by Rebecca Hahn
“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.
Two
IT 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.
Not that the nobles go through the hut when they come to walk in our garden. They take the path around it. They don’t put their shiny boots on the floor of our kitchen. They don’t throw their eyes on our beds and our one small dresser with our winter changes of clothes. They don’t touch a finger to the mantel I wipe down every night with my own two hands so it gleams like theirs do up in their castle without them ever doing anything about it. I’m not sure what I would do if they tried to slip themselves through our front door.
They come too often for my taste as it is, those lords and ladies from the king’s court. They come on horses, some of them, and some in fancy carriages, and some come walking on their own two feet, laughing and strolling along without a care in the world. Gramps calls out to them as they canter or roll or amble on up to our front porch, where we’ve set out our roses and marigolds and the rest, laid in rows all along our wide railing.
I don’t talk to them.
They laugh with my Gramps. They sit across the porch table from him, in the chair I use when no one’s around. They gossip about the doings at court and how the crops are coming in on their acres and acres of fields—not that they’re the ones who tend their own crops, but they talk as if they were, as if they sweated over the planting and burst their fingers with the harvest. They don’t talk about the way the woods keep moving in, not even this summer, when their estates must be having as many problems as the smaller farms.
I hover at the back of the porch, a wisp, a shadow. When they’ve done with the talking and get on with deciding what they want, I step up and pull the flowers together for them. I pick out the greens and the ribbon. I tie them all in a bunch, and I hand them to my Gramps.
And then some of them remember me and give me a smile.
“How’s our Tulip?” they ask. They’ve always called me that, as long as I can remember. My tulips come in so many colors, they near make a rainbow, and in my garden they bloom all summer long.
I don’t answer. I step back against the wall; I duck my head away. I owe them nothing.
They know it, too, and they always laugh a bit forcedly—the ladies high and bright, the lords a deep chuckle—and never push it. They take their flowers from Gramps, and then they get back on their horses or step into their fancy carriages or link their pretty arms and saunter up our path over the hill toward the city.
Gramps never answers for me, neither. He could. He could tell them what I’ve been up to, how long it’s been since I had a sickness. He doesn’t, though. He grows still, just like me, and waits until they’re done with asking, done with paying me any mind, before he turns back into the helpful, talkative flower man.
There are some things Gramps understands about me. There are some things even he won’t do, some things even he won’t say to make them happy.
But I welcome the villagers when they come. I invite them inside when they’ve a mind to visit before the fire, and I feed and water them too, and happily.
That afternoon last year, after I handed Jack his cup of milk, I leaned back against the wall, my hands behind me, my bare feet scratching each other, tapping on the porch floor, my braid hanging over my chest. Jack sipped and talked away with Gramps about the harvest and the new babies in the village and the weddings that would be coming in the spring. Gramps smiled and laughed with him, just as he does with the ladies and lords. Not one for any false sense of importance, my Gramps.
The time wore on, and still Jack sat there, clutching an empty cup now, and running out of things to say. My legs were falling asleep, but if Gramps could wait him out, so could I, and there wasn’t another chair in the house to fall into, and I wasn’t going to sit myself down on the porch. The village girls, they might have done that. They might have smiled and nodded at Jack as he talked on—he sure was smiling and nodding at me. But I wasn’t a village girl, was I? So I stayed standing there, and I let my mind drift off into the woods, where the sun would be dappling through the trees about now and the squirrels would be chittering, racing one another from branch to branch.
Into the silence of the porch and the silence of the woods in my mind, Jack said, “Well now, sir, and your wee Marni’s grown right up.”
It wasn’t something no one had said before. The women who bring our vegetables and such are always talking on about how I’ve shot up since they’ve seen me last, even if it was just two weeks ago. Them I give two or three smiles, if I feel like it. They make Gramps laugh, not just a politeness laugh, but a laugh deep from his belly, and there aren’t many who can do that. Them I like, and I don’t mind when they talk about me, so long as they don’t expect me to talk all that much back.
But the way Jack said it, as if he meant more than what he said—that I didn’t like at all. I pushed myself out of my slump, up straight against the wall, still keeping my head down but ready to run or fight or I didn’t know what.
Gramps had gone still, too. “She’s older than she was,” he said, “though I don’t know if I would say she’s completely grown.”
Jack shook his head at once, taking it back. “No. No, sir, not completely grown, that’s true. But grown right up, she has, into something beautiful. What do the noble folk call her when they come to buy your flowers? Daisy? Violet?”
I could see my Gramps not wanting to answer, but a name like that—a daisy, a violet, only the commonest of flowers he could have chosen—that I couldn’t stand, not even through my unease. “Tulip,” I offered, a bit put out.
Then I wished I hadn’t spoken, because Jack looked around at me as if the clouds had parted and the sun itself had started to speak. “Aye, that’s it,” he said, real soft. “A veritable Tulip you are, and you don’t mind me saying so, miss.”
“She might not,” my Gramps put in, “but I’ll have a word or two to say about it, you may be sure.”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir.” Jack turned around again so fast I thought he’d lose his cap. “But I mean nothing wrong by it, you know that, sir. I mean to pay my respects, that’s all.”
“And now you’ve paid them,” said Gramps, still calm, but with something in his voice that said that Jack would get up and go if he knew what was good for him.
No one could say that Jack didn’t know what was good for him. He stepped up and off the porch as quick as could be, tipped his cap to Gramps, and nodded toward me, almost a bow, if an awkward one. I didn’t nod or smile back, but only stood there as he walked away and watched until he disappeared over the hill.
So I’m growing up, that’s all that is.
Jack was the first, but he’s not anywhere close to the last. It started last fall before the deep snows, and it picks up again this summer. They come on sunny afternoons and rainy evenings, these village lads, to share news with Gramps and sip their cups of milk, watching me all the while from the corners of their eyes. I pretend I don’t know what’s happening, and Gramps turns them out soon as he’s able, soon as he can without seeming rude.
I sometimes wonder why they’re interested. Not that I don’t understand that I’m growing into a woman, and they are men. I mean,
I’m not a horror, but I’m nothing special, neither. I work outdoors with the flowers all day long. I take no pains to wash my face or hands. I wear a dress as patched as any you’ll find on a beggar in the city, I wager. My hair would be something pretty if I took care to brush it every night. But most times it’s tangled and dulled by the dirt and the weeds and from getting torn by rose brambles and by branches in the woods.
I figure it’s not me they’re watching, though, or anyway not the girl I look like. It’s the thing I’m not anymore. It’s how I’m not one thing or another, but something else, something unlike anyone they know.
Gramps did ask me once, last winter, if there was any lad I fancied. I was putting a loaf over the fire to bake; I turned round, still bent over, and stared at him.
“It would be a way, Marni, to be forgotten once and for all. It would give you more protection than you’d ever have living here with me.”
I straightened, feeling the flush of the flames on my cheeks. “There’s life, Gramps,” I said, “and then there’s life. I wouldn’t marry one of them if it were my last chance before the axe. What, and wear a village skirt and drink from the village well? Wouldn’t be just the king and his court who’d forget me. I’d forget myself.”
Gramps looked over my dress pointedly, and he sighed and shook his head, but he didn’t say nothing more. Yes, some of the village women wear better dresses than me. But then, they have the time to sew, or a wagon for traveling to the city for better cloth. And my dress doesn’t say I’m one thing or another. It’s just a piece of fabric, taking the place of what I should by rights be wearing. Now I wear the dress of—what? A flower girl? A made-up thing, a nobody. If I started dressing like a villager, I would become one. I’d give up what I’m not anymore.
Gramps didn’t say, You could marry a villager to make me safe. He didn’t say, This is no life, Marni. Become someone else and start again. Who you were is gone, as good as dead. Gramps understands things sometimes.