A Creature of Moonlight (20 page)

“No,” I say at once; then, “Yes. Tell Sylvie she's not to fret.”

The queen laughs, and it's the same laugh I've heard a hundred times before, incandescent. I stare at her. I always thought she'd created that laugh to seem ever happy and sociable, as if none of the court's cruel gossip could get to her. But what reason would she have to laugh that way now if it weren't real? “I'll tell her, dear,” she says, “but I don't think it'll make any difference.” She stands, and I look up at her numbly. She says, “It's late, and if I don't get back soon, Roddy will wonder where I am.”

I whisper, “Don't go.”

She looks down at me. You know that way a person can look when she's done with pretending anything anymore, when she's letting you see what all the years of worry and struggle have done to her—you know how, when there's nothing but this one moment before it all goes away, so there's nothing left to do or say or hope for, and you're bare to the storm—that's how she's looking at me, and I reckon that's how I'm looking at her.

“Do you want me to take any word back to
him?
” she says, and the moment, if it was such a moment, is over.

“No,” I say, “I've nothing to say to any
him
.”

“Well,” says the queen, “I have a message for you, if you'll hear it.”

I look at her, startled. “From him?” I would have thought he'd be forgetting me as fast as he could, now the king had won.

“He would have brought it himself, but he's watched even more closely than I am these days. Here, stand up, Marni.”

I let her pull me to my feet. I've not the energy to fight the queen, not when she's got that purpose in her voice and is tossing her little head in such a way. She looks downright regal.

When I'm standing, she grasps both my hands. “He sends his love,” she says, and I swear there's an evil glint in her eyes.

I'm about to snap at her—how dare he send his love? Does he think that's like to make me
happy?
But then she's wrapped one arm around my shoulders, and she's whispering in my ear: “Along with this.” And she's slipping a hard, cold key from her sleeve into my nearest hand. “I may have been wrong about the woods,” she continues, only just loud enough for me to hear, “but they are not going to kill a lovely young woman out of misguided superstition. Whatever the reason for the griffins and the phoenixes and the shy little men and everything, it's not you, Marni.” Then she folds my fist around the key and steps back, and I've just the strength of mind to bury it in my skirts as she calls for the guard.

The door is clanking open when she says, “I daresay I'll ask the guard to walk me back to the castle. It's long past sunset, and I could use the assistance.”

“Go safe, lady,” I manage, and she scoots out into the corridor. I see her wink at me, and then she's gone. The padlock clunks back into place; the guard's boots clomp off down the hall. I wait one minute. Two. I go to the door, peer into the dark of the prison. I listen hard. Nothing.

In a flash, I stretch my arms through the bars and get the key in the lock, and then I'm taking the lock off, as quiet as I can, and placing it down on the floor and swinging the door open, smooth, smooth, smooth. I leave it to hang, and I pad my way down the hallway, up the stone steps. The queen's blanket is still around my shoulders, and I wish I'd left it behind to free my arms, but I dare not leave it here. They'll see it, a minute before they see the empty cell, and that's a minute I might need.

The main floor of the prison is empty too. I don't know how she's managed that; could be that only the cells are staffed this late at night. It doesn't matter; all I care is that not five minutes after the queen leaves me in my cell, I'm running down the city streets, and luck is with me for once, because the moon has been swallowed up by a whole fleet of clouds and everywhere is shadows.

 

 

 

 

I
N THIS STORY
, the dragon was a man.

Don't ask me how that works, but he was a man; he came riding up on a great black horse as a girl was collecting berries and roots and such in a basket to bring back to her ailing mother and four younger siblings.

This was back when the woods were everywhere, and one of this girl's little sisters was just old enough to be playing about outdoors, and the girl had noticed how the fairies and the spirits swooped around more when her sister was nearby.

Well, and the girl was worried about the child's getting snatched away by the forest folk. When the dragon rode up, fire in his eyes, she dropped her basket and held the point of her little gathering knife against her chest, so that he pulled up his mare and stared at her, sitting still, so as not to startle her none.

“You'll be wanting to take me away,” the girl said.

“I reckon I will,” said the dragon. “Now, don't you go and do nothing foolish.”

“I won't if you won't,” she said.

And the dragon he shook his head because now there wasn't nothing he wanted more in the world than this girl.

“You're not understanding me,” she said. “I mean I'll go with you, and gladly, and stay as long as you'd like.”

“Good, then,” said the dragon as cautiously as a dragon could.

“But you and your folk will leave my family alone, and my people alone, and you'll pull back your trees so that we've space and sky and land to call our own.”

He might have laughed at this; some people say he did.

“I mean it!” she said, and held the knife tight against her skin. The blood beaded there, and her chest fell up and down with her breathing, and there was such life in her; the dragon had never seen such passion, such spark. How could he let this one get away?

“I so swear,” he said, and moved to pull her up onto his horse.

The girl kept the knife steady. “Not for a hundred hundred years,” she said.

“Not for a hundred hundred years,” he said, and what is that to a dragon anyway?

The girl threw her knife down next to her basket, and she ran and jumped up on the horse behind the dragon, and he took her away all for himself.

And the woods gave up the space and the sky and the land to the people, and they began to look around and blink their eyes and see one another, how many they were, and that was the beginning of our country.

The thing with this story is, who would have told it if it were true? It was only the girl and the dragon that day, and no one to hear them speak.

But others like it for the cleverness of the girl and the love in her heart, and they say it explains why the woods have been moving themselves in: our hundred hundred years are up, and the dragon's coming back to take what's always been his, and was ours only as long as the girl's bargain held firm.

Oh, and I forgot to mention—didn't I?—that when the girl's family found her basket and its contents strewn over the forest floor, they found a patch of flowers, too, growing all through the basket weaving and around the berries and over and under the roots. The knife was well buried beneath the creeping green vines and hidden by the bright blue blossoms.

In that story, it's how the dragon flower got its name, and depending on the teller, it was either a promise that he would keep his end of the deal, or a threat that one far-off day he'd be back, or just something the ground couldn't help but send up when the drops of the girl's bright blood fell and mixed with the leaves and dirt of the dragon's woods. The girl's brave heart and that dragon's harsh will, they say, made themselves a flower garden.

I
GO TO THE WOODS
, of course. Once I'm out the southern gates, I circle round and run north. The air grows cold and colder with each step. Soon I'm over the river and running across the open hills, and just as I see the first line of the trees—a dark mass on the horizon, closer, sure as sure, than ten long mornings ago—I catch the first sharp snowflake on my nose. For a second I don't know what it is, and I stop there in a valley between two hills and I touch it, the cold, wet sting. Then another falls into my hair, and as I lift my head, a soft flake lands on my tongue. I breathe it in, swallow. It tastes like something I've forgotten, a dream I used to have of impossible things.

They are falling all around now, big and slow, each one separate from the rest. It's not unheard of, to get a snowfall this late. But the ground is hard, and there are grasses pushing up already. It's like the first snow of the fall, not the wet, miserable snow we get in spring. It's as if we're outside of the seasons tonight, on the cusp of something uncertain, something new.

I hold out my hands, watching the silence drift around them.

I look up, and she is there.

A twist of wind in the blowing snow, a glint of the rising moon.

Hand held out, as always. Needles at her side. Face fractured; eyes stark and inescapable.

I step toward her. When I'm only an arm's length away, she says, “Tulip, it's time to come home.”

I close my eyes, thinking of the way the shadows stretch out long beneath the trees, of the chittering squirrels throwing acorns just above my head, of the days I could run and never see another person, of the griffins and the phoenixes I could ride so high we almost would touch the sky.

Back there is all the doubt and fear, everything I've never had and everything I'll never be. The last dregs of it are falling away from me. Finally, there is only this moment, and finally I can answer her.

I reach out and take her hand, and we run, as light as the clouds, across the fresh white hills, on our way to the woods.

 

I imagine there are a thousand reasons girls take themselves to the woods.

Cruel parents. Ugly betrothed. A wish, a dream of something they'll never have out there with those rules and probabilities, and they can't accept it anymore.

A thousand reasons, and a thousand choices, and a thousand fast-beating hearts and quick-stepping feet and deep breaths of their first moments of freedom.

 

This lady can run.

She doesn't let go of my hand, not all that night as we're racing through the trees that stretch like columns in every direction. Could be it's snowing still out there, but we don't feel it. Here, the ground is dry beneath our feet. The twigs snap and old leaves crunch, and I can smell them, the clear, musty smell.

There's nothing before this. I've become the wind, a flash of light, a spurt of magic. I'm laughing as we run, and the lady looks back at me, and if she had a mouth, I know that she'd be smiling.

 

There's a long way to go.

We're heading for the mountains; I know that without the lady telling me. It's the north of my compass, and it's pulling me as much as the lady's hand. These woods have spread themselves out so far, though, that we don't even reach the foothills by the morning.

There used to be farms all along this way, I think. There used to be families living here, safe and happy. Not anymore.

“Why have you moved so far into the kingdom?” I ask her as we're stopping to catch our breath. My breath, I guess. I don't reckon the lady needs such things.

She's bending down to look into the hole at the bottom of a tree. She pokes one of her long needles into the dark; there's a squeal, and she takes the needle out again, a mouse squirming on its end. “Does it matter, Tulip?” she asks. She plucks the mouse from the needle, cupping it in both hands so I can't see it. Her hands glow bright, and the squealing stops. When she opens them again, it's not a body she reveals, but a finely roasted bit of meat, skinless and steaming.

She hands it to me. I bite into it. The tangy, juicy charred flesh burns my mouth and seeps down my throat. It tastes like nothing I've had before, like sunlight, like power. I blink at the lady. “Does what matter?”

She holds out a hand again, and I take it. “Off we go,” she says.

 

It takes us three days and nights of running to reach the mountains, and all that time I am remembering those things I learned so long ago when the lady and all the folk of the woods were my teachers.

I'm calling out to birds and squirrels as we go, and they're calling back, welcoming me home.

I'm throwing myself into whatever guise I choose, leaping over logs as a deer, flipping through leaves as a bat, bounding along as a great gray wolf, panting and shaking my ruff in the midnight dew.

The lady follows alongside always. She doesn't lead anymore; I know full well our direction. But she accompanies me, sits by me when I stop to sleep, and finds me berries and meat when I've not the instinct for it.

As we get closer, the folk of the woods grow numerous. Seems every way I look, they are poking their grotesque heads out of a hollow log or flicking from trunk to trunk, trailing sparks, or swinging from branch to branch, gripping hard with tiny hands and screaming war cries with tiny voices.

The lady sees me looking. “They've come for you,” she says. “They've come to escort you back.”

I don't ask what she means by
back
, when I've never been here before. It seems right, somehow, the word, the idea that this isn't a leaving, but an arriving, not a first visit, but a return from a long exile.

We reach the first hints of the mountains to come: foothills rising from the gentle waves of the lowland into sudden steep slopes and drops. We follow a riverbed, climbing up and up. I turn mountain goat and cougar, picking and padding my way ever higher.

As we step into the true mountains at last, the final wide-leafed trees disappear and the pines grow thinner and farther between. We're walking in the open at times now, and the sun falls, unfamiliar, on my skin and fur and scales. If I stopped in a clearing, climbed a rock or a tree, and turned to look behind, I would see the kingdom, I imagine, all spread out for me like a map. I would see the edge of the woods, and the king's city, and the rivers flowing free along the fields that are left. I would see how far it's shrunk now, the land of my people.