A Creature of Moonlight (2 page)

Annel was good at that—making you see things with her words. Often as not, she'd stay clear through dinner, until the dark was creeping into the corners of the hut, and she'd curl up on our old wool rug next to me, her face all shining in the firelight. We'd have taken in a chair from the porch for Gramps. He'd sit straight as always, but with a softness in his face, as if he'd forgotten for the moment the pain in his legs, his fretful thoughts. And Annel would tell us stories, Gramps and me, and he would listen quietly, scarce moving, and I would eat them up like a river eats stones, rushing, gobbling every passing word, slipping on from tale to tale to tale.

Sometimes the stories she'd tell would get to be too much for my Gramps. A woman who got herself lost and never came back. A child without a mother, wandering far and wide, screaming so insistently that the earth opened up and swallowed it whole just to give it some rest. Then we would hear the chair scraping and the cane jolting against the floor, and Annel would stop talking until he'd gone out to the porch and sat down on the steps. She'd continue softer after that and stop her story soon as she could.

But she always kept on until the end. She knew, as I knew, that you don't stop a story half done. You keep on going, through heartbreak and pain and fear, and times there is a happy ending, and times there isn't. Don't matter. You don't cut a flower half through and then wait and watch as it slowly shrivels to death. And you don't stop a story before you reach the end.

 

Came a time as Annel got older that her parents stopped forgetting her. Came a time she only visited us once a week, and then once a month, and then not for months and months, and then we heard she'd gotten herself engaged to a wheelwright and would be married the next spring.

She visited me once that fall, just last year, and she watched as I turned the dirt over in our garden, readying the ground for the winter. I was listening to the flower bulbs settling into the earth, tucking themselves in for a long sleep. I was humming them a tune of warm dreams, dark waterfalls, green, hidden things. I've always been good with the flowers, just as I've always been good at listening to the trees and seeing the creatures that lurk in the secret spaces between their trunks.

For a bit, I let Annel stand there silent, unmoving as I worked. If she wanted to speak to me, she would. Could be I was angry with her some without realizing it. Even knowing it was not her fault, could be I blamed her for the lonely taste of those months.

“Funny,” she said finally, when I'd reached the end of a row and she was still back in the middle of the garden, watching my shovel with a twisted puzzle on her face. “Funny, isn't it, how things can go and change all about you, and you can grow up tall and fill out your dress, and still there's something won't ever change inside unless you take it up by the roots and hurl it away as hard as you can? I imagine it's not this way for everyone. Is it, Marni?”

The crickets had silenced themselves for the summer; the frogs were sleeping deep in their lakes. A whippoorwill whistled close by in the woods, the only one speaking, the only one still awake. “No, I don't reckon it is that way for everyone,” I said. I didn't know completely what she meant, but nothing was for Annel as it was for everyone.

“No,” she said softly, but the breeze flipped it round and brought it my way. “No, some don't care about the tearing. Some replant whatever's going to work in the new soil. You do that with your flowers, don't you? Whatever works, whatever's going to survive, that's what you plant.”

“I guess that's true,” I said. “Whatever's suited for the amount of sun and shade we get back here.”

“Not everything's suited, though.”

“No.”

“What if—what if, Marni, you're so in love with a flower you can't bear to rip it up? What if you couldn't smile if you didn't see it growing in your garden?”

“There's no such flower,” I said. “Or there's only the dragon flower, which won't go no matter how many times I try to chase it out. And that's the one I hate, the one I wish would disappear.”

“The dragon flower,” said Annel, “which won't go no matter how you try to kill it.”

“Can't make my garden without that flower.”

She nodded. The dusk was growing now. “Was a time,” she said, “I didn't think of nothing but running down from home to here, and back again when I felt the urge.”

“When you're married,” I said, “you come get a flower for your table every day.”

“Can I, Marni?” She laughed a bit. “Can I have a dragon flower?”

“Every day,” I promised her.

Then she moved, finally, coming down the row, and she hugged me, dirt and sweat and all. The whippoorwill had stopped. Only the wind through the woods rushed out toward us, flicked leaf bits in our hair. “Thanks, Marni,” she said. “I'll remember.” She pulled back, still holding my arms. “My mother sent me down to tell you about the wedding, but I guess you know all there is by this point. I'm to invite you—you and your Gramps.”

“We'll come,” I said.

“Well, then.” She smiled at me, though it wasn't much more than a flash of gray in the draining light. “Well, then, I'll see you again for the wedding in the spring.”

 

Only there was no wedding. As soon as the pale green tips of the dragon flower stems were poking out of the rich brown earth, even before the springtime thunderstorms had rolled off to the south, my friend took herself to the woods. They searched for her round about the villages, thinking she might have run off with this or that farmer boy. They came to our hut, even, stood with their caps in their hands, but you could feel the suspicion dripping from them, those men. You could see them remembering how often their Annel had come running down the path to us, and it wasn't any other girl who felt the need to do that, and it wasn't any other girl—well, not for a few years past anyway—but it was hardly anyone else who disappeared like this. And there I was, as clear as could be, my mother's daughter, telling them I hadn't seen Annel since winter fell, but still, they all knew, you could see. They knew that those visits with me had something to do with this.

They didn't say it straight out, though, or dare to threaten me or any such, not with Gramps sitting right next to me. They glared, and asked their questions, and went away after I'd answered them. I stayed clear of the woods for weeks after that, as my Gramps never left me out of his sight. After a time they stopped looking, and Annel became just another story, another girl who had grown up to be swallowed by the woods. And just like all those other girls, she hasn't ever come back.

 

There's a reason we plant our flowers at the back of the hut, away from the road, as close to the woods as we can get without actually growing them in the shade of the trees. Something in the flowers likes something in the woods; or something in the woods, could be, some growing, magic thing, likes the flowers, and those nearest the trees are the happiest.

We've the best there are. You won't find purple lilies like ours for sale in the city center. There aren't nasturtiums as vibrant and long-lasting as ours clinging to the windowsills in the villages. There's something here, I think, and maybe something too in the way I care for them, that makes them grow brighter and stronger than anywhere else.

Well, and no one else has dragon flowers, do they?

In the middle of our garden, there's a patch of them. You can't reach them on the paths. You have to edge through rose thorns or tiptoe betwixt lupine stalks until you reach their bed. We never planted them. But there they grow, no matter what I do—and used to be I tried, and Gramps tried, to rid ourselves of them. They always came back, and nothing else would grow where they had.

We gave it up, but Gramps still mutters about them now and again because dragon flowers are just the sort of thing he'd rather not have near.

There are stories about dragon flowers. Stories that tie them to the woods and to the thing that mothers frighten their children with, that gives the flowers their name—the dragon, of course.

The story Annel told most often about the dragon flowers took place in the time before the farms and villages and cities. It was in the time when the woods were everywhere, before we even had a kingdom, when people ran and hid and never dared come out at night for fear of getting snatched away.

In those days, the dragon flew free above the trees. He went where he pleased. He took the people he wanted; in this story they're girls, always pretty girls who don't know what's upon them until he steals them out of a clearing, or from a branch where they're perched picking nuts, or out of a cold, clear pond where they're fishing or cooling their feet.

What he does with the girls we don't know; something awful.

But one girl he took to more than the others, who knows why. He grabbed her as she was picking these pale blue flowers, tiny fragile things, not good for eating, not good for medicine. He asked her what they were for, and she said they were not for anything but holding in her hand and putting round her hair and placing in the window of her parents' hut.

She was a dimwitted thing, most like. If I were living in the woods, I'd not have time for picking flowers. I'd be running and hiding like the rest, and tearing my teeth on squirrels and gathering food for the winters.

But the dragon must have seen something in this girl because he snatched her away, as he was wont to do with girls he liked. And he must have liked this one even more, because one year later she came wandering home with a baby on her hip, a well-fed belly, and roses in her cheeks. She never married any man of the forest, but stayed with her parents until they died, and round their hut there grew the flowers, the thin, blue, pointless flowers that never did any good. While the girl's parents lived, she did just fine. The father hunted and the mother cooked meals. But when they were gone, try as she would, this girl couldn't make ends meet. Her boy was a dreamer, as she'd been, and with even less wits, if that were possible.

Well, and in this story, one way or another, they starve to death, and the dragon never cares enough to take them away again.

That's why the flowers are called dragon flowers, and that's why when a girl gets pregnant and won't name a father, they call the baby a dragon baby.

And that's why Gramps doesn't want the thin blue flowers in our garden, one reason anyway. We need no more reminding, not of woods nor of dead girls nor of a baby nobody wants.

They sell, though, those dragon flowers, and not just to the ladies, who wear them in their hair and twist them for bracelets. The village women buy them too, when they've saved money enough.

That's the thing about magic, and the thing about the woods—as much as we want to, or are told, or think we should forget them, there's nothing we can do to stay away. As sure as we dream, as sure as between one breath and the next we look up into the sky as if hoping, really hoping, to see that beat of wings and to feel the claws grasping us, lifting us away from it all—as sure as that, the woods keeps drawing us in.

It's something to do with freedom, isn't it? It's something akin to the way Annel dreamed so hard about all those many places her life could go.

“Marni,” she used to say to me, “don't you settle down until you've no other choice in the matter. Once you do, there's nothing left: no running through fields, no laughing with boys, no dancing.”

“Married women dance,” I'd say, squinting up at her through the garden's sun, or pouring a glass of water from the well bucket, or as we lay on our backs in the meadows near the hut.

“Not the way you do before you're tied down,” she'd say. “Not when you've got children and a house and a thousand things to do. Not like you do when you could go any way you want, and no one would stop you, because the whole of your life was still there, still fresh and new.”

Well, and that was what took her, wasn't it? I think that's what takes all the girls who disappear. In the stories, they don't have any choice—they're snatched away whether they like it or not. But I know my Annel, and she wouldn't have run if she hadn't wanted to. I know what it's like to want anything but what the world has planned for you.

I don't even have that future to run from, the one every village girl has, and every lady. I don't dream of a husband. I don't dream of children.

I dream of my mother walking out of the woods, alive.

I dream of doing what Annel used to plan—taking the king's road north through the mountains to the other side, to lands untouched by our woods, where no one knows my name. They have human witches and sorcerers in other lands. I could seek one out, a magic user, and ask for a poison so pure, our king would never know it was there until it was too late.

Maybe that's what I will do when my Gramps is gone, when I'm alone in truth. It makes me feel like a real dragon's daughter to think such things. It makes me wonder what I might become that day when I've nothing to hold me back, when I've only the flame in my gut and the beat of my wings to take me through the dark.

I
T WAS LAST
year, about the time that Annel was inviting us to her wedding, when a boy from a village not far away stopped by to talk and sit with Gramps. Jack, his name was, or something like. He was a man grown, I guess, though only three or four years beyond me.

I brought him milk from our cow, Dewdrop, and I gave him a smile as I handed it to him. I'll smile for the villagers, and I'll give up some of our bread and milk for them. We can afford to share. We pay them well for what they bring our way, too: flour, honey, vegetables. We've got Dewdrop and the chickens, but we've not time for growing all our own food if we're to get the garden ready every spring. The king and his court like it to look nice here. That's why we tend our paths so carefully and plant the flowers in neat rows, with the yellow next to blue, and the blue next to red, and so on around the garden, so that to step from our hut to our backyard is like stepping from a hovel to a castle yard.