A Creature of Moonlight (15 page)

“I didn't ask them to do it,” I say one evening as I take Edgar's arm to walk into the dining hall. We're bringing up the pack tonight; I've held him back so there's no one left to hear us as we walk. “I didn't ask them to pit themselves against the king.”

“You didn't need to,” Edgar says. “They were ready; they were ripe for it. There are plenty of us who never felt right about what happened to your mother or how he abandoned you. A king who can kill his own sister . . .” He shakes his head, and I near love him at that moment for what's in his eyes as he looks at me, all fierce and bright. “And now that there's trouble with the woods, and the king hasn't been able to stop it—”

“You said they blame me for that.”

“Some do. It's not your country, though, is it? You're not in charge of what happens to its people.”

We've reached the entrance to the dining hall; the others have found their seats, and the king will be arriving soon. He won't look kindly on us if we're dawdling outside the doors. “Well,” Edgar says before we walk on through, “it's not your country
yet
.” And then we're making our way to our seats. The nobles are watching us, wondering, no doubt, what we've just been speaking of, and I feel a thrill despite myself, to be this center of attention, to be the subject of their thoughts.

I love that, too, the sudden power of being courted by him. I love his talk of me taking the kingdom for my own, even though I know—I
know
—he's thinking that when I have the kingdom, he will be king.

He pulls out my chair for me as I sit down, and he whispers into my ear, “It won't be long now, Marni, before the king gets what's coming to him and you get what's yours.” He raises his eyebrows at me as he slides into the seat beside me, and I smile back at him.

When the king walks in with the queen on his arm, I let his glare wash over me. Edgar's words, his nearness, and his friendship keep me safe, and for a moment I believe him. I believe in the truth of the future that he's offering to me.

C
OME THE SECOND
week of the festivals, Edgar starts trying again to get me to marry him.

He asks me in silly ways, in breathtaking ways, and in serious ways. He asks me in the main hall as we're passing out berry tarts that the ladies have cooked up as a midwinter treat; we both reach for the same blueberry one, and we're standing like that, holding the tart between us, and he whispers, “Marry me,” and I shake my head, laughing.

He asks me while we're dancing; every time he spins me around, as I turn back to face him, he says it quick, then spins me away again. I don't have the breath for answering, even.

He asks me when we're sitting by my fire after dinner with only my maid Sylvie for company, and she's knitting and muttering to herself about something, and I don't know if she sees when he edges his chair over next to mine, takes my hand from where it's resting on my lap, and says, as solemn as anything, “Marni, I know I've made light of this, but I wish you would give in and marry me.”

The firelight is painting his face in orange shadows. His eyes are dark, darker than the corners of the room, and I want to look away because I don't know what I'm to do when he looks at me like that.

“I won't,” I say, but I keep on looking at him. I like the dark of his eyes and the light on his face. I like the seriousness in his voice. I've even grown familiar with the arrogance in every inch of him. He keeps asking because he knows I'll say yes. He owns near half the court now, their loyalty, their fear. It's not just him who thinks he'll win me. It's everyone who thinks so. They're only split on whether they like the idea or not.

“You think I'm asking only for the throne,” he says. He folds his other hand over the first, so that my fingers are cocooned between his warm palms. I'm not sure I've ever felt this way before. I think,
As long as he doesn't let go, I'll be safe. I won't have to watch out for myself anymore
.

“Yes,” I say.

“I'm not,” he says. “I don't like what the king has done, and I'd be happy to bring him down. I don't think I'm imagining that you feel the same way.”

“No,” I say.

“But it's more than that.” He's looking at me so softly, as if he cares—not just about my rights as a princess, but about me, the girl who thinks and dreams. “I like you, Marni. I want to love you. There's something pure about you, though you keep yourself hidden away. There's something unwilling to yield to any injustice, any untruth. I like that about you.”

He's so close now, and I'm not leaning away. Why am I not leaning away?

“I like a lot of things about you.”

And then—then he's kissing me. I suppose that's what this is, the warm rush of his skin, the taste of his tongue, the melting all through me. My fingers are tingling, and now his hand is on my waist, and now my hands are in his hair.

I don't want to stop. I want to keep on like this forever, and not care what it means, and not care whether he's lying or what the king will do about it. My eyes are closed, and I'm someone I've never been—free, certain, disconnected from the world. There's no thought of the woods and no thought of any vengeance.

I love it, this feeling. I love the melting into nothing; I love the fierce refusal to care anymore.

But it also terrifies me.

“Marni? What is it?”

I'm up; I'm standing by the fireplace, and Edgar's still sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning over my empty one. I'm breathing fast; there's tingling through me, still, but it's sharp, as though I've just shaken myself awake.

Sylvie's chair is empty too. I didn't hear her leave the room, and I wonder if he started kissing me because she left, or if she left because he'd started kissing me. Then I wonder what the queen would say if she knew I was all alone in my rooms with a man—a man the king near hates by now. I smooth my skirts out, avoiding Edgar's eyes.

“Thank you for your visit, my lord,” I say. “I'm afraid I had lost all sense of the time, and I should be well abed.”

The fire crackles. Edgar rises from his chair slowly, and I force myself not to back away, and I watch his feet as they come near.

He lifts my chin with a finger. He's smiling, that cocksure grin. “Too soon, my lady?” he says.

I'm not certain what that's supposed to mean, but I'm flushing, and I pull away from him. I sweep to the door. “Good night, my lord,” I say pointedly, and as Sylvie's not here to do such things, I open the door for him.

For a moment I even think he might refuse to leave, but then he's walking past me. He grabs my hand before I can flick it out of the way, and he bows over it, brushing the back with his lips. There's no tingling now, though, no warm rush of abandon. I'm cold all the way through, and when he murmurs, “Good night, lady,” I give him my politest smile in return without a shiver or a flinch. When he passes out into the hallway, I shut the door at once and turn the lock, and I stand with my back against it, wondering why I still feel so afraid.

 

Later that night, after Sylvie's helped me into my nightgown and gone off again to her room, I sit in my window seat and look out toward the mountains. The moon is full. I've pushed the window open even though it's dead cold and I've no wrap.

It has only just, in the last few days, begun to snow regularly, and the mountains are sparkling a thousand different colors in the moonlight. As I'm looking out over this world, which is almost as bright as it is in the day, as I'm leaning out and breathing it all in—a dragon flies across the moon.

I know it for a dragon; I know it without question. It near takes my heartbeat, the spread of its wings and the power, the downright royalty of its shape. There's nothing like a dragon. I've never seen one before, and I know already there's nothing to match its fierce beauty. As I watch it swoop across the sky again and once again, my ears resound with a cry they can't possibly be picking up this far away—a piercing cry, a roar like the boundless black sky all lit with the moon's cold fire.

I don't know how it is, but I'm standing, and then I'm up on the window ledge, outside the room, bare feet on gray stone, hands holding tight to the shutters.

I think if I wanted to, I could let go and balance perfectly. I think if I wanted to, I could jump and not fall. I could make that sound, the one that's still echoing through my body, and it would turn me into something bold and beautiful, something more like who I am than I've ever been before.

Then the dragon's gone, disappeared back into the bright white expanse.

I stand there a moment more, and then I leave the sky, leave the sparkling snow to take my needles from their place beneath my mattress. They are singing to me. Not in the usual gentle quiver, but with a loud hum I feel right down to my toes and along the nape of my neck.

And it's not just the needles, is it? The dragon's flight has done something to this whole room, has cast a spell over it so that the fire diminishes, the shadows melt away. The stones are thrumming softly. There's a tension, a breath, and when I close my eyes, I think I feel my mother's hand upon my hair.

She did this. She turned men from her room. She watched a great, wild beast fly across the moon. She had everything you'd think she could have wanted, and she gave it up to jump from a window, to run until she scarce could remember her own name.

And I would too. I would be running and running, forgetting all this and remembering a truer, older part of me, the part that knows the language of the woods. But the needles prick against my palm, and at long last I sit against the windowsill and I know what it is I am to knit. I call out to the moon; it answers with a skein of light, bright and strange. I wind it around my fingers. I know my uncle's gaze. I know how he hates me, and I know the bitter pain he steeps in daily, and through that I reach the deepest part of him. I tie it into the song I've started to sing, and I lace it with the sharpest tip of a claw, the hottest flick of a flame, the empty nothing of a moonlit sky.

I knit until the winter birds are starting their morning songs, and then I slip my vengeance back beneath my bed and sleep for the few last hours before the castle wakes.

 

The next day, when we are going out to the river to test the new ice for skating, the Lord of Ontrei offers me his arm and I turn my head and keep on walking.

I hear the whispers. I hear the rumor starting through the court already, that the princess and her favorite have quarreled. I hear Edgar's laugh behind me, and I near turn back, angry, but I'd rather avoid a real fight in front of everyone, so I keep on.

I stay away from him as I poke about the edges of the ice with some of the ladies, but I can feel him watching me all the same. Turns out that the river isn't solid enough after all. We spend the afternoon throwing rocks out into the center to see if they'll stay or slide off into a hole and disappear, and we race one another up and down the riverbank and watch the lords trying to push one another out onto the ice.

When we're all trooping in for dinner, I find I've somehow lost my scarf, and I peel back to search for it along the banks, telling Lady Susanna to go in without me, much as she tries to come help.

I was thinking it would be nice to have a few minutes on my own out in the winter silence, but I should have let her come along after all, for as I'm fetching my scarf off a bush and lifting my head to the gray, dense sky, Edgar says, “A hand, lady?” and reaches out to help me back up the bank.

I blink at his hand and want less than anything to take it. Behind, the river murmurs, and I've a sudden wild wish to run out to the middle until the weight of me shatters the undeveloped ice and I fall into the rushing blackness and sweep away, far from anyone.

Or if I jumped, maybe the sky would take me, swoop me into scatterings of wind and leaf bits, toss me across the land until I melded with the roll of the hills, the rustle of the trees, the sharp, unyielding mountain peaks.

It's only a hand, though, and what harm will it really do? I take it, mumbling my thanks as he pulls me up onto the castle lawn, and when he tucks my arm within his to lead me back to the castle, I don't protest.

But when we arrive at the steps up to a side hall where the nobles are gathered like a bunch of chirping birds, waiting as their servants rush around, plucking the layers of coats and hats and mittens from them, Edgar stops me from going in.

“Are we friends still, Marni?” he asks. “Are we allies?”

“Yes, of course,” I say. “Why wouldn't we be?”

He's looking at me, again with that intensity, and I wonder where my frivolous companion has gone. Where is the man who spun me around until I was dizzy? Where the whisperer of scandals, the daring horseman? “I think you have been avoiding me since last night,” he says. “I think you are frightened of me, maybe.”

When the firelight was playing across those eyes, it seemed right for them to draw together so, to be that serious. But the sky is wide and open, the breeze is teasing at my hair, and the voices of the nobles are drifting from the hall. He's as out of place as a daffodil in the snow.

I laugh, as naturally as I can. “I'm not frightened of you, mighty Lord of Ontrei.” I toss my head, even. “I'm not frightened of anything.”

There, the sparkle's back in his eyes, his smile. “Good,” he says, and I'm starting to relax when he bends his head toward me and kisses me soft on the lips.

Again, there's that immediate melting, that urging to kiss him back and let us see what happens next. But I'm not the girl I was last night. The sun is full upon me, and I've sleepless hours and the memory of a dragon against the moon to separate me from the part that wants only this, only him.