by Rebecca Hahn
They are falling all around now, big and slow, each one separate from the rest. It’s not unheard of, to get a snowfall this late. But the ground is hard, and there are grasses pushing up already. It’s like the first snow of the fall, not the wet, miserable snow we get in spring. It’s as if we’re outside of the seasons tonight, on the cusp of something uncertain, something new.
I hold out my hands, watching the silence drift around them.
I look up, and she is there.
A twist of wind in the blowing snow, a glint of the rising moon.
Hand held out, as always. Needles at her side. Face fractured; eyes stark and inescapable.
I step toward her. When I’m only an arm’s length away, she says, “Tulip, it’s time to come home.”
I close my eyes, thinking of the way the shadows stretch out long beneath the trees, of the chittering squirrels throwing acorns just above my head, of the days I could run and never see another person, of the griffins and the phoenixes I could ride so high we almost would touch the sky.
Back there is all the doubt and fear, everything I’ve never had and everything I’ll never be. The last dregs of it are falling away from me. Finally, there is only this moment, and finally I can answer her.
I reach out and take her hand, and we run, as light as the clouds, across the fresh white hills, on our way to the woods.
I imagine there are a thousand reasons girls take themselves to the woods.
Cruel parents. Ugly betrothed. A wish, a dream of something they’ll never have out there with those rules and probabilities, and they can’t accept it anymore.
A thousand reasons, and a thousand choices, and a thousand fast-beating hearts and quick-stepping feet and deep breaths of their first moments of freedom.
This lady can run.
She doesn’t let go of my hand, not all that night as we’re racing through the trees that stretch like columns in every direction. Could be it’s snowing still out there, but we don’t feel it. Here, the ground is dry beneath our feet. The twigs snap and old leaves crunch, and I can smell them, the clear, musty smell.
There’s nothing before this. I’ve become the wind, a flash of light, a spurt of magic. I’m laughing as we run, and the lady looks back at me, and if she had a mouth, I know that she’d be smiling.
There’s a long way to go.
We’re heading for the mountains; I know that without the lady telling me. It’s the north of my compass, and it’s pulling me as much as the lady’s hand. These woods have spread themselves out so far, though, that we don’t even reach the foothills by the morning.
There used to be farms all along this way, I think. There used to be families living here, safe and happy. Not anymore.
“Why have you moved so far into the kingdom?” I ask her as we’re stopping to catch our breath. My breath, I guess. I don’t reckon the lady needs such things.
She’s bending down to look into the hole at the bottom of a tree. She pokes one of her long needles into the dark; there’s a squeal, and she takes the needle out again, a mouse squirming on its end. “Does it matter, Tulip?” she asks. She plucks the mouse from the needle, cupping it in both hands so I can’t see it. Her hands glow bright, and the squealing stops. When she opens them again, it’s not a body she reveals, but a finely roasted bit of meat, skinless and steaming.
She hands it to me. I bite into it. The tangy, juicy charred flesh burns my mouth and seeps down my throat. It tastes like nothing I’ve had before, like sunlight, like power. I blink at the lady. “Does what matter?”
She holds out a hand again, and I take it. “Off we go,” she says.
It takes us three days and nights of running to reach the mountains, and all that time I am remembering those things I learned so long ago when the lady and all the folk of the woods were my teachers.
I’m calling out to birds and squirrels as we go, and they’re calling back, welcoming me home.
I’m throwing myself into whatever guise I choose, leaping over logs as a deer, flipping through leaves as a bat, bounding along as a great gray wolf, panting and shaking my ruff in the midnight dew.
The lady follows alongside always. She doesn’t lead anymore; I know full well our direction. But she accompanies me, sits by me when I stop to sleep, and finds me berries and meat when I’ve not the instinct for it.
As we get closer, the folk of the woods grow numerous. Seems every way I look, they are poking their grotesque heads out of a hollow log or flicking from trunk to trunk, trailing sparks, or swinging from branch to branch, gripping hard with tiny hands and screaming war cries with tiny voices.
The lady sees me looking. “They’ve come for you,” she says. “They’ve come to escort you back.”
I don’t ask what she means by back, when I’ve never been here before. It seems right, somehow, the word, the idea that this isn’t a leaving, but an arriving, not a first visit, but a return from a long exile.
We reach the first hints of the mountains to come: foothills rising from the gentle waves of the lowland into sudden steep slopes and drops. We follow a riverbed, climbing up and up. I turn mountain goat and cougar, picking and padding my way ever higher.
As we step into the true mountains at last, the final wide-leafed trees disappear and the pines grow thinner and farther between. We’re walking in the open at times now, and the sun falls, unfamiliar, on my skin and fur and scales. If I stopped in a clearing, climbed a rock or a tree, and turned to look behind, I would see the kingdom, I imagine, all spread out for me like a map. I would see the edge of the woods, and the king’s city, and the rivers flowing free along the fields that are left. I would see how far it’s shrunk now, the land of my people.
But I don’t look back, and my mind is on what’s in front, on what is waiting for me at the end of this race northward.
Half a day into the mountains, the first of the phoenixes comes rushing overhead, arrowing down through trees, to land, feathers furling, beak glinting, eyes narrowed, right in front of me.
I’m startled out of my wolverine self and shudder back up to a human, stepping away from the bird.
Like a sunset, this creature is, all over red, orange, and gold. It’s twice my height, and I reckon its wings would span right across the main hall of the king’s castle. Used to be, I’d run right up to a phoenix and stroke its feathers, and it would take me on its back for a ride up into the sun, and I would laugh and hold tight.
I’m grown now, though, and I’ve not the trust of a little girl. Nor, would I guess, does it have the trust in me.
“Don’t fear,” the lady says. She stopped when I did and looks back at me now. “She’ll not harm you.”
It’s a she, then. She shifts from one talon to the other, keeping her eyes always on me. She’s waiting for something, I think. She opens her beak, and her throat moves, and I’m covering my ears before the cry comes, the shriek that resonates through the woods.
Still shaking with the sound, I bring my hands back to my sides. The phoenix has dipped her head down low, and she looks at me sidewise, laughing maybe.
With a light head I step my way over to her until I can hear the rasp of her breath and see the quiver in her feathers. There’s wildness in the depths of each black eye. But there’s something else, too, a question, a puzzle—recognition.
“Hello, my lovely,” I whisper, and she ducks her beak to nudge my left hand, gently, almost a caress. Could be we know each other from way back when. I trace a finger across one long, silky feather, shining and glorious in the forest light.
She grows still under my touch. We’re breathing together, almost, and again I nearly know her. As though it’s been a thousand years and I only just awoke, I feel the answer swimming up through my mind, and I close my eyes, waiting, feeling her warmth beneath my hand.
“Tulip,” says the lady, right by my ear, “we must go.” Then she’s taken my hand and for the first time in days she’s leading me again, away from the phoenix, and the thought sinks
beyond my reach.
But she doesn’t leave us, that great, beautiful bird. When I look up, I see her shadow across the treetops and hear the echo of her shriek in my mind. Her sisters join us one by one; they land and touch their beaks to my hands or hair or shoulders, and I touch their feathers, and on we go. With none of the others do I feel the recognition of the first one, though. I always know where she is, even when there are so many I scarce can tell her shape from the pack.
Later in the day, the griffins start coming too, with their hawk heads and wings and their cougar feet and tails. Where the trees are thinnest, they run along beside us. I hear their heaving and panting, strangely feline from a bird’s throat, and their cries are deeper than those of the phoenixes, more powerful, not as piercing.
Darkness pushes the sunshine across the rocky slope until it tinges only the top peaks of the western mountains and then slides down, off the edge of the world.
I’m human, still. I’ve not changed since the creatures started arriving. The lady has let my hand go again, but she stays so close by my side that I fret I’ll trip her up or push her off a cliff without meaning it. She doesn’t suggest that we stop, and I’ve nothing but energy, a thrill that sets my legs always on, always up, a strength in my lungs as though I could keep going forever.
All around us, griffins scramble up the mountainside, and above us, phoenix wings beat the black night air.
There’s no moon, but I figure it’s round about midnight when the pines give up the climb for good and the bare face of the mountain, dotted here and there with snow, rolls out before us, gray and gleaming in the starlight. Not fifty paces from the tree line, a cave gapes, boring down into the mountain.
In the entrance, his head tucked between his claws, his tail wrapped around his side, and his eyes open, black and deep, glittering with a thousand reflections as they focus on me, is the dragon.
Three
HE LIFTS his head from his claws, and I can see his muscled neck. He is so long, so huge. I remember him, dark against the moon, and his mind-shivering roar.
The griffins have stopped at the edge of the trees, just behind me. The lady is there too, and the phoenixes circle overhead. There are little people poking their heads out of the grasses by my feet, and balls of light every color of the rainbow dart and twist among the rocks down the slope a few paces.
It’s me and this beast. Nobody, nothing stands between us.
I breathe in, out. It’s taking near to everything I have not to turn and run down the mountain, through the foothills, back across the miles of wooded fields.
Seconds go by; they last forever. The dragon gestures with his head, and I know he wants me to walk up the slope toward him.
I take another breath, steadying myself. If this dragon had wanted to eat me, he could have swooped down out of the sky anytime in the last three days. Running wouldn’t save me from that.
It’s insanity, but I clamber up over the rocks to the mouth of the cave and, keeping a good ten feet away, look the dragon in the eye.
His breath is hot, of course. I scrunch up my nose to keep out the scent of sulfur. I can see myself a thousand times in his pupils. There’s no familiarity here, no urge to reach out and stroke his razor scales. There’s the quivering of the prey, and the terror of the unknown, and there’s the thrill, too, the same rush that near made me jump from my bedroom window when last I saw this beast. Yes, there’s his size, and his teeth, and his claws, but he is beautiful, pure, and I near wish he would eat me up and make me part of him.
He pulls his head up, and up, and up, and his front legs are stepping back. His wings rustle, settling into a new position. He draws a great breath in; I hear it whistling through his lungs. I think, This is it. This is when the dragon burns me to bits, and I close my eyes without meaning to, without wanting to shut out the sight of him, but I can’t help it for that one moment, when the fear is sliding all over my skin like oil and I can’t even scream.
There’s a whooshing sound, and the hairs on my arms prickle. I seem to be alive, so I open my eyes and look up, and the dragon isn’t there.
“Tulip,” says a man. I bring my head back down. There he is, just in front of me where the dragon used to be. I don’t need anyone to tell me they’re one and the same. His eyes are black and glittering even from this distance, even in this dim starlight. He’s wearing some sort of leather pants and shirt, and his feet are bare and tough, as tough as the rest of him, I’d guess. “I hear that’s what they call you,” he says.
I somehow get myself to nod. “Some do,” I say. My voice is clear. Seems my body’s caught up on its own, or there’s some spirit taking over my speech while my brain’s still babbling incoherently at being near fried to a crisp, and seeing a dragon turn into a man, and hearing the man speak my own name.
He’s tilting his head at me. “It’s an odd name for a dragon’s daughter.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I reckon a dragon wouldn’t name his baby that.”
The griffins have crept up from the woods now, and the phoenixes are landing, too, in sliding thumps all around us. “Could be he didn’t have the chance to name her anything,” the man says. He speaks like me, like the villagers in the kingdom. I would have thought, if I’d thought anything, that he’d talk like the king.
I see the first phoenix, the one I almost recognized, coming toward me, stepping with her backward-bending legs across the stones, sending miniature avalanches down the slope. When I look back, the man is only two feet from me. He’s tall, taller than any lord at court, taller even than my Gramps would have been, if he had stood straight.
“I loved her, Tulip,” says the man. The phoenix is right beside me now. I can feel her breath on my shoulder. The soft edge of a feather trails along my arm. “I don’t suppose you’d believe that, me being what I am. And maybe my love is different, but I loved that princess so much it hurt sometimes. Should love hurt?” He’s tilting his head the other way. He’s looking at me as though I’d know the answer to such a question.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think it often does.”
“And then she ran away. And I was like to tear up her kingdom looking for her; I was like to take the whole land, risk losing any affection she had for me, to get her back. Does that sound like love, Tulip?”
The bird is nudging my hand again with her beak. I reach out absent-mindedly along her neck, grasp the down beneath her wing, feel her beating heart thrumming through my fingers. “Some folk love that way,” I say.
“Well, then, I loved her,” says the man.
I nod. “I believe you.” It’s like a story I’ve heard a hundred times in a hundred different ways. The phoenix gives a soft cry, much softer than before, so soft I’ve no need to cover my ears or step away. I look at her, and she’s looking at me. And she knows me, and then I know her.
“Dragon,” I say.
“Yes?” he says.
“What happens to all those girls, the ones who leave their homes and run away to your woods?”
“They get what they want,” he says.
“What do they want?” I whisper, and I’m looking at him, so I feel it first, the sudden heat through my hand, and then the shrinking, the feathers pulling away, leaving smooth skin and rough cotton. There’s a rush, like the rush when the dragon disappeared, and when I look her way, my hand is on her shoulder, and she’s smiling at me.
“We want our freedom,” she says, my friend, my long-lost Annel. All around, the other phoenixes and the griffins are shrinking into themselves as well, and I see it happen, the impossible transformations, there and there and there, all turning up as girls at the cusp of their lives, all those girls we’ve lost through the years to the siren song of the woods.
She reaches out to hug me, and I bury my face in her shirt, not quite knowing why I’m crying. “Welcome home, Marni,” she says.
“Which am I?” I say when I can manage to mumble the words through the wet and the cloth. “Am I to be a phoenix
or a griffin?”
“Neither,” says the dragon. Annel pulls back from me, lets me go. He takes my hand, and the heat of him crawls up my arm, but still I shiver. This was always going to happen. There was always going to be this night, with the stars to shine and a hundred lost girls to witness, and the lady of the woods, always at the edge of the trees, to see her mission finally complete. The dragon leans in close to me, with my reflections all sparkling, and he says the magic words, the ones that will change me, every bit of me: “You, my dear, are to be the dragon’s daughter.”
He tells me a story. It seems he must tell me the story now, at once, before anything else. He doesn’t wait for me to sit down on a rock or on the dirt of his cave. I listen standing up, watching him in the midnight dark. He’s hypnotizing, so I don’t notice my weary legs. He gestures in the oddest places and pauses in the oddest places. He speaks like a human, but his every breath and twitch give him away. He’s nothing like us.
But oh, he can tell a story.
He tells my mother’s story, the story of the princess the dragon loved.
The girls who run to the woods, they are all of them wishing for something they couldn’t have where they were. They are all of them avoiding some necessity, breaking free of some future they don’t want. My mother came to the woods like the rest, but she was something else altogether. The dragon had seen her in her bedroom window in her father’s castle. He’d seen the look in her eyes, and it wasn’t desperation, and it wasn’t some irresistible longing. This one had everything she could want, and what the dragon saw in the princess’s eyes was happiness, anticipation of a life she would choose for herself, every day she lived.