouldn’t quite matter if her neighbor was a witch, but it seemed smart to know the truth. It was easier to make choices when you knew what tools you had and what skills other people had.

“No, I’m just a woman with a heart of ice. There was a snow queen, you see… my heart couldn’t be melted, but there was an elf who owed me. I asked for what you’re thinking of asking for, and now I know more than I want. You see not enough of the hearts of people, I see… too much. Sometimes it isn’t real,” she admitted. “Sometimes the curse of seeing hearts makes me think there’s anger where there is only pain or tiredness. Sometimes I see my own heart reflected off them, think they feel what I’m feeling, only I don’t know what I’m feeling, because of the ice. But sometimes I just learn things I didn’t want to know.”

“Can you teach me what it’s like?” asked Coretta. “To see what people think and feel, I mean. I don’t want to have a curse, but maybe we can work together to make our hearts easier to bear.”

“It probably won’t work,” warned the woman with ice in her heart. “Nothing else has. Although that does mean I’ve nothing to lose. Sure, we can try.”

Years passed and Coretta became good friends with Kay, the woman with the heart of ice. They worked together to sort out a system Coretta could use, making subtle cues into a map, a diagram of the gears and levers of the heart, as reflected on the face. It wasn’t unlike building a large clock at all, she thought, or mapping out where in the work her mother was, based of what tools were out.

Still, though, it was lonely, just the two of them. The clockmaker and his wife were kind, but they did not really understand the two heartless women, and Kay and Coretta didn’t always like the same things. Coretta didn’t care about the long dresses and fine hats Kay collected, and Kay thought stories were boring unless they were true.

“I sort of want to go courting,” said Coretta. “The books make it sound fun.”

“Those books are written for women with hearts,” said Kay, fluffing the purple feathers on her newest hat. “And courting is more trouble than it’s worth. I never liked it, anyway, even before the snow queen put ice in my heart. People in my old town said that’s why she did it, she saw herself in me and wanted a successor.”

“Well, that’s great for you, but I still want to try,” said Coretta. She’d learned when it was best to ignore her friend’s pessimism, and when to see it as hard-won wisdom. “But I don’t want a man with a heart. People with hearts are too unpredictable, they lie too often, and I don’t trust them at all.”

“Seems smart,” said Kay. Even when she thought what Coretta wanted was silly, she appreciated the wisdom shown by the girl with the clockwork heart in how she got it. “I’ll send a letter to the next town, see if anyone’s heard of a boy with no heart. At the very least, we could use another person around here. Your mother’s not going to work that forge forever, and you’re much better at clockmaking than forging.”

They waited for months, and while they waited they did all the things they’d done before. Corretta worked in the garden of the woman with ice in her heart. Kay helped the parents of the girl with the clockwork heart. They ate dinners together every night at the same time, with food that changed like the calendar, neat and even and soothing. For women with no hearts, they learned to show a lot of love.

One day, Coretta was sitting on her bench by the front garden, watching butterflies and thinking of clock faces, when a boy stopped at her gate.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she replied. He hadn’t been rude yet, after all, and she liked to start things in the proper order, nice then rude, not the other way around.

“Is this the place where people have no hearts?” he asked.

“This is a place with two people who don’t happen to have hearts,” she said clearly. Specificity was important. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m a changeling,” he said. “Fairies left me behind and took the baby I look like away. My parents raised me because it’s bad luck to cast out a changeling before they turn eighteen, but my birthday is in two months, and I wanted to get settled before they tell me to go. I thought people with no hearts might understand me better.”

“Do you have a heart?” Coretta asked him. His face was nice, round like a clock’s face, and he didn’t smell of sticky perfumes and sour sweat, like the boys who lived in her town.

“Maybe? It’s a fairy heart if I do, and people think it’s strange. But I think it works alright.”

Coretta looked him over carefully. People said fairies were tricksome and cold, telling the truth but only technically, but then they also said that of Kay, who was quite nice. It wasn’t her fault people didn’t pay attention to what she was saying.

“What sort of work can you do?” she asked. “We’ll need another greensmith soon, Mother’s knees are starting to go click clack when she stands, and I haven’t figured out clockwork legs yet.”

“I’m no smith, though I could write a friend who is,” the changeling boy said. “My parents were innkeepers, I know how to run an inn. But I don’t have the coin to build one.”

“We do,” said Coretta. “People keep giving me money when I fix their watches and clocks, but I don’t really need it. I’d like to own an inn where heartless people can come, and maybe not feel lonely.”

“I will run your inn for you,” said the changeling boy. “But maybe we should start smaller. The name I use is Gwydion, but you can call me Dion if it’s easier to say.”

“Call me Coretta,” she said, trying a small smile at the edge of her mouth. The changeling boy Dion smiled back, his face almost cracking in two with it. Unlike the smiles of the boys with hearts, this one was only one emotion, happy.

“May I make you dinner?” Dion asked.

“That sounds very nice,” said Coretta.

And so he did, and she enjoyed it. Many years passed and the Clockwork Heart became a well known gathering place for the strange; the cursed who didn’t want their curses lifted, the damsels who didn’t want rescuing, and of course, those without hearts. Kay never did like the idea of courting, although she made many more friends, some of whom also had ice in their hearts and knew how she felt. Dion and Coretta courted a while, then decided they worked better as friends. Their strange hearts let them love each other even after the courting fell through, when all the hearted people said friendships failed. Others who came later courted and wed, and had children together, or formed up groups of adventurers. Some of the groups of adventurers wed, and had children. And over it all, Coretta presided, watching with a serene smile and the certainty of the ticking clock.