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The girl shut her eyes, and the vast blackness of her lids glinted in the blue snow-light. No letters moved on them, they were dark and smooth and empty, no more than a mark, no more than ink. An owl flew overhead, home from a night of hunting.
“Perhaps,” the girl said. “There is always a moment when stories end, a moment when everything is blue and black and silent, and the teller does not want to believe it is over, and the listener does not, and so they both hold their breath and hope fervently as pilgrims that it is not over, that there are more tales to come, more and more, fitted together like a long chain coiled in the hand. They hold their breath; the trees hold theirs, the air and the ice and the wood and the Gate. But no breath can be held forever, and all tales end.” The girl opened her eyes. “Even mine.”
“Yes, my dear, even yours,” said a gentle, rough voice, like the feathers of a goose’s wings rubbing together.
The girl turned and saw, on the other side of the Gate, on the other side of the wrought-iron battle with its cannon of ice, a bent old woman with tangled silver hair and a long, hooked nose. The girl caught her breath like a fawn in sight of a wolf, and her hands began to tremble.
“You are here… you are here to judge me,” she said, her throat dry.
“That would be a severe interpretation,” said the crone with a sly grin.
The girl’s great dark eyes filled up with tears, glittering like snowflakes in firelight. She bit her lip. “Am I good?” she blurted. “Was I good enough? Am I a good girl? I am not wicked, like they said. I am not a demon, I swear it. Was I good enough for the spirit? I tried so hard not to be wicked, or angry, or bitter, even when the night was very cold.”
The crone tucked a silver strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you remember me?” she asked, as though she had not heard anyone speak.
The girl dried her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Yes,” she said, “you came when I was little, as little as one of my brown-backed geese. You told me about the tales. And you gave me my knife.” The girl drew it out of her crimson dress, the small, curving silver knife with its handle of bone.
The old woman nodded. “It is my knife. But it was better that you have it. You were more often hungry than I.”
“Please,” the girl said. “How does it end? How do I end? I have waited so long.”
The old woman wound her hands in the dead, dry rose-roots of the Gate. “Oh, my darling girl,” she whispered, her voice thick, “I know you have.”
THE
LAST
TALE
ONCE, THERE WAS A FERRY ON A LONELY GRAY lake on a lonely gray shore. It creaked in the storms and the wind, and its tether stretched. A man with a hunch on his back poled it back and forth, clothed all in rags.
Once, there was a lonely island in a lonely lake, and on that lonely island was a woman with green scales glittering on her skin, and she walked the shore, and the eyes that blinked on the gray lakeside wept for her. But the woman did not weep. She wrung her fingers and looked into the mist and considered many things, for her mind was as vast as the lake itself. From time to time a young man with red skin like fine wood came to find her, and stroke her green-black hair. But she could not be consoled, and finally stepped onto the cracked boards of the dock and opened her throat to call the ferry. She called until her voice died on the wind, dry as a molted skin. Please, she called. Please come back.
It did not concern the ferryman if the lake folk needed him. But he could not help but hear the snake-woman’s cries, and when the day’s storms had passed, leaving his bones wet and his lizards irritable, he let the ferry drift as it wanted to—for sometimes in his loneliness the man believed the ferry as alive as he, and he spoke to it, and listened to its troubles, which had mostly to do with barnacles and algae. But the ferry now spoke of a voice pulling at it like a pole, and it longed to go toward that voice, that snake-song which flicked its tongue at the poor ferry in the fog. They floated out to the island with the beach of eyes, and there was the woman with her glittering green skin, her long hair wet and plastered to her hips, her eyes dark and needful.
“I want to see her,” she said, before the ferryman had finished his docking.
“That is impossible.”
“No, it is not. You ferry anyone, if they pay the toll. I will pay. In the world, in the Sun, in the blood-riddled world, my daughter is breathing and eating her breakfast with a golden fork and laughing at a joke the cook has told her. I want to see her.” The woman’s eyes softened with depthless pleading. “Just once.”
“And what do you think you can pay?”
“You took the huldra’s tail.”
“I did.”
“Will you take my hair?”
The ferryman considered. He did not wish to. It was not right, and not his habit. But he should, perhaps, have refused the child in the first place, and to become priggish now seemed useless, small. The tolls these days were strange, and he had seen more tolls than he had ever seen years in the world. He thought perhaps he had tired of them, the endless coins, and these late, grotesque amputations.
“I will take it,” he said slowly, his voice echoing not at all in the thick fog, “but you must agree to my terms.”
The woman waited, her green a scream of desire in the gray.
“I will take your hair as two tolls—across, and back. You may not go as the goose-woman went, into the world to live and eat bread and dance. You must come back. You are not like her. Go to your child, just once, and return to me, to the lonely lake and the lonely shore. This is all that is right and proper.”
The woman nodded, and gathered her long, shimmering green-black hair into her hand. With the sharp edge of the ferryman’s wing-bones, she severed it at her neck, and stepped on board the ferry. It sighed under her, glad in what ways nails and wood can be glad. They drifted into the lake, and Zmeya looked back to the shore, where two young men with red skin like a ship’s hull stared after the dwindling raft. She raised her hand, and the mist closed over her.
