A Creature of Moonlight

by Rebecca Hahn

  “What do you mean, the woods stopped coming in?”

  Nine

  THERE’S A BIRD singing outside the window, probably in the bushes along the riverbank, and we hear its bright, sweet song in the sudden silence. It’s winter still, no denying it, but there’s something of spring in that breeze today. It won’t be long before the king can ride out against the trees.

  “What do you mean,” I say again, “the woods stopped coming in?” My fingers are white against my needle. The ugly flowers have dropped to the floor, I don’t remember when. Sometime between when Edgar was looking so annoyingly worried and naïve, and when he said the thing that made time stop.

  “When your mother, the princess that was, came back from the woods,” he says, and pauses. “You don’t already know this?”

  I shake my head. “Not all. Gramps didn’t like to talk of it.”

  “Well,” he says, “I suppose I don’t like to either, though for a different reason.” He stops again, and we look at each other for a long moment, neither of us saying a thing.

  “Edgar, please,” I say. My voice sounds strange in my ears. “Tell me.”

  He nods. He takes a breath and lets it out slow, and then he speaks. “When she came back, it was spring. All that summer, as she hid her pregnancy, the trees were moving in. Just like this summer, really, bit by bit, nothing to cause alarm. But when she was found out and ran away with you to hide, the trees started coming in leaps and bounds.”

  “Like this fall,” I say. I look down to see whether I still hold the needle. I can scarce feel it between my fingers, but I’m gripping it so tight it’s making furrows in my skin. I place it, carefully, on the table beside me.

  “Yes,” Edgar says. “And that winter, while your uncle and the men your grandfather couldn’t placate paced the castle halls, planning their attack on her, the woods came in farther and farther, until they thought they might not have any kingdom in the spring.”

  “They rode out in the spring,” I say.

  “It was a long winter, but when they could ride, they found her in no time. She’d been living with an old servant who’d moved up north near a village against the mountains. For whatever reason, her house hadn’t been overrun by the woods, even when all the neighbors had trees growing right through their kitchen doors and vines closing off their wells, so they couldn’t find clean water without walking fifty miles.”

  “I thought—” I begin, and then can’t go on.

  “What is it?”

  I don’t know what’s on his face; I can’t look at him. I close my eyes against the drifting breeze.

  “I always thought she was so clever, to keep away from them so long. I thought it was her that kept me safe, not just that they couldn’t ride out in the winter.”

  He doesn’t say anything right away. I wish I could push down the shaking in my hands; I wish my voice hadn’t wavered so. “She was clever,” he says, “to hide her pregnancy as long as she did. And where was she to go?”

  “Across the mountains, to another country,” I say.

  “With a newborn, when the pass was closing up with trees? She did what she could.”

  I make myself breathe, deep, long breaths, and it calms me. Some. “Go on,” I say. “They found her there, and they killed her, and my Gramps was crippled when he tried to stop them. What did they do to the servant?”

  He sighs heavily. When I glance up, there’s that sadness in his eyes again. He looks down into his hands, held open in his lap, as if reading the palms for his next line. “They killed her, too. It wasn’t the king who did that. It was the Lord of Ontrei that was.”

  “Your father,” I say.

  “The king’s right-hand man.”

  “And the woods?” I whisper. “When my mother was dead, the woods pulled back again?”

  There’s a long silence. Edgar doesn’t look up. “You looked about at all of them with such eerie round eyes, my father and his men used to say. All those noble, brave soldiers used to say you were casting a spell on them, that you were thinking already how you could take your vengeance.” His hands are curling into fists. “As if a baby girl was anything to fear. As if seeing your mother killed wasn’t enough to make anyone look eerie, enough to stop up anyone’s throat.”

  I say, “But the woods pulled back?”

  Now he does look up, and there’s a sharpness in his face, and in his voice, too. “So what if they did? She was so far north, surrounded by trees on three sides when they found her. Why would the woods have needed to come any farther? No, it had nothing to do with her. It was coincidence, that’s all. It was the woods folk playing games with us, or just random, just something that is bound to happen now and again no matter what we do.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I say. I’m remembering the lady, what she said to me before I left for the castle: We will be coming for you. Every one of us will be coming after you. I know they want me. They’ve sent their dreams, their voices; they’ve shown me the dragon, stark against the moon.

  Edgar is telling me something. That it’s not my fault. That the king is out of his mind trying to blame someone for a thing that’s nobody’s fault. And again, about those soldiers looking at that little girl, so convinced she was already plotting revenge.

  But he’s grown up with the festering of his guilt, with a hatred for what his father did. He’s no more levelheaded than the king.

  I stop him. “It’s no matter, my lord.” I bend to pick up my work, and I grab the needle from the table again. My hands have finally stopped their shaking. I stick the thread straight into the center of a misshapen flower’s eye, smooth and certain. “He didn’t kill me then, and he hasn’t killed me now. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my lord, I’ve sewing to do—”

  “Marni, if he’s trying to kill you—”

  I wave one hand at him. “I have it under control. No need to worry about me.”

  There’s a pause, and then he laughs, short, under his breath. “As my princess commands,” he says, “I shall now cease to worry about her uncle chopping off her head.”

  “What do you want, Edgar?” I say, stabbing my curtains with the needle again, though maybe less accurately.

  “I could protect you. You would have the support of half—at least a fourth—of the nobles, and we could keep you safe. Watch your back, taste your food, make sure you live long enough to take the throne.”

  “That’s sweet,” I say, “but really there’s no need—”

  “You could marry me.”

  My breath catches. Not just because I thought we’d gone over this, but because as he says it, for one crazy instant I think about saying yes. I think about living with this man, who’s always taken my side, who melts me right away with his kisses, who believes in me and my innocence even when he really shouldn’t.

  He really shouldn’t.

  Before I can stop myself, I throw my sewing back on the floor and push myself out of my chair. Edgar rises to his feet as well, wary. “How many times is this?” I say, my voice shriller than I mean it to be, but I push my anger on, fall gladly into it. “What is it with you, my Lord of Ontrei, that makes you think that when I’m telling you no, and no, and no again, what I really must be meaning is ask me again? Could be I’m crazy, but I’ve no wish to be the stone you step on to reach the throne. If all you’re going to say, again and again, is marry me, then I reckon you’d better leave this room and not come back.”

  “Don’t you like me, lady?” he says, weak, when I’ve done. The stones are ringing with my words. I remember the open window and hope, belatedly, though without much force, that no one was outside just then. It’s the most beautiful day yet this winter, and at the very least the children and their nannies will be running about in the melting snow, and what the nannies hear, the nobles will know of by dinnertime.

  “Oh, perfect,” I say, falling back into my chair.

  Edgar makes a move toward me—to—to comfort me, or some such. “Get out,” I tell him, qu
iet. From the corner of my eye I see him hesitate, then make me a bow. It’s a correct bow, the bow of a lord to a princess. He goes then to the door and lets himself out of the room.

  The birds are still chirping. They, at least, aren’t bothered by my screaming. After I can bear to take my hands from my face, I go to the window and sit on the seat there, leaning out.

  Sure enough, there are children playing a game of hide-and-seek, and their nannies are gathered in a group near the castle wall, talking excitedly about something. As I watch, one looks up at my window and, catching sight of me, does a little jump in the air and turns back to her friends, gesturing even more.

  I wrinkle my nose at them, though I scarce care. My vengeance is itching against my arm. It knows we’re alone again. It knows it’s time for it to fly. But a memory is trickling into my head, something I’d forgotten—just as I’d forgotten the way I used to knit magic things with the lady—something that the Lord of Ontrei’s words set free. As the sun takes itself off to the west, this memory holds me tight. I watch it all the way through, waiting as pieces fill themselves in, as bit by bit it builds itself into the story of the very first time I went to the woods.

  I was out alone in the garden. That much is clear, and that much makes sense. Something called to me—maybe it knew my name, the little man standing on the edge of the wall, or the bright light pulsing in the tree branches, twinkling my way. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I remember the pull, the sense that if I climbed over the stones, dropped myself down onto the pine needles on the other side, there would be magic waiting, a magic that would belong to me and show me wonders.

  And I remember the lady, my first sight of her. Some children would have run at that sight, I reckon. She’s not a comforting presence. She leaned over me where I’d tumbled down from the wall, and she held out her hand. The way I’m remembering it, she said, Welcome home, little Tulip. We’ve been waiting. Again, that might have sent me running, except—it wasn’t just that what I knew of myself was tied to this lady, to this place. My mother had gone to the woods, and here was a woman reaching out her hand to me. My father had come from these woods; I knew that before I knew anything else about him. So the fact that there was a place for me there where the magic seeped and sparkled didn’t surprise me all that much.

  But it was always more than that, wasn’t it? It was deeper. It was much more dangerous. The lady’s words and her voice, and that face that would scare any normal child—they felt right to me. That little man, that twinkling light didn’t seem strange so much as a part of me that I was just discovering. It was the dragon’s blood, even then, rising in me, pushing me toward the woods.

  Those soldiers, the ones Edgar talked of, they said that little girl was already plotting her vengeance. Even when she scarce could walk, she had already become what she was going to be. And maybe, I’m thinking as the children and their nannies go inside and the cold air crawls into my skirts, maybe they weren’t so far off. Maybe the king isn’t so far off, or the lady or the dragon, even, all the ones who want me to come home. I’m the dragon’s daughter, aren’t I? Blood will out, even when you don’t know a single thing about yours.

  I don’t go down to dinner, and I’m shivering when Sylvie comes up with a tray from the kitchen.

  I smile at her as she puts it on my table. She fusses over me, pulling me from the window, bringing me to my chair, and tucking a blanket tight around my lap. I study her. She doesn’t seem fearful of me, or suspicious.

  “I know I’m not a normal princess,” I say, and she turns from closing the shutters to look at me, eyebrows raised.

  “What’s that, then, lady?” she asks.

  I smile more, ignoring the chattering of my teeth. “I talk funny.”

  “Less and less so every day.”

  “And I walk funny, and I won’t marry a great lord.”

  She sniffs. “No reason you should marry yourself off so soon, when you could have anyone you’d like.”

  “And no one knows who my father is.”

  “Well, that’s true.” She locks the shutters with a click, and she moves over to take the covers off the food for me. “Eat up, lady,” she says. “You’re going to make yourself sick, sitting in the wind like that, especially after what you went through today.”

  I lean forward to sniff the food. It smells delicious, but then so did the food the king tried to poison me with. Sylvie is watching me. She dried me off so thoroughly this morning, made me sit by the great fire in the main hall for hours. I ask anyway. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  She pulls herself up to her full five-foot height. “Lady,” she says, “you are my princess, and I am your maid. I would no more kill you than I would kill my own sister.”

  “That’s not as comforting as you might think,” I say, but she’s already moving about the room again, muttering to herself as she plumps a pillow here, straightens a tapestry there, and anyway, I guess the first person they would blame, should they need someone to blame, would be my maid.

  And I’m dead hungry, so I eat.

  The next morning, the lady’s voice wakens me, sliding into my head like one of my own thoughts, stronger than I’ve ever heard it, and I look, my heart beating sudden wild, into the dark folds of my bed’s canopy, and I see a griffin flying in for a kill, and a spirit dancing around an ancient tree, and eyes I’ve never seen before, all deep and black, with a thousand sparkling reflections, looking right at me.

  When I go to the window, the sun is only just brushing the sky with white. It’s warmed up considerable overnight; the river is flowing smooth, with only chunks of ice drifting here and there. Pockets of snow dot the castle grounds, but nothing like the heaps that still stood yesterday. The king will be able to ride out this morning if he chooses.

  I blink into the morning sky, breathing the scent of fresh spring grass and pine. I’ve been telling Emmy she should get out to the garden soon. Maybe I can go along and help her, make sure she plants things the right way. Maybe there I can find a place away from the nobles’ glares, away from Edgar’s worried looks, while I figure out what I am to do with the thing around my wrist. Maybe there—pine. I’m smelling pine.

  It takes a second or two for the sun spots to give way, for my eyes to look that far, beyond the castle lawns, beyond the river, over several hills, but still in sight, still not a ten-minute ride from the king’s front door.

  Dark green in the early sunshine, as tall and proud as soldiers, and reaching north in a jagged carpet all the way to the mountains. No wonder the lady’s voice is so strong. The woods are here.

  There’s a knock on my bedroom door, but I can’t move, I can’t think to answer it. There’s a song in my head of flying above the clouds, and there’s an itching in my feet to go, to jump from the window and run until the shadows eat me up. But the knocking is getting louder, and now I can’t keep from hearing the shouting, too, the deep anger in the soldier’s voice: “Open up! In the name of the king, open this door! You’re under arrest for treason!”

  Ten

  THIS IS THE KING trying once more to kill me.

  This is the king seeing his sister come home with a baby from who knows where, threatening his kingdom, tearing out his trust for her and his compassion all in one fell swoop. This is the king doing what he’s always done—protecting his lands by throwing his own blood on sharp steel, by hardening his will, his purpose, until he is nothing more than a tool for cutting down those in his way.

  I am thinking this as the guards break down my door, as I stand there unmoving by the window and they grab my arms, pull me away as though I’m like to scream and struggle and spit at them, when I’m barely moving my feet to keep from dragging along the floor.

  I am trying to remember the anger I hoarded for so many years, the bitterness I planted along with each flower bulb. The vengeance is tucked in against my sleeve still. It is crying out to me, high, desperate. It wants me to set it free. It’s telling me that this is the time, now,
here, at once. But I’ve nothing left anymore, no hatred, no resentment. It’s all gone.

  Could be Edgar’s story yesterday sapped it out of me—the certainty that I am right, the will to tear my uncle’s eyes clear from his head.

  Could be last night’s memory took it from me, that something shifted inside when I remembered how easy it was to go that first time to the woods, and now I can’t keep from wondering what I have to do with their advance.

  Could be, too, that the smell of pine and the memory of those piercing eyes drove any vengeful thoughts clear out of me. That sight of the woods and the heady smell of wildness pulsed all through me, like a fire, like a dip in freezing river water, and could be when I came out, I was someone else, someone entirely new.

  Because as they drag me uncomplaining from my room and down the tower steps, as we hurry along the corridors and the lords and the ladies come out to stand and watch, none of them saying a word and all of them looking straight into my eyes as if I’m already no longer there, as if I’m something they’ve dreamed up in the early morning—as we slip across the main hall and there are faces, the eyes of the servants watching from half-closed doors, and there are Emmy and Sylvie, and they are holding each other, pale and crying, but they don’t call out to me, they don’t come and take my hand—as we rush through the open castle doors and into a warm (warm!) spring breeze that lingers promisingly along our cheekbones and pours itself like honey into our lungs—as we make our way out the castle gate and through the city streets, and here, too, the city folk are at their doors, so someone must have spread this news so fast it seems impossible, and then we’re at the steps to the city’s prison, and a bailiff is opening those doors for us, and I think briefly of all the doors we’ve seen on our way, the doors of the lords and the ladies and the servants and the castle and the city folk, and this door to this prison—and then, as we’re stepping real careful down cold stone steps and stopping before another, final door, with iron bars and a great cold padlock, I’m thinking about how all those doors are the freedom I will never feel again—