A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

  After that, it seems the whole population of single lords reckons they’ll try their chances with me. Most are less pushy than Lord Bran. They bring me flowers as I’m walking about, or they kiss my hand upon taking their leave of me, or they pull out chairs for me when I’m wanting to sit, those sorts of things. None of the others makes a declaration. None of the others goes down on his knees. But they want to, they’re telling me with every look and gesture. I’ve never had so many people all wanting to talk to me at once, all laughing at my every joke, all so attentive.

  It puts me off my ease.

  The queen knows what’s going on, sure enough. She tells me once, as we’re walking together from the main hall to dinner, that I’d better go ahead and pick one before the king decides to pick one for me. I know that’s how it works. I know she hadn’t met my uncle before she married him, and she went right along with it anyway. Hers was a political marriage, mostly. Her country’s the one we get our wood from, carted over the mountains on wagons. No one here would dare go into the woods to cut down a tree for lumber to build a house. And we send her people grain and seeds. Theirs is a dry, lowland country, not covered over every inch with rich black soil and fields of crops like ours, but sandy and rocky all the way down to the sea.

  She’s told me of the sea—as far-reaching as our woods, blue some moments, green or black the next, always moving, except on still days when it spreads out as flat as glass. Her people catch fish in the sea; they go out in big wooden boats, and times are they get themselves lost in a storm and don’t come back. Very like our woods in that way, I tell her. Both the sea and the woods are like to swallow people up.

  She doesn’t say a thing when I say that, of course. Still blind to our magic, is the queen. But she does get a look on her face when she’s talking of her country, of the way the waves roll in and in, of how you can see the clouds coming from miles away.

  She loves it, sure as sure, in much the same way that I love the silence of the woods, their dangerous beauty. And still she doesn’t complain that it’s so far from her. When they told her to get on her horse, she rode away and never looked back.

  I’m not as willing to put up with such nonsense, though, and more and more I find myself walking off on my own, over the meadows to the north or around the castle gardens.

  There’s a garden of flowers on the eastern side of the castle, past the vegetables and the chicken houses, right as the hill begins to rise toward the horse stables. I didn’t stop to look the first time I saw it. Just a whiff of dying aster, just a glance at a larkspur stalk, and my eyes start burning, and I can’t blink away the shape of my Gramps, standing in the flowers, digging holes for stakes, and looking up to smile at me.

  One day, though, I pass the flower garden when a girl is in there working. The queen has let go of me for the day. I finished embroidering my first pillow this afternoon—it’s sloppy enough, and I reckon my uncle wouldn’t be all that proud even if he did care about such things, but the queen says it doesn’t matter. I finished it, and that’s the important thing.

  I’ve the rest of the day to myself, and as soon as I can manage, I run from the lords’ daft smiles and the stale air of the castle out to the shriveled grasses and the brisk wind.

  I’m glancing over the flower garden on my way past, thinking on how ours must look now, with no one to care for it, and I notice the way the girl working in there is holding her pruning shears, and I stop. She’s got such a look on her face, as if she’s certain that the whole plant race has it in for her. I start to laugh despite myself, and after a moment I give in and make my way toward her.

  It isn’t anything like our garden down at the hut, this castle thing. Each flower has its own square block, and the roses go all together in one section, and the petunias in another, and they haven’t been planted for color or scent or nothing. Just higgledy-piggledy, this castle garden. Well, and I guess if they wanted a better one, they came down to our hut to walk our paths. I wonder if this ugly cousin of a garden has wilted out of competition with ours or if it’s always been this boring.

  The girl looks up as I come by. She is trying her best to snip the old blooms off a thorny rosebush—not easy without good gloves and a sharp pair of shears and knowing the way of those thorns. “Lady,” she says, sinking into her curtsy.

  I hold out my hand for the shears. “Give those here,” I say. “Have you done this before?”

  “No, lady,” she says, wary. “It’s my job, though, and I don’t mind doing it.”

  “Never said you did. Here.” I gesture again, and she hands them over, frowning.

  “It isn’t right,” she says as I test the blade with my finger and eye the rosebush. “It’s not a job for a princess.”

  Crazily, I grin at her. There’s something moving now through my blood, something that’s been slowing through the last few months and had near stopped. The flowers are perking up all about, even as brown and dry as they are, to sense that something moving in me. “Only recently it was that I became a princess,” I say. “And truth be told, I’m not sure what the job entails. Pruning flowers, though, that I can do.”

  Bit by bit I bend the thorns into shape, and bit by bit I show the girl what she is to do, and when I hand the shears back to her to finish up the job, she’s talking and smiling almost as if I were one of her friends. Almost. Like the women from the village talked to me, kind and friendly, but with a reservation that never quite went away—all except Annel, of course.

  Still, it is something better than the empty gossip of the court. I watch as she trims the last few stems, closes up the shears. It’s late afternoon, and dinner will be served soon in the castle.

  The girl is remembering, now, who they all have decided that I am. As she puts the shears into a pocket on her apron, she twitches her fingers this way and that, and her eyes dart for an escape. I ought to let her go. It isn’t just the dinner waiting for me; girls who work in the castle aren’t given time to dawdle, and she will be expected back soon.

  It’s so novel, though, to stand among flowers again and talk with a girl who wants nothing of me, and I say, “Won’t you show me around the garden?” and what is she to do? Tell me no?

  There isn’t much to see this time of year, but she takes me past the drooping orchids and marigolds, the dried-up pansies and chrysanthemums. She’s new to the whole gardening business, and sometimes she can’t name a plant, but I know them all, and it doesn’t matter. I trail a hand along their stems, speaking their names beneath my breath.

  In the center of the garden, in among the tulips, of all things, there’s a block of tiny, delicate blue flowers nestled in a bed of creeping vines. I stop dead when we come upon it, tasting something fresh, something wild on the wind.

  “I didn’t know they bloomed here,” I mutter.

  “They don’t,” the girl says, following my gaze. “Not usually. I remember all about this, at least. They never bloomed here before, not even this year until a few months ago. No one knows why, or anyway everyone has a guess: the woods coming in, the griffin they saw, and, of course, they appeared just when . . .” She trails off.

  “Just when I arrived,” I guess.

  “Lady—”

  “No, don’t fret yourself.” I’m not meaning to, but somehow I reach down to touch a petal anyway, to make sure it’s real. The sweet scent of rain drifts out. I blink, and the lady’s bright eyes flash, and half a note of her song brushes my ears. “What griffin did they see?” I say, turning from them.

  “Lady?”

  “You said they saw a griffin. Where? Who?”

  “It was all through the castle,” she says, “how the king’s army went north and how the Lord of Ontrei, as he was standing guard one night with a soldier on the edge of the woods, looked out over the trees, and there, feathers glinting in the moonlight, a griffin flew.”

  All through the castle, she said—and yes, I’m sure everyone would have heard this news. Almost everyone, that is. It seems the lords
and ladies are better at keeping things from me than I would have thought. After all, there are new stories every day of the woods, and the courtiers have never seemed reluctant to pass them on to me. I hear that the king himself has been rolling up his sleeves to work alongside his men, and that the villagers and the farmers and the country nobles, too, join in with the army. I hear that at the northern edges of our kingdom, there are only the sharp thunks of chopping, and the grunts of the men and women, and a deep silence from the just-born woods.

  “A griffin,” I say. “I’d only heard it was phoenixes before.”

  “Yes, and they say it will be the dragon next, that he’ll come and bring his woods and he’ll never go back again.”

  “And here are his flowers,” I say, “right on the king’s castle grounds.”

  When I look down toward the castle, I see lights in the windows. They’ll be readying themselves for dinner, putting up their hair, spraying bits of scent.

  The girl is eyeing me, her hands twisting in her apron. I wait, and she says, “Do you know what it is, lady, that’s bringing them, the phoenixes and griffins and such, and that’s making the woods close in on us?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s just—it seems no one actually cares. Everyone talks of it, sure, but the next moment it’s gone clean out of their heads, as if it doesn’t exist. And if the dragon’s really coming, well, we’ll all be sorry for it, won’t we?”

  She looks so concerned, so sure that something ought to be done about this, and sure that I am the one who’ll know what to do. “In my experience,” I say, “there’s nothing we’re better at than pretending things don’t exist. We think if we pretend long and hard enough, the things will disappear.” I shrug. “Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “Which one is this?” she says. “Will it work with the dragon?”

  “How many times did the gardeners try to dig up the dragon flowers?”

  “Every day for a week,” she says, “and every morning they’d regrown themselves overnight.”

  I look at them, so delicate, so fragile. “I think this is like that,” I say. “We can push it out of our heads again and again, but it won’t make no difference in the end. The woods will keep on coming. The dragon will appear. We’ll walk half blind, thinking we’re safe, and one day we’ll turn and he’ll be there, right beside us, waiting.”

  Now the lights are starting to flicker off in the castle, and I’ll have to run if I want to get to dinner on time. “Don’t worry,” I tell the girl, maybe a bit belatedly. “The king’s best men are on the job.” I smile, the bright smile of a lady. “Don’t forget to ask them to get you new gloves,” I say. “Your old ones won’t last through the spring.”

  When the king comes home for the winter, he doesn’t stop to say hello on his way in through the main hall, where I’ve been talking with the nobles and the queen, but he rushes on by, only shooting me a glare so full of malice, so full of contempt, I actually take a step backwards from it. He’s come for the festivals, the ones the castle throws before the start of the real cold and the burying snows. The country nobles will be coming in soon from their estates, riding up in sleighs and light carriages, filling up the rooms in the unused wings of the castle. They’ll go home again at the end of two weeks, but the king will stay with his men. There’ll be no escaping them when the weather shuts us all indoors, not unless I keep myself to my room and never come out. The king may be hoping I’ll do exactly that.

  “My lady Marni.”

  I turn from watching the king sweep out the back of the hall toward the stairs to his rooms. It’s the Lord of Ontrei, Edgar, and he’s bowing over my hand before I know what’s what.

  “My lord.” I give him my best curtsy. The queen has followed the king, and the others around us bunch into their own separate groups. We are alone, or near to it.

  He lowers his voice so far that I need to bend in to hear him. “You must not think I have abandoned you, lady,” he says. “I wanted only to avoid it seeming as if I have spoken to you before.”

  He’s so conspiratorial, with his half-raised eyebrow and those twinkling eyes, that just like that I forgive him for all those weeks of ignoring me, and I nod at him. “Makes sense, my lord.”

  “Now that the king has returned for the winter, I can pay you the attention we will need to justify our engagement in the spring.”

  It takes me a moment to react to what he’s said, even in my own head. It’s not just the sheer brazenness of it. He speaks as though I have no say in the matter. He speaks as though I agreed to this proposal last summer, rather than all but spitting in his face and kicking him off our porch with the heel of my bare foot. I try to steady myself, but my voice comes out loud and shaky anyway. “You must not have heard me right the last time we went at this, my lord. I would have reckoned you’d remember a thing like that, but I guess with an arrogance your size you’ve no room left for memories.”

  Now we’re getting looks, sure as sure, and my every word will be passed around the court by morning. When the country nobles start arriving next week, it will be the first thing they hear.

  The Ontrei lord has grown right still. He keeps smiling in that blasted confident way, but his face has frozen too. Next moment, though, he slides back into action, giving me a bow and saying, loud and clear, “Forgive me, lady, for my impertinence. I will take myself away and bid you good night.”

  And then he is gone, and I’m left with a whispering court. When we all converge for dinner, the king doesn’t even glance my way the whole time, and somehow it’s been arranged that I’ll sit at a table many places down from the royal family, among a whole slew of round, spoiled nobles’ children and their grim-faced nanny.

  I speak to nobody and pick at my meat, thinking of all the reasons I’d rather have the Lord of Ontrei for a friend than a sworn enemy.

  That night I can’t knit a stitch. The needles clack together; they scrape. I cannot bend them to the shapes I need them to be. I give up at last and go to bed, but I lie there sleepless, staring into the dark corners of my canopy, and I imagine myself as my mother, just the age I am, growing up in my Gramps’s court.

  She would have had a father who loved her, sure, and a brother who adored her, before she ran off anyway. There would have been dozens of lords all trying to win her, as they’re trying now to win me. I wonder if she loved any of them. If there was a boy, maybe, that she’d grown up with, who’d known her before either of them understood things like princesses and kings, someone she trusted.

  Maybe it wasn’t a lord, even. Maybe it was a servant boy or a villager, and she’d ripped herself ragged trying to think of ways for him and for her to be happy.

  I don’t know. There’s no way I can know.

  There was some reason, though, for her running off to the woods. Girls don’t do that on a whim. They don’t wake up one day, free of all care, get themselves dressed, eat up their breakfast, give their hair fifty brushstrokes, and then say to themselves, Wouldn’t it be nice to run away to the woods and never come back?

  Not even princesses think like that.

  Maybe she was worn down by all the things they wanted her to be. Maybe my Gramps was different then, before he’d lost her, before he had a baby nobody wanted, before he became a nothing himself. She wouldn’t have had a queen giving her the tips my aunt’s been giving me. Her mother was dead long before she had grown, as she was for me.

  If I ever have a baby girl, I’m going to run us away, over the mountains to the land with the rocks and the sea, and I’ll find us a home there, where no one will come knocking who knows our names, who might want to take us through with a sword. When my baby girl cries, I’ll be there to hold her. When she stubs her toe or skins her knee, I’ll take her mind off it with stories, and I’ll sing her to sleep with songs. I’ll teach her how to plant flowers, though we’ll grow them only for ourselves, and we’ll bake sweet bread together and go for long walks and catch
toads just to set them free, and she’ll never have to stare up into the darkness wondering why she’s all alone.

  Five

  THIS IS WHAT it’s like to ride a horse: terrifying, thrilling, fun in a way that flows right through me, pushing back all the parts I’ve been devoting to fretting and lying awake at night, throwing them out into the clear, cold sky, so that I laugh as we ride along, as if all I needed to feel this way was to get my feet off the ground, to give up my safety to this hulking beast that huffs and rolls beneath me, near to pitching me off, but I hang on, grinning, my skirts sweeping back all around and my boots tucked tight into the stirrups, fingers twisted in reins and mane.

  I could do this forever and never tire of it.

  The Ontrei lord is riding just behind me; I think he’s somewhat startled by my taking to this horse-riding thing so fast, especially because when he told me where we were going, I said I’d never ridden my own horse in my life.

  “No time like the present,” he said, pulling me away from the flower garden. I’d been telling the girl I met there, Emmy, where the daisies should be moved in the spring—they had planted them next to the buttercups, as though any daisy could shine as it ought to alongside that garish yellow. I’ve been coming out almost daily in the last week to teach her how to ready the garden for the snows. The gardeners, the real ones who planted all the flowers to begin with, don’t bother us none. They leave us be as we squat in the dirt, mulching and trimming and making notes of what to plant. I reckon they don’t mind me training their new girl for them. Emmy is like a new bud in spring: fresh and honest, somewhat unknowing of the ways of things. I never met a girl like her out by the woods, but it could be that living so close to the trees changes a person, fills you up with a sense of danger you don’t get in here, where the whole world’s wide and open.

  My maid, Sylvie, tsks to herself at the state of my gowns, but she doesn’t say nothing to me about it. Could be she senses the spark—the something that runs through my blood after I’ve spent a day out with the flowers—that isn’t there when I deaden myself chatting with the nobles for hours on end. Could be, too, that she doesn’t dare complain to the girl who might one day be queen.