The queen bade him to slay the princess and bring back her human heart. “For,” she said, “I know you will not kill your own kind, and the chit was born, not made.”
The woodsman nodded gravely with a slow, inexorable tick of clockwork, shading his eyes with their smoked-glass inner lids before the queen. She dazzled his mechanically optimized eyes as she dazzled everyone's, for her outer cladding was white gold and germanium; but through his shaded lenses he could see how the streaks of blood-red rust decorated her, and knew as few could know that the plating was thin, for the metal beneath was base in nature, and the fresh coats she demanded ever more often could only slow the wearing and tarnishing. Perhaps, in her youth, this was why the automaton lady had adopted the name Rose Red, so that she might brashly claim the rust was only her true mechanical blood showing through, but this was when she was a bolder woman and before she had fallen in love with the king.
The queen's order was not unexpected. Everyone knew how she had seduced the king to her bed after his first, biotic wife had died in giving birth to the princess. The king had insisted upon marrying her, and when the people saw how she glittered and glowed in the light, they said that perhaps she was indeed a jewel fit to adorn a king; and when they saw her in the shade or in the cool darkness within the palace, and they could see the faint pink glow of love in her oscillated eyes, they agreed that maybe she was fit to be his wife and fit to rule.
But her shining body was beginning to tarnish now and it terrified her, and she feared as few biotic women would fear: that the aging of her sweet stepdaughter would draw away the eyes of her husband the king. Having no blood, she did not fully understand its ties; having no relations, there was no one to explain to her that raising a child forbade its sexual charms from the eyes of the parent, or point out to her that to many fathers, their daughters were always little girls. The queen saw only that the daughter's body was changing as the stepmother's never would; that her breasts were changing shape as the queen's hammered curves never could; and most terribly, that the queen's own underlying metal would tarnish away and poison the human parts soldered into her automaton form before the lines of a life lived ever graced the face of her daughter.
So she gave this order, and the woodsman bowed and spoke to say that it would be done.
He fetched the girl and took her into the forest, saying that her mother and father wished her to be shown the biotic-clockwork creatures in his charge, the descendants of half-perfected works escaped from the laboratories of long ago, which roamed the wilderness now under the woodsman's care. He noticed that the girl looked at him with polite curiosity as he led her pony with its kid-leather skin into the trees, for he was the same as the creatures he guarded and the queen he served: a human heart was made to mechanically beat in his forged chest, the fluid pressure of a human organ turning the gears that created kinetic force to move his limbs.
When they were deep in the forest, he asked her to dismount, and drew a knife from his belt. At first the girl looked trustingly around to see what he would do with it, but when she looked back at him, first confusion and then fear began to dawn in her inefficient but beautiful biotic eyes. He began to stab down at her soft, vulnerable chest with the knife, but her scream reached his ears and he halted just as the blade sliced her skin.
The woodsman was not incapable of feeling the pangs from his human heart, and he had learned to trust them, for they had never led him wrong, even when he did not quite know why.
He looked at the girl first through his dark inner lids and then with his full eyes. She had a glow that did not dazzle and overawe, like that of the queen's white gold and germanium body, but softened and soothed and quieted the pumping of his human heart in a way that he did not understand but which he connected, oddly, to the engineered nectar-full flowers that grew in the shady places of his wooded demesne, and the hydroponic antigravity bees that hummed busily over their heavy, sensual blooms.
“I will give the queen the heart of a sow,” he said. “You cannot return, for she will have me ended and disassembled and melted down, and you will be ended and molder in the dirt. You may die here in the wilderness, for I know the needs of biotic creatures are many, but you will not perish by my hand. I will give her the heart of a sow.”
So he let the girl go, and splashed her flowing blood over the fine leather skin of her pony, which stood patiently for this treatment as an unthinking creature does. She stared at him for a moment, then bent closer and cautiously kissed his cheek, with its coarser leather coat stretched over a carbon steel shell, which had never been kissed before. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Flee,” he told her, and she fled. The pony turned and made its refined clockwork steps toward the palace where it had its home.
The woodsman went to find a sow. The animals were made like him, and it grieved him to kill his own kind, but since they were made like him he could see that the small, young sow he chose could not feel, and did not suffer from her slaying. He could hear in the slow beat of the ventricles that powered him that the strange kiss from the girl had eased his human heart, and he could feel in the inexorable tick of his gears that what he had done was a lesser sin.
He cut out the sow's stilled heart and returned to his queen to lie that he had slain the princess.
***
The woodsman brought the sow's heart to the queen and she greedily stretched out her white and golden hands with their faint fingernails of rust. “Give it to me,” she said. “I will consume it and it will make the human parts of my body stronger. Since you have served me so well, you may have the smaller half.”
He gave her the heart with its drips of oil and blood soaking the wrappings, and she tore the cloth and split the heart with her strong metal thumbs. The woodsman took the smaller half she offered and both of them ate.
She did not think to look for it, but since the ancestors of the sow he killed had been imperfectly made many generations ago, the wire tendons and tiny clockwork movements of her joints had been passed along from the mechanical wombs of a dozen pigs and worked their way into her organs and bones in an evolution more complex than that of genes and more organic than that of technology. Buried within the heart were three tiny gears. The woodsman swallowed the largest, and felt it go down his metal throat; the queen bit in with her pearl teeth and swallowed two smaller ones, and felt neither.
***
There's more to the story, telling what happened to Steampunk Snow White, how she met the Prince of the Lost and his seven clockwork children, how the gears the queen and the woodsman swallowed affected them and what she did when she found out ... but this first part, at any rate, was reasonably fit to be shown to the world.
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