A Creature of Moonlight (6 page)

After a moment more, the Lord of Ontrei shifts his chair back and gets to his feet. He has to pass Gramps to reach the steps, and he pauses there, no doubt figuring his way around. Then he's across the porch, down the steps. At the bottom, he stops. He says, “I meant no disrespect to you, my lord, nor to you, lady.”

We neither of us answer.

“When the changes come,” he says, “remember that I have a more open mind than some. I can point you to others like me. There are plenty who would make the same offers of friendship I have—and maybe in time my alliance will prove more welcome to you both.” The night swallows him then, sound, shape, and presence, and it's only Gramps and me on the porch again.

Gramps sighs. “You won't take a villager; you won't take a lord. Who will you take, Marni?”

“No one,” I answer at once. “I've no need for anyone. Just you and me, Gramps, and the flowers.”

“It used to be that simple,” he says. “But nothing lasts forever.”

“Well,” I say, taking his arm to help him up, “we've no need to worry about forever. Just today, and tomorrow, and the next.”

He's quiet as we get him to his feet, and I leave him leaning against the door frame while I light a candle from the embers of our fire. As I'm standing, cupping the flame with my hand, he says, “That's what I thought about her.”

I catch his eyes. He's all still in the candlelight. “What did you think?” I say, soft, so as not to scare him from the topic.

“I thought worrying about one day and the next would be enough. I thought when it came down to it, something would change—your uncle's heart, my soldiers' loyalty. I thought I'd never have to worry about forever.”

I go over to him and take his arm again. Close to him, fierce, I say, “They'll never take me from you, Gramps.”

He switches his cane to his other hand and puts his free one over mine where it rests on his arm. “You're a good girl, Marni. None of this is your fault, you remember that.”

I laugh a bit; I can't help it. “Oh, Gramps,” I say. “It's all of it my fault. Now come along, it's high time you were in bed.”

But he holds me back a moment more. I say, “What is it?”

He doesn't say a thing, just looks long at me, as though he's readying himself to draw my portrait or some such. Then he shakes his head and turns away. “Nothing,” he says. He squeezes my hand again and switches his cane. The firelight glints on his cheeks.

He lets me lead him away at last, and this night I'm asleep as soon as I've pulled the covers up.

 

I wake up early the next day and go out while Gramps is still abed. I stand on the back step, breathing in the crisp air, pushing last night's lord out of my mind.

The birds are singing in the lilac bushes in our garden and all through the woods. The flowers are turning brown; some have already dropped. Soon I'll be picking the last crop, hanging it to dry in the rafters of our hut, and our job will be done for the year. I've bought vegetables and stored them in the space underneath the floorboards in the kitchen. I've dried meat and put it out in the shed, where we can tear ourselves a hunk whenever we're craving some soup or a fried piece in the morning. I've packed the chicken house with dead leaves and stems. I've packed our cow in too, singing to her as she chewed her grass with mournful eyes. I never have met a cow with joyful eyes. Could be they don't appreciate being crammed into wooden stalls. Could be there's a great cow knowledge of what it is we do to them when they've outlived their usefulness and we're hankering for that hunk of meat to go with our eggs.

We're ready for the cold and the snow and the winds. We're ready for another winter inside our hut, sitting by the fireplace, me sewing and Gramps sketching pictures with the bits of paper and charcoal we get from traveling sales folk. Gramps has a gift for drawing; if you didn't know better, you'd think he'd lived his whole life as an artist. A few strokes of his charcoal and the flowers draping the porch are transferred, alive and elegant, to the paper. Or he'll do a portrait of a child from a nearby farm, and the quirk of the boy's mouth and the glint in his eyes and the pixie ears will all be there in the drawing, just as they are in life. Come the winter, he'll be sketching away, tucking drawings into every corner and shelf in our hut, handing them out to everyone who stops by. Our visitors will dwindle to almost no one in the darkest, coldest weeks. It'll be as though the world out there doesn't exist anymore. It'll be as though we've found a place to disappear in truth. As the food runs low, we'll find ourselves wishing for the spring, but in the beginning, and for a stretch in the middle, we'll be perfectly happy to bundle up and forget it all.

Today, though, the cold and the snow are still holding off. Animals run, hurry-scurry, through the flower beds and under the cracks in the wall, piling up their hoard before the winter. Won't be many more days like this one. Won't be many more chances to slip out through the garden while Gramps is sleeping in the soft dawn light and to hop over the wall and into the trees.

At once, the scent of crumbling leaves fills my nose. I breathe in deep. It twitches my fingers. It lifts my lips in a smile without me quite knowing why. It makes me laugh. My hair flips back in the breeze. I walk on, and for once, I don't blink away the spirits dancing round. They're as much a part of the season as the wind is, as the nuts ripe on the branches and the early setting of the sun. I see it in their dances: the way the world is turning out of summer, out of languid, heavy heat into quick motions and shivering flights through frozen hills. There will be months of staying indoors, yes, but also urgent strikings of flint and keen-eyed hunters stringing their bows for rabbits the color of the snow.

The spirits dance like that now, quick, nothing excessive, with joy in the danger and the running.

I don't want to look away from them. I'm as caught up in the world today as they are, maybe more so. Despite what I said to my Gramps, I know that lord was right about the coming changes; I know that tomorrow or the next day we could lose the meager safety we've hoarded so long. My uncle might ride down this instant, demanding that I come with him, that I pay the price my mother did for her dallying with the woods, the price I've avoided for sixteen years only by his grace and by the foolish love of an old king.

I know it's coming, but I scarce can think of it just now, not when the woods are sparkling and dancing like this. The world has always moved from one extreme to the other, year after year, from scorching, dripping heat to blazing, breathtaking cold. The movements of a court, the fear of an uncle—what do they count compared with this?

And besides, something has been happening here in the last few weeks. I've sensed it growing, the little magics gathering, the voices multiplying in a way they shouldn't be at this time of the year. The floating lights should be dwindling, the speaking owls should be gathering fluff for their winter nests. But the creatures of the woods have only been running more, flitting here and there more, talking to each other incessantly as the air has cooled.

It makes me want to run forever, this thing the forest is doing. It makes me want to jump up high, to scream out loud, to become something I've never been, a beast, a voice—
magic
. I let this feeling run over me. I glory in it and don't think on all my fretting about forever.

I know it when she walks up from behind and joins me. We continue side by side, up over needle-laden hills, on into the woods. She sings, eerie and thin, a lullaby from long ago. She has a pair of needles in one hand, like the needles on the ground beneath our feet but fifty times bigger, and a skein of light trails from her arm.

She wouldn't have come at all if I hadn't been paying more attention than is sensible out here these past few weeks. If I'd been ignoring the creatures of the woods, if I'd been ignoring her as has been my wont for ten years now, she wouldn't have come up to me like this, all smooth and pleasing. There are things beings like her can do, and there are things they can't think of without your giving them leave. It's something to do with the difference between us. It's something to do with us being human and them being something not quite, yet not quite not, either, if you see what I am saying.

But I'm not feeling quite human now either, am I? So I let her walk beside me, and when I stop at last, when the forest is all about me so there's nothing else in any direction, only the mossy dirt and rough bark and silvery, whispering leaves, I turn to her, and she turns to me.

I know better than to talk to her, but though the changes seem far off in this place, they're never so far that I can forget them completely, and this might be the last chance I have for speaking. So I say to her, “What would happen, then? If we just kept walking and I never did go back?”

“Anything might,” she says, and keeps on with her humming.

“No,” I say. “I won't take that for my answer. I'm not seven anymore. I'm a girl of near seventeen, and I'm just the sort you want to spirit away. Maybe I'd think on it, but first I'd want to know what would happen next. What do you give those girls in truth? Quick death? Slow torture? What?”

“Anything,” she says again. “We give them anything they want.”

I shake my head. “Not
anything
. Not a true love. Not a pile of money to spend back home.”

She takes a step closer to me, and I steel myself not to back away. Though I've no wish to brush against her, I'm not about to let her see my fear, neither. “We don't promise things we cannot give,” she says. “Come with us, little Tulip, and you'll get exactly what you want.”

It's not only the lords and ladies who call me that. I don't know who started it first, in fact—the people who don't want to remember who I am or the creatures who don't care. I haven't heard that name from this lady, though, in many years. “Not so little anymore,” I mutter.

“No, and not so free.”

“I never was free.”

She breathes in and out through that mouth I can't ever see, and she's reaching out her hand again and saying, “Then leave it all. Come with me, follow me.” And she's promising me, she's promising more than I can bear with that hand, that voice; the whole woods shudders with this, the possibility of what I might find if I give in. “You think you're just another one,” she says now, excited, urging me. “You think you're another of those girls, that we don't see any difference.”

I frown. “You say that to everyone?”

“No, Tulip. Only to you. For the others, it is an exit, an exodus.” She's inches from me, but she's still not touching me. She could, with one swoop of her hand, one brush of her misty hair toward mine. “For you, it will be an entrance. Come with me, my flower, and you will be coming home.”

There's something flashing behind my eyes, some dark laughter, some impossible thing. I'm not backing away from her now, because I can't. I can't stop looking at her. I can't stop seeing the way her dress falls like needles and her hair floats like fog. She is so familiar. She's a dream I used to have.

“Remember,”
she says, and she's so close it's as though her voice is in my head. “Remember what you are, Tulip. Remember what you could be.”

And it's then, with her dress all lit in her hand's light and her hair drifting about and her face as hidden as the dark spaces between tree roots, and I'm not feared of her, I'm not thinking on how strange she looks, because I'm somehow as used to her as I am to my own Gramps, my own flowers—it's then that I remember the things I had forgotten about these woods, and what they were to me as a child.

I have said, haven't I, that long ago I would near lose myself in the woods, wandering, singing, forgetting. I wasn't the king's unwanted niece, and I wasn't the flower girl; I was someone else. I was anyone I wanted to be, maybe, but it was different from that, too.

Remember how I said I used to knit with the lady on the log when I was a little girl? Well, I didn't knit plain old human things. I didn't bring out my wool and horse-bone needles and sit there next to her knitting my Gramps's socks.

I knit what she knit.

I knit with pine needles I'd picked from the ground and held in my hand as they drew out long and strong. I spun my thread from the beams of light slicing through the trees, dappling the forest floor. I sang the song the lady on the log sang, the one with words I never could remember the moment I went home again, and we knit warm nests for the birds and secret crannies for the squirrels to hide their nuts in, and when we had been wronged by some inhabitant of the woods, we knit a revenge and sent it soaring away on its glowing wings to take our price.

And when I ran with the little ones, I shrank myself down to their size, and I grew myself a pair of wings as delicate and pale as theirs, and I screeched in their language as we went marauding against the other tribes of the forest or danced the afternoons away or sat in council, determining laws and punishments.

And when I met up with the bigger of the woods' peoples, when a phoenix or a griffin came down south near my Gramps's hut, I spoke to them in song, and when I was lucky, they took me up on their backs and flew me so high that I could see over almost the whole of the country: the king's castle gleaming by the river, the many-colored fields to the east, the mountains to the north, and the trees rolling on and on forever to the south. No one saw us, the great beautiful birds and me. Now there's a new sighting of a phoenix every week, but then it was as though we were hidden from the human realm.

Seems like all those memories had gone clean out of my head somehow. Oh, I knew I had talked with the creatures in the woods, the ones that weren't human, the ones that breathed magic for air and were as like to sing you to your death as to your sleep.