A Creature of Moonlight (7 page)

But I had forgotten how close I was to becoming one of them before I stopped letting myself see them, before I cut myself off from their dangerous voices. I thought the song these woods sang for me was no different from the one that tempts so many girls. I thought that's why they wanted me, because I'm a girl, not—not because I'm the dragon's daughter.

I can't help it; I stumble away from the lady. I reach out a hand and hold myself up by a tree. “I had forgotten,” I say.

“It has been a long time,” says the lady. “And you weren't ready to come with us yet.”

“And now you think I am.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want me for?”

“Tulip,” she says, “we want you to come home.”

Home
. There's that word again, and this time it rings all through me, and I've an urge, like a hunger, to do those things I'm only just remembering. To sprout some wings. To run on all fours. To dance through the trees alongside the spirits.

When I can, I look up at the lady again, and she's standing still where I left her, waiting for me to speak.

“I can't,” I say.

“Why not?” She sounds so unbearably bereft, as if it breaks her heart to hear me tell her no.

But I shake my head. “He never left me.”

She doesn't ask who I mean. “That's enough to stop you from being what you're meant to be?”

I say, “It's enough for anything. It's enough to tell me what I
should
be.”

He'll be awake now back at the hut, and I know it. I imagine him peering out our back door, looking here and there for me. I'm not sure, this far away, if I would hear it when he called. If I went with this lady, I would never know how long he searched for me. I would never know how many weeks it was before he grew sick with fretting and lay down in his bed. I wouldn't know if the king would take pity on him, the flower man without a flower, and would take him back to the castle finally, or if he would let him lie, stay silent, and with his turning away do what he hadn't dared to do all those years with an axe or a knife or a drop of poison.

The lady's looking at me now with her head half turned, a wary look, her eyes sharp pricks of light. Her arms are at her sides. “You used to sit with me happily,” she says, still in that eerie voice, whining now. “You know you did. You were perfection, my dark flower. No questions, just laughter, just dance.”

“I grew up.”

She shakes her head at me. The knitting hanging from her left hand is a comet flash through the woods. “You don't have to,” she says, quiet and quieter. She's sidling away, slipping back through the trunks. “You can have what the others have, what the others want, and more, because you are more. You can have your freedom.”

And then, between one thought and the next, she's gone. She's taken the spirits and the other magic folk with her. Only an ordinary wren tilts her head at me from a nearby branch before taking wing out into the depths, into that place where anything might happen. She's gone, leaving me behind, and the gray is filling in the corners of the woods like the shading in a drawing, and I go back from the farthest I have ever been, and when I get home, the sun is setting behind me, and I know as soon as I set foot in our garden that something is horribly wrong.

T
HE FLOWERS
are restless. I sense them, swiveling their heads toward me, quivering all along their stems. Only the faintest light still brushes the garden. I thought my Gramps would be at the door, frantic, calling my name. I thought he'd have gathered a search party, and all the meadows round about would be speckled with torches.

But it's dark, and it's silent, and there's a dread growing in me as I climb the back step into the hut. The flowers turn to watch me go. I've never felt them so upset. I've never felt them so uneasy with the world. Something has happened.

My Gramps isn't in his bed. He isn't sitting before the fire, and when I pass through to the front porch, he's not at his table there, neither.

Someone else is.

The Lord of Ontrei's eyes flash at me through the dusk. He stands. He's holding something in his hand, a piece of paper, looks like. I don't say nothing. I can't think. My Gramps's cane is lying on the porch, just before the steps, as though he threw it down there and never came back to pick it up. But he wouldn't do that, would he? There's no way my Gramps could go traipsing over the countryside without his cane. He couldn't go ten feet without it.

“Lady,” the lord says. “I've some terrible news.”

“Was it the king?” I can scarce hear my own voice, there's such a ringing in my ears. How could I leave him for this long? How could I go so far away that I don't even know now if he screamed? “Did he take my Gramps?”

But the lord is shaking his head. “No, lady. No one took him away.”

“What, then? Where did he go?”

“Please,” says the lord, “take a seat.”

I do, without thinking, without realizing that I'm crossing the porch, pulling out the chair, sitting in it. The lord sits across from me.

He says, “I came to see if you'd change your mind.”

It takes me a bit to think on what he means. “If I'd marry you after all,” I say.

“Yes. You've no idea, lady, what the king's been saying, what he's been talking of doing.”

“I reckon he'd like to kill us both.”

There, that's surprised him. “Not in so many words,” he says. “But that's the general idea. It's the woods. It's that they're moving in, and he thinks that you have something to do with it.”

There's a rustle of leaves in the bushes lining our path, and I shiver, not with cold, though. It's a tingle, a rushing in my blood as the memories of running with the woods folk flash through me again. For a moment I scarce can blame my uncle for being afraid. For a moment I think I'm the sort of thing that could kill him with my gnashing teeth or take his kingdom with only a whispered word.

But I shake my head. “They'll take themselves back again. They always do.” It's what my Gramps says, and I recall the strangeness in the flowers, the cane abandoned at my feet. “Where is he?” I say. “If he's not been taken, where did he go?”

The Lord of Ontrei takes a deep breath, and the dread comes back a thousandfold, and I know before he says it, the worst words in the world: “He's dead.”

“No.” We talked of this only last night, of time running out, of not escaping from forever. Just one night ago. It can't have happened already. The world can't—mustn't work that way. We ought to have today, still, and tomorrow, and the next. Today, tomorrow, and the next day—and then the day after that.

“I came by this morning to see if you'd changed your mind. He was here, where I'm sitting now. He was already gone.”

“No.”

“I think it must have been his heart giving out. There was no sign of a struggle. He sat with his head upon the table, with this paper under his arm.” He pushes it toward me.

I don't look at it. “What did you do with him, if he was gone?”

“I buried him out back.”

And there, those words. Those are the ones that make it real, that make him not just
not here
, but somewhere horrible, buried, like a crocus bulb that never comes up in the spring. I say, “Without me?”

“I waited hours, lady.” His voice is soft. “I didn't know when you'd be back. I didn't want to leave him here, to risk someone from the castle finding him. They'd have told the king, and I didn't think he would want that. I didn't think you would.”

And I wouldn't, I guess. The king would take the body. He'd bury it himself, where kings are buried, I suppose. He might talk over it, make some big fuss. I wouldn't want the king touching my Gramps.

The lord pushes the paper another inch toward me. “He left this for you,” he says.

It's dark now, so dark the words are near impossible to make out. I take it into the hut, where our fire still simmers, and I stir the embers with a stick, make them flame up into life. I tilt the paper so it catches the glow.

There's a drawing at the top, with squiggled, faint lines, as if the charcoal were shaking as it drew. But still I know the face, the hair, the smile I feel may never come again. It's me, and it's my Gramps's hand. He's drawn me so many times before, I'd know it anywhere.

Under the drawing is a line. Just one, and in my Gramps's writing, too. The village girls can scarce read, most of them, but he made sure to teach me my letters, to make me practice at my writing day after day. I'm grateful, now, not to have to ask the lord beside me what it says.

My Marni, I'll love you always. Be safe
.

It's like Gramps, isn't it, to be warning me to the last. That was all he lived for, so many years. Keeping me safe. And when it came to it, I couldn't even repay the favor. When it came to it, he died alone.

“He must have known.” The lord's still here, still slipping in where he has no right. “He must have had a few minutes when he realized what was happening, that he wasn't long for the world.”

“Where did you bury him?” I say.

“Out back.”

“Out back where?”

He hesitates. “By the lilacs to the north.”

Then I'm out the door, running to my Gramps's grave. I know what the flowers have been trying to tell me. They're trembling all through them to have seen my Gramps put down into the earth. They know him, sure enough, as much as they know me. They know he ought to be out in the air, walking about, not rooted down deep under mounds of dirt. They know something's wrong, and that's what I hear as I pass them by:
Something's wrong, something's wrong
.

I know!
I cry back to them.
Everything's wrong!

And there it is, under the northern lilacs, the place where the dirt has been turned up, where he is. I kneel down next to him, and my tears are coming quick now at the wrongness of it all. He shouldn't be dead. I should have been here to hold his hand. He should have had the greatest doctors, the strongest medicines, the softest sheets. All the kingdom should be crying now to know that he is gone.

My mother should be living to cry that he is gone.

The lord is back at the hut still; he didn't follow when I left. I don't want to think on him. I don't want to think of sleeping alone in our hut tonight or living one more day out here without my Gramps. This was our place. This was where he came to keep me safe. This was where I stayed to be with him. It needed both of us to work. It's not home now, and I can't stay here, and if I go back inside, the lord will be telling me the same, that it's not a safe place anymore.

The woods are calling my name.

I fold the paper and slip it into the waist of my dress. I kiss the dirt mounded up at my Gramps's grave. The flowers' song is heart-rending as I stand, brush down my skirt, and walk through them over to the wall. As I pass the dragon flowers, they cry out to me, so powerful I near hear it with my ears as well as my mind:
Tulip, come home!

The lady is waiting near the wall, but I don't cross over. She's back a bit in the woods. It seems an age since I last saw her, though it can't have been more than an hour. She's watching me. She's expecting me to come to her.

I call out softly, “I need a vengeance.”

She blinks; her eyes go dark for a moment. “What sort of vengeance, little flower?” she says, and her words twist this way and that through the air, lighting quietly in my ear.

“To kill the king.”

I hear her soft sigh. “I cannot make you such a thing.”

“Why not?”

“He's not here. He's out, beyond.” She lifts a hand toward the edge of the woods. “My magic only works in here.”

I take a breath. “Then I can't come with you.”

She moves; she's close to me in an instant, facing me across the wall. “There's nothing for you there now,” she says. “Forget it, little one. Nothing matters but your freedom, but the life you can have with us in the woods.”

But she's wrong. My Gramps lies dead in our garden. My mother never saw me grow. And the man who ruined both their lives walks free, unpunished, as happy as he ever was. And I know of things this lady may not, with all her mysteries, with all her secrets. I've heard tales of sorcerers and witches, away in far-off lands. I'm half dragon, yes, and that half is pushing me on, across the wall, into the woods. But I'm half human, too, and could be I can do things this lady would never dream.

I'm tall enough these days to reach across the wall, all the way to the forest floor, with one toe still in my garden. I snatch two pine needles, and before I bring them back over the wall, I lay them flat in my hands and I whisper the words I'm only just remembering, the words the lady taught me all those years ago.

The needles shimmer; my hands sting, sharp, under them. Between one blink and the next, the needles draw out long and strong, the same as the ones the lady keeps tucked into her dress. She doesn't say a thing, not as I call them into being, not as I pull them across into the garden, and they don't shrink, they don't disappear into nothing. They dim in the twilight so that they could be taken for any old knitting needles. But I can feel it still, the humming power spiraling down their lengths.

“Tulip,” says the lady, “don't do this. There's only more danger for you there, only more heartbreak. Come with me, back where you belong.”

I slip the needles into my waistband, next to my Gramps's note. “Maybe when I'm finished, I'll follow you,” I say. “First I've a vengeance to take.”

“We will be coming for you,” says the lady.

“You can try,” I say. “You've not had much success just yet.”

“No,” says the lady. “I mean that every one of us will be coming after you.”