by Rebecca Hahn
She saw him there, too, the dragon against the moon. She was happy, sure, but she was curious, too, and not feared of anything. She wasn’t one to let a mystery go untouched, and she ran after him, just like so many of the ordinary girls of the kingdom—and not at all like any of them. And when she came to the mountain and should have turned into a phoenix or a griffin, the dragon saw her standing here, hair all tangled around her silk gown and her last string of pearls.
There was a fierceness in her eyes, and he knew she wouldn’t have run from poverty or cruelty or even from a marriage—this one had come for the thrill of it. There was a flower in her hand, a white rose she had plucked as she darted through some garden or along some hedge. She’d carried it all the way up the mountain until it was drooping and sad. No flower grew like that in the dragon’s woods, and he knew that she wouldn’t have brought it all this way if she hadn’t been holding on to something else, too, and when she demanded that he give her what all the other girls had been given, that he let her feel what it was to fly free, he wouldn’t do it.
It wasn’t fair, he said; it wasn’t the bargain. No voice had tempted her. No spirit had called her name and led her on through twisting trunks until she forgot who she’d been, until she was nothing but instinct and hunger, as feral as a wolf. She’d come all on her own, and he couldn’t change her—could he—when she was still so much herself.
Well, but she wouldn’t go back, neither, not when there was so much to discover out in the woods.
She made herself a nest in a corner of the dragon’s cave, and she foraged for food, and she rode on the backs of the griffins and the phoenixes, and she walked with the lady of the woods, and the dragon didn’t let any of the woods folk harm her.
And he spent more and more time as a man and less and less time as a dragon, because he knew from the moment he’d seen her in her window that this was a girl he loved.
One thing led to another, and the princess must have known one day that she was going to have a baby. She didn’t tell the dragon, but she had kept that one white rose, had let it lie on a stone until it was thin and dry, and he saw her, more and more, sitting at the edge of the cave looking south, holding the rose to her nose and breathing in leftover whiffs of its scent.
And one day she was gone, and the dragon near went mad with grief.
There’s something to do with the magic that runs all through the woods, something without which none of the uncanny folk there can live. They can send their voices out, some of them, and they can step a few feet beyond without any harm. But if they go too far, it’s not only the archers of the king that need worry them. If they stray too far and too long from the woods—the little folk, the lady, the griffins and the phoenixes that used to be girls, even the dragon himself—they lose all memory of what they were in the woods and are nothing more than beasts, rampaging and wild.
So the dragon couldn’t just swoop down out of the sky and scoop my mother back up. He couldn’t just send a centaur to throw her over its back or a griffin to grab her in its claws. He had to send the very trees.
Turns out that my uncle was right after all. Turns out that he was right to kill my mother, and he should have killed me, too. Turns out that my Gramps, the hero of the piece, who thought he’d saved a baby, saved a monster.
When Annel takes me up on her back and we fly out above the trees, I can see that already they have started to pull back from the king’s land. Already the villagers will be returning to rush in the spring planting, rebuild their homes, and give thanks that the end of the world never came. The dragon has his daughter, and all is well.
“Go back,” I murmur into Annel’s soft neck. She banks, turns around, and brings me to the mountain.
I slide off into the sharp morning light, shrugging away the last of the bitter pain, the final niggling anger. The dragon is waiting at the mouth of the cave.
I go to meet him.
Four
IT IS A YEAR before I speak human words again.
I run with the little winged ones; they take me as their captain on their raids, and one day I fight for one side, and the next I fight for the other, and no one cares. The little ones shoot up like blades of grass from the ground. Just as we cut one down, another takes its place, and they don’t take petty things like death at all amiss.
I knit with the lady, masterpieces, and we hum dreadful songs all the while. Our fingers move in sync, and we throw our projects to the wind together and watch them flap away, gleaming new chances and final breaths, together.
I turn myself into a wolf and run with them for a time—a week, a month; afterward I’m not sure quite how long. It’s the middle of winter, and we race across the mountains, chasing fat rabbits and sleek weasels. At night we howl at the moon, and I almost hear it howling back; it’s so bright, it shoots through my wolf mind with such brilliance.
I romp with my pack in the snow. We’ve a litter of pups, born just last spring, and they pull at my ears, tumbling across my back. I sit and grin at them, my tongue tasting sharp air.
We cross over onto the other side of the mountain once, and we make our way down, farther and farther. The fairies disappear as we go. The scent of magic fades away by the time we’re at the foot of the mountain, and the woods are giving way to rocky ground, patchy bushes, and, far in the distance, an endless shifting mass I think must be sand.
My brothers and sisters keep on, out into this land, chasing a rabbit with ears so long I scarce can see the body. My wolf heart wants to follow them, but I’ve a stronger urging, to get back to the woods.
I give them up, leaping into a sparrow, and I angle back toward the mountain.
I turn myself into a tree in summer—grow roots, spread leaves far into the sky. I’m the sort of tree that hides a dozen faces, the sort that whispers songs and riddles in the dusk.
I listen to the other trees. I can hear them, now, as I’ve never heard them before. They’ve a whole society. They’ve a whole history, and I hear such things as I’d never imagine, of how they can trick a bobcat into leaping after a rustle it thinks is a mouse, or sing a song to a nesting bird so that it gathers up all the rocks it can find and sits on them, hoping every day to hatch a chick. They laugh, these trees, more often than not. They have more stories, more jokes, more fun than I reckon the jolliest lord does, even in his richest house.
The lady comes and sits by me at times to keep me company. She forms a tinkling bell out of sticks and stones and ties it to my leaves. I make music from it, and the other trees stop their chatter to listen, and I become friends with them this way.
We feel the birds flying overhead, and the phoenixes and griffins, too. And the dragon. It’s him what gets me to come back to myself at last. When he swoops by, I feel my roots not as comforts, not as anchors, but as ropes tying me tight, keeping me chained to the earth.
I tumble back onto the forest ground. The lady is waiting there, holding out a hand to help me up. For days after that, we don’t stop running and leaping and laughing out loud at the joy of moving through the woods.
I turn myself into a thousand things, everything but a griffin or a phoenix or a dragon. For days, for weeks and months, I lose myself in the woods.
Time doesn’t matter here. I reckon I may live forever now; I reckon the dragon has lived longer than he can remember. It makes no difference. One day is all the days, and when it is summer, it has always been summer, and when it is winter, the snow will never leave.
Five
IT’S IN THOSE in-between times—the first chill wind at the end of long months of heat; the quiet leaf bud poking out from a frozen bush—that the tinges of uncertainty creep in. I’ll be chasing down a vole as a fox, and I’ll see a robin hopping through a patch of grass where last week—or was it yesterday or last month?—were mounds of snow. In a flash, I’ll be myself again, in a tumble on the ground, staring at that bird as if it held the key to some great essential mystery.
For an hour or a day, there will be th
oughts in my head again, human thoughts formed with human words. I’ll look at my hands and name them: hands. I’ll breathe in the scent of the sun and remember that it is a thing to be treasured, this warmth, this opening up of the world.
I’ll walk about and notice things. Little things: the pattern of fallen pine needles, the shine of a feather. I will be separate from it all, when for months I’ve been a twig on a sapling, a rock on a mountain, blowing and rolling with all the other twigs and rocks. It will be beautiful to me, in a separate way again, and it will make my eyes tear, and then the tears will keep on flowing, now from the loneliness of being all myself.
And my wrist will itch, and I’ll look at it and see what I haven’t seen in weeks: a shine, a gleam, something I wanted once. I will remember. My mother, my uncle, my aunt. The Lord of Ontrei’s laugh. My Gramps’s smile, the one he kept just for me. It will be too much, too sudden. I will run up the slope, around the trees, and over the streams starting to trickle free, until I reach the dragon’s cave. I’ll go in, so far that the sunshine fades away and it’s winter again, as damp and as chill as yesterday or a month before. I’ll stand there until my skin goes numb, until I can’t think or feel the shining thing wrapped around my arm.
The dragon will find me there.
He’ll fold his arms around me, his warm, rough arms. He’ll whisper in my ear, the first words I’ve heard in as long as I can think. “Tulip, my Tulip, you are safe now. You are home.” He’ll hold me and rock me until my crying turns from sharp pain to dull relief that here, finally, I am where I’m supposed to be. That after all those lonely years, I have made it home.
Home, I think, is forgetting who you are. Home is knowing that nobody expects anything of you but that you get up in the morning, and you feed yourself during the day, and when you lie down in your leaf-strewn corner of the cave at night, you fall asleep as soon as your eyes close up.
The cave is filled with phoenixes and griffins the nights I’m there. As the sun is setting, they come flying in over the trees and land on the rocky slope, shaking their fur and settling their feathers before turning themselves human and filing into the cave. They nestle down here and there, calm and businesslike, not minding if they get a pile of leaves or only a bit of dirt floor. In human form, they wear their old village dresses still. It’s something, to see a pack of monsters turn themselves into a bunch of village girls.
Except they’re not just village girls, are they? No village girls walk as they do, smooth and feline, almost gliding across the floor. No village girls dart their heads from side to side, ready to pounce at any moment. Village girls don’t carry the power these girls do in every inch of them.
And village girls chatter.
Annel and I, we don’t talk after that first night. She sleeps near me; I watch for her at times, and at times she catches my eye before we fall asleep, and maybe she smiles quick, and maybe she gives me such a long look it’s almost like a message all its own. But she doesn’t come any nearer, not to tell me stories or to ask how my Gramps is getting on, or even to talk of the faraway lands she used to dream about. I don’t try going over to talk to her, neither. It’s always such a flutter of wings and tails coming into the cave, and they all seem to arrive just at the same time, and they all go to sleep almost at once. And I never wake earlier than when they’re getting up again, running to the mouth of the cave, jumping into the sky. I’m always left on my own, shivering in the sudden chill, listening to the pounding of the air beneath their wings.
The dragon, who’s been coiled in his beast form in the center of the cave, opens one eye, then the other. Stretches his muscles, sending a shiver all the way down from his head to the tip of his tail. He unfolds himself and pads out into the morning light.
Sometimes he takes off as well, without so much as turning to look my way. But sometimes he stops and slants an eye in my direction, and I scramble up out of my corner and run to him. He stands perfectly still as I climb my way up his front leg and slide into the groove of his neck, behind his ears and before the start of his wings.
It’s something, to be sitting on a dragon when he rolls out his wings for flight. It’s something, to feel the tendons tensing in his chest as he lifts his back up and takes his great running steps down the mountain. The rocks slide toward you and the trees rush up, and you think it’s impossible, no matter how many times he’s done it—you think there’s no way in the world we’re going to get ourselves off the ground this time.
But the wings are beating windstorms, and he’s snorting loud, smoky breaths, and between a moment of vertigo and a wild, crazy hope, we’re going up, as high as ever we want.
Those are the days, when I’m clinging to the dragon for all I’m worth, that I feel the freest. Those are the days I never miss the sound of speech, not even in the deepest corner of my mind, not even in the empty space right before I sleep.
When the dragon brings me back to the cave after a day of flying, he doesn’t say a word, but he changes to a man sometimes, and he sits with me on the rocks as the sun goes down.
When it’s dark, when the phoenixes and the griffins have dropped from the sky, slipped back into their girl shapes, and filed past us like apparitions in the twilight, and the sun has dripped itself out, we stand, the dragon and me, and walk together into the cave.
You’d think it would be awkward, or lonely maybe, to sit in silence like that. It’s not, though. It’s a sort of conversation, to share space, to hear each other breathe. Times are that I’ll lean against his burning shoulder and he’ll put his arm around me. There’s something I know in him. He doesn’t question things; he takes them in; he becomes them. He takes in the rivers and the trees, the mice and the spirits. It makes him more himself to be all those other things too.
I recognize that because it’s how I feel too. Some nights, sitting by him, it’s almost as though we’re sharing thoughts, I feel I know him so well. I match my breathing to his—deep and calm and steady. I listen to his heart beating next to me.
It’s that—his heartbeat—that reminds me that I’m not yet quite like him. His heart pounds, a never-ending drumbeat, sending blood enough to power a dragon’s great wings. And I’ve a simple, human heart still, that flutters and races and dully thumps away. Even when I’m a wolf or a tree or a talking owl spinning riddles through the wind—even then I’ve not a heart like his. I run and I swim and I fly, but I’ve not his sheer majesty. Nothing else comes close to the rush I feel when we jump together into the sky.
Could be if he’d change me to a dragon . . .
But he doesn’t.
He takes me flying, and he holds me in the cave, and he sits with me as the sunset brings his creatures in. He watches me, too, as I’m watching them spread out, dark against the draining light. It catches my breath every time I see it. I almost feel then that I could do it too, could leap up into one of them, and when I look back at the dragon, he’s grinning a wild grin. He knows what I’m thinking. He knows what I want. But he doesn’t change me.
And I don’t ask him to.
I’ve no rose from the lowlands clenched tight in my fist. There’s no reason not to ask, and there’s no reason he wouldn’t give it to me: the wings, the scales, the fire.
Still, though, I don’t ask for it. I guess I figure there’ll be time enough. Maybe I like the closeness that comes from riding with him; maybe he likes that too.
And anyway, I know that once it comes, there will be no more turning back. See, I never let the dragon know it, but there are other times, not just when the seasons are changing, when I fall out of this new life into my old self. They aren’t as dramatic as the others; they don’t hit me over the head. They slide in, peaceful-like, so that I scarce know they’re there until I find myself staring at the stars and humming a lullaby my Gramps used to sing when I was but a tiny thing. Or I’ll be knitting with the lady, and I’ll think if I turn my head, the queen will be there instead, telling me how all the woods’ magic is nothing but the cra
zy dream of a backward people. Or I’ll be sitting in a sunny clearing, eating berries, and think someone’s touched my hand, though when I look, there’s only the grasses blowing across my knuckles.
Not as dramatic, these times, and not as painful. They ease themselves in, the sensations, and then they ease themselves out again. They’re like the rain on my fur or the claws scratching along my bark.
And I know that when the dragon changes me, these moments will disappear, too.
I’ve seen it in the others. I see it in Annel’s eyes, the distance she’s gone from who she was. She’s gotten what she wanted, sure as sure, and she’s given up the girl that wanted it.
I want it too. I’ll ask him soon enough. I’ll turn to him as we’re sitting there on our rocks before the cave. He’ll look down at me, and I’ll see my determination a thousand times in his eyes. “I’m ready,” I’ll say. “Make me one of you.”
He’ll smile, because he’ll have been waiting for me to say just that. He’ll know that I’ll mean that I want to stay forever, and this will make him happy. He’ll turn into his dragon self, and he’ll do whatever it is that makes a girl a monster, and I’ll be free, finally, from all those memories that tie me down, that make me less than what I could be. I’ll rise up into my new shape. I’ll breathe in, a bigger breath than I’ve ever breathed, and I’ll feel my heart settling into its never-ending thunder. The fire will race along my sinews, pour into my muscles, temper my bones. I will scream. And we will kick the ground away and rush, tail to talon, toward the stars. We will sweep across the full white moon. Somewhere in a bedroom window, a girl will see us and hear our cries, and she will want to jump as well, want to throw herself into our flight, to risk the chill air and the jagged rocks for a chance at what we have.