A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

  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.”

  There’s a coldness in her voice, a low note I don’t remember hearing before. I’m almost frightened, hearing it. I back up from the wall. “There’s not a thing you can do,” I say, “without me letting you.”

  “You are not like the others,” the lady says. “We will do everything we can to bring you home.”

  She’s looking at something behind me, something in the garden, and she’s backing away into the woods. I hear, before she disappears, as though she’s speaking straight into my head, You can run, little Tulip, but not forever. Someday you will be ours.

  “Lady?” It’s the Lord of Ontrei, coming toward me through the garden, calling out.

  “My lord,” I say, going to meet him. He stands tall on the garden path. I look up at him, calm, certain. I see again how handsome this one is, with his dark hair, with his sharp eyes. He’s looking all mournful at me too, no doubt hoping I’ll believe he sympathizes. I say, as straightforward as I can, “You’ll be wondering what my plan is now, what I’m thinking of doing without my Gramps.”

  His voice is measured. “There’s only one thing you can do, considering the king’s current state of mind.”

  “That will be marrying you and coming to court.”

  I wait through his surprise. “Yes,” he says at last. “Though I understand the idea is distasteful to you.”

  I don’t answer that. Instead I say, “You mentioned something of an alliance.”

  “An alliance is always strengthened by family ties.”

  “Any alliance is better than none at all, I’d think. Especially when your ally is the king’s only heir.”

  There’s a silence again, and I can feel the flowers shuddering still, but I can feel my needles thrumming, too, and it eases me, sets my mind to its purpose.

  The lord says, “What would you expect out of such an alliance?”

  “That you’d have my back while I’m at court. That you’d support me in front of the other
lords if the king took an idea to move against me.”

  “And what would you offer in exchange?”

  “When the king is gone,” I say, “there’ll be many lords thinking on what they did while he was still around, regretting things, no doubt. I guess there’ll be time enough then for offering rewards to those loyal to me.”

  “I see.”

  I reckon he does. It’s a dangerous game we’re playing, him and me. We’ll both be hoping for things we’ve no way of guaranteeing. Could be he’ll step away right now, leave me to figure my own way out. Could be it’s not worth the risk for him.

  But the next minute he says, “It’s growing late. Don’t you think it’s time the king was told you’ll be coming to court?”

  And he’s offering me his arm—me, with my old ragged dress and my dirt. I take it, holding my needles in place with my other hand. We walk through the garden, around the hut. I’ve nothing I wish to take with me. Just my Gramps’s drawing, and the needles, and the memories of the woods burning a fire through me, telling me things that make me think I’ve a power greater even than the king, goading me on to use it, to finally bring him down.

  Out front, the lord unties his horse from the porch railing and he lifts me up across the saddle before hopping on behind. And then we are stepping away from the hut, past the bushes, up the hill. The stars are coming out, and I imagine my garden glowing, our windowpanes sparkling in their light. But before long we’ve come out onto the road toward the city and are cantering north through the meadows, and I’m looking only straight ahead, never turning round to see what I’m leaving behind.

  PART TWO

  One

  THERE ARE a thousand stories about how the first dragon died, leaving the woods to shrink in on itself, leaving the humans, us, to blink in the open sunlight for the first time, and to plant crops, and to build cities, and to feel safe from all manner of luring voices.

  There are a thousand stories.

  Some ways it’s told, a brave young knight searches out the dragon in his lair and chops off his head, chip-chop, just like that, and it’s done.

  Too simple, that one, I think.

  Some ways, a brave young maiden lets the dragon carry her away, and just when he’s fallen asleep, she slips a poison twixt his jaws, and he shrivels up and dies there while she watches, and it’s done.

  Too unlikely, that one. Where’d she have gotten the poison after the dragon took her away? And what chance of a human poison working on a dragon anyway?

  Dragons, they’re not killed by swords or poisons.

  Takes something else entirely to worm its way in past a dragon’s tough skin into a dragon’s heart. Takes something else to burn it until it screams from agony. Takes something stronger, something truer, something much more terrible.

  Something like a wish. Something like a dream that comes back again and again, every night, every morning before you wake, one that flits at the edge of your great dragon eyelashes all through the day, something that consumes you, scale by scale and tooth by fang, until you’re nothing but it, nothing but the pain, the unflinching, unyielding reality of this yearning, this dream.

  Some say the dragon took one girl too many from the woods to his cave, and one day he fell for his latest catch, not with a momentary passion, a passing infatuation with her beauty. No, this was deeper than the dragon cared to admit; this was something different. When this girl laughed, the dragon’s mouth turned up. When she cried for her parents, his own eyes welled up and his tail quivered with her pain. When she spoke, begging for his mercy, he scarce could keep his lungs breathing for the sound of it, and when she sang herself lullabies to drown out her rising fear, his blood near froze and all the fire in his belly fell to ash from his yearning to be nothing but a pair of ears, nothing but her song.

  Could be she realized, before the end, how the dragon loved her. Could be she told him she loved him, too, whether she did or not, thinking maybe he would let her go.

  He didn’t.

  When she died, the dragon lost his mind, these stories say, and dreamed only of her, night and day. And before another week had passed, the dream had killed him, and his woods and all their magics retreated silently before human axes and human tears.

  Two

  “MY GRAMPS is dead.” That’s what I say when the guard at the gate leads me all the way into the castle, through corridor after corridor lined with carpets and tapestries and great flaming lamps, to where the king is sitting up with his wife and a dog in a plush firelit room. It is the first time I’ve seen such a place. The chairs have velvet covers. The fire is as big as the great round table, which is so polished it reflects the flames. Even the dog shines bright, lifting one droopy eyelid my way, already nodding back off to sleep moments after the guard shows me in.

  I’ve come alone. Once we reached the city, the Lord of Ontrei left me in a silent square, its fountain gleaming in the moonlight, and I made my own way from there to the castle gate. We’ve no need to let the king know of our alliance just yet.

  “He died all alone,” I say, “and I buried him in our garden, beneath the lilacs.”

  The king is frowning. His wife, the queen, is sewing something colorful in her lap, and she looks up at me now and again, quick little flashes of eyelashes and the whites of her eyes. She didn’t greet me when I came in. Well, but then I didn’t give her a chance to, neither. The king started to rise, but before he could say a word, I cut him off with the news of my Gramps’s death.

  “I am sorry, Marni,” he says now. He even looks it, with that frown. He looks near as fretful as my Gramps. “You should have told us first. He was a king, and the father of a king. We would have given him a fitting funeral.” He’s forgetting not to meet my eyes again. He’s forgetting he’s only ever said four words to me.

  “Thank you, sir,” I say, as though I’ve no inkling how his heart must be singing to hear this. I grasp the needles hidden in my skirts, let their power run up my arm. I say, “But I’ve not come just to tell you the news.”

  “No?” says the king.

  “No. I’ve come to ask you, sir, if I might find a place at your court, now I’m all alone.”

  The queen stops sewing and peers at me with her head half tilted. The king’s face goes blank. “Ah,” he says, and nothing more.

  “Yes,” I say. “I don’t expect to keep a noble’s position, but—I can sew and I can cook. I’ll earn my place. I can’t very well go back to our hut now my Gramps is gone. I know we’ve had our differences, sir, but it’s one thing when I had someone to watch out for me. Who would keep me from harm there now?”

  The king’s blank look is growing dangerous. It’d be a stretch to say my Gramps could have fought off a squirrel.

  I wait. I’m sure he’s near to turning me out, calling the guards, but then the queen clears her throat with a little cough and looks up for real, folding her hands carefully on her knees. She gives me a pretty smile, all sparkling and bright. Despite everything, I blink at her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile quite that pretty. “Don’t be ridiculous, dear,” she says, and the air thins a bit. “Of course you’ll stay with us, and you won’t be working in the kitchens or any such nonsense.”

  The king says, “Now, hold on—”

  “No, don’t you say a thing, Roddy.” She turns her smile on the king. “There’s not much point in sending her back, is there? You were bound to bring her in someday. She’s your niece, the only blood you have left. You couldn’t leave her out there forever.”

  “No? And why not?”

  She only keeps on looking at him, her hands still folded just so in her lap, as calm as anything—and after a few moments the king drops his eyes.

  I’m astonished when he says, all quiet, “You say he died alone?”

  Even hearing him say it, even from that voice I hate to bits—it makes my throat close up. I nod.

  There’s a long pause. I’m looking at the king, and the queen has her hand over his, and the kin
g is just sitting there staring at his knees. He sighs. “I am sorry,” he says again. “I wish it could have been different.” He looks up at me, and I think for an instant that he means not only my Gramps’s death, but a whole host of other things as well. There’s something there, in the king’s face. There’s something dark and deep, a pain I’d hardly wish on anyone.

  But this is the king, and I say, sweet but also sharp, “Don’t trouble yourself, Uncle. You’ve always been so good at protecting us. Me and all my kin.” That’s all I say, but he knows what I mean. The pain dissolves into something harsher. It’s hatred, pure, undiluted after sixteen years, and I reckon what’s on the king’s face is on mine as well. It hovers there between us, a near-tangible thing. I’m fingering the needles in my skirts again. I’m wondering how fast I could knit myself a vengeance, throw it at the king’s throat.

  But then he breaks the gaze and leans back in his chair. “I am sorry, Marni, for your Gramps’s death. Whether you believe that or not, it is true. And you’re welcome to stay in my castle. Your aunt is right. I had been thinking in any case of . . . keeping a closer eye on you.” He reaches out for a glass of wine on a side table, swirls it as he says, “Where were you, anyway, that he could have died alone?”

  My mind goes blank in an instant. There are a hundred excuses I could make. Selling flowers in the villages. Paying a call to a farmer’s family. My Gramps never came along with me farther than our garden. But I can’t think, and I say, “Out back. I was out back when it happened.”

  “Out back,” the king says slowly. He takes a sip, sets the glass down again. “Would that have been in the garden—or farther back still?”

  I don’t answer him. He already knows. He knows where I was; he knows what sort of thing I was talking to. I wait for him to say it.

  But he doesn’t. Instead, he turns to the queen. “I suppose you know where to put her.”

  “For the moment,” she says. She makes a move as though she means to rise, then stops when the king raises a hand.